A new book about Kalanag

[Richard Hatch]

Here's a teaser video in English by German journalist, Malte Herwig, author of a new biography of Kalanag (Helmut Schreiber) to be published in Germany if a few weeks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBxrxjwm78E

Amazon in the US does advertise the kindle version will be available March 22 and includes 16 pages of color photos:
https://www.amazon.com/gro%C3%9Fe-Kalanag-Zauberer-Vergangenheit-verschwinden-ebook/dp/B08MCC8CWG/

[Joneseymagic]

I have Val Andrews’ book ‘Seven Keys to Kalanag’ and I found it fascinating. There are elements to the story that are almost unbelievable nowadays. Kalanag’s dominance over the German magic scene was overwhelming thanks to his promotion by Hitler as a sort of ‘official overseer’.

Looking back from this great distance of time I’m amazed that the U.K. Population were able to forget the tragic events of the war years so soon and pack the theatres for his British tours soon after.

I’d like to read this book, so I hope there’s an English translation. I’m not sure I’ll enjoy what I read though.

[Leo Garet]

I have Val Andrews’ book ‘Seven Keys to Kalanag’ and I found it fascinating. There are elements to the story that are almost unbelievable nowadays. Kalanag’s dominance over the German magic scene was overwhelming thanks to his promotion by Hitler as a sort of ‘official overseer’.

Looking back from this great distance of time I’m amazed that the U.K. Population were able to forget the tragic events of the war years so soon and pack the theatres for his British tours soon after.

I’d like to read this book, so I hope there’s an English translation. I’m not sure I’ll enjoy what I read though.

"Looking back from this great distance of time I’m amazed that the U.K. Population were able to forget the tragic events of the war years so soon and pack the theatres for his British tours soon after."


You should be amazed and you should rethink that statement.

Nobody I knew had any idea that this person was so closely connected to the Nazis. If they had, things would have been a lot different.

As for forgetting, all the adults I knew were busy trying to bring some sort of sense back into what was left of their lives. Ever-conscious of the empty spaces previously occupied by family members.

For what it's worth I saw him on TV a couple of times and was unimpressed by his performance.

[Joneseymagic]

Yes. I’m not claiming to be an authority on the subject and it sounds as though you have some knowledge of post war sensibilities.

I was referring to the fact that his tours of the U.K. were undoubtedly very successful which, speaking as someone who wasn’t there, surprised me somewhat!

I am certainly not championing or defending a former member of the despicable Nazi Party - I hope my post hasn’t given anyone that impression.

[Chas Nigh]

Here's an ironic little side note. http://www.jonathanallen.info/kalanagtwoinfo.html

[Max Maven]

Kalanag’s affiliation with the Nazi party was known and discussed in English-language magic literature since before the start of the war. After the war, he made efforts to spin the historical record. This worked for some; for example, in Abra magazine, editor Goodliffe declared himself a Kalanag supporter. But not everyone in magic arrived at that conclusion.

In Hugard’s Magic Monthly, starting in the mid-1950s, columnist Arthur Leroy wrote frequent and vehement comments about the German illusionist. When Kalanag toured North America in 1957, reactions were mixed (for both political and aesthetic reasons). In the November 1957 Hugard’s, Leroy gleefully reported that Kalanag’s show in Detroit drew poorly, in comparison to the ticket sales for a play in a nearby theater: The Diary of Anne Frank.

[Zig Zagger]

The German book will be out in a week, and I have just finished my interview with author, historian and journalist Dr. Malte Herwig (who by the way has a doctorate from Oxford and a fine track record in biographies, 20th century German history, and investigative journalism). Malte has worked on the Kalanag book for seven years. Through intense research and with a lot of help from German and international magic scholars, collectors, and others, he has apparently unearthed more than just a few hitherto unknown facts, documents, and photographs.

I have yet to read the book, but as Malte told me he has actually tracked down and spoken to Kalanag's two daughters, half-sisters who were both named Brigitte (you can't make that up!). He has also discovered detailed information about Kalanag’s accounts and even about the mysterious keys Gloria had found after his death. He promises glimpses into Kalanag's magic notebooks, backstage views of his show, and a lot more stories, truths, and deceptions. As Malte concludes, "Kalanag is the stuff Hollywood is made of." I think we are in for a treat!

Let's hope that the book will also be published in English in the future. (Penguin Random House is currently seeking to sell the worldwide rights.)

Here's a little theatrical trailer in English by Malte Herwig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VBo_rWbgHU

[Richard Kaufman]

We will have a cover story in Genii about Kalanag written by Dr. Herwig.

[Zig Zagger]

Happy to hear that!!

