Hermann flour

The magician Mellini in Vienna in February 1879 (portrait of Ignaz Eigner in the satirical newspaper Die Bombe )

Hermann Mehl (stage name: Mellini ; born December 17, 1843 in Schönebeck, † August 25, 1923 in Berlin ) was a German magician , showman and theater founder.

Life

Hermann Mehl was born as the son of the showman August Mehl. His sister Johanne Caroline Auguste married Wilhelm (actually: Friedrich Josef) Basch. Hermann Mehl learned various tricks from his brother-in-law. He adopted the stage name Mellini and toured Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Scandinavia and Switzerland before taking over the Odeontheater in Hanover in 1882 . After he had not had any success with this, he went on tour with the Willarel Museum, which he soon sold off, only to return to Hanover in 1887, where he founded the Mellini Theater , which opened in 1889. This theater remained in Hermann Mehl's possession until 1900. Even after the sale, he was the artistic director of the house, in which, among other things, operettas, variety and cinema performances took place. In 1908 he allegedly inherited Ernst Basch's magic shop .

Hermann Mehl's tricks included the electric drum, the goldfish catch, the taler catch, the Ibycus head, the dancing jumping jack, physical tricks with 85 pieces, duck hunting, self decapitation, Sphynx and the puzzling appearance, the disappeared and yet speaking human, Protheus, metamorphoses and the wonder cabinet.

literature

• R. Lange: A short walk through Hanover's theater history , 1994 (Prinzstrasse. Issue 2), pp. 73, 76
• Hugo Thielen : Flour, Hermann. In: Dirk Böttcher , Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein, Hugo Thielen: Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2002, ISBN 3-87706-706-9 , p. 248.
• ders .: Mellini Theater. In: Klaus Mlynek, Waldemar R. Röhrbein (eds.) U. a .: City Lexicon Hanover . From the beginning to the present. Schlütersche, Hannover 2009, ISBN 978-3-89993-662-9 , p. 437.

Web links

Commons : Hermann Mehl  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Die Laibacher Zeitung  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. reported about successful appearances in the Viennese flower halls in January 1881 .  
2. ↑ http://www.cirkus-dk.dk/htm/dk/nyheder2006.htm
3. ↑ This source  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. names Ernst Basch as Hermann Mehl's father-in-law, according to this ( memento of the original dated February 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Ernst was but a younger brother of the brother-in-law. Mehl's father-in-law would then have been Hirsch Basch. Ernst Basch's magic shop in Hanover passed into the possession of Reinhold Pfalz from Leipzig in 1918, cf. this illustration (PDF; 6.7 MB).