Alfred Wolfsohn's index page

WHO WAS ALFRED WOLFSOHN - Marita Günther

“....When I was discharged from the German Military Hospital in 1919, it was not because I was 'cured' from either the Mustard gas poisoning I had received in the trenches, nor the 'Combat Trauma' that I was suffering from due to my service in the first world war; on the contrary, it was because there was no further treatment that the doctors were able to offer me. For the next ten years I struggled with this appalling state of being.
Before 1914 I had perused singing as an interest of mine; partly in connecting with the musical training I had had, but also because I had a naturally pleasing singing voice. After the war this was no longer the case. In the ten years following my release from the Hospital one of the means that I first sort for re-finding my health, was to try and re-find that lost voice of mine. I went to a number of highly reputed singing teachers but none of them were able to help me.
By 1930 I was sufficiently myself again to be able to continue my pre-war job as a singing coach for professional classical singers; they came to me to redress their vocal problems; in working with them I began to realise that their problems, like my own, were based not on their physical condition, but on their psychic condition. It must be said that at this time the business of Psychology was in its infancy, so, the psychologists, like myself were all fumbling in the dark. After a little while I began to get some very encouraging results from this approach; over half my pupils where receiving sustained improvements in their singing capacities.
One of my last Berlin pupils, before I fled from Berlin to go to England to escape the Nazis in 1939, was a young girl called Charlotte Salomon. She also had fled from the Nazis a month before me to go to the south of France where she painted her extraordinary exhibition of paintings called “Life? or Theatre?”. I was surprised to learn, after her death at the end of the Second World War, that this collection of paintings; her life story, had included the story of her relationship to me and to my vocal teachings. She had included me in the guise of a character called 'Amadeus Daberlohn'. Her grasp of the work is quite striking. If ever you have the opportunity of seeing these paintings, they are housed in the 'Jewish Museum' in Amsterdam, I cannot recommend them highly enough to you.... I am hoping that Marita will be successful with the new publishers she has found for the publication of my book "Orpheus or the Way to a Mask" , which Charlotte refers to extensively in her paintings...."

Alfred Wolfsohn London 1962.