New DVD about Max Lorenz

Bloomberg.com reviews a new DVD about Max Lorenz:

"hough homosexually inclined and married to a Jew, Lorenz thrived in Nazi Germany.

Had Lorenz been a singer of Mozart, say, or Puccini, he and his wife would surely have ended up in Theresienstadt, the designated camp for the art elite.

But Lorenz specialized in the heroes of Wagner, especially Siegfried, whose lusty presence animates the last two operas of the “Ring” cycle. And he was one of the greatest, ever."

[...]

"Despite such dangerous escapades, Lorenz loved his wife, Lotte, and refused to abandon her, thereby enraging Goebbels, the propaganda minister, for whom mixed couples were a particular abomination. He engineered to have Lotte and her mother dragged off one morning in 1943 by the Gestapo (even with Germany doing poorly in the war, he kept to his priorities).

In the hysterical machinations that ensued, both were quickly saved by the intercession of Hermann Goering, another opera nut who presided over the Berlin Staatsoper and, in his spare time, the air force. He signed a long official letter affirming Hitler’s protection of tenor, wife and mother-in-law. We get a glimpse of the document during the program, along with photos and film snippets of Winifred Wagner, the chatelaine of Bayreuth and Hitler adorant. "

More here.

You can learn more about mixed couples in Nazi Germany in our "Classic Jewish Tour" or take a customised tour about Jews in German Music.

Exhibition: Gisèle Freund

The New York Times about the Gisèle Freund exhibition:

"She was born in Berlin in 1908, fled Germany in 1933, then had some shows and books published here during her later years that returned her to local attention. (She died in 2000.) Her portraits currently occupy the exhibition hall at the Willy Brandt Haus. The Ephraim-Palais has some of the lesser-known pictures she shot when she returned briefly to visit postwar Berlin in 1957 and 1962, as a kind of prodigal daughter, estranged but open-eyed. These are more interesting, in a way.

Freund was hoping to find lost landmarks of her childhood. Instead, she discovered a place largely unfamiliar, and her photographs steer blessedly clear of melancholy and moralizing; they’re cool, matter of fact, not art but honest and true.

True to an exile’s experience. She and the writer Walter Benjamin became friends in Paris. Writing about his own Berlin childhood, Benjamin once recalled how living abroad had made it “clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.” He added, “Several times in my inner life I had already experienced the process of inoculation as something salutary.” That’s roughly what Freund’s photographs suggest too: her attempt to inoculate herself against the vicissitudes of time through the lens of a camera.

[...]

It took an outcast to know one. Her father, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer and art collector, gave Freund a Voigtlander 6 x 9 camera when she was 17 and a Leica in 1929, the year she graduated from a secondary school for working-class girls. She had decided to quit her upper-middle-class surroundings to attend the Waldschule Eichkamp, and she lived there with her teacher. After that, at Freiburg, then Frankfurt, during its heyday with Theodor Adorno, Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias, she studied sociology and art history, protested against the Nazis, photographed the protests (her close-up pictures, attempting to go beyond just documents, convey urgency, above all); and, with the Nazis nearly at her door, she left for Paris, Leica in hand."

About the exhibition (in German) in the Ephraim Palais' site

Today in Jewish Berlin History

According to the blog "Today in Jewish History":

1924: In Berlin, Alexander Israel Helphand, the man who negotiated with the German’s during World War I to gain Lenin’s return to Russia from Switzerland which brought about the Communist Revolution and took Russia out of World War I passed away.

More about Weimar Berlin and Jews and Socialism could be explored in our tours on the subject.

Hans Robertson - Exhibition about a forgotten photographer

Deborah Kolben and Gal Beckerman write in "Nextbook" about Hans Robertson, a Weimar era Berlin photographer of Jewish origin:

"Robertson’s specialty was expressionist dance. And expressionist dance was huge in 1920s Germany [...] Mary Wigman, one of its main innovators, slid across the floor on her knees, eyes closed, fists clenched, performing her Witch Dance. Her school in Dresden became a center of this Ausdruckstanz, producing world-renowned modern dancers like Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi. They all posed for Robertson. His studio on bustling Kurfürstendamm—a boulevard that was both the Fifth Avenue and the 42nd Street of Berlin—saw a steady stream of business in the late 1920s and early '30s. [...] At 28, Robertson’s first photo spread—a pictorial tour through Holland—appeared in Photographische Rundschau. But his photo career would have to wait until 1918, when he arrived in Berlin. There he joined Lili Baruch—one of the disproportionately high number of Jewish women then making her living with a Leica—who set up the studio on Kurfürstendamm, specializing in dance photography, which Robertson took over in 1928.

