Nazi hatred of Charlie Chaplin, along with mention of a Louise Brooks film

Late last year, I ran a short series of blogs highlighting some of the new and unusual material I have come across while researching Louise Brooks' life and career. This was research conducted over the internet during the stay-at-home doldrums of the 2020 pandemic lock-down. My research has continued into 2021, as have the stay-at-home orders. Thanks to longtime Louise Brooks Society supporter Tim Moore, I have recently come across a handful of new and unusual items which I wish to share. This post kicks off another short series of blogs highlighting that material.

In the past, the UK newspaper Daily Telegraph ran a regular feature called "London Day by Day," featuring short news bits about and related to life in the English capitol. In August of 1934, it ran a piece on the English-born actor Charlie Chaplin, followed by a piece on the German actor Fritz Kortner (Brooks' co-star in Pandora's Box), who was then a recent emigrant to England. These two piece reveal the tenor of the times.

Chaplin’s movies were banned in Germany because of the actor’s suspected Jewish heritage. Though Nazi hatred of Chaplin is well known, their deep contempt for the widely loved comedian is still surprising, even shocking, after all these years - especially when one reads the Nazi description of Chaplin as "A nasty little Jew, not yet hanged." This clipping, it is worth noting, came 6 years before Chaplin satirized Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940).

Also surprising to me is the mention of Pandora's Box (a silent film) having shown in Berlin in 1934, some five years after it was first released - that is, four to five years into the sound era and a year after the Nazis assumed power. What also surprised me is the description of Pandora's Box as a "distinctly Liberalistic, if not Marxist" film. (It is unclear to me if that is the attitude of the Nazis, or the newspaper.) The clipping also mentions that Pandora's Box was one of the last films shown at the Camera theatre before it was closed by the Nazis, implying that this "world famous pocket cinema" was shuttered because of the films it showed.

The director behind Pandora's Box, the Austrian-born G. W. Pabst, was known as a left-of-center film-maker, and a number of his films contain subtle and not-so-subtle critiques of German society. (Pabst's critical attitude toward German society is also apparent in the other film he made with Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl). Despite, or perhaps in addition to Pabst's leftist politics, what likely got the Camera theatre shuttered was the fact that Brooks' co-star in Pandora's Box, Fritz Kortner, was Jewish. (No doubt, Kortner left Germany in 1934 because the Nazis prohibited Jewish individuals from working in the film industry. Also exiled because of the Nazi ban were members of Syd Kay's Fellows, the small jazz band seen playing at Lulu's wedding in Pandora's Box.)

Fritz Kortner looms over Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box. A Menorah  sits on the shelf to the left.

I don't know much of anything about Die Kamera theater, now demolished, except for what can be found on its Cinema Treasures page. Built in 1928, the theater was badly damaged by Allied bombs during World War II. It was not reopened, and later the Russian Embassy was built at its site. If any reader of this blog knows more, I would certainly be interested to learn what I might about its existence in the early 1930s. I would also be especially interested in obtaining any vintage newspaper advertisements from the time, especially for Pandora's Box. I wonder which German newspaper might have carried them?

Cinema Treasures has a couple of image of this historic theater, one an interior view, and another 1936 image of an exterior, street view. (That image, the image shown below, is a cropped from this Wikipedia image.) Its name, Kamera, can be seen behind the lamp pole above the door in the middle of the image. Another image of the theater, dating from 1934, and with Nazi flags hanging from the building exterior, can be found HERE.

For more on a 1933 screening of Pandora's Box, see this earlier LBS blog, "Amazing letter from Theodor Adorno to Alban Berg," in which the famous philosopher recounts seeing the film in a letter to the famed composer.

Louise Brooks Encyclopedia: Fritz Kortner

Welcome to a new feature of the Louise Brooks Society blog - a monthly entry from Louise Brooks Encyclopedia. This second entry is devoted to actor Fritz Kortner.  The Austrian-born stage and film actor and later theater director played Dr. Ludwig Schön in G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929).

Fritz Kortner with Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box (1929).

Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Kortner studied at the city's Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Kortner took part in Vienna's rich cultural life, and around this time met the critic and satirist Karl Kraus, who helped shape the hopeful actor's thinking on the theater as well as his Jewish identity. (Earlier, in 1904, Kraus was instrumental in helping Wedekind stage his Lulu plays in Vienna.) After graduation, Kortner moved to Berlin to make his name. He joined Max Reinhardt's theater company in 1911, performing in King Oedipus, Faust, and Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist, where he likely met Tilly Wedekind. After five years with Reinhardt, Kortner joined Leopold Jessner's company. Kortner's breakthrough came in 1919 with his performance in Ernst Toller's Transfiguration; soon afterward, Kortner became one of Germany's best-known actors and the nation's foremost performer of Expressionist works. He went on to appear in many classical and modernist plays, including works by Arthur Schnitzler and Bertolt Brecht. 

Fritz Kortner (far right) as Schigolch in a 1919 production of Wedekind's Die Büchse der Pandora.Mirjam Horwitz (middle) played Lulu.

Kortner played Schigolch in a 1919 production of Die Büchse der Pandora at the Hamburger Kammerspiele. And in a 1926, in production at the Schauspielhaus Berlin, he was both Dr. Schön and Jack the Ripper. (The role of Lulu in the latter production was played by Gerda Müller, an actress with whom he had performed in Macbeth. Her circle included Brecht and the noted conductor Hermann Scherchen, to whom she was briefly married.)

Fritz Kortner (far right) as Jack the Ripper in a 1926 production of Wedekind's Die Büchse der Pandora.
Gerda Müller (left) played Lulu, and Lucie Hoflich played the Countess Geschwitz (middle).

On stage, Kortner was known for his powerful voice and explosive energy; in the 1920's, however, his work began to incorporate greater realism as he developed a more controlled delivery and greater use of gesture. His considerable fame during the years of the Weimar Republic was linked to his playing Shakespeare's most problematic characters, Othello, Richard III, Hamlet, and especially Shylock. His presentation of the latter made him a target of the right, with Nazi pundits depicting the actor as a lecherous Jew. In March of 1929, not long after the debut of Pandora's Box, Kortner was falsely accused of raping a gentile woman.

Kortner appeared in over ninety films. His specialty was complex, sinister characters. His films include starring roles in Warning Shadows (1923, with Fritz Rasp),  The Hands of Orlac (1924), Beethoven (1927), The Woman One Longs For (1929), The Ship of Lost Men (1929, with Marlene Dietrich), Atlantic (1929, with Francis Lederer), Dreyfus (1930, with Fritz Rasp), and Chu Chin Chow (1934, with Anna May Wong), as well as later supporting roles in The Razor's Edge (1946) and Berlin Express (1948). In Pabst's Pandora's Box, Kortner reprised the role of Dr. Schön, a respected, middle-aged newspaper publisher entangled in a love affair with Lulu.

Like Pabst, Kortner was artistically and politically aligned against the Nazis. With Hitler's rise to power, the Jewish actor left Germany, emigrating in 1933 to Vienna, then to London, and then New York–where he renewed his friendship and was an advisor to the influential American journalist and broadcaster Dorothy Thompson. Eventually, Kortner ended up in Hollywood, where he found work as a character actor and theater director. His stay in Los Angeles brought him into contact with new acquaintances like Charlie Chaplin, and old friends and fellow exiles like Brecht, Salka Viertal, and Heinrich Mann. Following the war, Kortner along with Brecht and others committed themselves to rebuilding the German stage. The actor returned to his shattered homeland in 1949. In the decades that followed, he was noted for his innovative and sometimes controversial staging of classics by Molière, Schiller, and Shakespeare; in the latter's Richard  III (1964), the King crawls over piles of corpses at the play's end. Kortner penned his memoirs and died in Munich in 1970, at the age of 78.

Below are some scenes from Warning Shadows featuring Kortner.

Fritz Kortner : The Jewish Actor Who Would Not Be Intimidated

The Jewish Daily Forward has a good article on Fritz Kortner, the acclaimed Austrian-born Jewish actor who starred as Dr. Schön opposite Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box. The article can be found here.

Louise Brooks and the back of Fritz Kortner in
a scene from Pandora's Box (1929).

The article outlines Kortner's rather remarkable career. According to Wikipedia: "Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911, and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year he made his first appearance in a silent film. He became one of Germany's best known character actors. His specialty was playing sinister and threatening roles, though he also appeared in the title role of 1930's Dreyfus.

With the coming to power of the Nazis, Kortner, being Jewish, chose to flee Germany in 1933. He emigrated to the United States, where he found work as a character actor and theatre director for a time before returning to Germany in 1949. Upon his return, he became noted for his innovative staging and direction, particularly of classics such as his Richard III (1964) in which the king crawls over piles of corpses at the end."

Below is a German-language video clip of Kortner sharing his memories of Gustav Gründgens, the German actor who collaborated with the Nazi regime, inspiring Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel Mephisto and its 1981 screen adaptation.

While writing this blog, I learned that there is a book on the actor, From Shakespeare to Frisch: The Provocative Fritz Kortner, by Richard D. Critchfield. It was published in 2008 by Synchron Publishers. I will have to try and track down a copy to see if there is anything in it about Pandora's Box or Louise Brooks. In closing, here is  swell vintage postcard of Kortner as Beethoven in Das Leben des Beethoven (1927).