German people of Jewish descent

Käte_Stresemann

Käte Stresemann (née Kleefeld; 15 July 1883 – 23 July 1970) was the wife of the German Chancellor, Foreign Minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Gustav Stresemann. Widely admired for her elegance and intelligence, she was a prominent figure of society in the 1920s. As the wife of the foreign minister she made her salon at Tauentzienstraße 12a a meeting place of diplomats.
She was the daughter of a prominent Berlin industrialist, Adolf (also known as Arthur, born Aaron) Kleefeld. Both of her parents were born Jewish, but they raised their children as Lutherans. In 1903 she married Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929), who later became Chancellor and Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, and bore him two sons, Wolfgang (1904–1998) and Hans-Joachim (1908–1999).
Her brother, Kurt von Kleefeld, was the last person in Germany to be ennobled, when he was raised to the hereditary nobility of the Principality of Lippe by Leopold IV, Prince of Lippe "in recognition of his loyal service" to his noble lord, Christian Kraft of Hohenlohe-Ohringen, Duke of Ujest, on request by the latter, on 12 November 1918, the same day as the Prince's abdication.Kleefeld is mentioned in one of the fictitious quotes the 8 November 1926 issue of Time satirically attributed to quite a number of prominent people under the headline: Had they been interviewed, some people who figured in last week's news might have related certain of their doings as follows: Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister of Germany: "A story went the rounds of Berlin last week that my ability to entertain lavishly on a salary of $6,400 a year is due to the kindly furtherance of my affairs by the multimillionaire Dr. von Kleefeld, my bachelor brother-in-law."In August 1929, when Käte Stresemann hosted the program for spouses at the 25th World Advertising Congress in Berlin, Time described her as "no hausfrau, but a young, elegant, cosmopolite, English speaking Jewess, a woman equipped with the conversation of the polite world, equal to parlor or nightclub."
In the autumn of 1939 she fled Nazi Germany with her son Wolfgang and his family and settled in the United States, where her son Hans-Joachim had already found refuge. She lived in New York City until her death on a visit to Germany.

Hans_Blumenberg

Hans Blumenberg (born 13 July 1920, Lübeck – 28 March 1996, Altenberge) was a German philosopher and intellectual historian.
He studied philosophy, German studies and the classics (1939–47, interrupted by World War II) and is considered to be one of the most important German philosophers of the century. He died on 28 March 1996 in Altenberge (near Münster), Germany.
Blumenberg created what has come to be called "metaphorology", which states that what lies under metaphors and language modisms, is the nearest to the truth (and the farthest from ideologies). His last works, especially "Care Crosses the River" (Die Sorge geht über den Fluss), are attempts to apprehend human reality through its metaphors and involuntary expressions. Digging under apparently meaningless anecdotes of the history of occidental thought and literature, Blumenberg drew a map of the expressions, examples, gestures, that flourished in the discussions of what are thought to be more important matters. Blumenberg's interpretations are extremely unpredictable and personal, all full of signs, indications and suggestions, sometimes ironic. Above all, it is a warning against the force of revealed truth, and for the beauty of a world in confusion.

Horst_Caspar

Horst Joachim Arthur Caspar (20 January 1913 – 27 December 1952) was a German actor, prominent in German theatre and film in the 1930s and 1940s. His postwar career was cut short by his sudden death at 39.
Caspar was born in Radegast, the son of Max Caspar, an army officer. He had one Jewish grandparent. His mother Emmy died when he was 18 months old, and he was raised by his aunt in Berlin. He attended the Treitschke-Reform-Realgymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. In 1932 he took his abitur (school leaving exam), but did not go to university, since he had already decided to be an actor. He took acting lessons at the school of Ilka Grüning and Lucie Höflich, along with future stars of German cinema such as Lilli Palmer, Inge Meysel and Brigitte Horney. In the late 1930s Caspar, a handsome young man, appeared regularly in German films and on the stage. He was taken up by the director Saladin Schmitt and became a leading man at his theatre in Bochum, where he performed in plays by Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller. When he gave his final performance in Richard II in 1939, he received 108 curtain calls.Under the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, Caspar was classed as a Mischling (mixed race) of the second degree. Despite his part-Jewish ancestry, he continued to work as an actor. This was partly because he enjoyed the protection of Schmitt, who as a homosexual was no friend of the Nazi regime. But he also enjoyed the patronage of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels personally vetted cases of part-Jewish performers and allowed a number of popular part-Jewish actors to continue working.Caspar's first leading film role was as the young Schiller in Friedrich Schiller – The Triumph of a Genius. In 1940 Caspar joined one of the most important German theatres of the time, the Schiller Theatre in Berlin. In 1942 he performed at the prestigious Burgtheater in Vienna. This was regarded as a "rare and special privilege" for a part-Jewish actor in a city where all Jews had been purged from cultural life.In 1943 Caspar was engaged by the director Veit Harlan to play the young August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, who in 1807 defended the Prussian fortress town of Kolberg against the French during the Napoleonic Wars, in Kolberg, an epic film produced on the orders of Goebbels. This was only Caspar's second leading film role, but it is the one for which he is now best remembered, despite the fact that film was finished only shortly before the end of World War II and was seen by few people at the time.
On 20 January 1944 Caspar married a 22-year-old actress Antje Weisgerber (1922–2004). She gave birth to a son and a daughter. After the end of the war Caspar moved to Düsseldorf where he again worked in the theatre and in films. His last role was as a reporter named Peter Zabel in crime film called The Orplid Mystery, produced in 1950. In 1952 he recorded an LP of poetry readings, including works by Schiller and Goethe. Caspar died suddenly in Berlin in December 1952 of a stroke at the age of 39. His son Frank died on the day of his father's funeral, aged eight. His widow had a successful film career extending into the 1970s. All three are buried at St Anne's churchyard in Berlin-Dahlem.

Harry_Meyen

Harry Meyen (born Harald Haubenstock; 31 August 1924 – 15 April 1979) was a German film actor. He appeared in more than 40 films and television productions between 1948 and 1975. In the 1960s he also worked as a theatre director in West Germany.

Mathilde_Blind

Mathilde Blind (born Mathilda Cohen; 21 March 1841 – 26 November 1896), was a German-born English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist and critic. In the early 1870s she emerged as a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of artists and writers. By the late 1880s she had become prominent among New Woman writers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Amy Levy, Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She was praised by Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, Amy Levy, Edith Nesbit, Arthur Symons and Arnold Bennett. Her much-discussed poem The Ascent of Man presents a distinctly feminist response to the Darwinian theory of evolution.