Foreign News: Alas, Poor Gottschalk

Joachim Gottschalk had often played Hamlet at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater. Last October the Nazi Party demanded that he divorce his Jewish wife. Joachim Gottschalk decided to flee the oppressor’s wrong, to brave the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns. Joachim Gottschalk, his Jewish wife and their young child died by their own hands.

Joachim Gottschalk, it was learned last week, bequeathed his skull to the Deutsches Theater, for use in the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet, “so that I may continue to act in the play, although in another role, and by my personal presence inspire my successors to do their best.”