[....]

In 1933, following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the subsequent boycott of Jewish businesses, Robertson had an inkling of what was to come. He handed over the studio to his apprentice, Siegfried Enkelmann. One of the few documents Friedrich, the curator, has been able to uncover is a contract signed by Robertson that makes the transfer final, and describes Enkelmann as “reliable.” And he was. The protégé survived the war and continued photographing dancers (including Mary Wigman) until his death in 1978.

Robertson and his coquettishly beautiful wife, the actress and dancer Inger Vera Kyserlinden (born Levin), escaped to her native Denmark. While the avant-garde movement had been taking place in Berlin, Paris, and Prague, most photographers in Copenhagen were stuck in the pictorial style of the 1910s. As a result, in 1963 Robertson established the first modern photography school in Denmark. But eight years later, just before Hitler began deporting Danish Jews, the Robertsons were forced into exile again, this time fleeing to Stockholm. They returned in May of 1945 and Robertson died just five years later at the age of 67. "

A new exhibition dedicated to Robertson is now on the Berlinische Galerie. (till Feb. 2nd).

More about Weimar Berlin and Jews in West Berlin and Kudamm area could be explored in our tours on the subject.

Nelly Sachs Birthday

The blog "This Day in Jewish History" reminds us, 117 years ago today, Nelly Sachs was born:
"Birthdate of Nelly Sachs. Born in Berlin, Sachs was a German poet and dramatist who was transformed by the Nazi experience from a dilettante into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Sachs found sanctuary in Sweden in 1940. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people." She passed away in 1970 and was buried in Sweden."

You can see some of Nelly Sachs' Berlin in our tours to the Jewish West Berlin and to "Jewish Switzerland"; and in the "Classic" Jewish Tour.

Interview with Jewish Writer Maxim Biller

Recommendation: The transcendental workout blog publishes an interview with Jewish-German writer Maxim Biller, about his influences ("When I was twenty, I discovered the books of Malamud, Heller, Bellow, Roth. They taught me to be free to write about my own—the Jewish—people, just as Chekhov, Camus, and Fitzgerald wrote about their people."), his style, his connection to Jewish identity, as a German-Jew.

Biller (b. 1960) iummigrated as a ten year old from the Soviet Union (via Prague) to Munich. He lives now in Berlin and his books deal mostly with contemporary Jewish-German identity.

Jewish Women in Old Berlin

Hels publishes a review about Jewish Women and their Salons:

"Jewish collectors seemed to be open to modern art, and one salon was critically important. Felicie Rosen­thal 1850-1908 married Carl Bernstein, leaving St Pet­ersburg to set up their home in Berlin. Her salon was quite into modernity and risk taking. They were known as the first to buy French Impress­ion­ist art in Germany, and hang them on their walls in the salon."

[...]

"Viennese and Berlin salons were almost all run by Jewish women. Several gen­er­at­ions of Itzigs rescued the Bachs from obscurity. So why did this 100 year period of Jewish dialogue with high culture come to a crushing end. The beginning of the C20th brought in the real end of salons in central Europe. War turmoil, new ways of spending free time like travel and mass media meant women of leisure spent their time diff­er­ently. And because political intens­ity and commitment became, by 1914, more important that polite, witty conversation."

About Jewish Women in Berlin:
See our specialised tours in the subject

San Francicsco Exhibition about James Simon

"The State Museums of Berlin and the Legacy of James Simon," an exhibit of 150 treasures from the State Museums of Berlin, is on display at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

Offered as a "case study of the history of collecting during the late 19th and early 20th centuries," the exhibit is a testament to the philanthropy of Simon, the German-Jewish art patron and collector who donated thousands of works to Berlin's nine state museums before his death in 1932."

View the show from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays through Jan. 18 at Lincoln Park, 34th Avenue and Clement Street, S.F. Admission is $16 to $20 with a $10 surcharge included. Call 415-750-3600 or visit www.legionofhonor.org for more information.