There Goes a Mensch

A Memoir

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by Alexander Granach

Type

Autobiographies

Subject

Actor > Alexander Granach

Keywords

Alexander Granach, actor, Germany, 1920s, 1930s

Publishing date

2019

Publisher

Atara Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 402 pages
5 ½ x 8 ½ inches (14 x 21.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-9822251-5-8

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Book Presentation:
Alexander Granach was born in 1893 in Werbowitz, a small village on the easternmost rim of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and would become one of Germany's most successful actors of both the stage and early cinema during the Weimar Republic. He appeared in seminal German expressionist cinema classics, most notably Nosferatu and, later in Hollywood, had supporting roles in films with Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, and Ingrid Bergman. There Goes a Mensch is his early life memoir, a work that has found lasting resonance and continued success over many editions in Germany since its initial publication in 1945. Written in Los Angeles under wartime curfew for German emigres, Granach recounts the first half of a life that took him from remote Jewish shtetls in Galicia to the most renown acting school in Berlin, where he began his rise to theatrical prominence and became known as the "Koenig der Ostjuden" (King of the Eastern Jews). The Great War would intervene and he survives the Italian front, war captivity, and an escape across the Alps before returning to the stage. Steeped in Weimar Berlin's dyna­mic artistic circles, Granach was a friend to and colleague of many of the great writers, directors, and actors of the period. Lion Feuchtwanger called him "the most expressionistic of all the expressionist-era actors" and others referred to him as a primordial force of nature. Finally available with numerous photos, this edition strives to maintain the Granach legacy, a work that Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann urged him to complete, providing both a self-portrait and a portrait of the eras and milieus that shaped him.

About the Author:
Alexander Granach was a much admired actor during the Weimar Republic of both the stage and early cinema, known for his roles in films such as F. W. Murnau's classic Nosferatu (1922), and later as an emigre in Hollywood, in Ninotchka (1929), and Hangmen Also Die (1943). His memoir was completed while under curfew for German immigrants in California during the war, at the behest of friends such as Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Bertolt Brecht. Granach's book has had a long life in German-Jewish history studies, particularly in its German edition.Leopold Lindtberg, born in Vienna in 1902, was an Austrian-Swiss director and writer. His wartime film The Last Chance (1946) received a Golden Globe, and the Grand Prix award and International Peace Prize at Cannes. Other notable films include The Village (1953) and Die missbrauchten Liebesbriefe (1940). A former actor, he trained at the Vienna Conservatory, and began as a stage director in Germany. The son of a Jewish merchant, Lindtberg moved to Switzerland in the early 1940s to evade Nazi persecution and became that country's preeminent filmmaker as well as the director of the Schauspielhaus Zurich from 1933 to 1948.Willard Ropes Trask undertook rendering translations of such influential works as the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova - a notable 12 volumes worth - and works by Pushkin, Thomas Mann, José Ortega y Gasset, Émile Zola, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as compiling a translation of Joan of Arc in her own words. Trask was Ford Madox Ford's personal secretary, an independent scholar, and a recipient of the National Book Award.

See the publisher website: Atara Press

See the complete filmography of Alexander Granach on the website: IMDB ...