Thespians in Transit: Exile and Emigration to Buenos Aires

Abstract

During the late 1930s German emigrants in Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded the Nazi German Theater and its antifascist adversary, the Free German Stage. This paper focuses on the preliminary stages of emigration from Europe to South America of two actors—Paul Walter Jacob, founder of the Free German Stage, and his counterpart and opponent, Ludwig Ney, at the German Theater. Director and manager of a successful touring ensemble funded by the Strength through Joy organization in Germany, Ney abruptly emigrated to Argentina in 1937. Shifting to Jacob, this paper then reconstructs his final years in Germany before fleeing from Nazism in 1933 as a Jewish actor. Although these artists formed sharply hostile alliances, during the preliminary stages of emigration they honed overlapping survival skills and then deployed surprisingly similar tactics to prosper in Buenos Aires.

Publication Title

Amsterdamer Beitrage Zur Neueren Germanistik

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