The Berlin years
György Rauscher moved to Berlin in 1928 and within two years became a fixture of its illustrated press and its film-and-theatre society. He won the cover competition of Sport im Bild, took a permanent contract with Scherl Verlag, joined the Berlin film club, and painted the celebrities of the moment, Marlene Dietrich, Lilian Harvey, Elisabeth Bergner, among them. His manner shifted with the city, from the austere New Objectivity of Budapest toward the art deco of the gáláns világ, the galant world of shopping, society, and the stage. This chapter owns the Berlin story; other pages refer here.
When did Rauscher move to Berlin?
Rauscher moved in 1928, taking a studio on Düsseldorfer Strasse (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 13). The year is worth stating plainly, because it is often given wrongly as 1927: the family’s own calendar essay, the Hungarian Wikipedia article, and a 2012 local broadcast all say 1927, but Számadó 2019, Gálig, and the Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon agree on 1928, and the archive follows them (/methodology).
Sport im Bild and Scherl Verlag
In 1928 Rauscher won the international cover-design competition of Sport im Bild, the Scherl Verlag fortnightly (1895-1934) devoted to sport, theatre, and society, and became a permanent contributor (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 13; /publications/sport-im-bild). Across 1928-1930 he supplied eleven Sport im Bild covers and eight interior images, a cover for the Munich weekly Jugend, two covers for Scherl’s Magazin, and work for UHU and Ullstein’s Die Dame, whose August 1927 issue had already carried his Zwillinge (Ikrek, Twins) (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 23). The full printed-work record is at /printed-works.
The cover-competition win should be read with one caveat: it is documented in the Hungarian sources but has not been traced in the German trade press, where a win of this kind would be expected to leave a record (/methodology). The Jugend 1929 cover, by contrast, survives in a public-domain facsimile and is the one Berlin work a reader can verify independently.
The film and theatre world
Rauscher joined the Berlini Filmklub and became a regular at the KÜKÁ artists’ café, known as a portraitist of choice for the film and theatre demi-monde (/bibliography#pesti-futar-1929). His New Year’s Eve of 31 December 1928 in Berlin is documented twice over: in Színházi Élet alongside Countess Esterházy Ágnes (/bibliography#szinhazi-elet-1928-51), and in an Ullstein Bild press photograph by Ernst Schneider whose caption names “Richard Taber, Agnes Esterhazy, Liane Haid, Grit Haid, Walter Rilla and the painter Rauscher on New Year’s Eve.”
The sitters
The Berlin sittings of 1929 are the part of Rauscher’s career best known today. He painted Marlene Dietrich and Lilian Harvey, the UFA operetta star; Elisabeth Bergner, the celebrated stage actress; and, from the Hungarian stage, Honthy Hanna (1927) and the film actress Molnár Vera (1928, now at OSZMI) (/bibliography#szamado-2019, pp. 31-33). The Dietrich and Bergner portraits are both held at the Klapka György Múzeum. From the Sport im Bild society circle came sitters including Countess Barbara von Kalkreuth, Baroness Vendla von Langenn, Gina Lepsius, and Baroness Nina Baehr, gathered on the /sitters/berlin-society-1928-1930 page. Each named sitter has, or shares, a page under /sitters; they are linked once here and not re-introduced.
A change of manner
Berlin changed the work. The hard moral clarity of the Budapest years gave way to the art deco of the galant world: women shopping, walking dogs, riding, at society events. Fóthy János, writing in Pesti Hírlap in 1935, fixed the ambivalence of this turn in a sentence that has followed Rauscher ever since, “sometimes only a hair separates it from fashionable kitsch, but that hair is never missing” (/bibliography#pesti-hirlap-1935-10-26). Late in 1929 he left Berlin for Nice, and then Paris.
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