Hans Rehfisch

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin, where his father Eugen Rehfisch was a physician, Hans began his career as a successful lawyer before turning his hand to literature and the theatre.

[1] Marlene Dietrich made her name as a young actress in Berlin playing the role of Lou in Rehfisch's social satire Duel at the Lido in 1926.

He was a freelance writer until March 1933, when he was arrested by the Nazis in Dresden after the premiere of a play called Hauptmann Grisel's Betrayal, a warning of the dangers of National Socialism.

[5] He was released on the condition that he left the country never to return, so he escaped first to Vienna and then to London, where he worked first as a metal worker,[6] then for the BBC and the US Office of Strategic Services.

[7] While interred at Sefton Internment Camp on the Isle of Man in 1940, Rehfisch directed a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar (see citation 6 above).

Once released and in London, together with the philosopher Hermann Friedmann, the journalist Heinz Jaeger (1899-1975) and the former artistic director of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden Karl Wollf (1876-1952), Rehfisch founded The Club 1943,[8] a cultural association of German-speaking emigrants.

[12] After World War II he taught at The New School for Social Research in New York (1947–49), then returned to Germany in 1950 to settle in Hamburg.

A 1947 feature in colour, it was directed by surrealist artist and dada film-theorist Hans Richter, and produced by Kenneth Macpherson and Peggy Guggenheim.

Collaborators included Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Darius Milhaud and Fernand Léger.