Otto Tausig
Heinz Otto Tausig ( born February 13, 1922 in Vienna, † October 10, 2011 ) was an Austrian actor, screenwriter and director.
Life and work
Otto Tausig came into the family home in the favorite street in Vienna to the world. He had his very first stage experience, as reflected in his autobiography Punch, Kummerl, Jud - recalls a life story (2003), the age of four, when his parents took him to the Johann Strauss Theater, where Josephine Baker occurred. At each performance, she got a man on the stage and on this evening was their choice on Otto ( "I had no idea what she wanted from me, and began terribly to cry. People laughed. It was horrible. "). When he was 13 years old, he applied secretly at a drama school, but was rejected by the Council, it is with 16 to try again.
In 1938, after the "Anschluss" of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich, his parents sent him because of his Jewish origin due to feared persecution on a Kindertransport to the UK, where he worked as a farm and factory workers. His mother Franziska Tausig (1895-1989) fled to Shanghai and was her husband, who had already been deported to a concentration camp freely buy, and get to him. He died in exile from tuberculosis. She published her memories of that time in 1987 under the title Shanghai Passage. Flight and exile of a Viennese woman. Otto Tausig was interned as an " Enemy Alien". During the two years he spent in several camps, he met among others the poet Kurt Schwitters know. After being released from internment, he went to London where he worked as a mechanic during the day and evening was involved in satirical stage programs in the Austrian Center of the the Free Austrian Movement; among other things, there was also the Jura Soyfer Vineta. The sunken city listed.
After the end of World War II Otto Tausig returned, now married and back to the experience of the previous years as a convinced Communist, 1946 in his home. He began studies at the Max -Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna. Two years later, in 1948, Tausig began as an actor, director and chief dramaturge at the New Theatre at La Scala to work. The ensemble was communist -oriented, which meant that after the closure of the theater in 1956, the actors ( cf. Wiener Brecht boycott ) heavily arrived in the anti-communist sentiment in Vienna at that time in other theaters. Tausig recalled: " Either you signed that one turns away from communism in any form, or you get no more commitment. So I emigrated a second time. "He went to the German theater and the Volksbühne in East Berlin. Here he worked as a screenwriter and director of satirical short films of DEFA, the so-called " Stingers " productions. In those years, before the construction of the Berlin Wall, there was still freedom of movement, but the " spying the GDR authorities but then on my nerves ," he began to walk. Later, he turned away from the Communist Party and took part in demonstrations against the stationing of missiles in East Berlin as well as on the Mutlanger Heath.
In 1960 Tausig at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, before he was active as a freelance actor and director in Germany. In 1970 he was hired by Gerhard Klingenberg, ensemble member and director at the Burgtheater in Vienna, where he worked until 1983. During this time, he founded a group Amnesty International in support of politically persecuted actors and artists, with whom he campaigned among other things, Václav Havel.
After this engagement he again worked as a freelance artist in the entire German-speaking area. In addition to his theater career, he also worked as a film actor and director for film and television productions and as a professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. His stage career, he finished in 1999 with the role of the lawyer in Schnoferl Nestroys The Mädl from the suburbs to the Viennese popular theater.
From the beginning, Tausig was in his acting career in particular comedy roles, often with tragic undertones, specialized, which he in many Nestroy performances, as Truffaldino in Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, as Lope de Vega's Knights of the miracle or as Cyrano de Bergerac embodied. His repertoire also included, among other roles in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's The Difficult, de Beaumarchais ' The great day or The Marriage of Figaro, Peter Handke's The Ride Across Lake Constance, Yehoshua Sobol's Ghetto ( Director: Peter Zadek ), Jean- Paul Sartre's Kean, or Disorder and genius Molière's Tartuffe and Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein. As a screenwriter and director, he worked on around 70 productions. In 2009 he was honored with the Nestroy Theatre Prize for his life's work.
Many years devoted Tausig within the framework of the initiative of the artists of development aid development assistance clubs of development cooperation projects. Since the late 1980s, he donated his entire income from engagements and appearances this aid project ("This is the only purpose of my performances " ), even he lived from his pension as Burgtheater actor. With the initiative he supported about Indian children, who were freed from child labor in carpet factories and quarries, or refugee children without parents in Austria, the under came in pastoral mountain in Laura Gatner home, which was named after his murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp grandmother.
Otto Tausig died on October 10, 2011 after a long illness, surrounded by his family in Vienna and was in the Viennese central cemetery in an honorary grave dedicated (Group 40, Number 181) buried. In 2013 in Vienna Wieden ( 4th district ) of Tausigplatz was named after him and his mother Franziska Tausig. Tausig was married to his second wife and has from the previous marriage a son named Wolfgang ( b. 1950 ), and a grandson.