Professor Mamlock (play)

Professor Mamlock

The Berlin premiere of Professor Mamlock, with Walter Franck (carrying sign) in the title role. Hebbel Theater, 9 January 1946.
Written by Friedrich Wolf
Characters
  • Prof. Hans Mamlock
  • Rolf Mamlock
  • Dr. Carlsen
  • Dr. Hellpach
Date premiered January 19, 1934
Place premiered Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater
Original language German
Genre Tragedy
Setting Unspecified city in Germany, 1932-1933.
IBDB profile

This article is about the play. For the film by Herbert Rappaport, see Professor Mamlock (1938 film). For the film by Konrad Wolf, see Professor Mamlock (1961 film).

Professor Mamlock is a theater play written by Friedrich Wolf at 1933. Portraying the hardships a Jewish doctor named Hans Mamlock experiences under the Hitler regime, it is one of the earliest works dealing with Nazi antisemitism.

Contents

Characters

Synopsis

Act I

Before the May 1932 elections, in Mamlock's clinic.

The personnel and patients in the clinic discuss the political situation. Ruof and Hellpach support Hitler, while Hirsch and Seidel believe his rise to power will lead to war. Mamlock arrives and forbids conversation about politics in the institute.

Act II

28 February 1933. Mamlock's house.

Rolf claims the Nazis had organized the Reichstag Fire; he and his father, who disapproves of his political stance and activism, have a heated argument, in the end of which Rolf must move out of the residence. Simon arrives and announces that the SA are searching the clinic for 'non-Aryan' doctors. The government decrees that all communists, pacifists, Jews and other opponents of the new regime will be banned from practicing medicine and holding other offices. Ruoff declares she will not be willing to work under a Jew; Hellpach leaves the clinic to join the SS.

Act III

April 1933. Mamlock's house.

Mamlock is not allowed to enter his clinic by law, while his daughter Ruth is attacked at school. Ruth and Ellen realize that their early, idealistic support of the Nazis was misguided. When Mamlock attempts to talk with Hellpach, who now runs the institute, he encounters a group of SA men who molest him. He returns home a broken man, carrying a Yellow badge.

Act IV

The next day, in the clinic.

A new government decree lifts the working ban from all veterans of the First World War. Mamlock and Hirsch return to the clinic. There, Hellpach announces that all 'non-Aryans' who are not subject to the decree will be dismissed. Simon loses his work. Mamlock is revolted by this, and demands justice. He organizes a petition in which he calls upon the government to treat all citizens equally. Hellpach is enraged, and demands from all other personnel to sign an affidavit according to which Mamlock is guilty of various crimes. Mamlock is shocked to see that they all agree to do so - except Ruoff, who rejects her Nazi convictions. He realizes that his friends have abandoned him. Exasperated and despaired, Mamlock tells Inge that she and his son should fight for a better future. Then, he commits suicide.

History

Writing

Wolf wrote Professor Mamlock shortly after the Reichstag Fire forced him to leave Germany for exile in France; he intended his work to be staged by Gustav von Wangenheim's theater group Truppe 1931.[1] He completed Professor Mamlock while vacating in Île-de-Bréhat.[2] The playwright later told that he conceived the play on the very day after the Fire, when many of his friends called him, blaming him of being a communist and a sympathizer to those who set the Parliament aflame. Consequently, they severed all contacts with him.[3]

While the character of Mamlock bears resemblance to the author himself - a Jewish doctor, married to a non-Jewish wife - there was a real man named Professor Hans-Jacques Mamlok (12 April 1875, Koschmin[4] - 11 November 1940, New York)[5][6] who served as the director of the Dentistry Faculty in the University of Berlin before the NSDAP's takeover. He emigrated to the United States, arriving three days after the opening of Professor Mamlock in New York, at 1937; although he claimed that the play was based on his life,[7] it is unknown whether Wolf was in inspired by him.[8][9]

The play is considered as one of the earliest artistic treatments of the persecution of Jews in Germany.[10]