[David Ben]

David Mirvish, son of Ed Mirvish, who - with his father was/is one of the great presenters/producers of theatre in North America (and who at one point owned the Old Vic in London), and who loved magic, told me that he vowed to never invest in a magic show after seeing Kalanag because there were always more people on stage than there were in the audience.

[Q. Kumber]

Many magic clubs in Germany have their own premises. When I did a lecture tour there two years ago, one club had a Kalanag display as part of its museum, another wouldn't have anything to do with him.

As a side note Peter Diamond, the late illusion and prop maker from Preston, England, kept in touch with Kalanag's widow Gloria for many years.

[Dr. Solka]

A new video about Kalanag on German TV:
https://www.swr.de/unternehmen/kommunik ... 1-108.html

Enchanted and Repression - the career of the magician Kalanag
Deception, camouflage, and trickery as a career and life principle / Monday, March 22, 2021, at 11:35 p.m. in "History channel Erstes ARD ."
He was one of the most enigmatic figures in the German entertainment industry: the magician and film producer Helmut Schreiber, alias Kalanag. He was responsible for anti-Semitic propaganda films for the National Socialists and was considered the "court magician" of Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring. After 1945, he thrilled an international audience with excitingly exotic magic shows. The film depicts a magician's career who, from the Weimar Republic through National Socialism to the Federal Republic, managed to be among the winners time and again with tricks, deception, and trickery. "Enchanted and Repression - The Career of the Magician Kalanag" by Oliver Schwehm can be seen on Monday, March 22, 2021, at 11:35 p.m. on the German public broadcaster Erstes and will be available for one year afterward in the ARD Mediathek. The film features never-before-published archive footage. The narrator is actor Ben Becker.

===========================
BTW
He named himself after a dangerous jungle-snake - how appropriate!

[Dr. Solka]

Exoticism and illusion

When there was not yet a television in every living room, Schreiber became a star. With his wife Gloria and a troupe of 80 artists, musicians, and dancers, he traveled the world. In perfectly staged revues with exotic backdrops, he made cars disappear in elaborate grand illusions; girls split in three, and beer, wine, and champagne flow endlessly from glass decanters. When, at the end of the 1950s, the Adenauer government wanted to set up "Freies Fernsehen GmbH" as a private-law counterweight to ARD, Helmut Schreiber was finally hired for the post of future entertainment director. Had the Federal Constitutional Court not stopped Adenauer's project, it would have been a final astonishing turn in Helmut Schreiber's life. He died on December 24, 1963.

The magician of the powerful and the ordinary people

The documentary "Enchanted and Repressed - The Career of the Magician Kalanag" by Oliver Schwehm, in which historians and companions of Helmut Schreiber have their say and previously unpublished archive material can be seen, describes the career of a grandmaster of illusion who always knew how to be among the winners. From the Weimar Republic to National Socialism to the young Federal Republic, he seamlessly adapted to three systems and always prevailed.

Voices from the film

Rolf Aurich (Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin): "Did Helmut Schreiber really have a moral? Is that a range of sensibility that he had available to him at all? I would be very doubtful about that." Liselotte Littobarski (former secretary of Kalanag): "I must honestly say, when I saw the picture, the Gloria on one side, Kalanag on the other, in the middle Adolf Hitler... a world collapsed for me." Malte Herwig (journalist and Kalanag biographer): "Kalanag as a person shows that Stunde Null is the greatest illusion of 20th century German history. The zero-hours never existed. Nothing started anew and from scratch. The people were the old ones. The idea that everything is reset to zero and you can start over - that's ultimately a gigantic magic trick."

[Zig Zagger]

I have Val Andrews’ book ‘Seven Keys to Kalanag’ and I found it fascinating. There are elements to the story that are almost unbelievable nowadays. Kalanag’s dominance over the German magic scene was overwhelming thanks to his promotion by Hitler as a sort of ‘official overseer’.

Looking back from this great distance of time I’m amazed that the U.K. Population were able to forget the tragic events of the war years so soon and pack the theatres for his British tours soon after.

A possible explanation is given by Andrews in that very book:

The British had passed through their natural wartime distrust of everything Germanic and resumed their natural tolerance. The "filthy hun" of the dark wartime days was now the poor chap whose nose had been bloodied. If you were British, you knocked your opponent down, then stepped smartly aside to give him a sporting chance. There was no possible thought of putting the boot in.
(...)
Indeed, it was only in America, and there only in one industrial city, Detroit, that he encountered any sort of anti-German feeling.

