Review of Malte Herwig’s biography “The Great Kalanag” – Culture

Hitler has a special guest. He can even ask him how much money he has in his jacket pocket while taking a walk together. “Don’t you know that I never carry money with me?” Replies Hitler, surprised. “Of course, my guide. But would you still be kind enough to look in your left jacket pocket?” Confused, Hitler reaches into his jacket and pulls out a wallet with 150 Reichsmarks. This magician had actually managed to smuggle the wallet into there without his noticing.

The magician is Helmut Schreiber, who later called himself Kalanag, the black snake, after a character in Kipling’s “Jungle Book”. Not only once did he magically approach Hitler in such a manner; sometimes he stays on the Obersalzberg for a week or more and sends happy postcards from there to his envious colleagues. “No one has ever come closer to the Führer than Helmut Schreiber,” writes his biographer, – except maybe Eva Braun, but that too is by no means certain. “

The sentence is typical of the type and tone of the book by Malte Herwig, who has already written several bestsellers and is journalistic for the Southgerman newspaper, the mirror and the star has worked. It is written quickly and somewhat smugly. And what might have been a nuisance in other aspects of that era – it fits here.

The magic word “Simsalabim!” was his invention

Not that everything is cheerful because of it. Helmut Schreiber is not Felix Krull, but clearly a driven man who burns down his candle of life at both ends. Born in 1903 (or was it already in 1893? – he writes the zeros in such a way that it can also be read as a nine, and thus deliberately causes confusion), he already gives amazing samples of his talent at the age of 15 and is a star in Berlin at the age of 25 of the Weimar Republic. At 40, as Hitler’s guest, he looks like 50. At 60, he dies of a heart condition, obese and in poor health.

He’s not just a magician, he’s a magician politician, if you can call it that. As president of the “Magic Circle”, he also vigorously implements the “leadership principle” in his branch. At his suggestion, deviants receive a visit from the Gestapo. He knows his clientele well, is invited by Göring to a pompous magic celebration in Carinhall (a great scene in the book), but knows that he has to be careful with the nervous Goebbels, who doesn’t like being duped, and turns around with his Prefer tricks to his wife Magda. In addition, the restless is also active as a film producer and brings 180 films to the people, including an anti-Semitic musical entitled “Robert and Bertram” (certainly the only one of its kind), which still finds no favor with Hitler, because the clever Jews in it are well hit, but the Germans look too stupid.

Herwig does not succumb to the temptation to make his subject a hero. He recognizes in the amiable entertainer the calculating opportunist. He is evidently fascinated by the way Schreiber understood after 1945 to belittle his role as a companion of the Nazi greats to that of an inexperienced court jester and cultivated the image of an uncle who never tarnished a little water. When you see pictures of him from the fifties, he looks like Heinz Erhardt’s brother.

It was then that his great career began: Schreiber, now finally Kalanag, has been traveling all over the world for many years with his long-legged “Mystery Girls”, 70-man staff, three freight wagons with magical utensils, always in front of huge sold-out houses. He celebrates triumphs even in hostile England. In Stuttgart, his old home, 48,000 people see him in a single season.

He saws up virgins and makes cars disappear, drives blind and with a sack over his head, but with the permission of the police, through the cities he visits and appears at the hotel reception with a cheetah on a leash. At his side is his wife Anneliese, pepped up to the blonde Gloria de Vos, full of sparkling charm, but inwardly eaten away by jealousy. One of the many girls that she has specifically suspected lets her crash onto the floor from a height of three meters during a hovering act.

Open detailed view

In general, Herwig also staged the secondary characters well. In addition to Gloria, there is the Schwabing cabaret patriarch Papa Benz, the vain sexual and occult researcher Moll and Kalanag’s actual opponent Marvelli, in contrast to the nimble pycnic a crow-like, elegantly slack virtuoso who throws himself out of the magic circle and who throws himself out after the war tried to take revenge. Emotionally strongest are those passages where the author sought out the very old survivors, such as Schreiber’s long-lost daughter Brigitte, whose unexpected appearance the magician improvised as a stage agitator and who, in retrospect, attested to a nervous coldness.

The character testimonies quoted, not least the denunciations and Persil notes after 1945, vary wildly in their assessment. Those who knew him best seem to have experienced him personally, however, as a disappointment. He later fathered a daughter named Brigitte – how did someone come up with the idea of ​​giving two of his children the same name? But the twin number is part of the craft at Kalanag. He also tours the country with Heike and Heidi, of whom only one is allowed to show itself publicly at a time, because if people saw the other one too, one of the best magic pieces, based on their secret duplicity, would be in the bucket.

In the late 1950s, Kalanag’s star began to decline. The end of it is the television, in which he denies a few shows with card tricks and the like. The cars that he makes disappear are getting smaller and smaller, in the end it’s just a Vespa.

To what extent there could have been a kinship between Hitler and the magician in the manic urge to realize fabulous things like miracle weapons and floating virgins (Herwig suggests), must remain open. The magician is more likely to have touched the childish, artistic, the harmless, so to speak, side of the Führer. But by interpreting his Kalanag as a symbol of a post-war society that does not like to remember the recent past and instead turns all the more faithfully to the wonders of the upswing, Herwig has made a convincing move.

He rightly finds a bibliography superfluous and he treats Kalanag’s autobiography with the significant title “Simsalabim whirls around the world” for what it is, not as a source, but as the great final trick of this dazzling life. The name Kalanag is largely forgotten today. But “Simsalabim”, which he chose to be his magic word, inspired by a nursery rhyme of the shot and yet reborn cuckoo: this has been preserved to this day as the epitome of magic, an anonymous legacy. But when a year had passed – Simsalabim! – the cuckoo was there again. It is Kalanag’s own fate.

At the very end Herwig writes: “Because this book is not a novel, but a true story. Kalanag’s life would be too implausible for a novel.” Incidentally, he also mentions the reason why a good book that speaks of what really happened is always superior to the best historical novel.