Queer Places:
MC Club, Kastanienallee 22, 20359 Hamburg, Germany
Harry Pauly (September 29, 1914 in Berlin, Germany † 1985 in Negombo, Sri Lanka) was a German actor, director, playwright and concentration camp survivor. The actor was one of the biggest stars of homophile subtheater culture in Germany after the Second World War and one of the most dazzling figures of Hamburg's subculture.
Harry Pauly, of whom it is not known whether this is his real name or a stage name, was born into bourgeois conditions in Berlin, from which he soon tried to escape. He did not follow his parents' wish to become a hairdresser. Already as a teenager he was very interested in the theater. He was able to indulge his passion from the age of sixteen at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, where he made his debut under Erwin Piscator in the play "Lausejunge". After only a few performances, the play was cancelled, despite the great prominence of the director, but Pauly remained faithful to the theater and acting. This was followed by numerous plays in which he had to portray messengers, errand boys, pages, scouts and which he played on many of the stages of Berlin, such as the Volkstheater, the Künstlerbühne, the Schiller and the Lessing Theater. He made his film debut in 1932 in Gräfin Mariza, in which he played the riding boy. Through his work in theater and film he met big stars like Adolf Wohlbrück and got to know the then world-famous actor Peter Lorre, with whom he had stood on stage. In 1936 he was arrested for the first time for violating paragraph 175 and was transferred to the Neusustrum concentration camp, where he was first placed in solitary confinement and later had to do the heaviest work for fifteen months. After his release in 1938, he again managed to gain a foothold in the art scene. He recorded radio plays for the Reichsfunk and in 1938 became Berlin's, possibly Prussia's, youngest theatre director, at the age of just twenty-four. He was the director of a small acting company that mainly played matinees and pre-programs for Berlin cinemas. In 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. There he had the opportunity to play in the theater group of the Wehrmacht and to perform in front of the soldiers, mostly in female roles. In 1943 he was imprisoned again because he had been caught with two teenagers, so he was sent to an eight-month punitive expedition, which he was the only one to miraculously survive. After the war he first went to East Berlin, where he became director of the ABC-Theater 1946 in Berlin-Spandau and the Apollo Theater, among others, and had played "Charley's Aunt" more than 500 times until his escape. In 1952 he fled the GDR because he had fallen out with the Stasi. But even in the FRG he was not happy at first: he ended up in prison here for a few years, again on the basis of the paragraph § 175. After his release, he first said goodbye to the stage, entered into a "fictitious marriage" in 1954, became the father of a son and tried his hand as a farmer in Schleswig-Holstein. Unhappy with this situation, the marriage fell apart and he fled to freer Hamburg in the 1960s. There he opened a pub in St. Pauli in 1973, which quickly became one of the most famous gay hangouts in the Hanseatic city near the Reeperbahn and called "MC-Club" (Mother Courage)". The MC became a popular meeting place for homosexuals, prostitutes, night owls, tourists, eccentrics. In 1976, the infamous "Kellerbühne" was set up in the basement, for which Pauly became known throughout Hamburg and beyond. After the closure of the pub and theatre in 1982, he left Germany with his Ceylonese partner and lived in Sri Lanka. He died there in 1985.
Harry Pauly has written around twelve plays since his time in Hamburg, all of which were performed during his lifetime and in which he always played the leading role himself. His theatre, certainly the smallest in the Hanseatic city, had just 72 seats. The theatre and the pub were located in a side street of the Reeperbahn, in Kastanienallee. He recruited the actors from the male prostitutes of the area. He created the fictional character "Paula Courage", which became his trademark. The pieces did not require great intellectual achievement and were almost exclusively aimed at a homosexual audience. Pauly and his theatre were often seen as an alternative to the bourgeois Ohnsorgtheatre, as a sub-theatre and subculture with its own charm and audience. The 1977 documentary Pauline's Birthday or the Beast of Notre Dames howed his entire acting troupe, which also went on tour in Germany and appeared in Munich, Bremen, Münster and became known throughout the country, their skills. The film also became known because it was the first time it turned a real death into a film. One of the actors died unexpectedly during the shooting and they filmed that and incorporated this tragic case into the film. Even though he was not born in Hamburg, today he is often regarded as a Hamburg original. With his refusal to the mass audience, he was one of the great independent theatre makers in Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s. Today he has become a cult figure in Hamburg.
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