Walter Max Guido Jockisch (20 February 1907 – 22 March 1970) was a German pedagogue, dramaturge, librettist, and opera director.

Born in Bad Arolsen, Free State of Waldeck-Pyrmont,^[1] Jockisch was the only child of the Oberregierungs-Medizinalrat and Kingdom of Prussia Stabsarzt Franz 'Max' Louis Paul Jockisch (1865–1947) and his first wife Harriet Edeline Eugenie 'Melanie' née von Schlicht (1878–1929).^[2][3][4] Both parents were evangelical [de].

On 16 August 1933, Jockisch married the writer Gisela Günther née Schoenfeld (1905^[5]–1985) in Berlin-Wilmersdorf.^[6][7] The witnesses to the marriage were the writer Paula Ludwig from Ehrwald in Tyrol, whose son Ludwig Friedel [de] had been a pupil of Jockisch on the North Sea island of Juist, and Gretha Schaettler from Berlin. This marriage nominally produced a daughter, Michaela 'Michele' (born 10 November 1933 in Ehrwald, Tyrol; married to Richard Schenkirz from 1957).^[8][9][10]

His wife had been married before, then an actress, in 1924 to the merchant Heinrich Max Franz Westphal (born 1900) from Słupsk in Pommerania, who lived in Charlottenburg's Schlüterstraße 12.^[11] Their marriage was a marriage of convenience, because she was about to give birth to an illegitimate child whose father was a foreigner. Under the Nazi regime, Jockisch wanted to give the child an Aryan qualification.^[12] He had met his wife at the Schule am Meer, where she was later involved with the choir and orchestra director Eduard Zuckmayer, the elder brother of the writer Carl Zuckmayer, who worked there. After their divorce in 1934, Gisela and her daughter Michaela followed Zuckmayer into exile in Ankara, where he – through Paul Hindemith and at the invitation of President Kemal Atatürk – was to shape the entire Turkish music teacher training in the spirit of the German Youth Music Movement [de]. Zuckmayer was not able to marry her until 1947 because the Nazi authorities denied expatriate emigrants a Ehefähigkeitsbescheinigung.^[13] After their marriage, he adopted Michaela.^[14]

In 1946, Jockisch's childhood friend Grete Weil, née Dispeker, who had been married to his friend Edgar Weil who was murdered in the Mauthausen concentration camp in 1941,^[15][16] visited from their Dutch exile. As both had agreed after Weil's death,^[17][18] Grete Weil first lived with Jockisch in Darmstadt from 1947 onwards; they did not marry until 13 February 1961 in Frankfurt.^{[19][20][21][15][22][23][24]}

I did not go to a lonely place, I went to a man who was waiting for me, my childhood friend Walter Jockisch. Since he, who had become an opera director, had never left Germany, he had a large circle of friends, which soon became mine as well.

— Grete Weil^[25]

Jockisch grew up for about thirteen years initially at Heiligenbrunner Weg 6 in Gdansk-Langfuhr,^[26] where he attended school until his family moved to Frankfurt in about 1920 to Holbeinstraße 19 in the Sachsenhausen district.^[27][28][29] He subsequently attended the Musterschule and became close friends with the brothers Edgar (1908–1941) and Hans Joseph Weil (1906–1969),^[30] the sons of Richard Weil, a chemical-pharmaceutical manufacturer with a doctorate, who lived at Friedberger Anlage 9, near their father's company headquarters at Grüne Straße 11–13.^[31] Through her he met her grandcousin Grete Dispeker and her friend Doris von Schönthan around 1923/24.^[32] He thus belonged to the extended circle of friends of two of Thomas Mann's children, the closely related siblings Erika and Klaus Mann.^[33] At Easter 1925 he passed his Reifeprüfung for Musterschule.^[34]

He then studied Germanistics, history and English, at the Goethe University Frankfurt and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin.^[34] and completed his studies in 1929 in Berlin with an inaugural dissertation on Andreas Gryphius und das literarische Barock and his doctorate to Doctor philosophiae (Dr. phil.).^[35][36]

• as Walther Jockisch: Andreas Gryphius und das literarische Barock, Phil. Diss. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin 1929. Erschienen in Germanische Studien, fascicule 89, Emil Ebering, Berlin 1930, OCLC 459626118, (Cover page 1)
• ders.: Die Glückskinder. Steyer Verlag, Wiesbaden / Munich OCLC 1145279663
• as Walter Jockisch: Boulevard Solitude, music Hans Werner Henze, libretto Grete Weil, Szenarium Walter Jockisch. Schott, Mainz 1976, ISBN 3-7957-3352-9.^[54][49]

Due to the similarity of the name, Walter Jockisch is often confused with the actor Walter Jokisch, who also worked as a theatre director. Walter Jockisch is also partly recorded in the spelling Walther Jockisch, for example in his own dissertation of 1929, published in 1930. Additionally, the fact that his father Dr. med. Franz Max Louis Paul Jockisch was registered in the contemporary address books for Danzig and Frankfurt in the spelling Jokisch, Max, appears confusing, deviating from the civil registry entries.