Kurt Plapperer

Kurt Plapperer

Kurt Plapperer (born June 11, 1916 in Munich ; † April 20, 2003 in Rottach-Egern ) was a German tax advisor and business economist . Until July 1977 he was managing director and main shareholder of the Deutsches Theater München Betriebs GmbH .

Career

Kurt Plapperer came in 1916 in Munich as the second of six children of his parents Hans and Berta Plapperer the world . He grew up on Isartorplatz in Munich. His father, a furrier and master tailor , ran a fur shop there.

After primary school on Herrenstrasse, he attended Luitpold Oberrealschule.  

The high school he took only after after the war. This was followed by studying business administration at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich , from which he graduated with a degree in business administration. Subsequently, Plapperer initially worked as an independent tax advisor a. a. for auditors.

Long after starting his career, he received his doctorate in 1959 under Karl Friedrich Rößle at the LMU in Munich. rer. pole.  

Work at the Deutsches Theater in Munich

In 1951, Plapperer became commercial director of Paul Wolz KG. The company Paul Wolz KG, founded by Paul Wolz together with Oskar Angerer († 1961) to run the German Theater in Munich, was the tenant of the theater building, which was rebuilt after its destruction in World War II . The friendship between Kurt Plapperer and Paul Wolz and his family went back to the pre-war years, when Paul Wolz had been the private operator of the Deutsches Theater since 1936.  

In 1954, Plapperer received a profit share, which was converted into a limited partner in 1961. From then on he was co-director in addition to his position as commercial director of the company.

After Paul Wolz's death on May 4, 1965, Plapperer became a general partner of the KG. Together with his wife Clothilde, he took over the sole management and management of the theater and carnival operations at the Deutsches Theater. Hotel specialist Clothilde Plapperer became the company's limited partner and authorized signatory .

In 1971, Plapperer took his adopted son Heiko Plapperer-Lüthgarth (child from the first marriage of his wife Clothilde) into his company as a further co-partner and second managing director. Heiko Plapperer-Lüthgarth is a lawyer and has already gained practical experience in many areas of theater. The Deutsches Theater was now the last house of this size operated by a family company in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The lease with the owner of the theater building (Deutsche Theater Grund- und Hausbesitz GmbH) ended in 1977 due to the need for renovation.

Stage operation at the time of Kurt Plapperer

At the beginning of his co-direction, Kurt Plapperer showed today's world classic West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein in a Broadway cast as its first performance in Germany. The enthusiasm of the public and the feuilletons was limited: They were irritated by the unusual music and shocked by the violence danced in peaceful post-war Germany . The musical genre was almost unknown at the time. However, the performance of the West Side Story was the first step towards numerous musical performances by the house in the following decades.

In 1962, Plapperer showed the musical My Fair Lady in the production of the Berlin Theater des Westens for the first time in Munich. The main roles were played by Sonja Ziemann and Wolfgang Lukschy . The production was staged more than 300 times and generated record income for the private theater. It was the greatest success since it reopened in 1951. Up until 1975, Plapperer brought My Fair Lady five more times to Munich, each with a slightly different line-up.

Another German-language production by the Berlin Theater des Westens followed in 1964: the musical Annie Get Your Gun . In the main roles played u. a. Heidi Brühl , Robert Trehy, Brigitte Mira and Ilja Richter .

Undeterred and against the objections that a “farmer's theater” did not match the style of the house, Kurt Plapperer gave the TV series Der Komödienstadel des Bayerischen Rundfunks a home outside the television studio. From then on, Bavarian folk actors such as Gustl Bayrhammer , Michl Lang , Marianne Lindner , Fritz Straßner , Erni Singerl , Maxl Graf , Katharina de Bruyn , Max Grießer , Ludwig Schmid-Wildy , Beppo Brem , played on the stage of the Deutsches Theater under the direction of Olf Fischer Gerhart Lippert and Bernd Helfrich .

