Dora Gerson - Life and Work

Life and Work

Born Dorothea Gerson in Berlin, Germany, Gerson began her career as a touring singer and actress in the Holtorf Tournee Truppe alongside actor Mathias Wieman in Germany where she met and married her first husband, film director Veit Harlan. The couple married in 1922 and divorced in 1924. Harlan would eventually direct the highly anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß (1940) by request of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Harlan's niece later married the American Jewish filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

In 1920, Gerson was cast to appear in the successful film adaptation of the Karl May penned novel Auf den Trümmern des Paradieses (On the Brink of Paradise) and later followed that same year in another May adaptation entitled Die Todeskarawane (Caravan of Death). Both films included Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi in the cast. Both films are now considered lost films. Gerson continued to perform as a popular cabaret singer throughout the 1920s as well as acting in films.

By 1933 however, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, the German-Jewish population was systematically stripped of rights and Gerson's career slowed dramatically. Blacklisted from performing in "Aryan" films, Gerson began recording music for a small Jewish record company. She also began recording in the Yiddish language during this time, and the 1936 song "Der Rebe Hot Geheysn Freylekh Zayn" became highly regarded by the Jews of Europe in the 1930s. Gerson's most memorable recordings from this era were the songs "Backbord und Steuerbord" and "Vorbei" (Beyond Recall), which was an emotional ballad, subtly memorializing a Germany before the rise of the Nazi Party: