Max Bertuch

Max Bertuch (born June 28, 1890 in Frankfurt am Main , German Reich ; died 1943 in the Majdanek concentration camp ) was a German librettist , playwright , conductor and operetta composer .

Live and act

The son of a musician received his education at the Hoch Conservatory in his native Frankfurt. He then worked as an author of plays and composer of operettas; his first well-known work was the 1915 operetta Die Liebesfahrt . In addition, Bertuch was already working as Kapellmeister of the Hanau City Theater at that time. Later he also appeared primarily as a conductor and conductor of operettas, as a permanent employee (such as in Halle) as well as a guest artist. In addition, he participated to at various processed to stage plays literary works (for example, 1929 adieu favorite , 1930 at Eduard Künneke operetta Happy journey , which was to be filmed in 1933 and 1932 to Madonna, where are you? That as a template, first performed on 1933 film comedy Tell me who you are serving). In the 1931/32 season, Bertuch's three-act musical comedy, which was written shortly before, was performed at the New Theater in Frankfurt. Isn't that nice by Colette? premiered.

Although ostracized as a Jew in Germany since the seizure of power in 1933, Bertuch's works were still performed until 1940. Bertuch's wife managed to emigrate to the USA as early as April 1939; her husband's attempt to follow her, however, failed. Stranded in France, when the war broke out in 1939 he was initially interned as an "enemy foreigner" and held in the Les Milles camp in the south of France . There, Max Bertuch directed the performance of the play Im not quite white Rössel in September 1939 . On November 17, 1942, he was transferred from the Camp de Rivesaltes internment camp to the Camp de Gurs transit camp and from there on March 3, 1943 with convoy No. 51 to the Majdanek extermination camp, where Max Bertuch was allegedly murdered shortly after his arrival. His name was immortalized on the plaque of the municipal theaters in Frankfurt.

literature

• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 383.
• Herbert Gerigk , Theophil Stengel : Lexicon of Jews in Music , p. 32, Berlin 1940

Web links

• Max Bertuch on ffmhist.de
• Deportation of Max Bertuch on ushmm.org
• Max Bertuch in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Literature by and about Max Bertuch in the catalog of the German National Library