Hans Rehfisch

Hans Rehfisch (1891–1960), also known as Hans José Rehfisch or H.J. Rehfisch, was a German playwright, short story writer and film script writer.

Born to Jewish parents in Berlin, where his father Eugen Rehfisch was a physician, Hans began his career as a successful lawyer before turning his hand to literature and the theatre. He became the most famous German playwright of the 1920s.Marlene Dietrich made her name as a young actress in Berlin playing the role of Lou in Rehfisch's social satire Duel at the Lido in 1926. Together with Erwin Piscator he led the Zentraltheater in 1920, in the Alten Jakobstrasse, Berlin-Mitte. His most notorious work was probably The Dreyfus Affair (1929) a historical play written in collaboration with Wilhelm Herzog. It was made into a German film (1930), a British film (1931) and plagiarised in a Hollywood film. Rehfisch sued Warner Brothers film studios for using his work in the film The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and though he was awarded damages he did not win a writer's credit on the film. The Dreyfus Affair was premiered under the pseudonym René Kestner at the Berlin Volksbuhne in 1929, and was to be performed in Paris in 1931. However, after one performance the rightwing Action Francaise mounted riots and the production was withdrawn.

Rehfisch also published works under the pseudonyms H.G. Tennyson Holmes, René Kestner, Sydney Phillips, Georg Turner-Krebs, José Rehfisch and Georg Turner. He was a freelance writer until March 1933, when he was arrested by the Nazis in Dresden after the premiere of a play called Hauptmann Grisel's Betrayal, a warning of the dangers of National Socialism. He was released on the condition that he left the country never to return, so he escaped first to Vienna and then to London, where he worked first as a metal worker, then for the BBC and the US Office of Strategic Services.

While interred at Sefton Internment Camp on the Isle of Man in 1940, Rehfisch directed a modern-dress production of Julius Caesar (see citation 6 above). Once released and in London, together with the philosopher Hermann Friedmann, the journalist Heinz Jaeger (1899-1975) and the former artistic director of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden Karl Wollf (1876-1952), Rehfisch founded The Club 1943, a cultural association of German-speaking emigrants. (This was after he left the FGCL or Free German League of Culture). In 1944 he edited a symposium On Tyrants: 4 Centuries of Struggle against Tyranny in Germany, published by The Club 1943. Some of his plays written in English were produced in London, for instance G.I. Brides at Sea, which was played at the Granville Theatre of Varieties in Walham Green in July 1946. One of his short stories, titled Guilty Melody, was made into a British film in 1936. In 1938 The Iron Road was written in English by Rehfisch in collaboration with the English screenwriter Rupert Downing, for a production at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre which opened on 8 October that year. It was commissioned to mark the centenary of the London to Birmingham railway line, and dramatised the trials of George Stephenson who had to build over a swamp, and the effect of the railways on trade and the common man. Directed by Herbert M. Prentice it was considered an artistic success but did not transfer to London.

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