Erich Kürschner (puppeteer)

Erich Kürschner (born March 21, 1911 in Roßwein , Saxony , † July 17, 1977 in Essen ) was a German puppeteer .

Life

Not much is known and even less published about this puppeteer, although his artistic work has made a significant contribution to the appearance of today's Punch and Judy .

Furrier was a druggist from his first apprenticeship . At the age of 19, Kürschner traveled to the small Saxon town of Hohnstein , where the puppeteer Max Jacob ran a puppet theater at the Jugendburg , which in the years and decades that followed became the epitome of puppetry all over the world. Kürschner had already met Jacob during a guest performance in Döbeln and later met him for an interview in Leipzig . Furriers found the favor of the emerging Max Jacob and was in the Kasper family added, as the crowd formed around Jacob of puppeteers, woodcarvers and costume designers called himself. Jacob trained furriers as a puppeteer and sent him to guest performances across the country with the Hohnsteiner "daughter stage" under the direction of Hans Wickert . Wickert died in World War II , which made this stage extinguished again.

The success of the Hohnsteiner Puppet Show took on such proportions in the next few years that several more playgroups could be founded. At first the Hamburg puppeteer Friedrich Arndt led such a playgroup, which also included Erich Kürschner, later Harald Schwarz from Essen also took over a stage.

As a now experienced and mature puppeteer, Kürschner was entrusted with the management of his own travel theater in October 1962. Together with his colleague Helmut Althoff , he played exclusively for children of kindergarten and elementary school age and always used hand puppets in the traditional Hohnsteiner carving style (wood sculptors were mainly Theo Eggink and Till de Kock ), while the other two play groups under Friedrich Arndt and Harald Schwarz - Max Jacob had meanwhile retired - also addressed an adult audience and increasingly distanced themselves from the conventional style of Hohnsteiner productions.

Initially, the Erich Kürschner stage organized its performances from the town of Enger ( Herford district ) and went on its guest tours from there. Kürschner later moved to Essen, where Harald Schwarz was also based. The tour trips took furriers to South America. The artist lived in a rather modest apartment at 23 Holsterhauser Strasse until his death.

Ottilie Kürschner and the Hohnstein workshop

Erich Kürschner had been married to Ottilie Würster since December 21, 1946 , whose merit it is to have designed thousands of imaginative doll costumes until her death in the 1980s and made them together with her colleague Irma Priese . The Hohnsteiner workshop Ottilie Kürschner worked for the Hohnsteiner theaters themselves, but also dressed figures that were made for other puppet theaters or sold as standard types to schools and kindergartens. She was also responsible for a large number of animal and snap-mouth figures that still populate the stages of numerous puppeteers today.

Since Erich Kürschner, in contrast to Max Jacob and Friedrich Arndt, left practically no written publications or radio plays, it is above all the famous workshop sewers of his wife that keep the name Kürschner alive in circles of puppet show lovers to this day .

After the death of their parents, Erich and Ottilie Kürschner's son Michael continued to run the Hohnstein workshop under the name of his mother and died in January 2006 at the age of only 51.

literature

• Max Jacob: My Kasper and me. Memoirs of a hand puppeteer , Rudolstadt 1964.
• Rhenish Working Group on Puppet Play in the Düsseldorf District (Ed.): Puppenbrief (No. 1 from June 30, 1962), Düsseldorf 1962 (with an article about the re-establishment of the Hohnsteiner stage Erich Kürschner ).
• Marie Jacob: Erich Kürschner - 40 years of Hohnstein puppeteer . In: Freundeskreis der Hohnsteiner Puppenspiele (ed.): 31st Kasperbrief , Hamburg in May 1970.
• Erich Kürschner: curriculum vitae of a puppeteer . In: 50 Years of Hohnsteiner , Hamburg 1971.

swell

• Literature and puppets from the estate of Erich and Ottilie Kürschner as well as Irma Priese in the puppet theater collection Gerd J. Pohl .