Nanny Becker

Nanny Becker (born February 12, 1914 in Frankfurt-Fechenheim ; died 2008 ) was a German- Jewish singer, soubrette and innkeeper.

Live and act

Nanny Becker was the daughter of the Jewish florist and gardening owner Max Becker and Nanny Becker, born in the Nazi regime as Aryan . Mayerhofer. She graduated from secondary school in Offenbach am Main and initially worked in her own flower shop for about a year. She then completed private singing and acting studies with Siegfried Würzburger and Alfred Auerbach with the aim of working as an operetta singer . Regional appearances in Frankfurt-Fechenheim followed.

In 1933 an engagement as soubrette at the Cottbus Operetta Theater did not materialize because of her father's Jewish origins. From autumn 1933 she was sponsored by Max Neumann . He put her on for further singing studies with Käte Ullrich and hired her to perform in his "Wort-Ton-Evenings" in the Frankfurt area. At the same time, she also completed an apprenticeship as a gardener in her father's company. Since, as a half- Jewish woman , she saw no opportunity to participate in events of the Frankfurt Jewish Cultural Association , her mother, who was considered Aryan, obtained admission to the Reichsmusikkammer through a letter to Joseph Goebbels , which, however, did not improve her professional situation due to the lack of opportunities to perform. In addition, from 1936 onwards the family's flower shop was boycotted as a “Jewish business”.

Becker intended to emigrate to the USA in 1939 . First, however, she traveled to Zurich , where she worked as a cleaning assistant and received small engagements as a singer until she moved to Bern in 1941 . There she was engaged as a second soubrette and worked until 1946. She also gave concerts with spa orchestras and had radio appearances on Radio Beromünster, among others . Becker married in 1945 and had a daughter from this marriage.

In 1946 she quit her engagement in Bern and went to Innsbruck for a guest performance . In 1947 she visited Frankfurt and Fechenheim and from 1948 to 1953 she was the first soubrette member of the ensemble of the Swiss Operetta Theater in Winterthur . In the 1952/1953 season she took over the management of the Casino Operetta Theater in Zurich together with the conductor Gottlieb Lüthy .

In 1954 Becker made a guest tour in Germany with the Süddeutsche Operettentheater Stuttgart . She then returned to her parents' home in Fechenheim after separating from her husband and because of an emergency aid paid as compensation for returnees, where she only performed minor appearances. After another engagement in the Rosengarten Mannheim she ended her activity as a singer in 1956.

In 1959/1960 Becker opened - also with the help of payments from reparation proceedings - her own dance hall “20 Uhr Club” in Frankfurt am Main, where she worked as managing director for over ten years.

In his second marriage, Becker was married to an American secret service employee since the early 1970s . Her dance hall was closed because she was going to the United States for a long time. After separating from her husband, she moved back to the Frankfurt area permanently in the late 1990s. In 2005 the biography “Bomb Applause. Das Leben der Nanny Becker ”by Petra Bonavita, based on interviews and excerpts from her correspondence with her mother. Becker had the Protestant religion .

Web links

• University of Regensburg
• LexM University of Hamburg

swell

• Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden, https://landesarchiv.hessen.de/ : contains: Compensation file Nanny Santi-Becker (Sign .: Dept. 518 No. 41873)

• Petra Bonavita: Bomb applause. The life of Nanny Becker , Königstein: Helmer, 2005.
• Joachim Carlos Martini: Music as a form of spiritual resistance. Jewish musicians 1933–1945. The example of Frankfurt am Main . Vol. 1: Texts, Images, Documents, Vol. 2: Sources, with the collaboration of Birgit Klein and Judith Freise, Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2010.
• Matthias Pasdzierny: Resumption? Return from exile and West German musical life after 1945 , (= continuities and breaks in musical life in the post-war period), Munich: text + kritik, 2014

Nazi publications

• Hans Brückner, Christa Maria Rock (Hrsg.): Judentum und Musik - with an ABC of Jewish and non-Aryan music enthusiasts , 3rd edition, Munich: Brückner, 1938 (1st edition 1935, 2nd edition 1936, anti-Semitic publication).
• Theo Stengel, Herbert Gerigk: Lexicon of Jews in Music . With a list of titles of Jewish works. Compiled on behalf of the Reich leadership of the NSDAP on the basis of official, party-checked documents (= publications of the Institute of the NSDAP for research on the Jewish question, vol. 2), Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefeld, 1941 (1st edition 1940, anti-Semitic publication)