Walter Lesch

Walter Lesch (4 March 1898 – 27 May 1958) was a Swiss stage and movie producer-director. He was also a writer and, for nearly twenty years after 1933, artistic director of the anti-Nazi Cabaret Cornichon.

Life Bernhard Walter Lesch was born into a protestant family in Zürich. Bernhard Robert Lesch, his father, was a painter. He then spent several years travelling to Paris, Berlin, Rome and Paris, working variously as a salesman, a journalist and a private tutor. He worked between 1926 and 1928 as a dramaturge and producer at the "Theater in der Klosterstraße" on the edge of Berlin and then settled for a further year in Vienna where he supported himself through writing.

In 1933 Lesch was a co-founder with Otto Weissert of the Cabaret Cornichon. The couple's daughter, the actress Karin Lesch, was born in 1935. The marriage broke down progressively during the early 1940s, and Mathilde, who had met Herbert Crüger in 1939 and at some stage had married him as her third husband, moved to Germany in 1947, taking Karin with her, after which Lesch was cut off from his daughter.