Hanna Berger

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Hanna Berger

Hanna Berger ; actually Johanna Elisabeth Hochleitner-Köllchen; (Born August 23, 1910 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; † January 15, 1962 in East Berlin ) was an Austrian dancer , choreographer , educator , director , theater director , author and anti-Nazi activist.

Live and act

Hanna Berger grew up in the workers' district of Meidling . From the age of 14 she received piano lessons. In 1927/28 she became a member of the Communist Party. From 1929 to 1934 she studied modern dance in Berlin with Jonny Ahemm, Vera Skoronel , Gertrud Wienecke and with Mary Wigman in Dresden . During this time her relationship with the sculptor Fritz Cremer began , which lasted until 1950.

Artistic career

Berger was accepted into the tour ensemble of Mary Wigman in 1935 and that of Trudi Schoop in 1936 for a tour of the USA. She complements her knowledge of modern dance at the “German Masters for Dance” in Berlin. In October 1937 she made her debut as a choreographer and dancer in an eleven-part solo evening in the Berlin Bach Hall. The time-critical design of her solo "Krieger" (noise music by Keßler) forced her to flee from National Socialist Germany. Until then she had criticized the fascist dictatorship only under a pseudonym in the Swiss magazine “Der Bühnenkünstler” (1936).

She made her Viennese debut in December 1937 in the Great Hall of the Urania. After extensive work in Italy, Berger and Cremer became active in the resistance of the Schulze-Boysen group in Berlin . In 1942 she was arrested in Poznan on "suspicion of preparing for high treason". She was charged with "enabling subversive communist gatherings in her home". For lack of evidence and after the intercession of numerous prominent personalities, including the dancer Marianne Vogelsang , Berger was acquitted on August 21, 1943 by the 2nd Senate of the “ People's Court ” in Berlin after several months in prison . During a bombing in Berlin in 1943, she escaped two years of forced labor in the camp, to which she was sentenced. Despite being wounded, she managed to legally travel to Vienna.

After the war she worked as a dance critic and as an author of dance libretti and film scripts. She performed in the Vienna Volkstheater and in Paris and taught modern dance at the Academy for Music and Performing Arts. Until 1950 she directed the private “Wiener Kindertheater”, from which later famous artists such as Christine Ostermayer , Klaus Löwitsch and Gerhard Senft emerged. Dancing the solos "Solidarity" (Eisler / Brecht) and "Kampfruf" was part of Berger's program.

The founding of the GDR led her to consider moving there. In 1956 she took over the motion direction for the Janáček opera “ The clever little fox ”, staged by Walter Felsenstein . Efforts to be permanently appointed head of a dance theater under Felsenstein failed. Until her untimely death, she commuted between Vienna, Paris, Italy and the GDR as well as other socialist countries without a permanent home. Her main residence remained Vienna. There, her communist convictions were seen as an obstacle to her great career. In the GDR she could not live out her artistic personality, partly because she was not dogmatic enough .

After Fritz Cremer, the Viennese composer Paul Kont Berger became a life partner. With him she founded the Wiener Kammertanzgruppe in 1954. He wrote the music for three dance pieces, which Berger staged and choreographed in 1956 ("Danced Annoncen" after Schoop) and 1958 ("The sad hunters", "Amores Pastorales") on behalf of Austrian television. By studying film design at the Vienna Music Academy from 1955 to 1957, she hoped for a new career as a filmmaker until the end. The sponsorship award of the City of Vienna in 1959 enabled her to study with Marcel Marceau in Paris. She was the first of his students to obtain a pedagogical diploma.

