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.

Grave of Hans José Rehfisch in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin-Mitte; Honorary grave
Programme for Wer weint um Juckenack? , directed by Erwin Piscator at the Volksbühne , Berlin, 1 February 1925, (1925)