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Julius Kobler * 1866

Kirchenallee 39 Schauspielhaus (Hamburg-Mitte, St. Georg)

gedemütigt entrechtet
Behandlung verweigert - tot 22.06.1942

Julius Kobler, born 21 April 1866 in Damboritz (Damborice), Moravia, died on 22 Jun. 1942 at the Israelitic Hospital in Hamburg

last residence: Oberstrasse
professional domain: Deutsches Schauspielhaus (drama theater)

Julius Kobler was born as the son of the Jewish couple Juda and Hanny Kobler, née Stiassny, in Damboritz (Damborice) in southern Moravia. He began his acting career at the German theater in Pilsen (now Czech Republic). In 1890, he was a member of the Ducal Saxon Court Theater in Meiningen in Thuringia; from 1891 to 1904, he had engagements in Berlin, Vienna and New York: moving to Hamburg in 1904, he joined the company of the Thalia Theater, from where he switched to the neighboring Deutsches Schauspielhaus in 1917. In 1916, he had married the non-Jewish singer Käthe (Käthchen), née Wettwer (born 1893 in Altona), who joined the Jewish Community after her marriage, remaining a member until her leaving in 1940. Their children Norbert (born 1916) and Eva (born 1918) both wanted to follow in their father’s footsteps and become actors, but this was denied them in Germany by the Nazi regime on account of their parentage.

Julius Kobler was an extremely well-known and popular actor in Hamburg; he played the main parts in the plays of world literature that were most in demand at the time. On September 1st, 1934, he was forced to leave the company of the Deutsche Schauspielhaus. Until 1936, he went on tour, appearing on the stages of the German-speaking neighboring countries such as Austria, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia. In Germany, he only played on the stages of the Jewish Cultural Association in Hamburg and other cities, sometimes also directing. In the 1930s, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, which was initially successfully operated on in Vienna in 1936. After that, he continued to work for the Jewish cultural Association for a couple of years. However, his cancer got worse again at the beginning of the 1940s.
In June, 1942, he was first admitted to the University Hospital in Eppendorf, only to be discharged a few days later for the reason that, on account of a decree of 1936 that ruled that Jewish patients could only be operated on there in "extreme emergencies.” Julius Kobler was then transferred to the Israelitic Hospital, where an operation performed a week or two later could not save his life. He died there on June 22nd, 1942. Although three medical expertises in the 1950s denied a direct causal connection between the University Hospital’s refusal to operate on Julius Kobler and Kobler’s death, the actor was doubtless a victim of racial discrimination and persecution by the Nazi regime.
Julius Kobler’s children Norbert and Eva were considered to be "voluntary Jews” and were also subject to harassment and persecution. Norbert was already mobbed out of the Eppendorf high school in 1933 and had no chance of completing his school career with the "Abitur” diploma that he wanted to obtain by all means in order qualify for studying dramatic arts at university level. He joined his father on the stage already before 1933 and privately learned a lot of histrionics from him. From 1934, he performed together with his father and also alone on stages in Czechoslovakia, Austria and the Netherlands.
When Norbert Kobler in 1937 visited his parents in Hamburg following a theater engagement in Czechoslovakia, he was arrested by the Gestapo, who classified him as a "hostile alien” (he only had Czech citizenship from his father and had been away from the German Reich for more than three months) and ordered to leave the country immediately. Norbert went to France and finally left Europe by boat from Southampton for the USA, where he settled.
His sister Eva had similar career plans, and also had to abandon them on account of racial discrimination. Legally classified as a "voluntary Jew” on account of her Jewish upbringing, leaving the Jewish Community in November, 1939 did not save her from this stigmatization; she had to display the "Jews’ star” and endure further harassments and restrictions reserved for "full Jews”. Until the fall of 1942, she worked as a clerk for the J. Joseph Flach Company until the regime forced them to dismiss her. In the following, she often had to perform very hard forced labor at Hamburg factories.

In January, 1944 she received a deportation order to Theresienstadt. Immediately after it arrived, she fled to Munich to join a couple who had offered to hide her and her mother at their home in case of persecution. Shortly after her arrival, however, she was denounced to the Gestapo by that very same couple. The Gestapo arrested her, only releasing her in September, 1944, with the order to immediately return to her mother in Hamburg. Possibly, this surprising release was due to successful interventions with the Nazi authorities by her mother or influential friends. Anyhow, Eva Kobler was able to live with her mother inconspicuously up to the end of the war and the Nazi regime without being persecuted again.
A stumbling stone for Julius Kobler was laid in 2006 in front of his last voluntary residence in Oberstrasse, another in May, 2008 in front of the main entrance to his professional domain, the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Kirchenallee in St. Georg.

Translated by Peter Hubschmid

Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: October 2016
© Benedikt Behrens

Quellen: 1; AfW, Entschädigungsakte; Wamser, Ursula/W. Weinke (Hg.), Ehemals in Hamburg zu Hause. Jüdisches Leben am Grindel, Hamburg 1991, S. 138ff.