Rudolf Zeisel

Rudolf Zeisel (born May 1, 1869 in Kosmonos near Jungbunzlau, Bohemia , Austria-Hungary , today Mladá Boleslav , Czech Republic ; died July 22, 1942 in the Theresienstadt ghetto , Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ) was a Bohemian-German stage actor and director .

Live and act

Born near Jungbunzlau north of Prague, Zeisel received his artistic training in Vienna from Ferdinand Gregori , who was a year younger than him, late in the 20th century, and has played theater ever since. Initially (until the end of the imperial era) he appeared on stages in the German provinces, including Mulhouse and Bielefeld. After the establishment of the Czechoslovak state in 1918, Rudolf Zeisel returned to his homeland and worked at theaters there, for example in Brno at the beginning of the 1920s , where Zeisel now also worked as a director. Later he also directed at the New Vienna City Theater (for example, the play Seven Years and One Day in 1924 ). In 1928/29 he came to Berlin for a short time to fulfill an obligation as an actor and director at the Deutsches Künstlertheater. From 1929 Rudolf Zeisel worked as director, actor and senior director at the Deutsches Theater in Ostrava . There he set up “a demanding game plan”. Zeisel initiated the world premieres of Richard Duschinsky's Anny (1934) and The Blue University (1937) as well as Ödön von Horváth's The Youngest Day (also 1937). Numerous refugees from Hitler's Reich were employed by the Jew Zeisel, including Josef Almas , Hermann Vallentin , Leo Bieber and Sigurd Lohde ; Guest performances were given by renowned stage artists who were also in exile, such as Albert Bassermann , Else Bassermann , Ernst Deutsch and Tilla Durieux .

In mid-1938, even before the ratification of the Munich Agreement , Zeisel and his political intentions regarding an intellectual national defense in favor of his Czech homeland came into the crosshairs of the Sudeten German Party and its leader Konrad Henlein , which had won the municipal elections in the Sudeten German area by a huge margin. Zeisel soon had to stop his artistic activities. Since the so-called smashing of the rest of the Czech Republic in March 1939, the almost 70-year-old theater man and his wife have been completely isolated. On July 18, 1941, German agencies deported him from Prague to the Theresienstadt ghetto. There the elderly artist died the following year under unexplained circumstances, the death inspection (obituary report) spoke of "suicide by hanging".

Private

Zeisel's wife Magda Garden, bourgeois Zeiselová (1895–1943), was also an actress at Czechoslovakian theaters. She outlived her husband by about a year. After she was deported from Prague to Theresienstadt in early July 1943, she was finally deported a good eight weeks later to Auschwitz, where she was most likely murdered shortly after arrival.

literature

• Trapp, Frithjof; Mittenzwei, Werner; Rischbieter, Henning; Schneider, Hansjörg: Handbook of the German-speaking Exile Theater 1933–1945 / Biographical Lexicon of Theater Artists. Volume 1: Persecution and exile of German-speaking theater artists. S. 174. Munich 1999
• Trapp, Frithjof; Mittenzwei, Werner; Rischbieter, Henning; Schneider, Hansjörg: Handbook of the German-speaking Exile Theater 1933–1945 / Biographical Lexicon of Theater Artists. Volume 2, p. 1048. Munich 1999

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rudolf Zeisel in the Theresienstadt victim database
2. ^ Trapp / Mittenzwei / Rischbieter / Schneider: Handbook of the German-speaking Exile Theater 1933-1945, Volume 1: Persecution and Exile of German-Speaking Theater Artists. P. 174
3. ^ Rudolf Zeisel in: Anton Kuh works. Ed. by Walter Schübler. Göttingen 2016
4. ↑ ^{a b} Trapp / Mittenzwei / Rischbieter / Schneider: Handbook of the German-speaking Exile Theater 1933-1945, p. 1048
5. ^ Rudolf Zeisel in the Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database
6. ↑ Magda Zeiselová in the victim database Theresienstadt