Max Samst

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Samst, Lilienthal & Öser (1892)

Max Friedrich Louis Albert Samst (born November 29, 1859 in Ortrand , then Liebenwerda district , Province of Saxony , † May 11, 1932 in Berlin ) was a German actor and theater director .

life and work

Origin and first years

Max Samst came from a family of actors. His father Emil Christian Camillo Samst led his own ensemble and was married to the daughter of theater director Gottlob Meyer († 1843). In 1860 Emil Samst took over the theater in Rawicz , which opened in 1853 and where the entire Meyer-Samst family performed. Max Samst was there on stage as a child. Emil Samst then ran a touring theater and drama school with the family for several years .

When he was just under 20, Samst came to Berlin , where he first played classic roles at the Alte National-Theater am Weinbergsweg. In the 1880s he took over the old Königsstädtische Theater (formerly Alexanderplatz Theater , Quargs Vaudeville ). Max Samst was known as an “extremely funny and quick-witted fellow”, cheerful and enterprising. According to eyewitness reports, he had a great charisma as a comedian and also got good press as a character actor .

"Ostend Theater" 1890–1896

At the beginning of 1990, Samst became director of the Ostend Theater in Große Frankfurter Straße 132 (today Karl-Marx-Allee 78-84). The theater, built in 1877, had seen numerous changes of operator and was popularly considered a financial “mass grave of the Far East”. Samst began his management in May 1890 in the tradition of the house with the wild colportage piece The Executioner of Berlin . The main role played the well-known former Berlin executioner Julius Krautz , who waved his guillotine on the stage. Then Samst hired the most famous actor of the time, Josef Kainz , who was boycotted by all theaters of the German stage association after a legal dispute with the director of the Berlin theater Ludwig Barnay . Kainz appeared in classical roles at the Ostend Theater from May to September 1890 and caused sold-out performances. In the autumn of 1890, the house became the venue for the closed events of the Freie Volksbühne , which opened its program with Henrik Ibsen's supporters from society and also performed the captain's drama Die Weber , which was banned in Prussia .

The Samst actor ensemble was not considered to be of high quality. The skills of the actors who acted alongside Kainz in 1890, for example, fell to such an extent that the Vossische Zeitung blasphemed that only “the lack of physical strength” had led them to “choose the profession of miming over the more lucrative porter”. And like his father, Max Samst employed numerous family members at the theaters he ran. So not only his future wives, but also his nieces and a nephew worked for him as an actor, his son Max Jr. later became conductor with him . Around 1893/94 Samst married the actress Käthe Griep, who was a member of his ensemble.

In 1892 Samst won the aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal , to whom he actually owed money for the delivery of a steam engine for the theater heating, as a patron for his stage. Together with the actor Richard Öser, the two converted the house into a popular theater for the working class called the Nationaltheater ("Ten Pfennig Theater"), at which Lilienthal also appeared as an actor. Because of these reformist activities, Samst was suspected of social democratic or anarchist aspirations and monitored by the police between 1897 and 1901. But since the income from the “ten-pfennig theater” could not cover the costs, Samst tried to fill the house with concerts, children's parties, fairground attractions and wrestling events. When Lilienthal died in 1896 and there was no state support for the project, Samst had to give up.

Guest performance advertisement (1912)

1896-1916

From this point on, Samst gave up his reformist theater plans and from then on played mainly operettas, pranks and antics up to kitsch and smear theater . In 1896 he took over as director of the Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtische Theater in Chausseestrasse , which he ran until around 1899, and at the same time played again at the Alexanderplatz Theater with an almost identical ensemble . Despite brisk activities, Max Samst was unable to consolidate himself and his theater company economically over the next few decades. From around 1900 Samst traveled with his own touring troupe ( Max-Samst-Ensemble, Metropol-Ensemble ) through Germany for years and performed from Aachen to Königsberg , from Breslau to Wiesbaden . Soon he had the reputation of an "unfortunate tour theater director [s]".

In October 1908, Samst took over the Stuttgart Residenztheater . Despite a few world premieres and guest performances by prominent actors, Samst could not stop the financial and qualitative decline of the house. The Schaubühne demise of "an outrageous, extremely horrific Hamlet gunned up" during a guest appearance by Ferdinand Bonn in 1909 has been handed down. In March 1912 the theater was converted into a cinema and Samst went on tour with his ensemble again, during which he did five For months in the Metropol Theater in Cologne . In 1913, when trying to run the Bömly Theater in Basel , Samst ran into financial difficulties. He then leased the Cologne Small Theater in Schildergasse , which was a cinema from 1910 to 1913. In August 1914, all theaters were initially closed when the First World War broke out . The 54-year-old Samst himself was conscripted.

