Hans Otto (10 August 1900 - 24 November 1933) was a German stage actor. He came to prominence at a relatively young age. From the world of theatre, one of the greatest admirers of his talents, on and off the stage, was Bertolt Brecht. Towards the end of 1933 he was killed - most surviving sources use the verb "murdered" - by "Nazi paramilitaries", becoming one of the Hitler government's first victims from the world of the arts. At the time of his killing he had been a member of the Communist Party for almost ten years.
Life
Provenance and early years
Hans Otto was born in Dresden where Hermann August Theodor Otto, his father, worked in a managerial-clerical job for the government of Saxony. He was the oldest of five brothers, but only his parents' second child: the boys had a big sister. He grew up with his family in Dresden-Neustadt. When Hans was not quite twelve his mother, born Amalie Wilhelmine Bellmann (1866-1911), died. His father remarried almost at once.
As he grew up he came under parental pressure, which he firmly rejected, to make his way in the world as a businessman. Between 1914 and 1918 he attended two secondary schools, at each of which he distinguished himself in school drama productions. He probably developed a determination to become a stage actor at a young age, but did not initially dare mention the plan to his overbearing father. At one of the schools he attended a fellow pupil was Erich Kästner, who later achieved literary eminence, principally as an author of books for children. Although Kästner was more than a year older than Otto, he would later describe Otto as his "Klassenkameraden", implying that at school they were taught in the same class. Between June and December 1918 Hans Otto was called up for military service, but the timing was fortunate, in that he had still not been sent to the military front line when the war ended in November.
During 1919 Hans Otto took lessons in stage acting - including voice projection and singing - with Eduard Plate in Dresden and with Robert George. August Otto had still not become reconciled to the idea of his eldest son becoming a theatre actor: this now led to a break between father and son. In 1920, Robert George teamed up with Adam Kuckhoff to found the Künstlertheater (loosely, "Arts Theatre") in Frankfurt, which was where Hans Otto made his stage debut, and where he would become a permanent member of the theatre company for its first three seasons, between 1920 and 1922. This marked the start of a close friendship between Adam Kuckhoff and Hans Otto, who later became step-father to Armin-Gerd Kuckhoff (1912-2002), Kuckhoff's eldest son, and, after he grew up, a noted critic and scholar of the theatre.
Stage debut
Otto made his 1920 debut at the Frankfurt Künstlertheater in a production by Adam Kuckhoff of Schiller's "Kabale und Liebe" (loosely, "Intrigue and Love"). Over the next few years he appeared with the Frankfurt theatre company in city theatres across the Rhein-Main region, specialising in classical roles. A theatre critic at the time commended his "cuttingly sharp artistic personality ... a perfect specimen of a thoroughly modern approach to [stage] art".
"Mie Paulun" On 16 October 1922 Otto Hans married Marie Kuckhoff (born Marie Viehmeyer), the divorced first wife of his friend. Ten years his senior, Marie Kuckhoff was an actress, frequently identified in sources by her stage name as "Mie Paulun". The marriage was by some criteria childless, except that Marie's son by her former marriage stayed with his mother and thereby acquired Hans Otto as his apparently devoted step-father. Through the 1920s, as politics became more polarised, public figures in Germany came under growing pressure to "choose a side". There are indications that through her new young husband Marie Otto-Paulun became increasingly politicised, and that through the two of them the former dramaturge and successful theatre director Adam Kuckhoff also came to a heightened level of political awareness which in 1943 would lead to his execution under then Hitler government.