Stage productions

Truppe 1931 was dissolved before it could produce Professor Mamlock,[11] and Wolf's piece was first performed in Yiddish, on the stage of the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater at 19 January 1934, under the title The Yellow Badge[a 1] and starring Alexander Granach;[12] André van Gyseghem and Marie Seton, who traveled from Moscow after securing the rights for an English-language production from Wolf, attended the performance.[13] The next stage adaptation - directed by Leopold Lindtberg under the title Professor Mannheim - was in Hebrew, in Tel Aviv's Habima Theatre, and premiered on 25 July 1934[12] with Shimon Finkel in the main role.[14] Lindtberg also directed the first German-language production, which was held in Schauspielhaus Zürich at 8 December later that year, again by the name Professor Mannheim.[15] Swiss Nazis disturbed the performances: on several occasions, stench bombs were thrown at the stage.[16] When a cheap-ticket performance was carried in Zürich's Stadttheater, armed riot police had to secure the location, making more than a hundred arrests.[15]

Professor Mamlock was translated to English by Anne Bromberger in 1935.[17] In Britain, the play was approved by the Lord Chamberlain Cromer, but its planned performance in the Westminster Theatre at 1935 did not take place, apparently due to silent pressure from the Foreign Office on the background of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. It was staged there again at 1939.[18] The English-language version of the play, organized by Federal Theatre Project's Jewish Theater Unit and starring Joseph Anthony, eventually premiered in New York's Experimental Theater on 13 April 1937, where it ran for seventy-six performances.[19]

In Sweden, which banned explicit antifascist works due its neutrality and fears from the right-wing press' reaction, Professor Mamlock was the only such play allowed to be performed.[20] Between 1935 to 1943, it was also staged in theaters in Tokio, Moscow, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Johannesburg, Basel, Oslo, Shanghai, Chongqing and other cities, being viewed by millions.[21][12] It was the first ever foreign play to be performed in Kazakhstan, where it was produced during the Second World War.[22] After the end of the war, the drama had its German premiere in Berlin's Hebbel Theater, on 9 January 1946, starring Walter Franck.[23]

Wolf was awarded the National Prize of East Germany 2nd degree at 25 August 1949 for the writing of Professor Mamlock,[24] and the play was entered into the country's schools' curriculum.[25][26][27]

Adaptations

At 1938, Herbert Rappaport directed the first screen adaptation of Professor Mamlock, filmed in the Soviet Union by the Lenfilm Studio. It starred Semyon Mezhinsky in the title role.[28] A radio drama based on the play was broadcast on Berliner Rundfunk when Wolf worked there as a director. It was aired on 8 November 1945 and had many re-runs.[12] At 1961, the author's son Konrad Wolf directed a second film based on the play, made in East Germany, with Wolfgang Heinz as Mamlock.[28]

Interpretation

Peter Bauland commented that the play portrayed the slow, belated transformation of Mamlock from an a-political person who refuses to acknowledge the reality of the Nazi rule and who keeps having faith in the state to a man who realizes the severity of the situation, after enduring countless humiliations; when Mamlock understands that his faith in law and order is misplaced, it is too late. Wolf contrasted the doctor with his son, the active communist Rolf, who urges to resist the new regime by all means, although his father refuses to listen. Rolf's political convictions reflected Wolf's ideology, and Professor Mamlock had an unambiguous political agenda: "The play was, unfortunately, also filled with gratuitous leftist propaganda that added nothing to the drama".[19] John Rodden defined it as a "committed" communist work. When it was taught in East German schools, the teachers were instructed to stress out "the lame resistance to the rise of Hitler by the Weimar Republic and neutral, liberal-humanist professors such as Mamlock."[27] As noted by Manuela Gerlof, the character of Mamlock "embodied the humanist bourgeois." Wolf himself wrote that he aimed the play at "our country's twelve million Mamlocks - the little middle-class intellectuals," and claimed that the a-political, lethargic conduct of those not only allowed the Nazis to maintain power, but led them to it in the first place. According to Gerlof, while using the Jewish environment as a setting, Wolf's play targeted the German conservative worldview as a whole. This was also evidenced by the additional title of the play's edition printed in Zürich at 1935: Doktor Mamlocks Ausweg. Tragödie der westlichen Demokratie (Dr. Mamlock's Way Out. A Tragedy of Western Democracy).[12]

