Harry Raymon

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Harry Raymon / August 2016

Harry Raymon (born January 9, 1926 in Kirchberg im Hunsrück ) is a German actor , voice actor , director , author and co-founder of the Forum Theater on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin.

Life

Escape from Germany

Harry Raymon was born as Harry Heymann in Kirchberg im Hunsrück as the son of a Jewish merchant family. When the reprisals against Jewish citizens began in 1933, Harry's mother pushed for emigration. In 1936 the family emigrated to the USA. Harry was nine years old then. Harry later reported on the escape from his homeland in the Hunsrück in his novel once in exile and back . The novel was based on the script for the 1979 film "Raindrops".

Emigration to the USA

The liberal-Jewish family of Harrys moved to New York. His parents started a chicken farm in Farmingdale, a town in northeast New Jersey, and produced eggs there. Harry attended high school in Lakewood, New Jersey. After graduating from high school in 1944, he was drafted into the US Army. Immediately after the end of the war, the US Army sent Harry Raymon equipped with a US passport as a "Prisoner of War Interrogator" to Germany, where his task was to interview German prisoners of war.

education

During his military service in France and Germany, Harry attended acting courses, an advanced training measure for the American army for its soldiers. The acting courses took place in Biarritz, France.

After two years of military service, Raymon was given the opportunity to take acting and dance classes from 1946 to 1948 as part of a US government-funded program for exiled soldiers. These took place at the Dramatic Workshop drama school at the New School for Social Research in New York, which was still headed by the founder of the school Erwin Piscator at that time . Fellow Harry's students at the drama school included Tony Curtis and Harry Belafonte .

Professional background

Harry Raymon made his way back to Germany via France, first to Paris, where he became a member of the “American Theater in Paris”. There he began training in theater and pantomime. In 1948 he moved from Paris to Stuttgart, where he studied voice at the Musikhochschule. In 1951 he founded the pantomime theater "Die Gaukler" in Stuttgart. With that he made guest appearances all over Europe until 1955. TV stations repeatedly broadcast performances of the theater. On the occasion of the 1952 Berliner Festwochen, the pantomime pieces Bagatelle and Das verräterische Herz , choreographed by Raymon, were premiered . In 1956 he was hired by the Celle Castle Theater as an actor and director.

In 1957 Raymon moved to Berlin, where he worked as an actor, voice actor, director, author and model . In 1958 he played the second leading role alongside Horst Buchholz in the film Endstation Liebe . From 1957 to 2003 he was engaged as an actor in a total of 23 television films and series, including the films "The Expulsion from Paradise" (1977) and "The Great Role Model" (1963). In 1961 he became artistic director of the “Forum Theater” on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, which he helped to establish. In 1963 Raymon moved to Munich.

In the seventies, when his career as an actor stalled, he worked as a tour guide. Since 2015 he has devoted himself exclusively to the art of writing, published smaller essays and articles and gave lectures on his experiences as a Jew and avowed gay man in Germany and America and as a survivor of the Holocaust.

Works

In 1963 his first attempts at writing took place. With his friend Wolfgang Paar, he wrote his first piece in German in 1963, “Die Krake”, published by S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt. The WDR broadcast “Die Krake” in 1964 as a radio play, and in 1965 the model was used to create a television play that the SWF produced and broadcast. As a commissioned production for the SWF, Raymon and Wolfgang Paar wrote the television play “Das kleine Fest” in 1976 (S. Fischer Verlag). In 1969 the film was broadcast on ARD.

In 1982 the autobiographical film “Raindrops” was made, a story of Jewish children during fascism in Germany. Harry Raymon wrote the script together with Michael Hoffmann. Raymon shot it for three weeks in his native Kirchberg in the Hunsrück. Anne Frederiksen wrote in ZEIT on May 28, 1982:

“Seldom have filmmakers succeeded in telling about German Jews in the Third Reich as calmly and believably as the directors Hoffmann and Raymon. Your film also seems so authentic because you let your characters speak a dialect interspersed with Yiddish expressions. In the guesthouse, a Jewish woman recites Lessing's “Ring Parable”. It's good to hear them. "

The autobiographical novel Once Exile and Back is based on the film's script and is much broader.

Harry Raymon's last major project came into being in 2007. In the documentary film “In the Glockenbachviertel of Munich”, he documents life in the district in which he has lived and worked since 1963.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A life on the run. journalistenakademie.de, accessed on August 21, 2016 .
  2. ^ Citizens of the world - An exhibition in the Schwules Museum Berlin honors Harry Raymon. tagesspiegel.de, February 1, 2012, accessed on August 21, 2016 .
  3. ^ Anne Frederiksen: Jewish petty bourgeois fate. Zeit.de, June 10, 1983, accessed on August 23, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Torsten Haselbauer: As a Jew, I had no problems. More like a gay. juedische-allgemeine.de, March 15, 2012, accessed on August 22, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Reading with Harry Raymon “Once in exile and back”. (No longer available online.) Politma.de, archived from the original on August 21, 2016 ; accessed on August 21, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.politma.de
  6. ↑ Christina Schiffler: A life on the run. Journalistenakademie.de, accessed on August 21, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Schwerbrock: Burlesque and pantomime. zeit.de, July 12, 1951, accessed on August 23, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Program ... Guest performance of the pantomime theater “Die Gaukler”, Stuttgart, led by Harry Raymon. tvprogramme.net, March 25, 1953, accessed August 21, 2016 .
  9. ↑ Harry Raimon et alii: “Bagatelle”, “Das verräterische Herz” u. a. zvab.com/buch, accessed on August 22, 2016 .
  10. ↑ Harry Raymon in movies. imdb.com, accessed August 21, 2016 .
  11. ↑ Harry Raymon as a guest. Synagoge-Laufersweiler.de, accessed on August 22, 2016 .
  12. ^ Anne Frederiksen: In the cinema: Considerable. zeit.de, May 28, 1982, accessed on August 23, 2016 .
  13. ↑ Harry Raymon: Once in exile and back . Forum Homosexuality Munich, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-935227-11-6 .
  14. ^ Wolfgang Theis: Exhibition: Once Exile and Back - Harry Raymon. Schwules Museum, January 27, 2012, accessed August 23, 2016 .

Web links

Commons : Harry Raymon  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Raymon, Harry
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heymann, Harry (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor, voice actor, director, author and co-founder of the Forum Theater on Kurfürstendamm in Berlin
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirchberg in the Hunsrück