History of cabaret in Austria

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The history of cabaret in Austria goes back to the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy. As an art form accepted by the broader public, however, cabaret did not establish itself until the opening of the “ Beer Cabaret Simplicissimus ” (today “ Simpl ”) in 1912. Until then, folk and couplet singers dominated the entertainment scene in Vienna.

This literary-dramatic art form flourished with the predominantly Jewish bourgeois-liberal audience until 1938 and produced stars such as Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959), Fritz Grünbaum (1880–1941) and Armin Berg (1883–1956). The few connections that reached back to this time were maintained by the two Jewish returnees Karl Farkas (1893–1971) and Gerhard Bronner (1922–2007) in the first decades of the Second Republic , before leaving the student protest and the alternative in the 1970s A complete new beginning could be set out in the scene . A very influential figure in cabaret in Austria after 1945 was Helmut Qualtinger (1928–1986), whose artistic charisma is still effective today.

Predecessors and roots of cabaret

Humor and Satire before the 19th Century

The roots of cabaret can be for centuries to impromptu poets and -sängern as the Lieber Augustin in the 17th century and traced it. There, as well as in the street and puppet theaters of the late Baroque and Biedermeier periods , where Kasperl , Leopoldl , Staberl , Bernardon , Thaddädl , Jackerl played their jokes, the cabaret with its jokes and songs, with its irony, satire, and mockery of the authorities and current affairs its ancestors.

After increasing censorship under Maria Theresia and later under Prince Metternich , who barely allowed performing arts apart from theater and opera, this form of humorous contemporary and political criticism was temporarily pushed into the underground or pushed aside. In the Viennese coffee houses , where the literary scene gathered, but also among folk singers and couplet singers , critical humor continued to exist in a different form, until the emergence of cabaret again offered its own, more suitable stage as a mediator between performers and audience.

The cabaret emerged at the end of the 19th century

Cabaret bat

The beginnings of Austrian cabaret can be found around the theater crisis of 1873. As a result of the stock market crash of the same year, the then established theater scene collapsed. Since the people were still looking for entertainment, many new entertainment facilities emerged, such as the Varieté , which functions as a mixture of circus and theater , the Chantant, which functions as a dance café, and the Singspielhalle, which is used for singing, drama and comic performances . In it, solo entertainers were used for the first time as a break program until they got their own program items.

The comedian scene in Vienna also experienced a lively exchange with the then largely German-speaking Budapest , around 40% . This brought mainly Jewish jargon comedy to Vienna. In 1889 the Vienna Singspielhalle concessionaire Bernhard Lautzky traveled to Budapest specifically to put together an ensemble of singers, actors and comedians for performances in Vienna. The appearances took place under the name Budapest Orpheum . This settled in Leopoldstadt in 1892 . Comedians Max Rott and Benjamin Blaß were among the first members of the ensemble. They appeared as the Rott brothers and also achieved great popularity in Vienna as a duet. Later, comedians and cabaret artists in today's sense, Armin Berg , Fritz Grünbaum , Karl Farkas , Hans Moser , Georg Kreisler and Heinrich Eisenbach , who headed the Budapest Orpheum for a long time, discovered this stage for the entertainment industry.

The further development of cabaret in Austria during the First Republic is inextricably linked with the numerous Jewish population in Vienna before the Holocaust. Many cabaret bars were in the Jewish district of Vienna, Leopoldstadt .

Cabaret until 1938

First cabaret bars

Fritz Grünbaum in front of Hell , Wienzeile, 1908

After Rodolphe Salis opened Le Chat Noir in Paris as a cabaret artistique in 1881 , it took until around 1900 when a stage based on this model was also founded in Germany. In 1901, Felix Salten opened the “ Jung-Wiener Theater zum liebe Augustin ”, based on the Berlin model, as the first cabaret in Austria in the Theater an der Wien . However, after seven performances it had to close again and it was not until 1906 when new cabarets opened. The cabaret Hölle opened again in the basement of the Theater an der Wien . Its star was the Hungarian Mella Mars , who was accompanied on the piano by her husband Béla Laszky . Fritz Grünbaum soon celebrated his breakthrough as a philosophizing conférencier here .

