Every nation produces a different audience.
The German?
Is just as skeptical as the Swiss, judged the magician Helmut Schreiber in his 1962 memoir.
Dutchman?
"Lovely".
The North American?
"Tends to a certain arrogance".
And the Austrian?
"Is a great viewer," praised Schreiber.
"The audience goes with you and is enchanted from the start."
One
Austrian in
particular was very
impressed by the magic of the Swabian native: Adolf Hitler.
This is proven by a photo: Fascinated, the "Führer" stares up close at the hands of Schreiber, who is standing to his right and is doing a card trick.
Hitler, as the contemporary picture shows, seems to have forgotten everything around him.
Concentrated, he turns to the side, leans his left arm on the back of the chair.
The black-and-white photo was taken on July 27, 1939. Four weeks later, the Wehrmacht was to invade Poland and another horrific war was imminent.
And Hitler?
Opened the German Art Exhibition in Munich, where Schreiber did magic for him.
The self-made magician had arrived where he always wanted to: in Olympus of the Nazi elite.
Helmut Schreiber alias Kalanag shone in front of all party groups, in front of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, Albert Speer and Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann and Wilhelm Keitel.
He also performed regularly in Hitler's domicile on Obersalzberg, where he conjured up 150 Reichsmarks in Hitler's jacket and made Eva Braun's diamond-studded platinum watch disappear - and then took it out again.
However, Schreiber achieved his greatest feat after 1945: The magician made his own Nazi past invisible.
Simsalabim - and the Nazi careerist was gone!
After the Second World War, Schreiber skilfully, cold-blooded and daringly tricked his own entanglement in the terror system away.
In 1949, Schreiber was the first German entertainer to receive permission to perform abroad - and in the 1950s he became one of the world's most popular magicians.
The historian and journalist Malte Herwig has reconstructed how he managed to do this in the exciting biography "The Great Kalanag" that has just been published.
An elephant named "black snake"
Herwig came across Kalanag a few years ago while visiting the magic theater in Hamburg called Magiculum.
At the bar there was a likeness of a stout man with horn-rimmed glasses.
"I guessed Heinz Erhardt and was taught better," Herwig tells in an interview with SPIEGEL: This is the great Kalanag, they said in awe.
A man who embodied the Otto-normal-German in many ways: “As long as the sun of the 'Third Reich' was shining, Schreiber tanned himself in the splendor of the Nazi cultural bureaucracy.
From 1945 he was white as innocence «, says Herwig.
"A typical German biography, just more sophisticated than the average."
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Painted Herwig
The Great Kalanag: How Hitler's Magician Made the Past Disappear and Conquered the World
Published by Penguin Verlag
Number of pages: 480
Published by Penguin Verlag
Number of pages: 480
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Born in 1903 in the Swabian town of Backnang, Helmut, the son of a merchant, was supposed to become a dentist according to his parents' wishes.
But the boy burned for magic ever since an uncle had given the eight-year-old the "Golden Book of Magic".
The father took the book from Helmut and burned the magic box that the child had bought with his pocket money.
But Helmut got hold of a new copy of the "Golden Magic", continued practicing, entertaining the wounded from the First World War in the Stuttgart reserve hospital as a teenager in 1916.
A medical officer gave him the stage name Kala Nag ("black snake") - that's the name of the elephant in Rudyard Kipling's "Jungle Book".
Parking ticket for wrongly parked horse
The gifted autodidact went to Munich, enrolled pro forma at the university and hired for film as a translator, screenwriter, producer.
Schreiber presented his magic skills after work in Schwabing - a police officer gave him a ticket because the extroverted bon vivant had parked his gray horse Isabella incorrectly.
From 1925 in Berlin, Schreiber made a career at Tobis Filmgesellschaft, later he made it to the position of head of production at Munich Bavaria.
According to his own statement, the all-rounder had produced around 180 films by 1945 - including Robert and Bertram (1939), a staunchly anti-Semitic musical in which disdain for human beings is paired in the most perfidious manner with supposedly harmless entertainment trallala.
Parallel to his rise in the film business, Schreiber did everything in his power to gain access to the inner circle of the Nazi elite as a magician.
Author Herwig shows how systematically he went about it.
First Schreiber won over Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels for himself and in 1935 enchanted the birthday party of his wife Magda.
In a second step he made friends with Hitler's adjutant Julius Schaub.
Abracadabra in Hitler's Berghof
In 1938 he asked Schaub in a letter whether it would be possible for Schreiber to “contribute something to the evening entertainment in Obersalzberg”.
"Perhaps you can stimulate it." Duzfreund Schaub could: Schreiber was a welcome guest at the Berghof, and in the summer of 1939 Schreiber spent a weekend with Hitler.
The magician was invited to the wedding by the brother-in-law of the "Führer";
In April 1944, the Schreiber couple spent almost two weeks at Obersalzberg, according to a secret dossier from the Soviet security service NKVD.
According to the report, Eva Braun had called in the magician.
