Artur Michel

Artur Michel (born December 14, 1883 in Barmen , † November 16, 1946 in New York ) was a German dance journalist, theater critic and cultural journalist.

Live and act

Arthur (from 1914: Artur) Ferdinand Michel was the son of the businessman Max (Maximilian) Michel (1855–1918) and his wife Paula (1862–1902), the youngest daughter of Salomon Alsberg. This enabled his two sons Siegfried and Lois to found a large manufacturing business in Bielefeld in 1870, from which the extensive department store chain of the Alsberg Brothers in Westphalia and the Rhineland developed in the following decades . Max Michel was the owner of the Alsberg Brothers department store in Barmen until his death. Arthur Michel had a younger sister Ellie (1885-1965).

Michel studied law and history in Tübingen and Berlin from 1902 and received his doctorate in 1906 with a dissertation on the absolute nullity of civil and criminal judgments under the current Imperial procedural law. In addition, Michel dealt intensively with literature, art history, philosophy and the history of theater. He attended lectures on theater studies from Max Herrmann in Berlin and then decided to become a theater and literary critic. From 1913 to 1915 he completed a traineeship at the Magdeburgische Zeitung and published his first short theater reviews here from 1914. In 1915 he moved to Berlin, where he taught Latin and German at a humanistic grammar school. In January 1917 he was drafted into the military. Shortly after the end of the First World War , Artur Michel got a permanent position as an art critic at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in Berlin, where he wrote his first lengthy reviews of concerts, theater performances, exhibitions and books. At the same time as Michel, Fritz Böhme worked there as a features editor, who had already specialized in dance since 1916.

In 1922, Michel switched to the Vossische Zeitung and built up the department of dance criticism. As with Böhme, Michel's attention was less on ballet than on modern artistic dance. While Böhme was mainly committed to the direction of modern dance represented by Rudolf von Laban , which aimed at a renewal of the dance style in the theaters, but wanted to integrate into the theater business, Michel was a staunch supporter of Laban's former pupil Mary Wigman represented a direction that did not want to imagine modern dance subordinate to music or opera. Michel quickly became one of the most prominent and influential dance critics of the Weimar Republic . He also published in other newspapers such as the BZ am Mittag and the Berliner Morgenpost or in magazines such as Die Weltbühne or Uhu . Until the Vossische Zeitung ceased publication in 1934, Michel wrote almost all of the dance reviews that appeared here, but also numerous theater reviews as well as some travelogues and book reviews.

Michel emigrated to New York via Lisbon and Havana in early February 1941, where he arrived on June 24, 1941. In August of the same year, Michel was able to resume his work as a dance and theater critic - while the building was being built . At the same time he worked on the completion of his book manuscript on the history of European stage dance. It remained unpublished; Artur Michel died on November 16, 1946 in New York. His estate is in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library.

literature

Frank-Manuel Peter (ed.): Artur Michel's dance reviews in the Vossische Zeitung from 1922 to 1934 along with a bibliography of his theater reviews. With a biographical sketch about Artur Michel by Marion Kant. Peter Lang Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main 2015. ISBN 978-3-631-53736-7 .

Web links

Page about Artur Michel at the German Dance Archive Cologne .

Individual evidence

↑ Hugo Bieber: Herald of modern dance. Obituary for Artur Michel . In: Aufbau , Vol. 12, No. 47 (November 22, 1946), p. 21.
↑ Marion Kant: Against forgetting. Artur Michel - a sketch. In: Frank-Manuel Peter (ed.): Artur Michel's dance reviews in the Vossische Zeitung from 1922 to 1934 along with a bibliography of his theater reviews . Peter Lang Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main 2015, pp. 21–31, here p. 23.

personal data
SURNAME	Michel, Artur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German dance journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	December 14, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH	Barmen
DATE OF DEATH	November 16, 1946
Place of death	new York

[1] Hugo Bieber: Herald of modern dance. Obituary for Artur Michel . In: Aufbau , Vol. 12, No. 47 (November 22, 1946), p. 21.

[2] Marion Kant: Against forgetting. Artur Michel - a sketch. In: Frank-Manuel Peter (ed.): Artur Michel's dance reviews in the Vossische Zeitung from 1922 to 1934 along with a bibliography of his theater reviews . Peter Lang Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main 2015, pp. 21–31, here p. 23.