He worked as a baker, trained as an actor and then suddenly had to go to war. Alexander Granach’s autobiography “There goes a man” reads like a novel. And yet it is a living testimony.
Alexander Granach looked at the world impartially in order to describe it vividly in his autobiography.
At the beginning of our life there is a place and a date. Despite their concreteness, they mark an approximate, almost mythical time period. When memory and imagination invade this zone, our imaginations become dreamy and surreal. This also explains why Alexander Granach’s autobiography first leads into the wondrous.
We are talking about an everyday life in the deep east Galician province that is left alone by world history. Along with cattle and birds, children and skittles roll on warm earth. Summer and winter come regularly to the floe. Otherwise, however, the world only changes insofar as the household grows by another sibling year after year.
Until a tired mother, who not only has to take care of the offspring but also of the yard, house and general store, no longer wants to give birth after the eighth child. The woman even wants a divorce. The salvation of marriage and family now depends solely on Isaiah the Wise to help the couple.
The success of the Jewish itinerant preacher is testified to nine months later when another child is born. In honor of Jessaja it bears his name: Jessaja Gronach. Fate, however, leads the boy from eastern Galicia to the west. And in Germany, the Jewish East Galician Jessaja Gronach becomes the German actor Alexander Granach.
Alexander Granach trained as an actor in pre-war Berlin. He was already playing Shakespeare’s Shylock when the bells of war rang; the artist became a soldier. After the end of the war he became the star of the Munich theater scene. In the 1930s, however, he had to flee to the USA. He first lived in New York before Hollywood offered him a few supporting roles. In March 1945 he died at the age of 55 as a result of an appendix operation.
The actor as writer
Glory is fleeting. This applies especially to the heroes of the theater, whose art is difficult to archive. One will come across the name of Alexander Granach in German theater chronicles; Film historians know him from classics such as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s “Nosferatu” or Ernst Lubitsch’s “Ninotschka”. Nevertheless, the actor would have been largely forgotten by now if he hadn’t formally immortalized himself in an autobiography.
The actor had embarked on his autobiographical work less out of vanity than out of existential necessity. You can find out from “Heimat los!”, an autobiographical writing by his son Gad Granach. According to this, the emigrant is said to have started the chronicle of his life in New York, where he had little connection to the theater scene. However, it only lasted until the end of the First World War.
“There goes a man” by Alexander Granach is an authentic report, but not a sober report. The subtitle “An autobiographical novel” indicates that the text has a literary character. And sometimes there are symbols along the way of the story that mythically embellish one’s own path in life – for example a picture in the Jewish family home: “Moses with a large staff as he led us from somewhere to somewhere”.
As a child, Granach absorbed the Judaism of eastern Galicia, which was rich in prayers and commandments. And he always paid him respect later. In his book, however, he portrays himself as someone who prefers to follow curiosity rather than the rules of religion. And even in his early youth he embarked on professional or artistic challenges, travel and love affairs.
This makes the reading of the biography, which sometimes looks like an adventure story, sometimes like a Bildungsroman or a passion story, all the more lively. And yet, at the same time, it stands the test of time as historical testimony. It is thanks to Granach’s alert and unbiased view that one can not only understand his personal experiences, but also historical upheavals, namely the end of the Danube monarchy.
travel and love affairs
Granach spent the first years of his life with his family in the village of Werbiwizi in eastern Galicia. 150 families live here; 4 of them are Jewish, the others are Ukrainian; a rich Polish landowner lives outside. The village community actually lives peacefully together. The relationship between Christians and Jews only cools off on weekends. Tensions are fueled by the village priest, who rails against Jews. And when the alcohol flows later, violent arguments ensue.
But it is not hatred of the Jews that moves the Granachs to give up their farm, it is material need. The family therefore settles in the small town of Horodenka and opens a bakery. Little Jessaja has to help: he stands in the bakery at four in the morning, delivers bread at six, and school starts at eight. In the coming years, the older brothers left the family one by one. “The children fly away like birds,” complains the father.
