Paul Hölzig

Paul Hölzig (center) with colleagues (1951)

Paul Hölzig

Performance room

Scene from the Hodsha Nasreddin story in 1951

Paul Hölzig (born March 18, 1911 ; † May 29, 1989 in Wetzlar- Naunheim) was a German puppeteer . Later (after 1956) he also called himself Leo Paolo and performed as a magician .

life and work

Paul Hölzig dropped out of high school prematurely to join a traveling circus. Inspired by playing the Hohnstein puppet shows , however, he decided to become a professional puppeteer , not for the fair, but with artistic and educational ambitions.

In 1933 he opened the Dresden Puppet Theater and achieved great regional popularity with this first theater - despite the early limitations in play as a result of the Second World War .

In 1950, Hölzig saw the famous Moscow puppeteer Sergej Obraszow during a tour of the GDR . Obraszow's brilliant puppet theater, which came with a staff of fifty and in several railway wagons, made such an impression on Hölzig that he decided to follow Obraszow's example to become a professional puppeteer, albeit with considerably less technical effort.

Hölzig's first own production came out in 1951 with a Hodsha Nasreddin story, a play in the style of a Middle Eastern Till Eulenspiegel .

Hölzig played for children as well as for adults and soon became one of the most famous East German puppeteers and the GDR counterpart of the Hohnsteiner Kaspers and his player Max Jacob , who had already moved from his Saxon homeland to West Germany in the 1950s and has since then shaped the German puppet scene.

Hölzig named his stage " Bärenfelser Puppet Shows " after his place of residence in Bärenfels . At first glance, Hölzig's Kasper was very similar to that of the Hohnsteiner puppet shows, but on closer inspection, some decisive differences in the design of the figures can be identified, some of which indicate different ways of playing (e.g. wood-carved puppet hands instead of the cloth hands typical of the Hohnsteiners which made the handling of props much more difficult). Hölzig's preferred figure carver was Helmut Lange; later Hölzig also carved his figures himself or made them using the lamination process .

In addition, Hölzig was a skilled draftsman who could illustrate his schedules and posters himself with a light pen, and an extremely sensitive copywriter whose puppet literature had an unusually high linguistic level.

One of Hölzig's best-known productions was the play The Merry Sinner , premiered in 1951 with financial support from the GDR cultural fund and praised as one of the best East German puppet shows. The success of the Happy Sinner led to the Bärenfels puppet shows being elevated to the status of "Dresden State Puppet Theater"; Hölzig was earmarked for their artistic direction, but withdrew from this task prematurely due to time delays.

Other titles from Hölzig's program included a .: Doctor Faust's journey into hell , the Boan'lkramer , the legend of the water mermaid Undine , Im Weißen Rößl and the Christmas mountain .

However, the history of the Bärenfels puppet shows ended in 1956 when Hölzig moved from the GDR to the FRG. In the West he worked in various professions, including a. as head of a technographic company and under the pseudonym Leo Paolo as a magician and mouse dresser. Only a few recognized in him the great artist of the puppet theater. The artist died alone and poor in a nursing home in Wetzlar.

In Bärenfels, a puppet theater festival and a small figure exhibition commemorates the master of hand puppetry, who died in 1989. Puppets from the estate of Paul Hölzig can only be seen in the stage light at the Piccolo Puppet Shows , who staged their play The Disappeared Moonlight with figures from the Bärenfelser Puppet Shows.

exhibition

• November 28, 2002 to October 26, 2003: The Bärenfelser Kasper and the foundation of the State Puppet Theater Dresden , Hohenhaus , Radebeul

swell

• Paul Hölzig files in the State Puppet Theater Collection, Dresden
• Documents (in the form of photos, film, sound, correspondence and certificates), literature, hand puppets, the equipment in his photo studio and several drawings by Hölzig in the archive of the Piccolo puppet shows
• Hölzig collection of the Bärenfels inn

literature

• Office for information of the state of Saxony (Ed.): Puppet show on new ways . With an interview with Paul Hölzig, Dresden 1951.
• Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden (Ed.): Dresdner Kunstblätter (Edition 01/2003) with an article about Paul Hölzig, Dresden 2003.
• Olaf Bernstengel ; Manfred Scholze: Dresdner Puppenspielmosaik , Erfurt 2005, ISBN 3-89702-915-4 .

Web links

• Former Paul Hölzig's venue
• Bärenfelser local homepage with the program of the puppet theater festival under "Events"