James Michael was born in Berlin in 1916. He was the second of four children of the Cameroonian colonial migrant Theophilus Wonja Michael and his German wife Martha (née Wegner), who died already in 1926 […]
Born around 1891 in Morocco, Houssein ben Ibrik died nearly a century later in France. What is known about him sounds straight from a romance novel: a fighter of desert pirates, lion tamer, and acrobat […]
Hugo Strassburger came from the most important Jewish circus family in Germany. He worked as stable master, animal trainer, and buffoon horseman “Hugoletty” in the circus of his older brothers Adolf and Leopold, which was […]
The project “Diverging Fates: Travelling Circus People in Europe under National Socialism”(www.divergingfates.eu) in cooperation with its follow-up project “Forgotten Cosmopolitans: Europe’s Circus People in the Wake of WWII” will arrange a cooperative research workshop with […]
Carl Strassburger came from a German-Jewish family, whose horse circus tradition reached back to the early nineteenth century. In 1926, he took over the company from his father Adolf and his uncle Leopold. At that […]
Luisita Leers was a skillful power trapeze artist from Germany. During the 1920s and 1930s, Leers gained popularity both in European and American prestigious circuses such as the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus. […]
Senin Glazeroff was born as Salomon Abramovich Glazer in the Russian town Voronezh in 1882. Having received a professional dance education, he began to tour throughout Russia with great success. In 1905, he married the […]
“My family has lost everything”. That’s how Jean Richard summarizes his story. Born in Montreuil-Bellay in 1941, he only remembers the movie projector and the movies that his father, who was the owner of a […]
Carola Williams, born Althoff, belonged to the largest circus dynasty in the world. When the Nazis took power, Carola and her brothers Franz and Adolf Althoff began to harbor Jews in their two traveling circuses. […]
The Latvian-born circus performer Rodion Nikitins lived through WWII performing in different circuses and theatres in Latvia, Germany and Nazi-occupied Prague. In his autobiography Of Flight and Freedom from 1987, Nikitins confesses that his work […]
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