Herbert Kline papers

Herbert Kline (1909-1999) was an American documentary filmmaker, best known for his works about the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism in Europe, including his 1939 film about the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Crisis. Born in Chicago on 13 March 1909, as Herbert Klein, he was raised in Davenport, Iowa, and left home as a teenager to explore places that interested him throughout the United States. During the Great Depression, he became interested in the plight of the working class, and became involved in leftist political circles in Chicago and New York, becoming the editor of New Theater magazine, and being one of the first to publish and stage the plays of Clifford Odets. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he left for Madrid, in support of the Loyalist forces, and it was there that he teamed up with Hungarian photographer Geza Karpathi to make his first film, Heart of Spain, and in 1937 he collaborated with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson on a second film set in Spain, Return to Life. Sensing the unfolding political threat from Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia, he left for Prague in 1938, and working with Czech cameraman Alexander Hackenschmied (later Hammid), he made the film Crisis, which depicted the Nazi takeover of the Sudetenland. Kline gained access to Nazi rallies by pretending to be a Nazi-party member, and Kline later recounted the irony that he, as a Jewish American and an anti-fascist, had storm troopers following his commands and carrying his film equipment. When Crisis was released in the United States, it proved to be his most successful documentary, and was named one of the National Board of Review’s 10 best films of 1939. Kline’s subsequent films included Lights Out in Europe, an account of the German invasion of Poland, The Forgotten Village, which depicted the struggle to provide basic health care in an isolated Mexican village, a film on which he collaborated with John Steinbeck, and My Father’s House, a 1947 documentary about Holocaust survivors. Kline was blacklisted in the United States during the 1950s as a result of his leftist political affiliations, and did not resume filmmaking until the 1970s. One of his later films was Walls of Fire, a work about Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Kline met Rose Margaret Harvan (1916-1992?) while both were in Spain. Harvan was the daughter of Slovak immigrants who had settled in Pennsylvania, and after working as a dental technician in New York, went without her parents’ knowledge to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. The two married in 1939, and she accompanied Kline during the period when he was filming Crisis in Czechoslovakia. Upon returning to the United States, the two settled first in New York, and then Los Angeles. They worked together on the film The Forgotten Village, but subsequently divorced, and Kline later married Josine Ianco-Starrels, with whom he had two children, and from whom he was later divorced. Kline died in Los Angeles on 5 February 1999.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

The Herbert Kline papers were acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016.