Herbert Elections

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Herbert Wahlen (born August 24, 1904 in Düsseldorf , † August 1945 in Kaunas , Lithuania in Soviet captivity) was a German theater director , director and actor .

Life

Herbert Wahlen grew up as the son of a senior postal worker in Düsseldorf and passed his acting examination there in 1925. His teacher and mentor was Louise Dumont . At the Düsseldorf theater he also met his future wife Hilda Wahlen (born Brinkmann, 1903–1956), who trained as a dance teacher. The couple married in 1932 and had four children: their first-born daughter Karin, who also studied acting after the war (mother of Nicole C. Karafyllis ), and three sons who were born between 1936 and 1942.

From the beginning, Herbert Wahlen was interested in directing, which formed the core of his theater career. After positions at the Stadttheater Hagen , among others , he was senior director of the theater at the United Stadttheater Gladbach-Rheydt under artistic director Paul Legband in the 1929/30 and 1930/31 seasons . After further positions - including with Marianne Hoppe at the New Theater in Frankfurt am Main, headed by Arthur Hellmer - Legband brought Wahlen to the Stadttheater Altona (after the incorporation of Altona: "Deutsches Volkstheater Hamburg"), where he stayed two seasons. In the summer of 1937 he moved to the Städtische Bühnen in Frankfurt am Main as chief stage director under General Director Hans Meissner .

His last professional station was East Prussia , where Wahlen rose to the position of artistic director. From the 1940/41 season he was acting director at the New Theater of the Städtische Bühnen Königsberg , committed by Lord Mayor Hellmuth Will . “His move to Königsberg was generally very regretted.” From the Frankfurt ensemble he brought, among others, Antje Ruge and Martin Flörchinger to Königsberg, who later became famous in the GDR. Karl Pempelfort worked as a dramaturge at Wahlen's side until he was called up in 1942. In 1943, until the nationwide closure of the theaters in the summer of 1944, Wahlen was in charge of the entire municipal theaters in Königsberg. They were among the largest in Germany and were particularly influential for what was then known as the Eastern Region, including the performance in the theaters in the areas of Poland and Belarus occupied by the German Wehrmacht from summer 1941.

In the fall of 1944, elections to the Wehrmacht were called. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Soviets and died in August 1945 at the age of forty in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in Kovno or Kaunas in what is now Lithuania. He is buried in a mass grave in the associated cemetery; since 2009 his name has been engraved on a memorial stone among others. Until well into the 1950s, elections were considered lost in the German theater scene, and a return from prisoner-of-war was hoped in vain.

Services

Herbert Wahlen was considered an influential figure in the German theater landscape until his untimely death and was also active in training drama students at the University of Theater in Frankfurt am Main . A closer acquaintance connected him with Heinrich George . Again and again he was on stage in smaller roles, preferably in comedies and comedies. What was explicitly considered an achievement with regard to the staging of plays at the time must be viewed against the historical background and still requires analysis from the perspective of theater studies. Wahlen was known, among other things, for several first and world premieres of the Spanish baroque poet Lope de Vega in Frankfurt am Main and Königsberg. His new production of Faust (Part I) for the opening of the 1942/43 season in Königsberg also met with positive press coverage throughout Germany (with Otto Michael Bruckner as Faust, Willi Molthoff as Mephisto , Antje Ruge as Gretchen, Hilde Willer as Marthe, Max Weber as Wagner).

The long unknown date of death (the exact date of death remains unclear) and the comparatively poor source of information on the municipal theaters in Königsberg for the 1940s meant that Herbert Wahlen does not appear in numerous standard biographical and theater-historical works to this day.

Works

  • Herbert Wahlen: Schillers' German broadcast: a Schiller week in the Ruhr area . Festschrift of the United City Theater Duisburg-Hamborn, (Leipzig: Beck) 1934, 36 pages

literature

  • Thomas Eicher et al .: Theater in the “Third Reich” . Kallmeyer 2000
  • Albert Richard Mohr: The Frankfurter Schauspiel 1929–1944: a documentation . Kramer 1974.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kurt Loup: Beauty, and Freedom. Friedrich Schiller and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus Dumont-Lindemann . Stern-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1959, p. 159 (reference to Hilda Brinkmann).
  2. ↑ Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch 1930 , Vol. 41, pp. 426f.
  3. ↑ Birgit Pargner, (Deutsches Theatermuseum Munich): Marianne Hoppe: “First beauty, then wisdom and then the bright, clean heart” . Henschel 2009
  4. ^ Mohr 1974, Herbert Wahlen is mentioned in numerous places.
  5. ↑ See also Deutsches Bühnenjahrbuch, vol. 53, 1942, p. 509, as well as Thomas Eicher et al .: Theater in the "Third Reich" (2000)
  6. ↑ Mohr 1974, p. 288.
  7. ↑ Family Research.
  8. ↑ See e.g. B. Schältke, Bettina: Theater or Propaganda? Die Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt am Main 1933–1945 , series: Studies on Frankfurter Geschichte 40, Kramer 1997 (with naming of Wahlens in several places)
  9. ↑ In the standard work, the Deutsches Theater-Lexikon (Deutsches Theater-Lexikon) by W. Kosch, there is even not even his date of birth in 2004, but the note “life data unknown”; see. Kosch, Wilhelm; Bigler-Marschall, Ingrid (ed.): Deutsches Theater-Lexikon . Zurich / Munich: KG Sauer, 2004: Vol. V, Ueber-Weisbach, entry “Wahlen, Herbert” on p. 2926
personal data
SURNAME Elections, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater director, director and actor
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH August 1945
Place of death Kaunas