Ernest Thorn

Ernest Thorn , born Moses Abraham Thorn , (born September 22, 1853 in Jaroslau , † May 21, 1928 in Leipzig ) was an Austrian magician .

Life

Gravestone Ernest Thorn and his wife Julie Thorn in Leipzig

Thorn grew up in the German-speaking family of small business owner Leo Thorn and attended grammar school.

In 1865 Thorn saw a performance by Professor St. Romans , whereupon Thorn built magic apparatuses and successfully demonstrated them to his school friends. He secretly left high school and his parents' house and traveled to follow the magician. In Vienna in 1867 he became assistant to the magician Henry Smith alias Cagliostro. He then went into business for himself and went on trips, organizing his performances himself. He came to Berlin around 1870 and became Bellachini's assistant , who developed Thorn into a first-class magician.

Around 1875 Thorn undertook his own tours . He performed in Constantinople , Egypt and India . At the end of the 1870s, he and his brother Heinrich (1857–1943) alias Henry Darvin founded the Thorn & Darvin company with its own magic show, in which Henry mostly worked in the background as an assistant. They performed in Sydney and traveled via Hawaii to San Francisco for their first US tour. Henry Thorn became a US citizen in 1882. This was followed by tours in Romania , Serbia , Bulgaria , Turkey with a performance in front of Abdülhamid II in the Yıldız Palace , Greece and Egypt.

After another US tour, Henry Thorn stayed in the US around 1890 and married Laura Cubitt in 1906. Ernest Thorn went to Constantinople and stayed there for two years. There he met Julie Zücker, whom he married a few years later and who became his manager and assistant. After appearances in Vienna and several years in Budapest and Lviv , where he was director of the Colosseum Lviv , a tour with a new show to London , Copenhagen and Stockholm followed in 1904 . From 1908 he called himself Chevalier Ernest Thorn . 1908-1910 South America and the USA were traveled. Egypt and India followed again.

At the beginning of the First World War , Ernest Thorn and his wife settled in Leipzig, where Henry Thorn had come as a shoe dealer in 1906 to look after his sick mother. In 1915 Ernest Thorn appeared in Vienna as a Cagliostro from Krakow . In 1918 Ernest Thorn became an honorary member of the Hamburg Magical Circle , of which he had been a member since 1912. In 1919 his wife Julie died and he himself suffered from diabetes mellitus . The inflation of 1923 devalued his savings so that he had to live on selling magic articles and antiques from his travels. He died penniless and was buried in the old Jewish cemetery in Leipzig. Henry Thorn died on January 24, 1943 in Leipzig in the Jewish old people's home of the Julius Ariowitsch Foundation and was also buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery.

Web links

• Zauber-Pedia: Ernest Thorn (accessed October 16, 2018).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} John Thorn: Magician's Blood (accessed October 16, 2018).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Wolfram Fiedler, Manfred Martin: Life is an Illusion - On the biography of the Jewish magician Ernest Thorn . In: Kalonymos . tape 21 , no. 3 , 2018, p. 7-10 .
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Jens-Uwe Günzel: One hour in the magical dreamland of Chevalier Ernest Thorn . In: magic . June 1, 2018, p. 291 ff .