Born Martin Heinrich on January 31, 1905, in Dresden, Martin Hellberg came from a modest background and initially trained as a locksmith while also taking acting lessons at the Dresden Conservatory. In 1923/24 he began working as an extra at the State Theater in Dresden, where his acting skills were soon noticed. He was engaged as an actor in 1924 and went on to become a popular and in-demand artist, celebrated for his interpretations of classics and contemporary works alike. The press lauded the “extraordinarily talented Martin Hellberg,” who captivated audiences with his “assured expressiveness” his “beautiful, expressive, and simultaneously unforced manner of speech.”
His career at the State Theater came to a sudden end when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Hellberg was a member of the Communist Party and had publicly exposed himself to scrutiny as the leader of communist workers’ theater groups. Furthermore, he had married Berta Gurewitsch—a Jew—in 1926. Deemed “politically unacceptable” and relieved of his duties on April 21, he first went to the private Dresden Komödienhaus, though he was soon forced to give up his position as Franz Heger, the general director of the State Theaters, threatened to initiate SA raids. Hellberg subsequently left the city and in the years that followed worked on various stages in Berlin and Hamburg and occasionally in films, for which he had to receive special permission. In 1938 he began working as a radio broadcaster and in 1940/41 at the Württembergische Landesbühne. In 1941, his contact to a former colleague from the Staatsschauspiel proved helpful: the dramaturge Wolfgang Nufer, who had been an SS member since 1935, had by then become director of the theater in Freiburg. With Nufer having apparently leveraged his influence and Hellberg having already divorced his Jewish wife in 1935—likely for personal reasons, after which she emigrated to Palestine with their son—he was appointed director in Freiburg in September of 1941.
Upon Nufer’s departure from Freiburg in 1942, Hellberg lost the protection he had relied on until that point, and the stigma of “political unreliability” caught up with him once again. In August of 1942, he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Culture, leaving him without any possibility of working in the arts. The Saxony regional party leadership stated “that H. [had been] one of the most repulsive cultural Bolsheviks and [was] still a Bolshevik through and through today.” Furthermore, the complaint continued, he had “maintained relations with a Jewish woman until 1935.” The Propaganda Ministry therefore decided “that H. should first be given the opportunity for front-line service …”
Hellberg was drafted into the Wehrmacht in summer of 1943 and sent to war against the Soviet Union. After the war, in 1945, he returned to the theater in Freiburg, before moving to Munich in 1946. In 1949, he briefly served as senior director at the Dresden Schauspielhaus and subsequently held the position of general director of the State Theaters from 1950 until 1952. His tenure as theater director was marred by conflict with the cultural bureaucracy of the GDR. At the same time, Hellberg became increasingly drawn to film, and he directed a number of motion pictures for DEFA from 1952 onwards. In 1962, Hellberg briefly assumed the direction of the theater in Schwerin, which would be his final theater engagement. Martin Hellberg died on October 31, 1999, in Bad Berka.
1905 Dresden
1999 Bad Berka