Max Hansen

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Max Hansen (photography by Alexander Binder , taken before 1929)

Max Hansen , actually Max Josef Haller , (born December 22, 1897 in Mannheim , † November 13, 1961 in Copenhagen ) was a Danish cabaret artist , film actor and operetta singer (tenor) who was born and raised in Germany. He was a great music and acting star in Berlin during the Weimar Republic .

Life

Hansen was born as the illegitimate son of the Danish actress Elly Benedicte Hansen (1873–1930), who then appeared as "Eva Haller" at the Apollo Theater in Mannheim. The father's identity remained in the dark for a long time. Joseph Walder, a Hungarian "artist" of Jewish origin and colleague of the mother, is entered in the baptismal register as his father.

As a baby he came to live with his foster parents, the Bögl family in Munich. Even before the First World War, he had appeared on the scene - even abroad, such as in Copenhagen, Paris and St. Petersburg - due to his beautiful, modulatable voice, and was nicknamed "Little Caruso ". He received piano and singing lessons. In the Munich theater-pub Simplizissimus he appeared as a cabaret artist with partly self-written texts and songs.

During the First World War, Hansen lived in neutral Denmark, where his birth mother also lived. After the war he went to Vienna in 1919 , where, as before in Munich, he received his vocal training. He financed his singing studies as a banter with appearances in various variety theaters and cabarets . He took the pseudonym "Max Hansen" , which was composed of his first name and his mother's last name , because he believed he could better market a Scandinavian- sounding name.

Hubert Marischka discovered him in 1923 as the main actor in the Ronacher Varieté for the operetta Countess Mariza . In the role of Zsupán, Hansen appeared in the Metropol Theater in Berlin. This was the actual starting signal for a glamorous stage career. Max Reinhardt hired him for The Beautiful Helena , Erik Charell for The Merry Widow . His greatest success was his role in the operetta Im Weißen Rößl as waiter Leopold (first performance in 1930 in Berlin).

From 1926 Hansen also built up a career with shellac recordings, initially as an anonymous singer in various orchestras, later under his own name. From 1927 he had regular live radio appearances.

With the rise of the talkie, Hansen also got a big boost there and got a further boost in popularity. His slightly nasal voice, as we know it today from Max Raabe, was characteristic. Between 1930 and 1933 alone, Hansen was in front of the camera for ten films, mostly comedies and musicals, many of them with actress Jenny Jugo . With Paul Morgan and Carl Jöken , he even founded his own film company, Trio-Film GmbH, which, however, did not have its first production Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari came out. The film, in which Hansen worked as a screenwriter, composer, songwriter and actor, was not a commercial success.

Parallel to his appearances as a singer and actor, Hansen worked as a cabaret artist from the start. Together with Paul Morgan and Kurt Robitschek , he was one of the founders of the legendary Berlin cabaret of comedians . There he performed frequently from the end of 1924. The highlights of the program were unannounced appearances by the opera star Richard Tauber , whom Hansen "accidentally" discovered in the audience and brought to the stage, where he then performed a Tauber parody accompanied by the famous tenor on the piano . To Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Movement wrote Hansen sharp-tongued sarcasm - Chansons . In his slightly frivolous hit song "Have you ever been in love with me?", Which is evidently based on the couplet "Didn't you see little Cohn?" Composed by Julius Einödshofer around 1900? is inspired, he assumed Hitler had homosexual tendencies towards Siegfried Kohn, a spokesman in the Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten. At the premiere of his film The Ugly Girl on September 8, 1933 (screenplay: Hermann Kosterlitz and Felix Joachimson, both Jews), the National Socialists staged a scandal : Hansen, who has Jewish ancestors, was bullied and pelted with tomatoes. Hansen recognized the danger that threatened him as an unpopular artist and emigrated from Hitler's German Empire.

Engagements in music theater initially took him to Vienna. When Greta Garbo canceled in 1936 while preparing for Benatzky's revue Axel at the Himmelstür , Hansen brought the hitherto unknown Zarah Leander to the Theater an der Wien as his partner . In 1938 he moved to Copenhagen. After the divorce from his first wife Lizzi Waldmüller , an Austrian actress, he opened a summer theater with his second wife Britta (24 years younger and mother of his four children) in the glass hall of the Tivoli . Theater trips have taken him to Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Switzerland and Amsterdam.

In Denmark, the resourceful, multi-talented all-rounder managed to get through the German war and occupation unscathed by obtaining proof of Aryan status: he paid the bankrupt "Aryan" Swedish baron Per Wilhelm Fredrik Schürer von Waldheim to play his father. In public, and for fear of exposure also in the family circle, he passed off as the grandfather of his children. His two daughters and two sons only found out about their Jewish ancestors and their fictitious grandfather after the Second World War.

Max Hansen secured the economic existence of his family by working for Scandinavian radio. He also shot some very successful musical comedies in Sweden between 1939 and 1951, for which he also composed songs under the pseudonym "Sylvester".

