Karl Valentin - With Bertolt Brecht

With Bertolt Brecht

In 1923, Valentin appeared in a half-hour, slapstick film entitled Mysteries of a Barbershop (Mysterien eines Friseursalons).

The film script was written by Bertolt Brecht, directed by Erich Engel, and also featured Valentin's cabaret partner, Liesl Karlstadt, as well as an ensemble of stage, film, and cabaret performers, including Max Schreck, Erwin Faber, Josef Eichheim, and Blandine Ebinger. Although the film was not immediately released after it was completed in February 1923, it has come to be recognized as one of the one hundred most important films in the history of German filmmaking.

The previous year, 1922, Bertolt Brecht, had appeared with Valentin and Karlstadt in a photo of Valentin's spoof of Munich's Octoberfest. Brecht regularly watched Valentin perform his cabaret routines in Munich's beerhalls, and compared him to Chaplin, not least for his "virtually complete rejection of mimicry and cheap psychology."

Brecht wrote:

But the man he learnt most from was the clown Valentin, who performed in a beer-hall. He did short sketches in which he played refractory employees, orchestral musicians or photographers, who hated their employer and made him look ridiculous. The employer was played by his partner, a popular woman comedian who used to pad herself out and speak in a deep bass voice. When the Augsburger was producing his first play, which included a thirty minutes' battle, he asked Valentin what he ought to do with the soldiers. 'What are the soldiers like in battle?' Valentin promptly answered: 'They're pale. Scared shitless.'

This anecdote has become significant in the history of German theatre, since it was Valentin's idea of applying chalk to the faces of Brecht's actors in his production of Edward II that Brecht located the germ of his conception of 'epic theatre'.