Gustav Manker

Gustav Manker as director of the Vienna Volkstheater , 1974

Gustav Manker (born March 29, 1913 in Vienna ; † July 7, 1988 there ) was an Austrian director , set designer and theater director . From 1968 to 1979 he was the director of the Volkstheater in Vienna.

Life

Pre-war period

Manker attended the Stiftsgymnasium St. Paul in the Carinthian Lavanttal and then studied from 1933 to 1935 with Max Reinhardt at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna directing and acting as well as set design with Alfred Roller and Oskar Strnad . During his student days he took part in Reinhardt's productions of Jedermann and Faust at the Salzburg Festival . In 1935 he got his first engagement with Ernst Lönner at the avant-garde theater " Small Theater in Praterstrasse " in Vienna, where he a. a. 1935 provided the Austrian premiere of Ödön von Horváths Kasimir und Karoline . In 1937 he worked with Elias Jubal at the basement theater " Theater for 49 " in Vienna. From 1936 to 1938 Manker was a set designer and actor at the German-speaking city theater in Bielsko-Bielitz in Poland .

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1938 Manker was hired by Walter Bruno Iltz as a set designer at the Deutsche Volkstheater in Vienna, where he worked for more than forty years, from 1942 also as a director , then as head of equipment and theater director, and from 1968 to 1979 as its director. Manker was the defining figure of this house, he staged a total of 155 pieces and designed the sets for 207 productions.

In 1938 Manker designed the equipment for the opening premiere of Friedrich Schiller's Die Räuber , directed by artistic director Walter Bruno Iltz . Over forty more followed until the theater was closed in the course of the general theater ban in 1944, including classics such as A Midsummer Night's Dream , The Maiden of Orléans , King Ottokar's Fortune and End , The Judge of Zalamea , A Faithful Servant of His Lord , Maria Stuart , Hamlet , Trend and Nazi historical dramas by Hans Rehberg and Otto Emmerich Groh to dramas by Ludwig Anzengruber ( The Perjury Farmer ), Richard Billinger ( The Giant ) and Karl Schönherr ( Faith and Homeland ) as well as Austrian classics such as Johann Nestroys Der Zerrissene and Ferdinand Raimunds Der Farmer as a millionaire and the ghost king's diamond .

During these years his first work with the directors Leon Epp and Günther Haenel , who were to become Manker's most important artistic partners, took place. Performances such as GB Shaw's Die heilige Johanna (1943) and Ferdinand Raimund's Der Diamant des Geisterkönigs (1944), both directed by Günther Haenel and in sets by Manker, formulated a recognizable theatrical resistance for the attentive audience. For Manker, the work on "St. Johanna" was a decisive step towards achieving a modern theater style. He renounced any illusion and created a completely abstract scenery. The portrayal of Johanna by the only 19-year-old Inge Konradi was widely praised, but Manker's purist stage design was attacked by the Völkischer Beobachter , as it did not conform to the Nazi claim for total illusion.

At The Diamond of the Ghost King there was a clear demonstration of theatrical resistance in 1944: Nikolaus Haenel's staging of Raimund's Magic Tale set the "Land of Truth" stylistically in present-day Nazi Germany, Manker's set parodied the monumental Nazi aesthetic with statues in the Arno style Brekers also ironicized the German imperial eagle , which turned its rear end towards the audience, and paraphrased the symbol of the power through joy wheel at the entrance to the king's palace. The costumes were based on the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), the king's daughter and her friends appeared as BDM girls with a center parting and long blond braids. Karl Kalwoda , the actor who played King Veritatius, spoke in broken sentences and delivered a parody of Hitler in gestures and posture . For the balloon ride from the land of truth, the relational sentence “The future is in the air!” Was added at the end of the scene .

In addition to his work at the Deutsches Volkstheater, where he was the only set designer from 1942 due to the war situation, Manker also designed sets for the comedy in Johannesgasse under the direction of Leon Epp and the Exl-Bühne, as well as for the Wiener Kammerspiele , the Bürgertheater and the renaissance theater . Manker's first directorial work was in December 1942 Der loyal Johannes by Walter Hans Boese based on the Brothers Grimm , a performance of the German People's Theater in the "Komödie" in Johannesgasse.

