Alfred Neubauer, a famous motor racing team manager, refers to Hanussen in his autobiography, Speed Was My Life (first published in English in 1960). In the chapter 'A Prophecy Comes True', he describes a prediction made by Hanussen before the race at AVUS in Germany in May 1932. While at the Roxy Bar with other drivers, Neubauer challenged Hanussen to predict the winner of the following day's race. After some 'leg pulling', Hanussen wrote two names on a piece of paper, which he folded, and put in an envelope. This was placed in the custody of the barman. He had strict instructions that it be left unopened until after the race. Hanussen announced, 'One of us at this table will win tomorrow, another will die. The two names are in this envelope.' During the race, driver Prince George Christian of Lobkowicz was killed, and Manfred von Brauchitsch won. After the race, Neubauer states he opened the envelope and found those names inside. Several days later, a Berlin newspaper reported that Hanussen had urged the German Automobile Club to persuade Prince Lobkowicz not to take part in the race, but Club officials had taken no action. On the syndicated television show Ebert & Roeper, Ebert's co-host Richard Roeper was also enthusiastic, calling the film, "A tremendous piece of work." [2] Hanussen wasn’t Hanussen at all. His true name was Hershmann Chaim (later Hermann) Steinschneider. He was born in Vienna in 1889, the son of Siegfried Steinschneider, a ne’er-do-well Jewish vaudevillian and travelling salesman. Herschmann’s birth was registered in Prossnitz (today Prostejov in the Czech Republic), the Moravian town which was the traditional home of the Steinschneiders. The family and the place have interesting histories.

Kugel, Wilfried. 1998. Hanussen: die wahre Geschichte des Hermann Steinschneider. Düsseldorf: Grupello.I can appreciate why critics were a little sniffy about Invincible on its release. The fact that it was the first dramatic feature from a filmmaker of Herzog’s calibre for a decade seems to have created expectations that the film was never designed to meet. I’ve certainly seen it described as a lesser Herzog movie and even an oddity, which for me seems a strange thing to say about a director whose career is liberally peppered with fascinating oddities and whose choice of projects has always been eclectic. That it’s very occasionally a little rough around the edges is almost a Herzog signature, as is the film’s fascination with those living or working on the fringes of society and a cast in which professional actors converse with untrained first-timers. Do I think it’s a misjudged masterpiece? I’d have to say no, but I also don’t believe that it’s anything close to the misfire that it’s been dismissed as in some quarters. For me, it proved a captivatingly told tale whose fictionalisation of real-life characters I was previously unaware of intrigued me enough to prompt my own research and subsequent appreciation of the true-life details that are authentically recreated here, including how Zishe and Hanussen’s individual stories conclude. Gorgeously shot by Herzog regular Peter Zeitlinger and featuring a beautifully emotive score by Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt, Invincible is a film that, like so much of Herzog’s work, does not play to convention or expectations, while its quietly sobering impact ultimately stems from how history tells us that world events subsequently played out, and is frankly all the more effective for choosing not to explicitly tell us what we already know. sound and vision You know, the next movie, I imagine, would take us up to World War II. I'm more intrigued about the rise of Hitler. Historians are actually split on how exactly the assassination of the Tsar (and his entire family) played out in July 1918. We're pretty sure that Hitler wasn't involved in it, but one aspect of this credits scene does ring true to history. In the midst of the war, Steinschneider went AWOL to give psychic performances in Vienna. To keep the army from discovering his disappearance, he did not perform under his real name; his manager cleverly invented the name under which he would perform, Erik Jan Hanussen. With it he became a Danish noble, achieving enormous popularity with his hypnotic performances and selling out large venues throughout Germany and Austria. However, history still runs its course and we see that Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates, and Tsar Nicholas II and his family are unfortunately assassinated during a family portrait.

Hanussen’s sympathies found favor at the very top of the Reich. At the height of his fame in the 1920s, he met Hitler in the restaurant at the Hotel Kaiserhof, where the Führer had taken up residence. With his Jewish name abandoned and his officer friends endorsing him, Hanussen had no reason to arouse any suspicions. By some accounts, he conferred with Hitler a dozen times between 1932 and 1933, evaluating the bumps on his head, reading his palms, and reassuring the dictator that his rise to power was inevitable. When in-person meetings were difficult, the two spoke on the phone. A few days before an assassin tried to kill Hitler at the Munich Beer Hall, a Swiss astrologer tried to warn Hitler that his life was in danger. His name was Karl Ernst Krafft, and at the start of November 1939, he wrote a letter to his friend Dr. Heinrich Fesel, who worked for Heinrich Himmler. Hitler would be in danger, Krafft warned, between November 8 and November 10. Krafft said Hitler should cancel every public appearance. Hanussen, Meine Lebenslinie (orig. 1930), Kindle edition, Frankfurt a. M.: Wunderkammer Verlag, 2012, location 74.

