Herbert Zernik

Already in 1917, the teenage Herbert Zernik worked as an assistant to Director Richard Oswald. He continued as a piano accompanist in theaters and cabarets, married and divorced. After 1933, with Hitler in power work was getting increasingly difficult. As a ‘Quarter-Jew’ he also was barred from the ‘Reichs-Musikkammer’, the mandatory union for employment. In 1938 Herbert Zernik was arrested as part of the Nazi-strategy to expulse Jews from Germany. Only proof of imminent emigration would get him released. Visa waitlists were not an option anymore and his family had to sell belongings in haste to be able to buy a ticket to the only visa-free port of Shanghai. He arrived there in April 1939 on the Japanese steamer ‘Hakusan Maru’.

Herbert Zernik started almost immediately as a bar pianist and soon secured a regular post as artistic director of the ‘Fourth Marine Club’. His busy engagements are chronicled by advertisements in the ‘Shanghai Jewish Chronicle’, the Jewish German Daily paper (published by Ossi Lewin) – and reviews by art critic Erwin Felber. He regularly performed and acted with his Berlin friend Siegfried Sonnenschein, singer Raja Zomina, and actress Lilly Flohr. He also participated in plays, musicals, and operettas such as ‘Mackie Messer’ in the Brecht/Weill „Dreigroschenoper“. Like many refugees he tried to work and live in the residential French or British ‘concession’ – and leave Hongkew, a densely populated poor quarter where all refugees were housed initially. But in 1943 the Japanese ‘Proclamation’ forced all so-called 'Stateless Refugees after 1937' (a euphemism for Austro-German Jewish refugees) to relocate back to Hongkew and mostly perform in the venues of ‘Little Berlin’ or ‘Little Vienna’ like the restaurant ‘Zum Weissen Rössl’ (White Horse Café), or ‘Roy’s Roof Garden’. The war with the US had cut funding for the soup kitchen and other services – so spending on cafés and music was very limited. As the financial situation worsened, Zernik increasingly performed for Jewish charities, hardly making a living. By 1945 Zernik had remarried a fellow refugee, Edith a native from Hamburg. After the end of the war, all restrictions were removed and entertainment rebounded. He continued working with his German colleagues Siegfried Sonnenschein and Harry Friedländer. His directing and acting in the 1946 Operetta „Sag’, bist Du mir gut?“ – performed in the Eastern Theatre was quite successful. He followed his friend Sonnenschein to San Francisco in March 1948.

In the US Herbert Zernik and his wife lived in a series of cities for various engagements. In Chicago, he worked at a German radio station for two years, and they obtained their US citizenship in 1953. In 1958 they moved to Berlin. Zernik again worked in radio, theater, and comedy. A famous interlude was his promotional role in Willy Brandt’s election campaign. He also acted - and was cast as ‘Lurcio’ in the film “Der Weiberheld” in 1964. Herbert Zelnik died at age 69 of a heart attack on Oct 15, 1972. His wife Edith died in 1984.