Otto Bernstein (director)

Otto Bernstein (born November 13, 1887 in Posen , † spring 1943 in Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp ) was a German theater actor and director .

Live and act

Bernstein had received his training in Berlin , where he began his first engagement in 1906 at the Charlottenburg Schiller Theater . After three seasons he left the capital in 1909 and followed a call to the Hildesheim City Theater . Further stage stations were Frankfurt am Main from 1911 to 1914 and, after his military service in World War I , again Berlin, where from 1919 he appeared for two seasons at the Volksbühne , directed by fellow actor Friedrich Kayßler . There he worked alongside the later celebrated directors Jürgen Fehling and Heinz Hilpert . In 1924 Bernstein moved to Dresden , where he appeared in several venues ('Neues Theater', 'Die Komödie' and Albert Theater ), but also directed for the first time (from 1926).

Excluded from the German cultural scene in 1933, Bernstein returned to Berlin and organized himself into the Jüdischer Kulturbund which had just been founded . There he staged plays, but also made a name for himself as a reciter . Until its dissolution in late summer 1941, Bernstein remained a member of the Kulturbund.

On February 26, 1943, he and his wife, who was also acting, Jenny Schaffer-Bernstein - both of whom had met in the late summer of 1911, when they were simultaneously committed to Frankfurt's newly founded 'New Theater' - were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and presumably there gassed shortly after both arrival .

Both son Wolfgang Bernstein survived the Holocaust in exile in Shanghai and later worked for the ZDF in Mainz after his return to Germany .

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. 63.
• Hannes Heer ; Sven Fritz; Heike Brummer; Jutta Zwilling: Silent voices: the expulsion of the "Jews" and "politically intolerable" from the Hessian theaters 1933 to 1945 . Berlin: Metropol, 2011 ISBN 978-3-86331-013-4 , pp. 363f.