That same year, the Munich opened Marc Henry and Marya Delvard and Hannes Ruch in Ballgasse the cabaret night light with the Star diseuse Marya Delvard and initial advice of Karl Kraus . Artists such as Roda Roda , Egon Friedell , Carl Leopold Hollitzer and Gertrude Barrison performed there. It closed in 1906 and the Cabaret Fledermaus was reopened in its place in 1907 . Henry was also involved in the artistic direction this time and Hollitzer, Barrison and Delvard appeared there again frequently. Even Alfred Polgar graduated there performances. After Henry left the cabaret in 1913, it was transformed into the revue theater Femina.

Viennese cabaret artists such as Fritz Grünbaum and Paul Morgan were already known in Germany before and during the First World War, for example through long guest appearances in Berlin.

The "Simpl"

The Simpl in the inner city

In 1912 the Simpl theater cabaret was founded in the Wollzeile in Vienna, analogous to similar venues in Munich or Berlin . Here Fritz Grünbaum and his younger colleague Karl Farkas further developed the Budapest- based form of the double conference in the 1920s . The themes of the cabaret were initially largely non-political. This development was to be repeated in the first decades of the Second Republic. The Viennese cabaret in the interwar period was closely interrelated with the cabaret scene in Berlin. An example: the Jewish cabaret artist and chanson artist Armin Berg took over the song Der Conscientious Mason, written by Otto Reutter , and “viennized” it, thus adapting it to the local color. After the war, it went to Heinz Conrads , who popularized it through radio throughout Austria so that since then many in Austria have wrongly ascribed authorship to it. The best-known cabaret venues in Vienna between the wars were the Simpl in the Wollzeile and the Hell, which was located in the basement under the Theater an der Wien. There also joined Egon Friedell and celebrated with his one-act play Goethe (The poet laureate must undergo a rigorous examination pedantic about his life undergoing and falls with drums and grenades by) triumphs. The content of the cabaret consisted largely of revue items . They were based on the tradition of the operetta , but also on the emerging sound film, which in its early days liked to record musical performances. Apart from these established bars, a literary cabaret emerged. The protagonists in this direction were Peter Hammerschlag and Jura Soyfer . Hammerschlag fell back on the fund of the Wienerlied and Jura Soyfer was emphatically political.

Cabaret after 1945

Reconstruction after 1945

Georg Kreisler at a reading at the Akademie der Künste (Berlin)

After the Second World War, the Viennese cabaret scene was partly re-established by Jewish returnees. Karl Farkas, who had managed to escape to the USA, became artistic director of the reopened Simpl . Gerhard Bronner , who fled to Palestine via Czechoslovakia in 1938 , founded the cabaret group Nameless Ensemble , which was successful in the 1950s , together with Helmut Qualtinger and Carl Merz, who had already been active in the interwar period . The venue was first the Marietta Bar , then the Intime Theater and finally, from 1959, the New Theater at the Kärntnertor , which was newly opened by Bronner . Georg Kreisler , who came from New York, later joined this group. With programs like Glasl vorm Aug and Brettl vorm Kopf , the reconstruction time after the war was caricatured. The topics were less politics and more everyday life after the war. In these programs, the double conference was used between Qualtinger and Bronner. Figures like Travnicek , embodied by Qualtinger, or the Halbwilde not only reflected the incipient mass motorization, but also the first social upheaval after the war. This ensemble dissolved again in 1960 with the departure of the central protagonist, Helmut Qualtinger.

In the 1960s, when television rose to become a mass medium in Austria as well, Simpl, which was still run by Karl Farkas, had its prime. Programs such as the balance sheet for the season with rather mild political criticism and the double conferences between Karl Farkas and Ernst Waldbrunn reached almost every household. In the New Year's Eve program, ORF broadcast popular Simpl revues. Helmut Qualtinger made the excellent contribution to Austrian cabaret in the 1960s: the one-man play Der Herr Karl , written together with Carl Merz and broadcast in 1961 on television, which was then under the influence of the SPÖ .

