Hans Rehfisch

Hans Rehfisch (10 April 1891 – 9 June 1960), also known as Hans José Rehfisch or H.J. Rehfisch, was a German playwright, short story writer and film script writer.

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.

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,

a cultural association of German-speaking emigrants.

(This was after he left the FGCL or Free German League of Culture).

He became the most famous German playwright of the 1920s.

Together with Erwin Piscator he led the Zentraltheater in 1920, in the Alten Jakobstrasse, Berlin-Mitte.

Wer weint um Juckenack? or Who Cries for Juckenack (1924) was made into a TV film in 1965.

Rehfisch plays were often forensic in nature, involving the uncovering of truth and often featuring lawyers and judges.

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.

His most notorious work was probably The Dreyfus Affair (1929) a historical play written in collaboration with Wilhelm Herzog.

The Dreyfus Affair was premiered under the pseudonym René Kestner at the Berlin Volksbuhne in 1929, and was to be performed in Paris in 1931.

However, after one performance the rightwing Action Francaise mounted riots and the production was withdrawn.

Rehfisch also published works under the pseudonyms H.G. Tennyson Holmes, René Kestner, Sydney Phillips, Georg Turner-Krebs, José Rehfisch and Georg Turner.

In The Dreyfus Affair (1929) Rehfisch used a historical story to denounce militarism and anti-Semitism.

It was made into a German film (1930), a British film (1931) and plagiarised in a Hollywood film.

He was twice president of the Union of German Stage Writers and Composers (1931–33 and 1951–53).

It was adapted into a British film, entitled Dreyfus, in 1931.

His book about Danton was made into a German film in 1931.

Der Verrat des Hauptmanns Grisel (Captain Grisel's Betrayal) (1932) warned of the approaching fascist dictatorship.

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.

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,

then for the BBC and the US Office of Strategic Services.

One of his short stories, titled Guilty Melody, was made into a British film in 1936.

Rehfisch sued Warner Brothers film studios for using his work in the film The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and though he was awarded damages he did not win a writer's credit on the film.

In 1938 The Iron Road was written in English by Rehfisch in collaboration with the English screenwriter Rupert Downing, for a production at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre which opened on 8 October that year.

It was commissioned to mark the centenary of the London to Birmingham railway line, and dramatised the trials of George Stephenson who had to build over a swamp, and the effect of the railways on trade and the common man.

Directed by Herbert M. Prentice it was considered an artistic success but did not transfer to London.

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).

In 1944 he edited a symposium On Tyrants: 4 Centuries of Struggle against Tyranny in Germany, published by The Club 1943.

Some of his plays written in English were produced in London, for instance G.I. Brides at Sea, which was played at the Granville Theatre of Varieties in Walham Green in July 1946.

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.

Rehfisch also wrote the novels The Witches of Paris (1951) and Lysistrata’s Marriage (1959).

His greatest success in the postwar period was the antimilitarist "Colonel Chabert" comedy in 1955-56.

He also wrote radio plays, and for a time was chairman of the Society for the Exploitation of Literary Copyrights (GELU).

He was co-writer of an experimental American film called Dreams That Money Can Buy.

He made the first of many visits to East Germany in 1957.

Rehfisch wrote many successful plays, mostly on the subject of politics, contemporary society and the abuse of power.

His last play, The Boomerang (1960, presented that year at the Leipziger Schauspielhaus) deals with the 1872 trial of A. Bebel and W. Liebknecht.

In 1967 his selected works appeared in four volumes, edited by the Eastern German Academy of Arts, Berlin.