Michael Jaffé
Carl-Heinz Jaffé Archive
Published: 21 March 2022
My grandfather Carl Jaffé was a famous actor in his native Germany in the 1930s, before his Jewish roots forced him to flee to England.
Once there, he picked up his dramatic career again, building up new experiences in UK radio, television, theatre and film. This included almost 40 years working at the BBC, where he had a very special role in the newly developed, post-war German service – teaching the Germans the ‘eccentricities’ of the English language.
Origins
Raised in Hamburg, and living through Nazism with Jewish Community support (and a name change), Carl gave his last theatre performance in June 1936 for Hamburg’s Kulturbund. Then he evaded the Gestapo by just a few hours by smuggling out of the country on a London-bound coal barge. His passage was arranged through a Warburg banking connection sympathetic to the Jewish plight.
Once in London, Carl was given six shillings by London’s Jewish Refugee Committee, and so a new life began. My grandmother Elsbeth (a successful abstract artist) had fled earlier to Copenhagen in 1935 with her sons Frank and Felix, eventually securing safe passage to England in 1939, to join Carl there.
BBC Radio
As WWII started, Carl avoided ‘enemy-alien’ internment by signing up with the Aliens Company of the Pioneer Corps, ‘composed of fiercely pro-British foreign refugees with outlandish names and accents’ as one BBC colleague would later describe them. By this time, he had already joined the BBC Drama Department in 1938, becoming a familiar radio voice, reading news bulletins and broadcasting intelligence messages to Germany from Bush House, the centre of the BBC’s Overseas Service.
Once the war was over, the BBC's Head of German Radio, Hugh Carleton-Greene (brother of the famous author Graham Greene, and later a very successful BBC Director-General), appointed Carl to help conceive, present and manage the new English Lessons series to German listeners; the aim being to help foster better integration of Germany into the new modern Europe being envisaged by the Allies.
And so from 1945 until his sudden death in April 1974, Carl created over 3,000 original episodes of the famous ‘Lernt Englisch Im Londoner Rundfunk’ programme. The twice-daily transmissions from Bush House mounted up to an extraordinary total of more than 20,000 broadcasts during Carl’s tenure.
Though Carl was not a trained teacher, he drew on his dramatic experience, aiming to make his lessons entertaining programmes which could be listened to and enjoyed by quite ordinary people who had perhaps never intended to learn English at all.
He also wanted the language to be relevant: ‘My starting point is always a real-life situation, not a grammatical expression’ he said. He was fascinated in particular by the idiomatic nature of English – what he called its ‘eccentricities’, and would spend hours with his English and German friends and colleagues analysing why an English person says something one way, and a German another.
A perfectionist
Carl was a perfectionist. He recorded and re-recorded the first radio lesson 18 times, before he was satisfied that it passed muster. This was then broadcast in June 1945, just one week after hostilities had officially ended. His perfectionism and commitment continued over time.
Even when his stage career took off and he would be on tour in the provinces, he continued to write his radio scripts – friends recall seeing him do it on trains, on buses, and in his lodgings, later posting the scripts off to his secretary in London to be typed, and frequently making the often several hundred mile journey to London to record them.
Carl’s perfectionism paid off, and by 1960 the format had become so popular that the team expanded to service the demand. They recruited ex-Austrian state ballerina and wartime émigrée Anita Bild – better known as dancer Anita Douglas – to work with Carl.
For nearly 15-years the two of them ran the series, developing LP sets and courses published via BBC mail order. The service also gained a growing number of listeners following broadcasts from London, from seven German stations and from one station in Austria, Switzerland and Italy.
BBC Television
Carl’s BBC work started from early post-war and viewers saw him in popular programmes featuring big stars such as Vanessa Redgrave, Boris Karloff, Buster Keaton. In total, he appeared in over 60 BBC shows, plus 30 for ITV. Many of the very earliest programmes were of course live and no recordings exist.
Highlights included original drama series such as ‘Magnolia Street’ (1961), acclaimed adaptations ‘Epitaph for a Spy’ (1961) and ‘A Farewell to Arms’ (1966) the latter with Vanessa Redgrave, George Hamilton and DonaldSutherland, mystery thriller series ‘The Third Man’ (1959) with Michael Rennie, plus several episodes of the ‘Wednesday Play’ during its 1960s heyday.
Although Carl relished the new medium of television, there were limitations to his casting…He invariably found himself playing military or mysterious enemy types. Most memorably he faced the antics of the Walmington Home Guard in the Dad’s Army episode 'Enemy within the Gates' (1968) playing Captain Winogrodzki. This involved the following famous interchange:
Capt. Winogrodzki: You're supposed to keep a look out like soldiers. Not talk like old women. What are you names?
Jones: Jones, sir.
Pike: Pike, sir.
Walker: Smith.
Jones: Walker.
Walker: Oh, thanks very much.
Capt. Winogrodzki: It's no good you try and give me falseys
He reprised a similar role in the popular sitcom Hugh and I, starring Terry Scott.The Jewish Chroniclecaptured the irony of his casting when it wrote of him later: ‘Strangely, it was as a Nazi that he was to be cast in a number of films and television plays of the 1950s and 60s. As a person he was kind and gentle – so unlike the characters he often portrayed’.
However, more diverse roles thankfully followed. In The World About Us documentary strand, he voiced the explorer Alexander von Humboldt in a biopic on his life and achievements, and in 1971 he was cast as the Rabbi in the popular drama series Take Three Girls.
Other career highlights
Carl starred in over 60 films, working for almost every major film studio, with a cinematic Who’s Who including Cary Grant, Gina Lolabrigida, Eric Portman, Dirk Bogarde, Elizabeth Taylor, Christopher Lee, Brigitte Bardot, Yul Brynner George Formby, The Crazy Gang.
He also had an extensive theatre career with over 5,000 appearances in 110 productions. Including work with the likes of Noël Coward, Raymond Massey and Ivor Novello.
The BBC provided Carl’s final work in 1974 – reprising Dad’s Army on BBC Radio 4, then Votek’s BBC2 Playhouse production of Isaac Beshevis The Joke with Donald Pleasance. Carl also featured posthumously in Peter Straschek’s ground-breaking 1974/5 German TV documentary Film Emigration from Nazi Germany.
He died on 12 April 1974, and shares his final resting place with many friends and colleagues in London’s Golders Green Crematorium. Carl’s old BBC colleague Anita Bild wrote of Carl on his death: ‘He was a unique blend of elegance, disciplined work and boisterous hilarity. Jaffé belonged to Bush House as Big Ben to London’. What a fitting tribute.
Biography
Michael Jaffé is Carl Jaffé’s grandson. He works as a Care Home Administrator in London for its pre-eminent provider to the Jewish Community, previously having had a 40-year career in design, marketing and advertising.
