Wilhelm Marckwald

Wilhelm Marckwald was a German actor and director in both theatre and film. He went to Spain in 1933, fleeing to as the political situation heated up. Accused of being a communist, he and his wife were forced to leave Sweden for France. As World War II broke out, they made their way to England.

Marckwald was born to a family related to the wife of painter Max Liebermann, Martha, née Marckwald.

Marckwald first worked as a businessman, then became a musician and played in a café. He then became an actor and then began directing. In 1929 and 1930, he worked with actor P. Walter Jacob at the Stadttheater Koblenz and was a senior producer at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. He left Germany in 1933, then went to Spain, where he became known as Guillermo Marckwald, and began directing films in Barcelona. He was married to a Spanish actress, Pilar, and in 1936, they fled Francisco Franco and his troops. They went to Stockholm, but Marckwald was accused of being a communist and they were expelled to France. As war broke out, they fled to England.

In 1942, Marckwald and his wife arrived at Trench Hall, where, because of restrictions on employment, Marckwald became the boilerman for the school and did gardening. His wife worked in the kitchen. Marckwald immediately formed a theatrical group at the school and began organizing plays. Among those in his theatre group were Frank Auerbach, Michael Roemer and Michael Trede. Decades later, Roemer named Marckwald in the acknowledgments in his 1997 book, Telling Stories

His father, Fritz Marckwald (October 1871 – 14 September 1942) and mother were both baptized Protestant, but were nonetheless deported as Jews by the Nazis and perished in the Theresienstadt ghetto. While they were in the Judenhaus in Dresden, awaiting deportation, Victor Klemperer came to know them and wrote about them in his diary, published decades later in 1995, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten,I Will Bear Witness to the Bitter End, translated into English in three volumes.

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