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Beggar Bar

  • Beggar Bar was an artists bar and cabaret which was founded in 1941 by the German actress and dancer Valeska Gert (1892–1978).
  • Beggar Bar
  • Bettlerbar

  • Bar
  • Beggar Bar was an artists bar and cabaret which was founded in 1941 by the German actress and dancer Valeska Gert (1892–1978).

    Word Count: 20

  • During the 1920s, Berlin-born dancer and actress Valeska Gert was famous in Germany for her abstract and eccentric performances. She was, for example, part of Laterna Magica – auch eine Revue (1926, Friedrich Hollaender) together with Marion Palfi, who was at this time still working as an actress; after her emigration to New York, she worked as a photographer. In 1933 Valeska Gert emigrated to London, where she took part in the short film Pett and Pott. After marrying her second husband, the writer Robin Hay Anderson, she emigrated with him to New York in 1939. Restarting her dancing and acting career proved to be almost impossible.

    Beggar Bar was located in Greenwich Village, which was already at the time a borough much frequented by émigré artists and home to such cultural avant-garde intellectuals as Berenice Abbot, Patricia Highsmith and Lisette Model. The exile publishing house Pantheon Books was also located there. Beggar Bar ran from 1941 to 1945 and was not only a showcase for Valeska Gert’s own performances, but also a contact zone, where other émigré and American artists like Kadidja Wedekind could perform, as well as meet there or work at the bar.

    Word Count: 191

  • 3 Morton Street, Greenwich Village, New York City.

  • Advertisement “Valeska Gerts’s Beggar Bar.” Aufbau, 9 October 1942, p. 13
  • Gert, Valeska. Die Bettlerbar von New York. Arani, 1950.

    Klösch, Christian and Regina Thumser-Wöhs. “From Vienna”: Exilkabarett in New York 1938 bis 1950. Picus, 2002.

    Maaß, Ingrid. Repertoire der deutschsprachigen Exilbühnen 1933–1955. Hamburger Arbeitsstelle für Deutsche Exilliteratur, 2000.

    Trapp, Frithjof, et al., editor. Handbuch des deutschsprachigen Exiltheaters 1933–1945, vol. 2: Biographisches Lexikon der Theaterkünstler. K.G. Saur, 1999.

    Word Count: 54

  • Helene Roth
  • 1941
  • 1945
  • Ellen Auerbauch, Valeska Gert, Oskar Maria Graf, Marion Palfi, Lisette Model.

  • New York
  • No
  • Helene Roth. "Beggar Bar." METROMOD Archive, 2021, https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/2948/object/5145-11013233, last modified: 04-05-2021.
  • Lisette Model
    Photographer
    New York

    Lisette Model was an Austrian-born photographer who lived in New York with her husband Evsa Model after emigrating from France. Her street photographs capturing the curiosities of everyday life quickly caught the interest of museums and magazines.

    Word Count: 37

    Rolf Tietgens
    PhotographerEditorWriter
    New York

    Rolf Tietgens was a German émigré photographer who arrived in New York in 1938. Although, in the course of his photographic career, his artistic and surrealist images were published and shown at exhibitions, his work, today, is very little known.

    Word Count: 39

    Marion Palfi
    Photographer
    New York

    Marion Palfi was a German émigré photographer who lived in New York from the 1940s to the 1960s. Her photographic engagement in social and political topics made her name for her use of the camera to draw attention to social injustices.

    Word Count: 41

    Lotte Jacobi
    Photographer
    New York

    In October 1935 the German émigré photographer Lotte Jacobi, together with her sister Ruth Jacobi, opened a photo studio on 57th Street. The two sisters had to leave their parents' photo studio in Berlin in the 1930s and emigrated to New York.

    Word Count: 41

    Pantheon Books
    Publishing House
    New York

    Pantheon Books was a publishing house founded in 1942 by the German émigré Kurt Wolff (1887–1963) and aimed at the exiled European community in New York.

    Word Count: 24