Hanna Berger died on January 15, 1962 in the East Berlin Charité hospital. She is buried in an honorary grave of the City of Vienna.

reception

At the matinee on January 5th, 1958 in Vienna's Urania, Berger officially passed her dances on to a new generation. The dancer and ballet teacher Mitterhuber received the solo “Unknowns from the Seine” (Debussy). She had studied with Berger from 1947 to 1951 at the dance department of the Vienna Academy for Music and Performing Arts and was also a participant in the Berger dance program in 1958. 1995 began with the rehabilitation of this solo, which has since been danced by the Viennese dancer Esther Koller Vienna saw the rediscovery of the time-sensitive and visionary Berger (among other things, she had proposed the establishment of a dance stage and a dance film museum).

As part of Esther Linley's production “Dances of the Ostracized” in 1995, this solo played a central role at the Linz Posthof. In 2000 Mitterhuber reconstructed the Berger solo “Mimose” (Casella), again with Esther Koller, for the program “Tanz im Exil” curated by Andrea Amort in the Vienna Academy Theater as part of the festival tanz2000.at & ImPulsTanz.

In 2006 Andrea Amort curated the program “Hanna Berger: Retouchings” at the Festspielhaus St. Pölten: the choreographers Nikolaus Adler , Manfred Aichinger , Bernd Roger Bienert , Rose Breuss and Willi Dorner developed new creations based on the fragmentary work of Berger. The program was shown at festivals in Washington, Braunschweig and Vienna. Esther Koller last danced “The Unknown from the Seine” in 2011 at the opening of an exhibition on the achievements of teaching women at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. On the 25th anniversary of the archive at the University of Music and Performing Arts, which was celebrated on November 9, 2018, Koller performed the special solo on the dancer Eva-Maria Schaller in a ceremony. As part of the exhibition "Alles tanzt. Kosmos Wiener Tanzmoderne" curated by Andrea Amort and the dance program "Rosalia Chladek Reenacted" in the Theatermuseum Wien on March 30, 2019, Schaller brought an extended version of "Unknowns from the Seine" (with additional music by Matthias Kranebitter) and on October 11, 2019 Berger's "Call" (Vienna 1944) newly appropriated based on historical material.

literature

  • Hanna Berger (under the pseudonym Ursula Tal): About German dance and its real content. In: Der Bühnenkünstler, 1936 5/6, pp. 7–9.
  • Hanna Berger (under the pseudonym Ursula Tal): Dance in the stadium. In: Der Bühnenkünstler, 1936 7/8, pp. 15-17.
  • Hanna Berger (and Kurt Pichler): Description of works, 1944. German Dance Archive Cologne, Dance Archive MUK Vienna.
  • Hanna Berger: Dance as a political will. In: Plan. Literature. Art. Culture. Ed. V. Otto Basil (1945), 3, pp. 248-251.
  • Andrea Amort , Mimi Wunderer-Gosch (Ed.): Austria dances. History and present. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2001, ISBN 3-205-99226-1 .
  • Andrea Amort: Free Dance in Interwar Vienna. In: Deborah Holmes, Lisa Silverman (Eds.): Interwar Vienna. Culture between Tradition and Modernity. Camden House, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-57113-420-2 , pp. 117-142.
  • Andrea Amort: Hanna Berger. Traces of a dancer in the resistance. Christian Brandstätter Verlag, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-85033-188-3 .
  • Andrea Amort: The whole world is shaking. The political and artistic turn in modern dance in Vienna. In: Everything is dancing. Cosmos of Viennese dance modernity. Edited by Andrea Amort, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978 3 7757 4567 3 , pp. 204–227.
  • Geertje Andresen: Hanna Berger. In: The dancer, sculptor, Nazi opponent Oda Schottmüller 1905 - 1943. Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-936872-58-9 , pp. 144 ff.
  • Eva-Elisabeth Fischer: The Unknown from Socialism. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 23, 2006, p. 13.
  • Gisela Notz : The combative life of the dancer Johanna (Hanna) Berger (1910-1962). In: Yearbook for research on the history of the labor movement . Issue III / 2012.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Berger, Hanna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berger, Johanna; Hochleitner-Köllchen, Johanna Elisabeth (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Austrian dancer
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH January 15, 1962
Place of death Berlin