David Kalisch

David Kalisch (also known under the pseudonym: D. J. Schalk; 23 February 1820 – 21 August 1872) was a German playwright and humorist. Early life His infancy and early childhood were spent in a home of comfort and culture; but when he was only seven years old his father died, leaving the family without any means of support, and Kalisch was compelled to add to the family resources by entering the employment of a dealer in small wares, who later on entrusted him with the management of a branch establishment in Ratibor. In 1843 he returned to Breslau, and in October 1844 went to Paris, where he gradually became on terms of intimacy with a group of poets and socialists that included Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, Karl Grün, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx, and Albert Wolff. He made at Leipzig his first attempts as a farce writer with his Die Proletarier and Auf der Eisenbahn. Early career Kalisch was still bound to a mercantile career, however, as neither literature nor the stage had yet made a place for him; and so in 1846 he found his way to Berlin and took another position as salesman. He found time to continue his literary efforts by writing a number of the peculiar verses which, under the name of Couplets, were first employed by him, and which he afterward utilized with great success in his stage pieces. He also tried his hand at adaptation from the French, the little farce Ein Billet von Jenny Lind being produced at the summer theater at Schöneberg, near Berlin; the principal result of this was that it secured for him an invitation to write for the Königsstädter Theater, where his Herr Karoline was produced, and later (23 December 1847) his Einmal Hunderttausend Thaler, which at once achieved a veritable triumph. There followed in quick succession. Berlin bei Nacht, Junger Zunder, Alter Plunder, Aurora im Oel, Münchhausen, Peschke, Ein Gebildeter Hausknecht, Der Aktienbudiker, Berlin, Wie es Weint und Lacht, Einer von Unsere Leut, Berlin Wird Weltstadt, Die Berliner in Wien, Der Goldonkel, and Musikalische Unterhaltung. Success Very soon he practically dominated the German farce stage of his time. At the old Wallner Theater in Berlin and in the great comedy houses throughout Germany there were years when none but his pieces were produced, some of them having runs of hundreds of performances. Nor was it in Germany alone that his plays became famous, for by adaptation and translation they were produced throughout the world.