In 1969, Plapperer showed the Broadway musical Anatevka in German, which became the next successful series with months of running time. Main actor Shmuel Rodensky was the Munich crowd favorite as Tevje. In 1972 Anatevka was included in the program for the third time as a contribution to the festival program of the Summer Olympics . On the eve of the Olympic assassination on September 5, 1972, the Israeli Olympic team attended the performance of Anatevka . The last photos of the unsuspecting team were taken at the subsequent press meeting for the athletes with the majority of the artists present on the stage.

The annual Theater Weeks in cooperation with the Munich Theater Community (director: Jakob Baumann) and Neues Theater München (director: Christian Dorn) were a permanent fixture. During the theater vacation time in Munich at that time, top-class productions of drama classics were shown every year, which were neglected by the subsidized Munich theaters; u. a. Saint Johanna (1961) with Klaus Kinski ,   The Merchant of Venice (1964) with Ernst Deutsch as Shylock , Hamlet (1968) with Maximilian Schell and Elisabeth Flickenschildt , The Dyer and His Twin Brother (1975) with Josef Meinrad and The Robbery of the Sabine Women (1973) with Kurt Plapperer's childhood friend Gert Fröbe in his favorite role of theater director Striese.

Corporate concept

Kurt Plapperer with his wife Clothilde and adoptive son Heiko Plapperer-Lüthgarth (from left to right)

The business economist Kurt Plapperer knew how to run what was then the largest guest theater in the Federal Republic with 1,800 seats without public subsidies , even though he paid a substantial rent to the city owner of the theater building, and that in the vicinity of the highly subsidized Munich theaters. He was able to do this mainly thanks to the results from the then highly lucrative ball season.

During the carnival season, dozens of well-attended costume and gala festivals took place in Munich's carnival stronghold, the Deutsches Theater. The house's ball tradition stretched back to the decades before the beginning of the Second World War. The pent-up demand for joie de vivre after the end of the war explained the enormous enthusiasm of the population for lavish and intoxicating ball nights.

The auditorium, stage and all side rooms of the theater were transformed into an imaginatively decorated ballroom for the duration of the carnival season (decoration: Hans Minarik). The auditorium was transformed into a ballroom with a dance floor for up to 2500 enthusiastic guests. During the ball and gala season, theater director Plapperer was responsible for catering for the guests in collaboration with his partners Bayerischer Hof (Falk Volkhard) and Künstlerhaus (Carl Spremberg) and was therefore also a major restaurateur. During this time, his wife Clothilde managed the catering business as a trained hotel specialist. During these years, his son Heiko Plapperer-Lüthgarth organized and hosted glamorous new carnival festivals such as the Munich Opera Ball , the Soirée der Stars (the revival of the legendary film balls of the 1950s) with co-organizer Carl Möhner, Y Viva Espana , the James Last Party , 1001 Nights . The attraction and success of the house continued to grow. The financial return of the carnival season in the post-war years was to a certain extent the self-subsidy of the lavish theater business and made it possible to design the program successfully.

Despite great popularity with the public, the Deutsches Theater had to be closed in 1976 for an inevitable renovation due to structural defects from the period of too rapid reconstruction after the war.

Kurt Plapperer was no esthete , but a clear-calculate merchant. Until its closure in 1976, he had successfully managed the Deutsches Theater as the last large private theater company in Germany, both artistically and economically at his own private risk. He closed his books in an orderly fashion and without a business scandal - a rarity in the more than 120-year history of this house of the light muse. Kurt Plapperer said goodbye after 25 years with a stage guest performance by the Parisian pantomime Marcel Marceau . The family company of Plapperer and his co-partners - Mrs. Clothilde Plapperer and son Heiko Plapperer-Lüthgarth - was dissolved.

After the 1977 ball season, the house remained closed until it reopened on October 8, 1982.

Life after the theater

Kurt Plapperer and his wife Clothilde retired to Rottach-Egern am Tegernsee . From 1978 they ran the small Hotel Garni Helenenschlössl there for 20 years . There they received artist friends, friends and acquaintances. From there, they followed with interest the turbulent renovation of the German Theater, its glamorous reopening and the new operation, which from then on was subsidized with five million marks annually, by the Deutsches Theater München Betriebs GmbH (100 percent owned by the City of Munich ), the son, Heiko Plapperer -Lüthgarth, then headed this company for 25 years as director and general manager.