Caspar Neher

Caspar Neher (born April 11, 1897 in Augsburg , † June 30, 1962 in Vienna ) was a German-Austrian set designer . Among other things, he is important because of his lifelong collaboration with Bertolt Brecht .

Life

Neher, also called Cas (after a Henokian angel), grew up in Augsburg as the son of a teacher and from 1911 attended the secondary school there , which was later named Peutinger-Gymnasium . He attended the same school class as Bertolt Brecht . Cas made friends with Brecht, who later mentioned him in some of his poems. In 1914 Neher went to an art school in Munich and from June 1915 he took part in the First World War as a volunteer . From 1918 he was an officer. During the war he was in regular correspondence with Brecht.

From 1919 until 1922 he studied at the Munich School of Applied Arts and then turned to stage painting . Brechts Baal with drawings by Neher was published shortly afterwards by Musarion Verlag in Berlin. In 1921 he designed the stage design for Brecht's Drums in the Night , which was rejected by the Münchner Kammerspiele , and in 1923 that for Heinrich von Kleist's Käthchen von Heilbronn . He gave up his attempts as a screenwriter and concentrated on scenography .

After 1933 he stayed in Germany and turned more and more to music theater . He also wrote libretti for operas by Kurt Weill , with whom he went to Paris in 1933, and Rudolf Wagner-Regeny . He worked at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus under Walter Bruno Iltz . From 1946 he got in touch with Brecht again. Neher had been an Austrian citizen since 1948 and worked for the Salzburg Festival , among others , in Zurich, Munich and Berlin. In 1954 he became technical director at the Münchner Kammerspiele and from 1958 until his death he was professor of stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna . He died in Vienna in 1962 and is buried in an honorary grave in the Grinzinger Friedhof (group 37, row 5, number 1) in Vienna.

His father-in-law was the Graz geologist Alexander Tornquist . Parts of the graphic estate are in the theater studies collection of the University of Cologne.

literature

• Gottfried von Eine , Siegfried Melchinger (Ed.): Caspar Neher. Stage and visual arts in the XX. Century . Friedrich Verlag, Velber near Hanover 1966.
• Vana Greisenegger-Georgila:  Neher, Rudolf Ludwig Caspar. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , pp. 37-39 ( digitized version ).
• Christian Jauslin: Caspar Neher . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 2, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 1312 f.
• Oskar Pausch (Ed.): Caspar Neher 1987–1962. Catalog of the Austrian Theater Museum and the theater collection of the Austrian National Library. Vienna 1987.
• Susanne de Ponte (ed.): Caspar Neher - Bertolt Brecht. A stage for the epic theater . Henschel Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89487-554-2 .
• Christine Tretow: Caspar Neher - Eminence gray behind the Brecht curtain and the backdrop of the music theater. A work biography. Trier 2003, ISBN 3-88476-576-0 .
• John Willett : Caspar Neher - Brecht's Designer . Methuen, London 1986, ISBN 0-413-41240-7 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Caspar Neher in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Caspar Neher  in the German Digital Library
• Digitized decorative folders of the Württemberg State Theater Stuttgart in the Baden-Württemberg State Archives : Stage sets by Neher zu Xerxes (1959) and Oedipus the Tyrann (1959).
• Entry on Caspar Neher in the Austria Forum  (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
• About Neher (English)
• Neher, Rudolf Ludwig Caspar. Hessian biography. (As of April 11, 2020). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
• Neher, Caspar in the Frankfurt personal dictionary