Kate Cool

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Kate Kühl (born December 16, 1899 in Cologne as Elfriede Katharina Nehrhaupt , † January 29, 1970 in West Berlin ) was a German cabaret artist , chansonnière and actress .

Life

Kate Kühl as Lucy in Threepenny Opera

Kate Kühl was born in Cologne . Her father, a doctor, encouraged his daughter's artistic ambitions early on. As a 19-year-old, she came to Berlin shortly after the First World War to take up classical singing studies. She found acceptance at the then renowned Stern Conservatory (today part of the University of the Arts ) and quickly developed into a potential oratorio singer.

But she soon said goodbye to her actual professional goal. She preferred to join the committed bohemians who gathered in the well-known cafés and artist bars around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in western Berlin. One of these new time-critical literary meeting places was the Café des Westens - in Berlin jargon called Café megalomania for short . It was located on the corner of Kurfürstendamm and Joachimstaler Straße .

The sculptor Karsten Kühl , whom she decided to marry and who helped her to her first cabaret appearance , also frequented the place . He told his young wife about Rosa Valetti's intention to found a company, who wanted to establish her own literary cabaret directly one floor above the Café des Westens. Kate Kühl then wrote the well-known Diseuse a letter and offered her her services. Rosa Valetti engaged Kate Kühl on the spot.

Four days after her 21st birthday, on December 23, 1920, Kate Kühl stood on a stage for the first time and performed chansons to a premiere audience. With her reserved, somewhat bitter manner, she became a new type of actor overnight, because she brought a new tone to the erotic ballad style that Klabund and Walter Mehring used.

Through her appearances, Kate Kühl got to know musicians and composers such as Friedrich Hollaender and Werner Richard Heymann , but also the singing colleagues Blandine Ebinger and Annemarie Hase . However, it was one acquaintance that would shape her further artistic career most effectively - that with Kurt Tucholsky .

The cabaret megalomania under the artistic direction of Rosa Valetti was only granted a brief heyday. Inflation was rampant in Germany and many literary stages had to close. During this time, Trude signed Hesterberg Kühl to her cabaret, the Wilde Bühne on Berlin's Kantstrasse, where Tucholsky also frequented regularly. During this time, Tucholsky's chanson Die Dorfschöne was created , which he wrote especially for his "Kulicke", as he called his muse. When “Tucho” went to Paris in 1924 as a correspondent for the Weltbühne and the Vossische Zeitung , from where he only returned to Berlin on a visit, he maintained his friendly and professional contacts with Kate Kühl through lively correspondence.

Kate Kühl has meanwhile celebrated the success she had hoped for on Berlin theaters. On August 31, 1928, the first performance was the Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht instead. Kühl was hired for the role of "Lucy".

At the beginning of the 1930s, the heyday of critical cabaret came to an end. Most of the cabarets were only filled with cheerful melodies, one did not want to hear much about biting time criticism; Meanwhile the SA storm troops and the Red Front were fighting fierce street battles outside on the streets. Shortly before Hitler came to power, Kate Kühl and Hubert von Meyerinck stepped challengingly to the ramp in Friedrich Hollaender's cabaret revue Höchst Eisenbahn and smashed a newspaper couplet against the sheet of Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels into the crowd.

Then came the end. Many artists left Berlin, disappeared from Germany overnight and found themselves in exile. Most of the cabaret artists who stayed were banned from working. Kate Kühl was also affected. But she stayed in Nazi Germany, worked as an unnamed country broadcaster and occasionally appeared in entertainment films as a supporting actress.

After the war ended, in 1945, she became a member of one of the first newly founded Berlin cabaret groups, the Outsiders . This ensemble was co-founded by Curth Flatow . They had a friendship with Ernst Busch for many years. He convinced her to move to East Berlin and Kate Kühl joined the KPD . Together they appeared in Brecht programs. It was also Busch who helped her to make a record in East Berlin. Brecht founded the Berliner Ensemble together with Helene Weigel , where Kate Kühl appeared in several productions. A musical collaboration began with Hanns Eisler , later also with Boris Blacher .

But in the mid-1950s she left East Berlin again. The Cold War era had begun. Kate Kühl, who was now close to the SPD , supported the party in the fight against a new threat of war. She appeared in Günther Weisenborn's Göttingen cantata , a musical warning against the atomic armament of Europe, which the director Erwin Piscator staged in 1958 for the SPD party conference in Stuttgart. But shortly afterwards the mood changed, the SPD made an unexpected U-turn and decided to arm the Bundeswehr. Kate Kühl retaliated in her own way, a little later she appeared in a carnival cultural event of the SPD parliamentary group. Here she threw provocatively the red melody , Tucholsky's flaming anti-war chanson, into the crowd.

Kate Kühl's grave in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend

Then she withdrew from all political activities. Until 1961 she occasionally performed in the Mitternachtsbrettl in Berlin's Hardenbergstrasse. In the last years of her life she lived very withdrawn, suffering from severe diabetes, alone in her apartment in the Berlin-Westend district . Kate Kühl died, already forgotten during her lifetime, only six weeks after her 70th birthday on January 29, 1970 in Berlin.

Her grave is in the state's own cemetery in Heerstrasse in Berlin-Westend , in the immediate vicinity of the resting place of her cabaret colleague and friend Joachim Ringelnatz (grave location: 8-C-65).

Kate Kühl's estate is in the archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Discography (excerpt)

  • The body regiment (the drum) (T. Tiger / WR Heymann), Apollo-Verlag, Berlin
  • Lene Levi (A. Lichtenstein / F. Hollaender), Schott Musik International GmbH, Mainz
  • The village beauties (T. Tiger / WR Heymann), Apollo-Verlag, Berlin
  • Charlot (M. Schiffer / WR Heymann), Schott Musik International GmbH, Mainz
  • Sings eener uff'n Hof (T. Tiger / O. Bienert), Christian Bienert, Berlin
  • Ballad by the fisher woman (Die Waiting) (T. Tiger), Kurt Tucholsky Archive, Rottach-Egern
  • Chansonettes (J. Ringelnatz / O. Bienert), Christian Bienert, Berlin
  • Surabaya-Johnny II (E. Kästner / B. Grund), Atrium Verlag AG, Switzerland
  • At the bar (J. Ringelnatz / O. Bienert), Christian Bienert, Berlin
  • Rote Melodie (T. Tiger / F. Holleander), UFA music and stage publishers, Berlin-Munich
  • The Sawed-Up Lady (F. Hollaender), Dreiklang-Dreimasken-Verlag, Berlin

Filmography (selection)

literature

Web links

Commons : Kate Kühl  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 490.