New beginning in the 1970s

At the beginning of the 1970s, Austrian cabaret seemed to be a “petrified” version of bourgeois theater that could hardly keep up with the rapidly changing socially, culturally and technologically changing world. The death of Karl Farkas (1971), the takeover of the traditional Simpl stage by Martin Flossmann (1974), the turn of the cabaret artist Maxi Böhm , who was popular in the first post-war decades, to the theater and the first solo program by Lukas Resetarits (1977) can be seen as milestones of the transition . Georg Kreisler, at least 46 years old at the time, was able to launch a satirical-cabaret television program called " A Hot Quarter Hour " on ORF in 1968, an otherwise rather insignificant " revolutionary year " for Vienna and Austria , which attracted " long-haired " and " bums " "and called for criticism from authorities. When, in 1968, the then Mayor of Vienna, Bruno Marek, had student protesters removed by the police on the edge of the traditional May march of the Social Democrats from Rathausplatz, Kreisler wrote the satirical song " Let's protect the police " for his program .

New forms emerged in connection with the incipient student alternative and pub culture. The breaking point for this was the arena line-up in 1976, which was less of a "late 1968" than more of a "Viennese Summer of Love ", as the music journalist Heinrich Deisl analyzes in his book Im Puls der Nacht . Erwin Steinhauer and Lukas Resetarits were protagonists of this movement, who in turn made themselves known to a wider audience through the mass medium of television. In the same environment, the rediscovery of the Wienerlied began, from which artists such as Roland Neuwirth & Extremschrammeln, Kurt Sowinetz and André Heller were able to elicit rebellious and revolutionary potential. In 1980, the television program Ohne Maulkorb reported on the “new cabaret” and brought the first programs by Lukas Resetarits. Werner Schneyder , who always appeared correctly in a dark stage suit, assumed an outsider position in this left-wing, alternative environment . He represented the classic political cabaret, as it is cultivated in Germany in the Münchner Lach- und Schießgesellschaft and the ARD broadcast windshield wiper to this day. When Schneyder began performing with Dieter Hildebrandt in 1974 , what the two understood by “political cabaret” was considered “ shitty liberal ” in the heated mood of the extreme left against the background of the second generation of the RAF and the Stammheim trials .

Hans Peter Heinzl , who has been a cabaret artist since 1977 - sometimes with his own satirical TV programs such as Zeit am Spiess - also performed at the piano with his own political chansons, which was rather atypical for his generation.

Alfred Dorfer
Roland Düringer

However, the “new cabaret” only became suitable for the masses in the later 1980s, when a corresponding infrastructure was created at bars in Vienna and all provincial capitals and sales opportunities. In Vienna these were the cabarets Vindobona , Orpheum , Spektakel , Cabaret Niedermair and Kulisse . In Innsbruck , the greenhouse that emerged from the alternative scene in 1983 became the most important cabaret stage. During this time the rise of I Stangl , Josef Hader , Andreas Vitasek and groups like Schlabarett began , from which the solo careers of Alfred Dorfer and Roland Düringer emerged . In addition, radio began reporting on the cabaret scene on a regular basis. Ö1 has been broadcasting selected cabaret performances in the Kabarett Direkt program once or twice a month since October 1993 . Groups like Die Hectiker or Alexander Bisenz , who specializes in imitations and fictional figures, served the broad public who were less interested in "critical" topics. When these protagonists had their prime, dropped many records and appeared in the popular ORF program The Big Ten , around the turn of the 1980s to the 1990s, the word “cabaret artist” almost degenerated into a dirty word in certain circles. In 1989 a "satirical niche" within the Ö3 youth program ZickZack developed into the program Salon Helga, which is still broadcast on FM4 . The two makers, Christoph Grissemann and Dirk Stermann , preferred to call themselves “moderators”. In 1993, the management of the Simpl was handed over to Michael Niavarani , who was only 25 at the time and who has been in charge ever since. 1993 can be seen as a "turning point" in the history of cabaret in Austria: in that year the film India, based on the play of the same name by Josef Hader and Alfred Dorfer, was released in Austrian cinemas. The two authors were seen in the main roles. An Austrian unique was born: the so-called "cabaret film". The success of India was only surpassed by Hinterholz 8 by and with Roland Düringer in the later 1990s.

