The Double Accountant

Photographer Unknown

1916

Photograph of two figures looking at each other.

Very little is known about the actor Siegfried Berisch (1877–1933). He started out performing in the cabaret and German Jewish theater scenes in Berlin and Vienna. Berisch’s first major role was in Schmidt will nicht heiraten (Schmidt Does Not Wish to Marry, 1910) and his film debut was in Aus eines Mannes Mädchenzeit (From a Man’s Girlhood, 1913). He starred in more than a dozen silent films through 1929 and a handful of talkies and musicals before he died in Vienna.

Very little is known about Josefina Kleine (b. late nineteenth century), an actress who performed in 1916 together with the Jewish actor and comedian Siegfried Berisch in the burlesque Der doppelte Buchhalter (The Double Accountant) at Berlin’s Gebruder Herrnfeld Theater, a popular Yiddish theater for Jewish and general audiences in Imperial Germany.

Credits

In Peter Sprengel, Populäres jüdisches Theater in Berlin von 1877 bis 1933 (Berlin: Haude & Spenersche, 1997). Photo courtesy Harvard University Library.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.

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