References

  1. ^ Jasmin Arnold. Die Revolution frisst ihre Kinder: deutsches Filmexil in der UdSSR. ISBN 978-3828884793. Page 81.
  2. ^ Zlata Fuss Phillips. German children's and youth literature in exile, 1933-1950: biographies and bibliographies. ISBN 978-3598115691. Page 274.
  3. ^ Professor Mamlock on projekt-judentum.de.
  4. ^ Vereinigung Demokratische Zahnmedin. Zahnmedizin und Nationalsozialismus: Liste der Opfer (M). vdzm.de.
  5. ^ Dr. Hans Mamlok, Subject of Play, Dies at Age 65. New York Times, 12 November 1940.
  6. ^ Dr. Hans Mamlock Dies. The Gazzette. 12 November 1940.
  7. ^ Exile Here As Play Portrays His Life. New York Times, 17 April 1937.
  8. ^ George Kazacoff. Dangerous Theatre. ISBN 978-0820407524. Page 127.
  9. ^ Albrecht Scholz, Caris-Petra Heidel. Das Bild des jüdischen Arztes in der Literatur. ISBN 978-3933050946. Page 130-134.
  10. ^ Gabrielle H. Cody, Evert Sprinchorn. The Columbia encyclopedia of modern drama, Volume 2. ISBN 978-0231140324. Page 1486.
  11. ^ James MacPherson Ritchie. German Literature Under National Socialism. ISBN 978-0709922179. Page 233.
  12. ^ a b c d e Manuela Gerlof. Tonspuren: Erinnerungen an den Holocaust im Hörspiel der DDR (1945-1989). ISBN 978-3110225891. Pages 109-140.
  13. ^ Freedomways. Paul Robeson, the Great Forerunner. ISBN 978-0717807246. Page 45.
  14. ^ Wolf beim Mossad. Der Spiegel, 8 April 1996.
  15. ^ a b Wilhelm Hortmann, Michael Hamburger. Shakespeare on the German stage: the twentieth century. ISBN 978-0521343862. Page 165.
  16. ^ Hermann Glaser. The Rubble Years: The Cultural Roots of Postwar Germany, 1945-1948. ISBN 978-0913729267. Page 242.
  17. ^ Friedrich Wolf, Anne Bromberger. Professor Mamlock: A Play. Universum Publishers and Distributors (1935). ASIN B002DOK1CI.
  18. ^ Anthony Aldgate, James Crighton Robertson. Censorship in theatre and cinema. ISBN 978-0748619610. Page 51.
  19. ^ a b Peter Bauland. The Hooded Eagle: Modern German Drama on the New York Stage. ISBN 978-0815621195. Page 267.
  20. ^ Jean Michel Palmier. Weimar in exile: the antifascist emigration in Europe and America. ISBN 978-1844670680. Page 419.
  21. ^ Henning Müller. Friedrich Wolf, Weltburger aus Neuwied: Selbstzeugnisse in Lyrik und Prosa : Dokumente und dokumentarisches Bilder und Briefe. ISBN 978-3980115247. Page 89.
  22. ^ Don Rubin (editor). World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Vol. 5: Asia / Pacific. ISBN 978-0415059336. Page 319.
  23. ^ Pól O'Dochartaigh. Jews in German literature since 1945: German-Jewish literature? ISBN 978-9042014633. Page 297.
  24. ^ DEFA Chronicle of 1949.
  25. ^ David Foster, David R. Russell. Writing and Learning in Cross-national Perspective: Transitions From Secondary To Higher Education. ISBN 978-0805844856. Page 210.
  26. ^ Sassan Niasseri. Der Mann hinter Markus Wolf. Der Spiegel, 7 July 2005.
  27. ^ a b John Rodden‏. Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology, and Eastern German Identity. ISBN 978-0271025216. Page 53.
  28. ^ a b Anette Insdorf. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. ISBN 978-0521016308. Pages 153-155.

Annotations

  1. ^ In the original play, Mamlock was forced to wear the badge. In the film adaptations and in several stage productions, his surgeon's robe was emblazoned with the word "Jew"; alternatively, he had to carry a sign with the inscription.

External links