Essad Bey was a German-speaking writer of Jewish-Russian origin, who converted to Islam in 1922 and later passed himself off as a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. With "The Orientalist," Tom Reiss offers readers a fantastic biography. Sonja Hegasy introduces the book
In a few months, pandemic permitting, Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies’s recently completed feature-length documentary
Walter Kaufmann: Welch ein Leben! (Walter Kaufmann: What a Life!) will hit cinemas in Germany. But its subject, a German with an Australian passport, won’t be there for the film’s opening night. He died in Berlin on 15 April.
Kaufmann had turned ninety-seven in January. Virtually anybody who reaches such a ripe old age has led a life worth making into a film or writing about, for that matter. Kaufmann’s story, that of a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an Australian writer and then moved to the old East Germany, was particularly rich.
Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a
y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known and widely published, in Berlin and Vienna as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Kraków, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the