It will soon be Alexander’s turn. At the tender age of eleven, his years of apprenticeship and travel began. We owe his courageous descriptions insights into various spheres of East Galician life at the beginning of the 20th century – from apprenticeships to mating behavior.
The young baker’s assistant, who can find work anywhere, owes a certain precocity to material independence. And he promptly embarks on his first amorous adventures. In the town of Kolomea he falls in love with a maid. He even follows her to the next town, where the adored girl falls into the hands of a pimp.
A key experience
Granach is also confronted with new political movements. A Russian intellectual takes him on and introduces him to socialist ideas. In the city of Stanislau, where he once again hired himself out as a baker, Granach presented himself as a trade unionist. A big bakers’ strike turns out to be a fiasco. The trade unionist is fired, he ends up on the street. He finds shelter with a whore until a brother discovers him and takes him to Lemberg.
In Lemberg there was a crucial experience: Granach visited a theater for the first time and saw his vocation and religion in the art of acting. In fact, the pathos of the heroes reminds him of Jewish preachers: “That’s exactly how the Hasidim in Horodenka spoke about the holy miracle rabbis.”
Granach will later complete Max Reinhardt’s acting academy in Berlin. However, he has to overcome two hurdles on his artistic path. On the one hand, he has to give up his mother tongue, Yiddish, in favor of stage German, which he learns in private lessons. On the other hand, he has to fight an apparent flaw: knock knees. In a daring operation, the bones are broken and reassembled. The operation was a success, and his friends congratulated Granach – with the terse remark that they had never noticed anything about knock knees.
Absurd War
But no sooner is Alexander Granach on the stage than the world-historical tragedy takes hold of him: war has broken out. Berlin is “drunk with enthusiasm for the war,” writes Granach. He himself does not allow himself to be infected by fanaticism and nationalism. Meanwhile, the German-speaking actor from East Galicia has to return to his Galician homeland, where he is drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army.
The experiences on the Austro-Italian front and the time spent in southern Italian captivity bring to mind the horrors of war in vivid detail. Granach also records the distrust, anti-Semitism and hatred in his own ranks: “The Czechs hated the Austrians, the Austrians hated the Czechs, the Ukrainians, the Croats, the Slovaks, the Poles, the Jews. The Hungarians again hated everyone together. There was no friendship among these peoples.”
“Here goes a man” is about Granach’s experiences, about the clod and the gutter, about craft stalls and the theater stage, about peace and war. A recent episode in Vienna shows how unfair and absurd fate can sometimes be. Here Granach reports to a commission that is supposed to grant material aid to former soldiers at the front. This does not apply to the East Galician, however, because his homeland is now part of the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic. For four years he risked his life for the empire, he claims. And gets a prompt answer: “I’m sorry, that was just a mistake.”
Poets from Galicia and Bukovina
rbl. · With this text about Alexander Granach, we are continuing our series of portraits of German-speaking authors from Galicia and Bukovina. These are the two easternmost crown lands of the Habsburg monarchy – today large parts of this area belong to the Ukraine, including the former state capitals of Czernowitz (Tschernivzi) and Lemberg (Lviv). Around the turn of the century, world literature arose on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The carriers of German-speaking culture were mainly Jews. And although many authors also knew Ukrainian, Polish or Yiddish, some decided to write in German. Their biographies are almost always stories of flight and expulsion. The Nazis wiped out this unique cultural life. Here we present well-known as well as somewhat forgotten authors.
Alexander Granach was born in 1890 in the eastern Galician village of Werbiwizi. In the small town of Horodenka, he learned to bake in the family-owned business, later he trained as an actor in Berlin. After the World War he became a star of the Munich theater scene and appeared in films such as “Nosferatu”. After emigrating to the USA, he wrote the autobiography “There goes a man” in the late 1930s. He died in New York in 1945. – Next week a portrait of the writer Soma Morgenstern (1890–1976) will appear here.