Paul Kornfeld

Marriage to Frieda fritta Brod, 1919: Hesse, Germany, Marriages, 1849-1930: Frankfurt am Main 1919 image 489

Paul Kornfeld was a well-known "dramaturg' in Berlin 1920-33, when the Jew laws forced him back to Prague. See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kornfeld_(playwright)

Paul Kornfeld (11 December 1889—25 April 1942) was a Czech-born German-language Jewish writer whose expressionist plays and scholarly treatises on the theory of drama earned him a specialized niche in influencing contemporary intellectual discourse. (http://www.amazon.com/wiki/Paul_Kornfeld_(playwright)/ref=ntt_at_bio_wiki) (Judy Kornfeld Baumgarten - 7/9/2011)Kornfeld, Paul

See also: The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe -- Paul Kornfeld,(1889–1942), dramatist, expressionist writer and theorist, and stage director. Born and raised in Prague in the generation of Franz Kafka, Paul Kornfeld moved to Germany and made an important contribution to German expressionism on the stage. While he must be considered an assimilated Jew, as was the case with many of his German-speaking Jewish counterparts in the so-called Prague Circle, he and his friends made much of his descent from Orthodox rabbis, including a prominent great-grandfather. Jewish themes and biblical language were central instruments of his universalist, expressionist vision. While he left Prague for Frankfurt at the age of 25 and much of his contribution was made during a career in Germany proper, his background as a Jew from Prague is deeply relevant to that contribution. Kornfeld’s consciousness of himself as a writer developed while he was a boy in the wake of the tragic death of his talented older brother. As a student, Kornfeld came into close contact with other German-speaking Jewish writers of the Prague Circle, including Max Brod, Franz Kafka, and Franz Werfel. When Kornfeld came of age as a writer with published dramas, essays, and short fiction (from 1913 on into the war years), expressionism was peaking, and the movement suited him. He was not the most famous dramatist of the movement, but he was one of its most articulate exponents, and his programmatic writings are better known to literature specialists today than are his plays, which were successful in their time. The first installment of Kornfeld’s early essay “Der beseelte und der psychologische Mensch” (Soulful and Psychological Man; 1918) was the lead article for the new expressionist revolutionary journal Das junge Deutschland, and in it he presented a complex vision of the dualism of humankind and a program for a revolutionary change in the relation of self to world. It is a theology of expressionism, more than an artistic program. In notes advising actors in expressionist plays, Kornfeld urges them to eschew naturalistic portrayal and instead to reflect the anguish of the soul with exaggerated movement and vocal delivery. Quite a few of Kornfeld’s pieces experiment with form and rhetoric by presenting themselves as prose poems, often making use of biblical style. The content of his plays from this very productive early period focused on characters who “break out” of their everyday lives and seek dramatic expression of their inner souls, or who seek to commune with all humanity rather than contain themselves within a narrow existence. These expressionist themes were well suited to Kornfeld’s background as a German-speaking Jew in a Central European environment where civil society was fragmented into increasingly small and defensive slivers of national life. German expressionism has sometimes been divided into a politicized, “activist” variety centered in Berlin and a highly aestheticized, “contemplative” variety centered in Vienna. If Kornfeld can be seen as an exemplar of Prague’s German expressionism, he defines a space that is both of these in his insistence on a spiritual revolution within humanity and within individuals that would bring forth a less divisive and more spiritually rich, universal humanity. (Deborah Guth 26.2.2019) Author:Scott Spector Copyright ©2010, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Paul Kornfeld: Leben, Werk, Wirkung By Wilhelm Haumann, published by Königshausen & Neumann 1996.

http://www.holocaust.cz/en/database-of-victims/victim/144549-pavel-... --

Born 11. 12. 1889

Last residence before deportation: Prague XII., Brathouova 50

Address/place of registration in the Protectorate: Prague XII, Mánesova 50

Transport D, no. 753 (31. 10. 1941, Prague -> Łódź)

Murdered 25. 04. 1942 Łódź

See also -- www.doew.at

JewishGen: In Lodz, lived at Siegfried Strasse 15, Flat 25.