A few people know that the German Jewish actor and director Kurt Gerron (Berlin, 1897- Auschwitz, 1944) was the first one who sang the famous ballad Mack the Knife, from Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with music by Kurt Weill. Maybe we remember him better as the hefty and cynic figure of the magician Kiepert in The blue angel (Der Blaue Engel, 1930), a Josef von Sternberg’s film which shot Marlene Dietrich to fame. But even less people know that Gerron acted in 53 movies, that since 1926 he directed 22 films, or that he was involved in one of the most sordid episodes in Nazi cinematography.
The political uncertainty of Germany during the period between the wars coincided with the growing industrial and aesthetic strength of its film industry. To focus on the production company which Gerron worked with, the Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft, best known as UFA, it got a high economic profitability, mainly at the end of the twenties and at the beginning of the thirties, partly thanks to its impulse both for popular cinema, and for more ambitious works from the artistic point of view, among which we can include the above mentioned The blue angel. Filmed in a double version -German and English, a very frequent practice in that moment-, its best trump card lies in the creative use that Sternberg made of a new resource such as sound.
But it was in the most commercial genres where Gerron assumed the direction. Having worked as a theatre actor and as a cabaret artist since 1920, in 1931 he directed six short films that showed musical acts, all of them with the title Kabarett-Programm. The following year, with a production design reminiscent of Hollywood, he directs Ein Toller Einfall (A mad idea) (1932), a musical comedy of intrigue, set in a high mountain hotel. Although from the arrival of sound and until almost the end of the nazism this gender became the most characteristic in German cinema, productions that mixed suspense and adventure were also very frequent. In this genre so unique names such as Fritz Lang started to work, and to it belongs another Gerron’s film Der Weiße Dämon (The white demon) (1932), also shot in French and where we can find Peter Lorre in the role of an evil drug dealer.
In 1933, Gerron was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany, from where he moved to Paris, then to Prague, and from there to Holland, where he would still direct successful films such as Merijntje Gijzen’s Jeugd (1936) and Die drie wensen (1937), before the German occupation, the latter being based in a story by Grimm brothers. Unlike many intellectuals who escape from Europe long before the nazism, first for professional reasons, and later for political reasons, Gerron didn’t. Why? He probably supposed that the situation would not became so radical. In any case, in 1943 he was arrested by the SS, and taken to Westerbrook (Netherlands), and from there to Theresienstadt. Although he continued with his theatre activity in both camps, Gerron became sadly famous for being forced to direct a fake documentary film for propaganda purposes for the Nazis. However, that was in vain: on 28th October 1944 he was gassed in Auschwitz accompanied by his wife Olga, one day before Himmler ordered the closing of the camp.
Festival Internacional de Cine de Huesca
