Chéri Maurice

Lithograph by August Weger

Chéri Maurice , actually Charles Maurice Schwartzenberger , (born May 29, 1805 in Agen , Lot-et-Garonne , France , † January 27, 1896 in Hamburg , Germany ) was a German actor and theater director of French origin.

Life

Chéri Maurice was the son of the businessman Maurice Schwartzenberger (1780-1853) and his wife. Maurice came to Germany in 1824 (1826 according to another reading) and settled in Hamburg. The father leased the Tivoli pub, including a beer garden and a summer stage , in the suburb of St. Georg . During the summer months, bear guides, jugglers and acrobats performed there and Maurice earned his first success as a master of ceremonies.

Soon he was staging, together with his father, smaller, self-created plays and with increasing success, more and more professional performances came about. Maurice had his greatest successes with dialect pieces in the style of Georg Nikolaus Bärmann ; but also antics by Louis Angely and Karl von Holtei found an enthusiastic audience. Through his acquaintance with Charles Caßmann , the theater master of the Hamburg City Theater, he got the theater license from Wittwe Handje (she was Caßmann's mother-in-law).

Maurice converted from the Jewish to the Protestant faith and married Emilie Möller (* 1812) on July 31, 1832 in the Church of St. Petri . With her he had a son, Gustav (1836-1893). His great-grandson was Emil Maurice (Nazi politician and functionary).

When widow Handje died of the consequences of the great fire in 1842, the city's Senate granted a concession for a new theater building, "considering the energy, solidity and skill it had proven itself ..."; however with the condition that the heirs of the widow Handjes be compensated. Maurice commissioned the architects Franz Georg Stammann and Auguste de Meuron with a new building, which he was able to open on November 9, 1843 under the name Thalia Theater .

Collective grave Thalia Theater

In May 1885 Maurice handed over the management of the theater entirely to his son and withdrew into private life. Gustav Maurice had already supported his father in business matters for years, but could not replace him. Gustav Maurice died suddenly and unexpectedly during the preparations for the 50th anniversary of the Thalia Theater on November 9, 1893. With the support of Bernhard Pollini , Chéri Maurice acted as managing director for a few months until Pollini Thalia-Theater and Stadttheater could merge with effect from June 1, 1894.

Four months before his 91st birthday, Chéri Maurice died on January 27, 1896 in Hamburg, where he found his final resting place in the Jewish cemetery.

At the Hamburg cemetery in Ohlsdorf , in the area of ​​the “Althamburg Memorial Cemetery”, the collective grave of the Thalia Theater, among others, “Schwartzenberger Charles called Maurice” is remembered.

Quote

The theater critic Rudolf Elcho: "Maurice had only one enemy all his life, the German language".

literature

• Diedrich Diederichsen :  Maurice, Chéri. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 444 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Ludwig Julius Fränkel:  Maurice, Chéri . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 52, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1906, pp. 249-256.
• Adolph Kohut : Famous Israelite Men and Women. In the cultural history of mankind; Life and character images from the past and present , Vol. 1 (1900), pp. 245–249.
• Reinhold Ortmann: 50 years of a German theater director. Memories, sketches and biographies from the history of the Hamburg Thalia Theater . Verlag Richter, Hamburg 1881.
• Hermann Uhde: The city theater in Hamburg 1827–1877. A contribution to German cultural history . Cotta, Stuttgart 1879.