The autobiography of actor Alexander Granach Da geht ein Mensch was released in 1945. However, he did not live to see its publication: on Sunday, 9 March 1945, Granach performed for the very last time in a theatre on New York’s Broadway and died the next day following an appendectomy. Shortly before that, he had shown the finished manuscript to friends who worked on the German-speaking emigrant magazine Der Aufbau. Excerpts from the manuscript were first read out at an evening event organised by the magazine.

Granach was prompted to write his autobiography when a curfew was imposed on emigrants in the USA in 1942. Granach was living at the time in California and he filled the long evenings he was forced to spend inside by writing his book. In it he describes the various stations of his life: his childhood with nine siblings in a poor shtetl in Galicia; his initial years as an actor in Berlin, where he first of all made his living as a baker and coffin-maker; and his first performances in Berlin’s Jewish district, the Scheunenviertel, after two years in the city. In this chapter, Granach tells the reader how he lost his job as a 14-year-old baker’s boy as a result of a strike and how he survived without money and with nowhere to live.