[Richard Hatch]

As a counterpoint to the Kalanag story, there is currently a proposal to rename a street in Berlin after a Jewish scholar of magic, Guenther Dammann, who was a victim of the Holocaust, as were his two brothers. This proposal has received support from David Copperfield and the President of the Berlin Magic Circle, who lives in the neighborhood where the street in question is, which is the street the Dammann brothers lived on until they were forced to sell their home. Here's a link to the first article in the Berlin press about it last week:
https://www.morgenpost.de/bezirke/charl ... n-vor.html
A follow up article about local reaction was mostly sympathetic, though the movement to rename the street was championed by the Berlin anticolonial movement, which would prefer it be named for a female active in the anticolonial movement (the person whom the street is name after was a hero at the time it was named - 125 years ago - but is now regarded as a racist war criminal for his brutal suppression of national uprisings in what was then German East Africa (now Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda)). Berlin currently doesn't have any streets named for magicians, whereas Vienna (for example) has 6 or 7...

[Q. Kumber]

A possible explanation is given by Andrews in that very book:

The British had passed through their natural wartime distrust of everything Germanic and resumed their natural tolerance. The "filthy hun" of the dark wartime days was now the poor chap whose nose had been bloodied. If you were British, you knocked your opponent down, then stepped smartly aside to give him a sporting chance. There was no possible thought of putting the boot in.
(...)
Indeed, it was only in America, and there only in one industrial city, Detroit, that he encountered any sort of anti-German feeling.

Val Andrews' biographical books were homages to his magic heroes and he never claimed them to be entirely factual. They were largely fact but also based on what he imagined, or hoped, to be fact.

Val was a big fan of The Magnet (which ran from 1908 - 1940), a weekly story paper for boys written by Frank Richards, pen name of Charles Hamilton. The stories featured Billy Bunter and the boys of Greyfriars boarding school. I suspect his views on British chivalry and sportsmanship, expressed in Zig Zagger's post, came from those stories.

On a side note, I had lunch with Val a few moths before he passed away in 2006. He told me he was working on the full script of Dante's show. This project was based on his own notes and those of a friend of his who had seen Dante's show multiple times. After Val died, I alerted Pat Page, executor to Val's estate, to look out for the manuscript, but alas, it was never found.

[Dr. Solka]

unboxing Kalanag:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX-smsE-nuQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VBo_rWbgHU

[Zig Zagger]

For your convenience, dear fellow Geniis, I have translated my German interview with Malte Herwig on Helmut Schreiber-Kalanag into English.

With kind permission, there are also some photographs included which you have probably never seen before:

https://zzzauber.wordpress.com/2021/03/ ... te-herwig/

I hope you find it interesting and look forward to a potentially upcoming English version of Malte's biography!

[Zig Zagger]

I've just read a funny chapter in Malte Herwig's book where David Berglas remembers how he taped about a dozen TV shows with Schreiber-Kalanag as producer in Germany in 1960. Apparently it was an early panel show that had psychics and other freaks perform their feats for a mixed panel of judges (including Henk Vermeyden) before Berglas recreated similar wonders by purely magical means.

[Richard Hatch]

I've just read a funny chapter in Malte Herwig's book where David Berglas remembers how he taped about a dozen TV shows with Schreiber-Kalanag as producer in Germany in 1960. Apparently it was an early panel show that had psychics and other freaks perform their feats for a mixed panel of judges (including Henk Vermeyden) before Berglas recreated similar wonders by purely magical means.

A very short segment from this program (basically just introducing the panel, which included a parapsychologist, a priest, a "trick technical adviser" (Henk Vermeyden) and a few others) was shown in a 45 minute documentary about Kalanag shown on Germany television this evening. It appears the replay will be available to watch in their archives for one year, but apparently is not available from the US:
https://www.ardmediathek.de/ard/suche/kalanag/
A shame if so, as it had some really fantastic film footage and photos and told his story quite nicely (even showing the congratulatory note he got from Hitler on his 1941 marriage to Anneliese Voss, who was later rebranded as his glamorous assistant Gloria de Vos. This note is also shown in Malte Herwig's terrific new biography, available as a kindle download and hardcopy from Amazon, see my first post on this topic).

[Paco Nagata]

I've never heard about the Magician Kalanag, so last night I read the entire Zig Zagger interview (in English; not in German before going to sleep... And, as I usually say, I'm happy to be less ignorant in the world of magic.

Thanks a lot for your interview and translation effort, Jan!

[Joe Lyons]

We will have a cover story in Genii about Kalanag written by Dr. Herwig.

I just read the story in Genii - fascinating.

For anyone looking for more on this like I was, I refer you to Richard Hatch's excellent article in the archives Kalanag and the Vanishing Banknotes in Magic Magazine July 1998.

[Zig Zagger]

... and if you want to find out even more about Kalanag's colorful biography and Malte Herwig's fine book, you may want to check out Richard Hatch's four-page, in-depth review of the book in the latest issue of Marco Pusterla's fine little journal, Ye Olde Magic Mag (see https://yeoldemagicmag.com/downloads/vol-7-issue-3).