Through the intervention of the "Hornik" resistance group , Manker was saved from military service and met young Helmut Qualtinger in the air raid shelter , with whom he had an artistic friendship.

post war period

In May 1945 Manker became a member of the Communist Party for a short time . The first work at the theater was the stage design for the first performance of the last four, apocalyptic scenes The Last Night , the epilogue to the tragedy The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus . During Günther Haenel's management time at the Volkstheater , Manker u. a. Have the theater scandal from Julius Hay , Anatoli Lunatscharski's The Liberated Don Quixote , Jean Anouilh's Antigone , Eugene O'Neill's Confusion of Youth (with the young Oskar Werner ) - mostly directed by Günther Haenels. At the same time he worked on Leon Epps Die Insel , on the Kammerspiele (premieres by Franz Werfels Jacobowsky und der Oberst , 1946, and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies ), in 1948 at the Citizens' Theater, the Renaissance Stage and the Theater in der Josefstadt .

Manker's actual directing career began in January 1946 with Ben Jonsons Volpone . It was followed by JB Priestley's Dangerous Truth and Ferdinand Bruckner's Heroic Comedy . In 1947 Manker staged his first play by Johann Nestroy, Kampl with Karl Skraup, at the Vienna Volkstheater .

Nestroy, of whom he staged a total of 43 plays, became the defining author of his life. With his performances, Manker succeeded in developing a new Nestroy style that took away any Biedermeier coloring from the pieces - also with regard to the decoration - rather presented it in an intellectually pointed manner, dispensing with arrangements and additions. In 1948 Manker staged, for the first time in his own set design, Nestroys on ground floor and first floor ; a way of working that he remained true to for many years. This was followed by Der Talisman (1951, with Hans Putz and Inge Konradi ) as well as Der Bauer als Millionär (1948) and Der Verschwender (1949) by Ferdinand Raimund, each with Paul Hörbiger in the leading role and in the choreography by Rosalia Chladek .

In 1948 Günther Haenel moved to the newly founded Scala . Manker could not accept their offer and stayed at the Volkstheater, where in December 1948 the first performance of Ödön von Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods led to one of the biggest theater scandals of the post-war period. The most important directing works by Manker during this period were Jacques Offenbach's Die Schöne Helena in a Viennese dialect version (with Christl Mardayn , Fritz Imhoff , Inge Konradi and Karl Skraup in a surrealist set by Stephan Hlawa ), in 1951 Georg Kaiser's Napoleon in New Orleans , the first performance of Albert Camus ' Die Gerechten , Vicky Baum's people in the hotel and in 1952 Franz Werfels Juarez and Maximilian , mostly in their own set.

Directorate Leon Epp

During the direction of Leon Epp (1952–1968), Manker was the decisive director at the Vienna Volkstheater , chief stage designer and senior stage director. Schiller's Die Räuber in particular was groundbreaking in 1959 on a two-part simultaneous stage directed and set by Manker. In 1963, the Volkstheater, with Mother Courage and her children , dared to play a play by Bertolt Brecht after it had not been performed against the backdrop of the Cold War in Austria due to the so-called Brecht boycott . The press spoke of the “Blockadebrecher” premiere on February 23, 1963 with Dorothea Neff , Fritz Muliar and Ulrich Wildgruber , directed by Manker, who subsequently also The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1964, with his wife Hilde Sochor ), Saint Johanna der Schlachthöfe (1965) and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1968) and thus initiated a rethinking of Brecht's plays on Austrian stages.

Manker's important productions during this period were the premieres of Albert Camus ' The State of Siege (1953), A Village Without Men by Ödön von Horváth (1954), The Ice Man Comes by Eugene O'Neill (1955) and The Great Wall of China by Max Frisch ( 1956), Solar Eclipse by Sidney Kingsley (based on the novel by Arthur Koestler , 1957), Der Teufel und der liebe Gott by Jean-Paul Sartre , the first performance of Blick zurück im Zorn by John Osborne (1958), the world premiere of Franz Grillparzer's Blanka von Kastilien (1959), Danton's death by Georg Büchner (1960), Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare (with Michael Heltau and Elfriede Irrall ), and a Frank Wedekind cycle with Lulu , Spring Awakening , Music , The Marquis of Keith and King Nicolo and Ferdinand Bruckner's Die Verbrecher (1963) on a 7-part simultaneous stage.

In addition to his work at the Volkstheater, Manker also found time to work with Berthold Viertel at the Burg- and Akademietheater , as well as to stage at the Theater in der Josefstadt and at the Kammerspiele . As theater director, he discovered a new generation of Austrian playwrights in the early 1970s with Wolfgang Bauer and Peter Turrini . Manker liked to stage pieces from the old Viennese Volkstheater , which shaped a new style of performance for this genre through the organic interaction of his stage sets and his direction. His Nestroy performances with protagonists such as Karl Skraup , Hans Putz , Walter Kohut , Fritz Muliar , Karl Paryla , Heinz Petters and Helmut Qualtinger are legendary .

