“I’ll look you in the eye, little one.” If a television report on cinema history already includes a quote from the classic Casablanca begins, which has been quoted so often in the last few decades that you can actually no longer hear it, this does not bode well for what is to come. In the WDR cultural program Westart This was particularly true recently. The legendary Essen cinema “Lichtburg” and its history played a central role in this.
One could expect that in such a format, at least one point, the biography, work and fate of the Berlin film entrepreneur Karl Wolffsohn would be referred to in more detail, i.e. the person who shaped Essen’s Lichtburg and cinema in Germany in general like no other.
persecution At the entrance to the cinema in downtown Essen, everyone can clearly read: “Karl Wolffsohn, the Berlin publisher and pioneer of film journalism, had been the tenant and operator of this large cinema since 1931. Persecuted as a Jew, Karl Wolffsohn had to sell his movie theater to the semi-state film company UFA in 1933/34 under pressure from the NSDAP. “
“I will not leave the robbers what they have stolen from me,” Wolffsohn vowed.
Now, of course, there is no obligation to remember the expropriated Jewish film entrepreneur Karl Wolffsohn in every TV report about the Essen Lichtburg. However: Westart presents a brief overview of the history of the Lichtburg, from its opening in 1928 to the present day.
And in this context it would have been the duty of the makers to go into at least two or three sentences about Karl Wolffsohn’s services to the Lichtburg and the “Aryanization” of the cinema. When asked, the WDR editorial team informed this newspaper that it had decided not to mention Karl Wolffsohn in such a brief historical review. Hand on heart: Then the excursus on the history of the Lichtburg would have been better deleted.
only For Wolffsohn’s grandson Michael, journalist and historian, one thing is certain: “The makers of the show, who are supposedly so historically aware, completely ignore the fate of the Jewish owner – an absurdity, especially in a 30-minute documentary, in the enough time would have been available. ”
In Michael Wolffsohn’s experience, however, this is unfortunately not an isolated case: “In media reports about my grandfather’s cinema, he, his work and the enormous robbery of his property only appear marginally at best.”
In general, the years 1933 to 1945 were outlined in the WDR report with just one sentence: “The Nazis are making propaganda films, the war is ruining everything.” A sentence that is as short as it is misleading.
Even if Karl Wolffsohn was not mentioned in the WDR cultural program, there are still a number of books that are reminiscent of the film entrepreneur and his achievements: Christoph Wilmers Karl Wolffsohn and the Lichtburg (2006), Ulrich Döges Wolffsohn biography (2016) and of course Michael Wolffsohns German Jewish lucky children. A world story of my family (2017). Further works will certainly follow, because the life and work of the unique film pioneer Karl Wolffsohn provide material for a whole series of books.
berlin When Karl Wolffsohn moved from Posen to Berlin in 1900, at the age of 19, to work as a typesetter and then learn the printing trade at Ullstein, the film was just six years old. The revolutionary medium had several fathers, including Thomas Edison in New York, the Lumière brothers in Paris, Birt Acres in London and the Skladanowsky brothers with their bioscope in Berlin. It was more of a coincidence that Karl Wolffsohn became a film journalist: from 1908 he and two of his brothers owned a small print shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
And when the Wolffsohns got the opportunity in 1910 to acquire the run-down film magazine “Lichtbildbühne” (LBB), they took it immediately. After the brothers’ death, Karl Wolffsohn became the owner and publisher of the “LBB”. He made the magazine one of the world’s leading publications dealing with the technical, entrepreneurial and artistic aspects of the new medium.
In May 1927, in the presence of Ernst Lubitsch, Wolffsohn opened the world’s first archive and specialist library that was dedicated to film and accessible to everyone. The constantly growing archive comprised thousands of photographs, books, dissertations, manuscripts, international press publications as well as a cataloged press archive and even historically valuable films. The venerable Parisian Musée des Arts et Métiers even gave Wolffsohn one of these rare films in recognition of his pioneering work. Wolffsohn’s archive had also become an irreplaceable source of information for film scholars.
wedding As early as 1921, the Lichtbildbühne-Verlag, in which Ullstein was now involved, resided in the lower Friedrichstrasse, where almost all the important German and international film companies were represented. Wolffsohn was not only an authority on film matters in the German and European film world; in Hollywood too, his articles were read and the books he published were widely discussed.
