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24/1/2008

Karl Valentin

Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin

The Martin-Gropius-Bau is showing an exhibition devoted to Karl Valentin, a comedian, cabaret artist, author and film producer from Bavaria. Born Valentin Ludwig Fey in 1882, he demonstrated considerable artistic talent and manual skills as a child. Everywhere he lived he set up a workshop where he would make his own props, for example the wooden-built, ‘just for a laugh’ slope that was used as a ‘frog-jumping course’ at the 1921 Munich October beer festival. This obsession with technical equipment, manifest in the productive transformation of objects and the use of tools and props for other than their original purpose, was a recurrent feature throughout his career. It is apparent in Der Flug zum Mond im Raketenflugzeug (1928) with its links between the stage and the cinema, in silent films like Der neue Schreibtisch (1913), Die Mysterien eines Frisiersalons (1923) and the performance/sound film production In der Schreinerwerkstatt (1928).

It was a publican by the name of Ludwig Greiner who spotted Valentin’s most effective vehicle of artistic expression: his body. In 1908 Greiner portrayed him as a skeleton, which gave Valentin an idea of how he could profit from his skinniness.

A ‘poor, thin man’, Valentin subsequently harped on his build and features in his humorous texts and quickly became an avant-garde performer among popular singers in Munich. Valentin Ludwig Fey transformed himself into a living caricature, going on to enjoy huge success under his stage name of Karl Valentin.

Crucially important was Valentin’s ‘other half’, Liesl Karlstadt, whose name was to go down in theatre and cinema history. It was during a joint appearance at the Wien-München cabaret theatre in 1915 that she first sang the Chinesisches Couplet, for which she is still famous even today. Karlstadt achieved a breakthrough with her portrayal of the fat, domineering conductor in the play Orchesterprobe (ca. 1918), which was later turned into a film.

Despite his fondness for the stage, Valentin’s great love from the very beginning was the cinema. His craftsmanship and interest in the new means of communication – telephony, cinema and radio – prompted him to set up his own film company in 1912. The same year he shot his first film Valentins Hochzeit – before Charlie Chaplin made his debut as a director. By 1937 he had produced a further 30 films, including the surrealistic Die Mysterien eines Frisiersalons (1922) in cooperation with Bertolt Brecht as well as Im Photoatelier (1932), Der verhexte Scheinwerfer (1934) and Der Antennendraht (1937).

Karl Valentin carried out experiments of his own just before sound films came in. In 1929, he produced the ‘first German sound film’ In der Schreinerwerkstätte, which involved a live sound performance staged behind the screen in a Munich cinema. Valentin and Karlstadt sawed, made loud noises and argued during the projection of the silent film; they were invisible to the audience yet present on the screen. Mit dem Fremdenwagen durch München was premiered in May 1929. Valentin’s production came at the start of the sound film era, when there were just seven sound film projectors installed in cinemas in the whole of Germany. In addition to the theatre and the cinema, Karl Valentin turned his attention to another medium in 1928, when his monologues and satirical songs began appearing on records. It was not long before Valentin, who by now had effectively turned his skinny body into a trade mark, was advertising the products of several record companies.

In October 1934, finally, he opened his collection of curios in the basement rooms of the Hotel Wagner. His plays on words and scepticism about language, which had made him famous as a stage and film comedian, were communicated there in the form of objects. The collection was a museum of the senses and of the deception of the senses, located somewhere between gaiety und horror – a place which made everyday reality unreal and the unreal perceptible to the senses. For example, he presented a cinema in which wax dolls stood waiting for a performance that was never to take place. But his venture flopped – the public stayed away. The failure of this project, to which Liesl Karlstadt had contributed a great deal of money, left her in a state of deep depression and drove Karl Valentin to the brink of financial ruin in 1935. The couple consequently separated for a while.

Under the Nazis, Valentin’s film Die Erbschaft (1936) was banned because of its ‘depiction of wretchedness’. His films increasingly dealt in tragic-comic style with the everyday worries of those sections of the population who did not match the National Socialists’ ideal notion of German citizens. Under financial pressure, Valentin agreed to play a part in two sound films advertising the German Savings Banks and Giro Association.

These ‘savings films’ along with the sketch In der Apotheke (1941), filmed from a stage performance, were among his last works. In 1940 he said a temporary farewell to the stage following the closing of the ‘Ritterspelunke’ and an appearance on behalf of the Winter Relief Fund at the Circus Krone. In 1945, Valentin dreamed again of a film studio of his own. However, his black humour was no longer in demand in the post-war period. His 1946 radio series Es dreht sich um Karl Valentin was stopped because of protests from listeners.

If Valentin’s career were to be charted on the basis of the characters he portrayed, he could be described as beginning as a ‘living caricature’ on the screen and ending as a down-and-out member of the lumpenproletariat. The roles he played ranged from that of a lean dandy in Valentins Hochzeit (1912) to an unemployed rag-and-bone man in Die Erbschaft (1936): a downward curve matching that of his own life.

The exhibition deliberately avoids a biographical approach to Valentin as a regional popular singer and stage comedian. Rather, a comprehensive look is taken at the uses he made of various media. 300 exhibits illustrate Karl Valentin’s grotesque stage, film and language world and his experimental, humorous games using different media effects. On show are photos, original manuscripts, typescripts, letters, drawings, posters, records and films.

Karl Valentin died on 9 February 1948 at his home in Planegg near Munich, impoverished, half-famished and largely forgotten by many of his contemporaries.

Organizer
Berliner Festspiele and German Film Institute – DIF e.V. / German Film Museum.
An exhibition of the Film Museum Dusseldorf and the German Film Museum Frankfurt am Main in cooperation with the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn
Media partners RBB Inforadio, RBB Kulturradio

Martin Gropius-Bau
Niederkirchnerstrasse 7 - Berlin

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