In post-war Germany and Austria , like many other exiled artists, he was unable to return to his heyday as an entertainment star of the Weimar Republic . He tried it and came back to Germany in 1951. The cultural break of the twelve years of the Thousand Year Reich and the economic hardship of the reconstruction era gave him no real chance of picking up where he had once left off. Wolfgang Neuss followed in his Berlin footsteps, not as a singer, but as a cabaret artist, time critic and minor film star .

Hansen returned to Copenhagen in 1953, where he died in 1961 at the age of 63, in poor health after a stroke and a heart attack . He was buried anonymously in the Vestre Katolske Kirkegård in Copenhagen. He left behind his wife and four children. Two of the children ( Ann-Mari Max Hansen , born 1949 and Max Hansen Jr. , born 1954) are known as actors in Denmark today.

Documentary 2005

In 2005 the historical documentarist and film director Douglas Wolfsperger made the documentary Have you ever been in love with me? The title quotes a chanson of the same name from the pen of Max Hansen. In addition to radio archive finds, film clips and researchers such as the cabaret historian Volker Kühn , contemporary witnesses and successors have their say, for example the actress Brigitte Mira . The film received, among other things, the FBW rating “Particularly valuable”.

Museum film for the NS Documentation Center Munich 2007

In his film for the NS Documentation Center in Munich, the Israeli director Avi Bodar puts Max Hansen's song “Have you ever been in love with me?” At the center of his key scene . On the day of the seizure of power of Adolf Hitler, he can sing in a nightclub this song until a young singer (based on the figure of Max Hansen) Hitler Youth ends the bustle violent. The allusion to Hitler's alleged homosexuality is the drop that brings the barrel to overflow. The tense situation escalates. This fictional scene serves to illustrate the temporal circumstances in which Max Hansen published his song. The music in this film is a new recording (producer and arrangement Max Joseph) of the Hansen classic, albeit alienated by electronic means. In the night club scene, “Have you ever been in love with me?” Is interpreted by the young tenor Anton Leiss-Huber .

Music (selection)

  • In the white horse
  • Can you whistle, Johanna?
  • Have you ever been in love with me?
  • Now the dolly is fine
  • I'm going to Maxim
  • When a lady has no master
  • Oh, Louise!
  • Music has to be
  • My dear Lola
  • If you go to Honolulu with me, I'll go to Honolulu too
  • Classic, classic
  • What can Sigismund do for being so beautiful?
  • I would really like to know if the fish kiss each other
  • Tell me oui
  • I say blue, she says green
  • I have a passion
  • I do not have a car
  • The song of the spectators
  • Bavarian seaman's song
  • For once I don't want to worry
  • Franz Schubert, you weren't in love for nothing
  • The first woman I kissed
  • What do you get if I love you (Danish: Hva 'glæde har du af, at jeg ka li' dig)

Filmography

  • 1925: Hussar fever
  • 1926: The Schimeck family - Viennese hearts
  • 1926: In the white Rößl
  • 1926: The laughing husband
  • 1926: When I came back
  • 1926: The little one from the Varieté
  • 1926: The Blessed Excellency
  • 1927: Venus in tails
  • 1927: Mrs. Sorge
  • 1928: Freiwild (The Sorrows of Anna Riedel)
  • 1928: The girl from the revue
  • 1929: We got on well ...
  • 1929: Now the dolly is fine
  • 1930: Juggler ( Les Saltimbanques )
  • 1930: Vienna, you city of songs
  • 1930: Terra Melophon magazine No. 1
  • 1930: The jumping jack
  • 1930: The cabinet of Dr. Larifari
  • 1931: Schubert's spring dream
  • 1931: Who takes love seriously?
  • 1932: The women's diplomat
  • 1932: They - or none
  • 1932: For once I don't want to worry
  • 1933: The Ugly Girl
  • 1933: Happy journey
  • 1935: Csardas
  • 1936: Skeppsbrutne Max / Rendezvous in Paradies
  • 1939: Rosor varje kräll
  • 1941: Tror you, any he født i går?
  • 1941: Wienerbarnet
  • 1943: En fllicka för mej
  • 1944: Hoist Gröna
  • 1945: Trötte Teodor
  • 1946: En förtjusande fröken
  • 1946: Bröder Emellan
  • 1947: Bröllopsnatten
  • 1947: Ingen väg tillbaka
  • 1951: Beautiful Helena

Radio plays

Remarks

  1. ↑ The film was made in a German and a Swedish version. The German version was shown to the public for the first time in February and March 2000 as part of the retrospective "Unwanted Cinema. The German-Language Emigrant Film 1934-1937" organized by the Filmarchiv Austria.

literature

  • Marie-Theres Arnbom : Have you ever been in love with me? Film stars, operetta favorites and cabaret greats between Vienna and Berlin . Böhlau, Vienna et al. 2006, ISBN 3-205-77550-3 .
  • Kay Less : 'In life, more is taken from you than given ...'. Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 231 f.

Web links

Commons : Max Hansen  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Max Hansen
  2. ↑ Have you ever been in love with me? on Youtube
  3. ↑ If you go to Honolulu with me, I'll also go to Honolulu on youtube
personal data
SURNAME Hansen, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haller, Max Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish cabaret artist, film actor and operetta singer (tenor)
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Mannheim , Germany
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1961
Place of death Copenhagen , Denmark