Even before the film could run and finally learned to speak and sing, Wolffsohn began to accompany the development of the new art both lovingly and critically. As his grandson Michael Wolffsohn put it, he “personified the film industry in its totality, so to speak”. Even more: Karl Wolffsohn was always convinced that profit and high quality at low prices do not have to be mutually exclusive.
An impressive example of this is the “Atlantic Garden City” in Berlin-Wedding, a social housing project planned by Rudolf Fränkel in the “New Objectivity” style, right at the Gesundbrunnen train station in Berlin. Thanks to Karl Wolffsohn’s initiative, the Lichtburg cinema in Berlin, which opened in 1929 and has 2000 seats, became the heart of the “garden city”. Cinema as the center of life: that suited Karl Wolffsohn in every way.
»gartenstadt atlantic« In 1937 Wolffsohn succeeded – through straw men in Austria – in becoming the owner of the entire “Gartenstadt Atlantic” and thus keeping his Berlin Lichtburg. That couldn’t go well for long – and it didn’t do it either: In the course of the so-called Aryanizations, the forced expropriations or forced sales, Karl Wolffsohn finally lost all of his companies, including the «Garden City», its cinemas and the legendary Berlin variety shows «Scala» and « Plaza ».
Fortunately, Wolffsohn found a buyer who was willing to pay a fair price for the involuntarily sold LBB-Verlag. Unfortunately, that was an absolute exception. Wolffsohn was even taken into “compulsory detention” for an indefinite period of time in order to be able to “legally” rob him of the Berlin Lichtburg.
essen Karl Wolffsohn’s Lichtburg in Essen was apparently legally bought from the entrepreneur as early as 1933/34. Although Wolffsohn had found buyers who would have been willing to pay him a reasonably reasonable price, the Essen Gauleiter Josef Terboven insisted that only the UFA should keep the cinema.
The humiliatingly low purchase price, which was ultimately not even fully paid, did not even cover what Wolffsohn had invested in the large and modern cinema in Essen. When Wolffsohn was released from Gestapo detention in February 1939 after the “Aryanization” of the Weddingen “Gartenstadt Atlantic”, including the Lichtburg in Berlin, he had little time to flee Germany.
At the beginning of May 1939 Wolffsohn arrived in Palestine with his wife Recha, where his sons Max and Willi were already waiting for them. Karl Wolffsohn, robbed of almost all of his property, from then on lived with his wife in a room in a small two-room apartment in Tel Aviv. In 1942 the Wolffsohns became Palestinians, then finally Israelis in 1948. And of course they stayed Jeckes.
He had to sell many cinemas well below their value. One was “legally” stolen from him.
After the Shoah, it was clear to Karl Wolffsohn that he finally had to get justice: “I will not leave the robbers what they have stolen from me.” However, he soon had to understand that – in order to get justice – he had to personally travel to Germany and fight for his rights. This also affected the Lichtburg in Essen. So the Wolffsohn couple traveled to Germany at the end of 1949.
compensation Karl Wolffsohn was not naive enough to believe that he would get reimbursed for the real value of the cinema and the income he had lost. Under his leadership, the Lichtburg had earned almost one million Reichsmarks annually, and the interior furnishings alone were worth 800,000 Reichsmarks. Wolffsohn, however, hoped for at least adequate compensation.
The city of Essen was still the owner of the building. The city, ruled by the CDU, emphatically denied that any kind of pressure had been put on Wolffsohn in the “sale” of the cinema. Wolffsohn quickly realized that he had to stick to the UFA. The lawsuit against the company lasted eight years. Karl Wolffsohn died on December 6, 1957, before the end of the trial in front of the “Compensation Chamber” in Essen. His widow Recha was finally awarded around 30,000 D-Marks.
The robbery of the Lichtburg in Essen was subsequently almost legalized. In one case, however, Karl Wolffsohn’s struggle for justice was victorious: his family got the “Gartenstadt Atlantic” back and continues to run it today in the spirit of Karl Wolffsohn, for whom entrepreneurial profit and social ethics go very well together – and not only in the cinema.
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