Almost every evening after Hitler's briefing with his generals, Schreiber appeared in front of the "Fuehrer" in the great hall of the Berghof.
While the Battle of Crimea was raging in the east and German planes were bombing London in the west, Hitler was amazed at Schreiber's magic - according to the NKVD report, the Führer even joked how nice it would be if Schreiber could also conjure up the Russian armies.
But not even the strength of the great Kalanag was sufficient for that.
To do this, at Christmas 1938 in Carinhall, the gigantic Gut Görings estate in Schorfheide, he conjured up a bird and a cage on stage and made Emmy Göring's scarf disappear.
As president of the magic circle, Schreiber also ensured that Jews were kicked out of the committee.
"Goering among the magicians": This is what the Jewish doctor and amateur magician Hans Katzenstein called him - he had to flee from the Nazis to the USA.
Schreiber, however, sent magicians he liked to the front to entertain the soldiers in his function as leader of the Aryanized German magicians' guild.
Enlarge image
Macabre: In 1944 Kalanag performed magic in front of inmates of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in the underground facilities where weapons V1 and V2 were produced
Photo: Hanns Hubmann / picture agency for art, culture and history
Raising the morale of the troops was so important to Kalanag that he even picked up his magic wand in person for the Wehrmacht: In December 1943, the magician traveled with a spear to the Murmansk front on the arctic tundra.
And shortly before the end of the war, he crawled into a tunnel in the Harz Mountains to do magic in front of inmates of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.
A photo from 1944 shows Kalanag, as always well-dressed and well-fed, on an improvised stage with two men in the underground factory: where the "flying bomb" V1 and the rocket V2 - Hitler's alleged "miracle weapon" were produced under horrific conditions.
Despite all the hocus-pocus, things turned out differently: Nothing came of the "final victory", the "Führer" took his own life with poison.
However, his favorite magician, Helmut Schreiber, survived the Nazi dictatorship unscathed.
And shortly after the war, the great Kalanag really took off.
Enlarge image
Simsalabim, there I am again!
Schreiber managed to seamlessly build on his career after 1945
Photo: SWR / Magic Art Foundation / dpa
"As a magician, it was part of Schreiber's profession to make things disappear professionally," says Herwig: The magician disguised his Nazi past with the same mechanisms of deception, distraction and manipulation that he used to conjure up pigeons out of nowhere or cars to Disappeared, let flames blaze out of hand, or turned water into wine, ink, liquor, or soda.
"Houdini of coming to terms with the past"
Documented NSDAP party membership since 1939?
Just a preliminary application.
The party badge on his lapel, clearly visible in photos?
The Badge of the Magic Circle.
Incriminating testimony?
The lies of devious envious people.
The appearances before Hitler?
Compulsory and annoying compulsory exercises for artists.
But the "Houdini of coming to terms with the past" (Herwig) was not satisfied with dismissing all accusations and stylizing himself as a harmless follower.
He even stylized himself as a resister who allegedly hid the persecuted and employed half-Jews and authors who were banned from professions.
When the Americans remained suspicious and clung to his heels, Schreiber fled to the British zone in Hamburg in 1946, where his fairy tales were taken from him more uncritically.
Schreiber was denazified, received an official work permit - and with his Simsalabim revue of the 1000 wonders stomped a show from nowhere that was second to none: fast-paced, frivolous, luxurious.
Magic combined with striptease, dance, brisk sayings and music.
Exactly what the war-torn, life-hungry audience needed now.
Nazi gold as start-up capital after 1945?
At first Kalanag performed magic for English troops, then for the German audience and from 1949 for viewers around the globe.
After Kalanag, Herwig emphasizes, no magician has traveled around the world with such a train.
The magician wrapped opponents around his finger, he wiped away sporadic rumors about his involvement in the Nazi regime as well as the question of where the starting capital for his lavish show came from.
Did Kalanag mediate between SS men and allies in the search for the lost Nazi gold, how people whispered?
Had he siphoned off a fair amount of money in the process?
Schreiber was silent and performed magic, tirelessly presenting his tricks.
Even after he lost the battle to his greatest enemy, the television, in the early 1960s.
The discarded old magician bravely romped through the province - his last appearance in Germany was at a fashion show for tights.
Five weeks later, on December 24, 1963, Schreiber's heart stopped beating.
Desperate, his ex-wife Gloria de Vos searched the house for the wealth of the great Kalanag.
All she found was seven keys - to seven different safes.
"The chamber magician Adolf Hitler" (according to the actor Fritz Benscher) took all his secrets with him to the grave.
Who was hiding behind the dazzling figure?
"A charming and unscrupulous egomaniac who ruthlessly got his way," says Herwig.
Donald T. Shea, director of the intelligence information department of the American military government in Germany, put it similarly.
In a memorandum dated May 18, 1949, Shea wrote of Schreiber:
"The subject must be viewed as an opportunist of the worst kind, devoid of beliefs, and does not hesitate to use every available method to endorse those in power at the appropriate time."
