Julius Hans Spiegel

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Julius Hans Spiegel (born June 5, 1891 in Berlin , † October 13, 1974 in Capri ) was a German painter and dancer .

Life

Julius Hans Spiegel was born to German-Jewish parents in Berlin in 1891. At the age of three he lost his hearing due to an illness. After the early death of his parents, he grew up in the boarding school of the Royal Deaf-Mute Institute in Berlin. He studied painting in Berlin and Munich, and then allegedly met a Javanese prince who taught him to dance and with whom he may have had a relationship. After his death, he left him a collection of East Asian masks and robes. He also studied dance with Raden Mas Jodjana and probably with Max Terpis , head of the ballet of the Berlin State Theaters . From the beginning of the 1920s, Spiegel appeared in cabarets, variety shows and private events as a grotesque or exotic dancer, mostly without musical accompaniment; including 1926 in the “Sturm-Evenings” of the Expressionists in Berlin, in Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology , in Jane Marnac's “Shanghai” revue in the Apollo Theater in Paris, as well as as a dance performance in screenings of Lola Kreutzberg's lost cult film “Bali, the Wonderland “(1927). Guest appearances took him to Milan and Rome, where he was promoted by the Futurists . His interpretations of Japanese, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese dances in original masks and costumes were characterized by intense rhythms and expressive gestures. As a homosexual, Jewish artist, he fled Germany in 1934 and settled on Capri . There he became a local celebrity and postcard subject. He earned his living by taking dance classes for young American women and selling his paintings, was an advertising medium for Gaggia coffee machines and Carpano vermouth and a focal point for gay tourists on Capri. He was friends with the British ballet dancers Anton Dolin , Thomas Mann and the ice skating couple Ernst and Maxi Baier, and made the acquaintance of Hollywood greats such as Liz Taylor , Orson Welles and Clark Gable . In 1974 he died on Capri.

estate

His mask collection is now housed in the Five Continents Museum (formerly the State Museum of Ethnology) in Munich, the rest of the estate is in the German Dance Archive in Cologne.

Appreciation

As part of the Berlin theme year Destroyed Diversity, Spiegel was portrayed on a biography column. The Theater Freiburg hosts from January to April 2014, the Julius-Hans Mirror center, artistic and scientific research center that deals with the exoticism of modern dance in Germany.

literature

  • Klaus Sator: Art. "Julius Hans Spiegel", in: Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller (Ed.) Man for man . Biographical encyclopedia on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area , Berlin, Lit-Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10693-3 , pp. 1128–1129.
  • Curt Maronde, “Danced Picture Sheet. Berlin - Java - Capri ", in: Film und Frau , Heft 3, 1954.
  • Horst G. Werner, “The deaf-mute dancer. Memories of Julius Hans Spiegel ”, in: Il Gabbiano di Capri - The Seagull on Capri , No. 3 1987, p. 4f.
  • "The deaf and dumb dancer Julius Hans Spiegel", in: Die Bühne Jg. 3, 1926, H. 90, p. 23.
  • Geyer, "The deaf-mute dancer". In: Musik und Theater , vol. 4. 1929, 1. Aug-H., P. 15.
  • "East meets West in the Dance Compositions of a Deaf Artist", in: The Volta Review 34 (1932), pp. 338–341, 376.
  • “Dance without music. The rhythms of the deaf and mute. ”In: Berliner Volkszeitung . January 28, 1925.
  • Matthew Isaac Cohen, "Dancing the Subject of Java." International Modernism and Traditional Performance, 1899–1952 “, in: Indonesia and the Malay World , vol. 35 (2007), no. 101, pp. 9–29.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Destroyed Diversity ( Memento from January 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Tanzfonds - Julius Hans-Mirror Center. In: tanzfonds.de. Retrieved October 11, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Bettina Schulte: Dance curator Anna Wagner on the transformation of the Winterer Foyer - Culture - Badische Zeitung. In: badische-zeitung.de. January 16, 2014, accessed October 11, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Spiegel, Julius Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German dancer and painter
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1974
Place of death capri