The Austrian folk plays by Johann Nestroy, Ferdinand Raimund and Ludwig Anzengruber were particularly important to Manker, for which he had a first-class ensemble available in Karl Skraup, Hans Putz, Hugo Gottschlich , Fritz Muliar, Walter Kohut , Kurt Sowinetz and Hilde Sochor. Manker also staged many unknown plays by Nestroy, such as An apartment is for rent in the city, an apartment is to be left in the suburbs, an apartment with a garden is to be had in Hietzing (1962) with Qualtinger, love stories and marriage matters (1964), Das Haus der Temperamente (1965, with Karl Paryla), and On the ground floor and first floor (1967, with Heinz Petters).

Austrian modernism from Schnitzler to Horváth , Ferdinand Bruckner and Ferenc Molnár as well as the world premiere of Helmut Qualtinger's The Execution (1965) were also in Manker's hands. Qualtinger was also seen in Dostoyevsky's Guilt and Atonement as an examining magistrate and as the magical king in Horváth's Tales from the Vienna Woods (1968).

Director of the People's Theater

In 1968 Gustav Manker took over the management of the Volkstheater after the accidental death of Leon Epp. One of the milestones of his management was the discovery of young Austrian dramatists. In 1969, Change of Wolfgang Bauer Premiere and 1971 the New Year or the massacre at the Hotel Sacher (with Qualtinger), directed by Bernd Fischer Auer , 1971 Rozznjogd premiered by Peter Turrini and then also its pieces Sauschlachten (1972) The most amazing day (1973) and The Landlady (1975). Other young authors were Gerhard Roth ( Lichtenberg , 1974), Wilhelm Pevny ( Sprintorgasmik ), Herwig Seeböck ( Household or Die Sandhasen ), Wilhelm Pellert ( Jesus von Ottakring , 1974), Walter Wippersberg ( Was haben vom Leben , 1976), Harald Sommer ( I emphasize that I have nothing to complain about in the government ), Winfried Bruckner ( Raped in the evening , 1978) and Helmut Zenker ( crazy happy , 1976).

Manker generally paid a lot of attention to the maintenance of Austrian literature, from Raimund to Anzengruber , from Schnitzler to Horváth, Csokor, Karl Schönherr , Lernet-Holenia , Wildgans , Herzmanovsky-Orlando , Ferdinand Bruckner and Hermann Bahr , whose pieces Das Konzert und Wienerinnen zu Were big hits. In 1971, Arthur Schnitzler's posthumous piece, Zug der Schatten , was premiered , after a cycle of his earlier works Freiwild , Das Märchen and Anatol had already been performed.

Manker's ambitious cultivation of classics included Grillparzer as well as Shakespeare - in 1970 there was the acclaimed premiere of William Shakespeare's Hamlet 163 with Michael Heltau - and culminated in Richard Beer-Hofmann's arrangement of Goethe's Faust I and II in one evening. Helmut Qualtinger continued to appear frequently under the direction of Manker, for example in 1969 in Johann Nestroy's Der Talisman .

Manker's annual Nestroy productions were legendary, which in addition to much-played pieces also unearthed the unknown and performed with a well-rehearsed “Nestroy Ensemble” (consisting of Heinz Petters, Herbert Propst , Rudolf Strobl , Walter Langer , Hilde Sochor, Dolores Schmidinger and Brigitte Swoboda ) his special style ("Nestroy pur") became popular hits: The Talisman (1969), Heimliches Geld, heimliche Liebe (1972), Das Gewürzkrämerkleeblatt (1972), There is no means against folly (1973), in vain! (1974), He wants to have a joke (1976), Lumpazivagabundus (1977), Hell fear (1977), Former circumstances and The bad boys at school (1978).

Other engagements

Manker also staged at the Salzburg Festival ( Der Unbrechliche ) and the Bregenz Festival , at the Schauspielhaus Zürich , in the Komödie Basel , at the Residenztheater Munich (Johann Nestroys Der Zerrissene with Walter Schmidinger ), at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm Berlin, the Thalia Theater Hamburg ( Das House of Temperaments ), the Württemberg State Theater Stuttgart , the Burgfestspiele Jagsthausen or the Luisenburg Festival in Wunsiedel as well as at the Theater in der Josefstadt (including Schiller's Don Karlos ), at the Vienna Academy Theater , at the Vienna Volksoper ( Giuseppe Verdi's I masnadieri ).