Contribute to This Page

Hanussen, Erik Jan. 1989. La notte dei maghi: autobiografia di un veggente. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee.

There were other reasons why the Nazis wanted Hanussen dead. Goebbels and Goering both saw him as an interloper and a potential rival for the Führer's attentions, and there was the little matter of all those IOUs Hanussen had collected. Hanussen also, supposedly, had film footage of SA members involved in homosexual orgies. But perhaps more than anything, it was his Jewishness that made him a liability. The communist press had long published reports that Hanussen was Jewish, but it wasn't until the Reichstag fire bequeathed totalitarian powers to the Nazis and allowed them to eliminate the communists as a threat that they had the time to focus on Hanussen's bloodline. Gordon's complicated, fascinating tale is one familiar to many Germans, but completely unknown to Americans, save for some devotees of magic who regard Hanussen's name, acquired while his career was in its infancy, with a reverence second only to that of Harry Houdini's. Despite the 1988 film "Hanussen" by Hungarian director Istvan Szabo (starring Klaus Maria Brandauer in the strangely Aryanized title role), and a number of articles written in English by German imigris in the 1930s and '40s, Americans have had almost no exposure to this bizarre tale of a Jew who played the part of psychic advisor to Hitler. No wonder the uninitiated roll their eyes when Gordon starts to talk about it. A man wants to buy a flower for his girlfriend for her birthday but doesn’t have the required funds, so comes up with a rather extreme plan to procure one in this technically wobbly but inventively designed and animated 8mm short.If you appreciate this article, please consider a subscription to New Dawn magazine. Berlin & Hanussen’s Rise to Power

If there is a sequel, expect to see Hanussen play a major role as the new Shepherd in the world of Kingsman. The events of the movie follow the conflict created by Matthew Goode’s Shepherd (a.k.a. Captain Morton) as he leads a shadow organization that influences international leaders by recruiting trusted aides and those with private access as spies, such as Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), Erik Jan Hanussen (Daniel Bruhl), Mata Hari (Valerie Pachner) and more. As a Scotsman, The Shepherd wants to punish England and bring down King George V by orchestrating The Great War. Essentially, the same as the German trailer but of better quality and with an American voiceover and English language dialogue. Whether this edit was created by the German distributor or its US counterpart I can’t say for sure, but according to the IMDb, the film was first screened in Germany almost a year before it’s limited USA release, so draw your own conclusions.

Bibliography:

Hanussen, Erik Jan. 1992. Manuale di lettura del pensiero: corso pratico in 12 lezioni. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee. As a drama, the film gets off to a hesitant start, the result of requiring non-professional first-timers to deliver dialogue in what is a second language both for them and their writer-director. There’s certainly a slight imbalance in the screenplay, with some of the dialogue and monologues so well written that it can leave some of the personal interplay feeling a little flat by comparison, and it will probably come as no surprise that real-life Finnish strongman Jouko Ahola was making his film acting debut as Zishe. The thing is, while his inexperience gives these first scenes a slightly awkward feel, as the film progresses, it actually works for his character, giving him an air of almost childlike innocence that makes him disarmingly easy to sympathise and even empathise with, as well as adding weight to his eventual embrace of his Jewish heritage. In the early scenes we see the world through Zishe’s eyes, as his journey to Berlin is aided by the kindness and friendliness of those he meets, and as he observes the theatrical world with awed delight. He also has one of the most charming smiles I’ve seen on screen all year. Seriously, how could you not like this guy? His fascination with the theatre’s pianist Marta is nicely balanced by the fact that she is played by Russian concert pianist Anna Gourari, who is also new to acting and tonally very much on Ahola’s wavelength. That she has become the plaything of her employer, who violently mistreats her and regards her more as a possession than a partner, sees that innocence and her underlying sadness cast her as a victim of circumstance, trapped in a relationship without which she would have no job and be forced to leave the country. Tim Roth – Hanussen. The owner and star attraction of the cabaret. He is based on Erik Jan Hanussen.