Alfredo Bannenberg

Alfredo Bannenberg (born September 29, 1901 in Elberfeld ; † June 24, 1978 Neviges ) was a German puppeteer , variety artist and author .

life and work

Bannenberg founded a puppet theater in the 1920s and traveled all over Germany, later also today's Czech Republic as well as France , Italy , Sweden , Finland , North Africa (including Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt , where he was the victim of a theater bankruptcy) and Russia . For children he played Kasper - and fairy tale plays with puppets , while for its variety programs primarily puppets began.

In Germany he showed his games in places as diverse as the Düsseldorf Zoo, which was still in existence at the time, and - during a specially scheduled tour - in mental hospitals. Above all, the experience with people on the fringes of society brought Bannenberg to a humanistic image of man that would have a considerable influence on his later work.

At the beginning of the Nazi era, Bannenberg ran into political difficulties: he had presented theater puppets at various exhibitions, which came across as likable thugs and vagabonds. The " cultural Bolshevik " Bannenberg, so the charge against the puppeteer, who had shown his performances in Russia, among other places, is hardly the right artist to be entrusted with the influence of German youth . After house searches, interrogations and a temporary arrest, Bannenberg was banned from his profession - at least with regard to his ideas about children; However, he was allowed to continue playing his variety programs. Thus Bannenberg is the only puppeteer known by name besides Walter Büttner who was not allowed to practice his profession in the Third Reich without restrictions for political reasons .

Bannenberg then went into hiding in Berlin's Lunapark , an amusement park that had been closed since 1933, and later went to Stockholm until his work permit there expired and he had to return to Berlin.

During World War II he was with his puppet variety show at the Western Wall for troop entertainment confiscated. For this he wrote in his autobiography free admission :

I kept thinking of the children who sat in front of my stage years ago. Hundreds of thousands! How had they laughed, how happy they were. And now they probably wore the soldier's skirt too. Maybe some of them were sitting in front of my stage again and this time watching the variety program.

Later, the commanders assigned him to work as a draftsman for airport construction near Wilhelmshaven .

After the war, Bannenberg was able to perform again for a children's audience. In his autobiography he recalls:

They were children with small, gray faces and hungry eyes. They had seen the horror of war; they had never seen a puppet theater before.

Bannenberg trained young puppeteers (including Jo Micovich ) in the post-war years and modeled figures for other puppet theaters. He broke away from active play more and more in favor of his writing activities, whereby he concentrated as far as possible on the writing of children's and youth literature. The puppet show was the focus of his journalistic work only twice: in the aforementioned autobiography and in the volume Once Upon a Time with a Puppeteer from 1953.

Works

As far as the books are listed without dates, they are issues of the Wuppertal KOLIBRI publishing house from the 1960s.

• Inge goes to Suomi , Wuppertal o. J.
• Commissioner Funke and his friends , Wuppertal 1968.
• Zimba and the white elephant , Wuppertal 1966.
• Fire in the circus. History of a friendship , Wuppertal o.J.
• Be a movie star for once. The hunt for the idol , Wuppertal 1966.
• Once upon a time there was a puppeteer , Reutlingen 1953.
• The counterfeiter , o.
• Suchkind Cornelia , Wuppertal 1955.
• Free entry. Travels and adventures of a puppeteer , Berlin 1958.
• Sascha shouldn't die , Balve 1959.
• Pierre. A boy experiences the Guldberg camp in Kassel in 1958.
• The Copenhagen Shoe Club , Kassel 1961.
• Postcard is enough! , Wuppertal 1965.
• Monika , Balve 1972.
• Fips, the wonder dachshund , Hanover 1975.
• Tutti , Wuppertal 1977.
• Happiness on four paws , Balve 1977

Web links

• Literature by and about Alfredo Bannenberg in the catalog of the German National Library