He discovered and promoted actors such as Otto Schenk , Ulrich Wildgruber , Fritz Muliar , Michael Heltau , Heinz Petters , Walter Langer , Karlheinz Hackl , Dolores Schmidinger , Kitty Speiser , Brigitte Swoboda , Herwig Seeböck , Franz Morak and Almut Zilcher .

Reception and appreciation

Manker was "a man who was fascinated by the art of acting, almost manically obsessed with the theater, inspired by intellectual curiosity, introverted, shy, emphatic and exalted" ( Der Standard , December 31, 2010), a "renaissance man of theater" (Fritz Muliar) , full of “skill and vision” ( Michael Heltau ) and in the eyes of the author Peter Turrini a “strange mixture between a representative of the public theater and a bull and rebel and disruptor”, who as theater director “let others disturb - or who disrupted allowed ". Manker said of the theater: “It is the highest thing there is to do great theater. The worst thing when it's bad ”.

On December 8, 2006, a portrait of Manker by Johannes Grützke was unveiled in the Volkstheater . On March 17, 2013, on his 100th birthday, a matinee took place in the Vienna Volkstheater, in which Dolores Schmidinger, Hilde Sochor, Brigitte Swoboda , Karlheinz Hackl , Michael Heltau, Walter Langer , Paulus Manker, Peter Turrini and Andrea Eckert participated.

family

Gustav Manker was the son of the engineer Josef Manker von Lerchenstein and Ludmilla Flesch von Brunningen, a cousin of the writer Hans Flesch-Brunningen and a relative of the painter Luma von Flesch-Brunningen . The Manker family was raised to the Austrian nobility in 1865 in the form of the Imperial and Royal Councilor Johann Manker with the title of Lerchenstein . Manker's grandmother came from the Kaler zu Lanzenheim family . An uncle, Vinzenz Gustav Anton Flesch von Brunningen, was an architect whose first building was the Schwarzspanierhaus in Vienna's 9th district in 1904, the successor to Ludwig van Beethoven's death house, in which the Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger committed suicide in 1903 . Luma von Flesch-Brunningen was a painter from the Vienna and Munich Schools, works of her hand were exhibited in the Munich Glass Palace in 1902 and also acquired by the Emperor of Austria. Manker's uncle, Hofrat Gustav Ritter von Manker, was the security director of the Vienna State Opera until 1935 and thus chief dispatcher of the monthly schedule and the evening casts, which were then subject to the approval of the director, first Franz Schalk and Richard Strauss , then Clemens Krauss and Felix Weingartner . He regularly provided the pupil Gustav Manker with free tickets for the Burgtheater and the State Opera.

Gustav Manker was married to the actress Hilde Sochor and is the father of the actress Katharina Scholz-Manker (* 1956), the actor and director Paulus Manker (* 1958) and the doctor Magdalena Manker (* 1967). The grave of Gustav Manker and Hilde Sochor is in the Weidlinger Friedhof near Vienna.

literature

• Paulus Manker : The theater man Gustav Manker. Search for clues. Amalthea, Vienna 2010 ISBN 978-3-85002-738-0 .
• 100 years of popular theater. Theatre. Time. History. Youth and People, Vienna-Munich 1989 ISBN 978-3-224-10713-7 .
• Andreas Kloner: Gustav Manker. The theater father. ORF radio feature 2013, 48 min.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Paulus Manker : The theater man Gustav Manker. Search for clues. Amalthea, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-85002-738-0 manker.at
2. ↑ Helmut Schwarz, design and designer of the modern stage set: Judtmann, Manker, Meinecke (dissertation, Vienna 1950)
3. ↑ ^{a b c} 1 00 years people theater. Theater, time, history. Jugend und Volk, Vienna 1989, ISBN 3-224-10713-8 .
4. ↑ Andrea Huemer (Ed.): Gustav Manker. Booklet accompanying the memorial exhibition 1998. Self-published by Volkstheater, Vienna 1998.
5. ↑ Oskar Maurus Fontana, 75 years of popular theater. Path and Development (Vienna 1964)
6. ↑ Margit Konschill, Gustav Manker and the Vienna People's Theater (thesis, Vienna 1999)
7. ↑ Karin Breitenecker, It must be dared. The Directorate Leon Epp (diploma thesis, Vienna 1991)
8. ^ Ernst Lothar : Critique of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the Express on April 27, 1964.
9. ↑ Weidling parish cemetery book. (PDF) Weidling Parish, December 25, 2018, accessed on March 22, 2020 .