Karl Valentin


Karl Valentin was a Bavarian comedian, cabaret performer, clown, author and film producer. He had significant influence on German Weimar culture. Valentin starred in many silent films in the 1920s, and was sometimes called the "Charlie Chaplin of Germany". His work has an essential influence on artists like Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Loriot and Helge Schneider.

Early work

Karl Valentin came from a reasonably well-off middle-class family; his father had a partnership in a furniture-transport business. Valentin first worked as a carpenter's apprentice, and this experience proved useful in the construction of his sets and props later in life. In 1902, he began his comic career, enrolling for three months at a variety school in Munich, under the guidance of Hermann Strebel. His first job as a performer was at the "Zeughaus" in Nürnberg. In the wake of his father's death Valentin took a three-year break from performing during which he constructed his own twenty-piece one-man band. Valentin also took musical studies, learning the guitar with Heinrich Albert.
Soon Valentin was performing regularly in the cabarets and beerhalls of München. He developed a reputation for writing and performing short comic routines, which he performed in a strong Bavarian dialect, usually with his female partner, Liesl Karlstadt. Valentin also made numerous films, both silent and with audio; but it was as a stage performer in cabarets that Valentin built a reputation as one of the leading comic performers in Germany during the Weimar Republic.

With Bertolt Brecht

In 1923, Valentin appeared in a half-hour, slapstick film entitled Mysteries of a Barbershop.
The film script was written by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Erich Engel, and also featured Valentin's cabaret partner, Liesl Karlstadt, as well as an ensemble of stage, film, and cabaret performers, including Max Schreck, Erwin Faber, Josef Eichheim, and Blandine Ebinger. Although the film was not immediately released after it was completed in February 1923, it has come to be recognized as one of the one hundred most important films in the history of German filmmaking.
The previous year, 1922, Bertolt Brecht had appeared with Valentin and Karlstadt in a photo of Valentin's spoof of Munich's Oktoberfest. Brecht regularly watched Valentin perform his cabaret routines in Munich's beerhalls, and compared him to Chaplin, not least for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology."
Brecht wrote:
This anecdote has become significant in the history of German theatre, since it was Valentin's idea of applying chalk to the faces of Brecht's actors in his production of Edward II that Brecht located the germ of his conception of 'epic theatre'.

Performance style

Valentin's naïve sense of humour produced sketches that in spirit were loosely connected to dadaism, social expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit. Along with Karl Kraus, he is considered a master of gallows humor. His art centered mostly around linguistic dexterity and wordplay—Valentin was a linguistic anarchist. His comedy would often begin with a simple misunderstanding, on which he would insist as the sketch progressed. The notable critic Alfred Kerr praised him as a Wortzerklauberer, or someone who tears apart words and language to forcefully extract and dissect its inherent meaning. His sketches often parodied and derided "shopkeepers, firemen, military band players, professionals with small roles in the economy and the defence of society".
Many contemporary artists, including film-maker Herbert Achternbusch and Christoph Schlingensief, trace their artistic roots back to Karl Valentin.

Legacy

Films on DVD

Complete Works in 8 volumes. Edited by Helmut Bach Maier and Manfred Faust. Munich: Piper.