The Disappearance of Kurt Gerron

A film actor, singer, dancer, director, and stage personality, Kurt Gerron seemed to be all over Berlin and the silver screen in Germany from 1920 until the war. Involved in approximately seventy films, it would have been difficult to erase his presence from the history of motion pictures. And yet, there seem to be large gaps both in his film presence and his actual biography; even a recent book on Gerron is admittedly more creative non-fiction than fact. One example is a film ‘featuring’ Gerron made in 1930, People on Sunday, which depicts life in Berlin, portrays people anticipating a performance of Gerron, but omits Gerron himself, as if parts of the film were deleted. This is also the case of numerous other films. Cutting would have impossible in motion pictures in which his roles help to carry the plot, such as The Blue Angel (1928), but in Diary of A Lost Girl (1935), in which his role is significant, he is generally uncredited. Gerron, who was the first to sing “Mack the Knife,” was not chosen for the film of the Three-Penny Opera, although his fame was so great he is said to have been filmed by German soldiers singing just before his demise in Auschwitz. Goebbels uses Gerron as an example of The Eternal Jew (1940) and as the unwilling director of the film, “Hitler Builds A City For The Jews,” he remains the quintessential representation of the distortion and erasure of the human truths of the Holocaust.