"A Lidl und a Tanc" oder "There's no Business like Showbusiness"

In an uncut copy of the "Kronika Getta Warszawskiego", a kind of diary that Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in his spare time while he was in charge of the "Ghetto Archive" (Oneg Szabat) he founded, the author noted events "with a hot pen": "Yesterday I was in the Jewish theater. For two hours one forgot the sad world” and “Five theaters play in the ghetto”. Previously it was considered certain that a “Theater in the Warsaw Ghetto” – if such a thing existed at all – would have put on extremely nebulous performances by poor, desperate Jewish actors performing Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise”, while drunken Germans sat in the audience, disrupting the proceedings with their bawling. This twisted and biased view has been thoroughly corrected in the work on this topic. The theater schedules mostly featured touching plays and folk comedies, while the tabloid comedies were often box-office hits and were performed up to 39 times. Furthermore, the audience was made up of residents of the ghetto, with no Germans to be seen at the performances. Ringelblum's "Kronika Getta Warszawskiego", supplemented by reviews and theater advertisements from the ghetto newspaper "Gazeta Żydowska", gave an unbelievable picture of celebrated theater performances and great popular success in the Warsaw ghetto. Based on these sources, which have been translated into German for the first time, Klaus Berg presents an almost complete documentation on the theaters in the Warsaw Ghetto, which allows an appreciation of the artists and should lay the foundation for further research as well as for popular scientific presentations.