The Herrnfeld brothers 1898
Photo: Archive
Berlin is holding its own – and doubts about it are obviously unwelcome here! – for a cultural city. It is quite inconvenient that the provincial government is once again questioning the continued existence of three large opera houses. Narrow-mindedness, coupled with a penchant for thrift in always the wrong places. The Berlin of today does not stand up to the comparison with the cultural life in the capital at the beginning of the last century. It used to be a metropolis, but today it is just a location for the cultural industry.
The fact that the city was once criss-crossed by countless large stages and small theaters, commercial entertainment venues and dignified art temples can now only be understood through historical city guides. It is no secret that intellectual and cultural life in Berlin at that time was dominated by Jews. At the time, its protagonists included the now largely forgotten brothers Anton and Donat Herrnfeld: two actors, comedians, playwrights, directors and theater entrepreneurs.
In 1906 the two had their Gebrüder-Herrnfeld-Theater built in Kreuzberg’s Commandant Street. Jargon pieces were performed here with great success, between light muse and Jewish wit, scenic milieu studies and burlesques. The stage soon had its fame.
After Donat’s death in 1916, Anton Herrnfeld sold the house, which had an eventful history and was taken over several times before it initially stood empty. Today, if you walk through the history-emptied Otto Suhr settlement, where the theater once stood, you will no longer come across any traces. Almost. Since 1990, there has been a memorial stone between the apartment buildings that reveals that the former Gebrüder-Herrnfeld-Theater housed the theater of the Jewish Cultural Association from 1935 to 1941, the last venue for Jewish artists, Jewish theater people behind the stage, Jewish audiences.
When the Kulturbund was banned, the death camp awaited many.
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On Wednesday, 83 years after the building was closed by the Gestapo, an open-air exhibition entitled “Yiddish and Jewish Theater in Berlin” opened at this location and will only be on display for a short time, until September 22nd.
The Jewish Cultural Association, initially founded in 1933 under the name Cultural Association of German Jews, functioned as a self-help organization for Jewish artists to avoid professional bans. At the same time, the Bund, which not only brought opera and plays to the stages, but also organized concerts, film screenings, exhibitions and lectures, was an instrument for the Nazis for surveillance and harassment, and also for the further expulsion of the Jewish population from Aryanized society. When the Kulturbund was banned in 1941, the death camp awaited many of those who had previously worked there.
On the initiative of Klaus Wichmann, who also designed the exhibition, nine panels at Commandant Street 57 now illustrate the history and prehistory of the Jewish Cultural Association Theater, the last place in Berlin where Jews were still allowed to perform in theater during fascism.
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Using a variety of images from archives, the exhibition gives an idea of the rich cultural life at the beginning of the last century and the almost impossible conditions for artistic creation for Jews under the swastika. Portraits, announcements and posters, street shots and scene photos show what cannot be reconstructed and what was inevitably lost due to the Nazis’ policies aimed at extermination.
Big names are listed on the boards, names of those who worked here, who were once celebrities during the Weimar Republic, and some who later went on to have a career in Hollywood or elsewhere. But the exhibition not only puts them in the foreground, but also the unknown, the forgotten, the people behind the stage. And of course it also reminds us of all those who were deported and died in the camp, after some of them had continued to work as artists under the most inhumane conditions. After the theater closed, most of them were transported to Auschwitz, some via the Westerbork transit camp and the Theresienstadt ghetto.
This exhibition cannot replace the unwritten history of the Jewish theater in Berlin. Too much has been lost with the murdered theater people. But impressions remain – of the destroyed culture from the time when Berlin was still a theater metropolis; of trying to make art despite all odds; about the bestial politics of the Nazis. The nine panels lay tracks; they are less an exhaustive offer of information than a temporary place of warning and remembrance. And that seems sorely needed at the moment.
“Yiddish and Jewish Theater in Berlin”, Commander Street 57, Berlin-Kreuzberg, until September 22nd
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