Present - the cabaret since 1990

Josef Hader

In 1993 the “now time” of Austrian cabaret can begin. The diversification of the Austrian cabaret landscape, which began in the 1980s, continued in the 1990s and in the first decade after the turn of the millennium. Roland Düringer managed to fill the Wiener Stadthalle , where international show greats usually perform. Josef Hader played his critically acclaimed program Privat, which premiered in 1994, on long tours through the entire German-speaking area with hardly any decline in audience interest. Ten years after its private start, his current program, Hader muss weg , achieved a similarly good response from audiences and critics. The niche of the absurd and literary, slightly quirky cabaret occupied from the mid-1990s, Karl Ferdinand Kratzl that a wide audience by supporting roles in films such as Hinterholz 8 , but especially by embodying the role of Mr. Claus in the sitcom MA 2412 became known . Also noteworthy is the success of Bernhard Ludwig with his "seminar cabaret" guide to sexual dissatisfaction or the career of Alf Poier , who became famous for his absurd comedy , which has so far led to two song contests .

The "turning point", ie the takeover of government by the blue-black coalition under Federal Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel in February 2000 initially resulted in a temporary politicization of the cabaret programs. This initial politicization shifted to the TV cabaret Dorfers Donnerstalk, which was created by the conservative ORF leadership under Monika Lindner as a “valve” . After the return of the grand coalition in 2007 and especially when the affairs of the BUWOG affair and Telekom became known in 2009 and 2011 respectively, the Austrian cabaret programs became much more political again.

The wave of so-called “cabaret films” of the 1990s, which brought Austrian cinema records such as Muttertag (1993), Hinterholz 8 (1998) and Poppitz (2002), ended in the early 2000s. The first decade of the 21st century was marked by a noticeable change in the Austrian cabaret landscape. Always at the seaside was never seen as a “cabaret film”, although two-thirds of the leading roles were cast with fixed stars of the Austrian cabaret scene. The same applies to the Brenner series with Josef Hader. Phenomena like maschek. , the science cabaret Science Busters , the satire website Die Tagespresse with the daily press Show and the television program Tagespresse aktuell or productions such as Sendung ohne Namen can no longer be compared with forms of traditional cabaret programs that have been common in Austria since the 1970s. The cabaret Die 4 da , also produced for television, packs detailed political and social criticism in the form of 25-minute skits full of allusions.

In September 2002, the thundering daily alternative cultural program was art pieces , under which beside experimental films, cultural reporting and discussions with artists among others own cabaret shows like Suite 16 or later culture box, each with Stermann & Grissemann, or Diskussiaunsrunden of Project X were broadcast in Dismissed in the course of the program reform despite major protests. A month later it was replaced by the new Thursday night concept , the content of which was now pure comedy and entertainment. The program initially consisted of old ORF entertainment programs such as MA 2412 . As a result, various new formats were tested, such as the program without a name , whose unconventional combination of image, text and language meant a program that was both thoughtful and entertaining. Of the numerous formats tested, Dorfers Donnerstalk, originally established as a talk show satire, remained in the program until 2011. Robert Palfrader's We Are Emperors proved to be even more successful . As part of summer cabaret, cabaret programs by Austrian cabaret artists have also been broadcast at this summer broadcast time since 2000. From 2012 to 2014, the ORF broadcast the Hyundai Cabaret Days in six seasons . ORF has been showing the series Cabaret in the Tower since 2016 .

The Ybbsiade cabaret and cabaret festival has been held annually in Ybbs in Lower Austria since 1989 and the Vienna Cabaret Festival has been held in the arcade courtyard of the Vienna City Hall since 2011 . The Salzburger Stier cabaret award has been awarded annually since 1982, the Grazer Kleinkunstvogel since 1987 , the Freistädter Frischling since 1995 , the Golden Cabaret Nail since 1996 , the Austrian Cabaret Award since 1999 (also known as "Karl" until 2006) and the Enns cabaret since 2008 .

literature

See also

Web links

Commons : Cabaret in Austria  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Weys: Cabaret and Cabaret in Vienna. Verlag Jugend und Volk, Vienna / Munich 1970, ISBN 3-8113-6038-7 , p. 11.
  2. ↑ Georg Kreisler Forum episode guide "A hot quarter of an hour"
  3. ↑ Heinrich Deisl, In the pulse of the night. Sub and popular cultures in Vienna 1955–1976 , Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2013.
  4. ↑ Werner Schneyer according to the video recording in his last program "Moments and Farewells"
  5. ↑ Hans-Peter Heinzl Austrian Cabaret Archive, accessed on June 27, 2014.