Harry Pauly

Harry Pauly , also Harry Pauli (born September 29, 1914 in Berlin , Germany , † 1985 in Negombo , Sri Lanka ) was a German actor, director , playwright and concentration camp survivor. The actor was one of the biggest stars of homophile sub-theater culture in Germany after the Second World War and one of the most colorful characters in Hamburg's subculture .

Live and act

Harry Pauly, from whom it is not known whether this is his real name or a stage name, was born in Berlin into a middle-class situation from which he soon tried to escape. He did not follow his parents' wish to become a hairdresser. As a teenager he was already very interested in the theater. From the age of sixteen he was able to indulge his passion at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, where he made his debut in the play "Lausejunge" under Erwin Piscator . After only a few performances, the play was canceled, despite the great celebrity of the director, but Pauly remained loyal to the theater and acting. Numerous plays followed in which he had to portray messengers, errand boys, pages and boy scouts and which he played on many of the stages in Berlin, such as the Volkstheater, the Künstlerbühne, the Schiller and Lessing theaters . He made his film debut in 1932 in Countess Mariza , in which he played the riding boy. Through his work in theater and film he met big stars like Adolf Wohlbrück and got to know the then world-famous actor Peter Lorre , with whom he had been on stage.

In 1936 he was arrested for the first time for violating Section 175 and was transferred to the Neusustrum concentration camp , where he was first placed in solitary confinement and later had to do the heaviest work for 15 months. After his release in 1938, he again managed to gain a foothold in the art scene. He recorded radio plays for Reichsfunk and in 1938 became Berlin's, possibly Prussian youngest theater director, at the age of just twenty-four. He was the director of a small acting company that mainly played matinees and supporting programs for Berlin cinemas. In 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht . There he had the opportunity to play in the Wehrmacht theater group and appear in front of the soldiers, mostly in female roles. In 1943 he was arrested again because he had been caught with two young people, so he was assigned to an eight-month punitive expedition, which he was the only one who miraculously survived.

After the war he first went to East Berlin , where he was director a. a. of the ABC-Theater in Berlin-Spandau in 1946 and the Apollo-Theater and had played " Charley's Aunt " more than 500 times before his escape . In 1952 he fled the GDR because he had fallen out with the Stasi . But even in the FRG he was not happy at first: he ended up in prison here for a few years, again due to Section 175. After his release, he said goodbye to the stage, entered into a "sham marriage" in 1954, and became the father of a son and tried his hand at farming in Schleswig-Holstein . Unhappy with this situation, the marriage fell apart and he fled to the freer Hamburg in the 1960s. There he opened a pub in St. Pauli in 1973 , which near the Reeperbahn quickly became one of the most famous gay meet -ups in the Hanseatic city and was called the "MC Club" ( Mother Courage ) ". The MC became a popular meeting place for homosexuals, prostitutes , Night owls, tourists, eccentrics . The infamous "cellar stage", for which Pauly became known throughout Hamburg and beyond, was set up in the basement in 1976. After the pub and theater closed in 1982, he left Germany with his Ceylonese partner and lived in Germany from then on Sri Lanka, where he died in 1985, but the day and month can no longer be reconstructed and Pauly never made a secret of his homosexuality.

Paula Courage and Theater im Kiez

Harry Pauly has written around twelve plays since his time in Hamburg, all of which were performed during his lifetime and in which he always played the leading role. His theater, certainly the smallest in the Hanseatic city, had just 72 seats. The theater and the pub were located in a side street of the Reeperbahn, in Kastanienallee. He recruited the actors from the male prostitutes in the area. He created the fictional character "Paula Courage", which became his trademark. The pieces did not require any great intellectual achievement and were almost exclusively aimed at a homosexual audience. Pauly and his theater were often seen as an alternative to the bourgeois Ohnsorg theater , as a sub -theater and subculture with its own charm and audience.

The documentary feature film Pauline's Birthday or the Beast of Notre Dame , made in 1977, showed his entire acting troupe, which also went on tour in Germany and a. in Munich , Bremen , Munster and their skills became known throughout the country. The film also became known because it was the first time it had filmed a real death. One of the actors died unexpectedly during the filming and it was filmed and this tragic case built into the film.

Even if it was not a native of Hamburg, today it is often considered a Hamburg original . With his rejection of the mass audience, he was a major independent theater maker in Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s. Today he has become a cult figure in Hamburg.

Filmography

• 1933: Countess Mariza
• 1977: Pauline's birthday or the Beast of Notre Dame
• 1980: a man for life

Plays (selection)

• They get married anyway
• The beast of Notre Dame
• Help, my mother-in-law is a man
• Tumult in the Hotel Sacher
• Dr. jerk
• Scandal in Baden-Baden
• Noise in the Kastanienallee
• The third spring

literature

• Man for man; Bernd-Ullrich Hergemöller, Suhrkamp-Verlag, 2001, pp. 549-550.
• Leben, Lieben, Legenden- Hermann J. Huber, Part 1, 1989, pp. 172-176.

Web links

• www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/idcard.php?ModuleID=10006658
• www.2mecs.de/wp/?p=2114