From 1917

In 1917 Max Samst took over the Thalia Theater in Chemnitz . In 1918 he married the young actress Käthe Schmidt (1897–1979) who was engaged there . The Chemnitz theater had to give up on Saturday in 1922. Back in Berlin he was first an actor at the Folies Caprice at the Oranienburger Tor . Then Samst ran his touring company again and leased - partly with co-operators - various smaller or run-down Berlin theaters, such as the Neue Theater am Zoo , Wallner-Theater , Central-Theater , Residenztheater and finally the Walhalla-Theater , again without lasting economic success.

In 1930 Samst , who suffered from diabetes among other things, had to retire from theater life and was financially distressed in his final years. “Shrouded in legends, swirled around by anecdotes” he died in 1932 at the age of 72. He was buried with great sympathy in the Jerusalem cemetery ( cemetery II of the Jerusalem and New Church Congregation ) in Baruther Strasse ( Berlin-Kreuzberg ).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Obituary in: Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch 44 (1933), p. 109.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Erika Schachinger: Käthe Schmidt-Jürgensen (1897–1979). A Berlin artist's fate. In: In: Mitteilungen des Verein für die Geschichte Berlins 76 (1980), pp. 144–149 ( PDF , accessed on January 29, 2014).
  3. ^ Deutscher Bühnen-Almanach 25 (1861) - 33 (1869).
  4. ^ Nic Leonhardt: Pictorial dramaturgy. Visual culture and theater in the 19th century (1869–1899). Bielefeld 2007, p. 317f .; Deutscher Bühnen-Almanach 54 (1890), pp. 96-98.
  5. ↑ a b c Max Samst †. In: Vossische Zeitung v. May 11, 1932 (evening edition).
  6. ^ A b c Paul Wittko: The Stuttgart Theater Year. In: Die Schaubühne 5 (1909), issue 34/35 v. August 26, 1909, pp. 197–202, here p. 201.
  7. ↑ a b c d Manuela Runge , Bernd Lukasch : Inventor life. The brothers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal. Berlin 2005, pp. 193-213.
  8. ↑ The East of Berlin. Berlin 1930, p. 262; Judith Eisermann: Josef Kainz. Between tradition and modernity. The path of an epochal actor. Munich 2010, pp. 155–162; Matthias Nöther: Josef Kainz. The beating heart. In: Der Tagesspiegel v. December 30, 2007 (accessed January 30, 2014).
  9. ↑ Neuer Theater-Almanach 3 (1892), pp. 17, 189f .; The first Volksbühne performance. In: Kunst und Volk 8 (1930/31), Issue 9 (May 1931), pp. 278–280.
  10. ↑ to Max Jr. s. e.g. Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch 40 (1929).
  11. ↑ cf. Neuer Theater-Almanach 6 (1895), p. 577f .; Biographical stage lexicon of German theaters. 1st year. Munich 1892, p. 266.
  12. ^ Lorenz Friedrich Beck (edit.): Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv. Tradition from the Prussian province of Brandenburg. Munich 1999, Pr. Br. Rep. 30, Berlin C Police Headquarters Berlin No. 1114.
  13. ↑ a b New Theater Almanac 8 (1897) - 19 (1908).
  14. ^ Richard Zanker: Beloved old Stuttgart. Stuttgart 1964, p. 157; Viktor Bruns (ed.): Württemberg under the government of King Wilhelm II. Stuttgart 1916, p. 570; New theater almanac 20 (1909) - 24 (1913).
  15. ^ Berthold Büche-Brink: From former Kleinbasler theaters. In: Basler Stadtbuch 1972, pp. 165–175; New theater almanac 26 (1915) - 28 (1917).
  16. ^ New Theater Almanac 29 (1918) - 33 (1922).
  17. ^ Obituary in the Vossische Zeitung v. May 13, 1932 (morning edition).
personal data
SURNAME Saturday, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Samst, Max Friedrich Louis Albert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor and theater director
DATE OF BIRTH November 29, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Outskirts
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 1932
Place of death Berlin