Charles Schumann, the Munich bar owner, author of important books on drinks and drinking, model and leading actor in unforgettable advertising films, has his birthday today - and if his many fans among writers, academics, artists and journalists want to do something useful on this occasion: Then they could they immediately stop claiming that they go "to Charles" whenever they are in Munich.
The claim is wrong;
First of all, the bar we are talking about is located in southern Germany, where the article is put in front of the first name;
So you go “to Charles”, which is only possible if “Charles” is there too, which he often isn't.
Claudius Seidl
Editor in the features section.
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Because, like every Munich-born man by choice and opinion, Charles Schumann is best able to endure the beautiful little town, on the most beautiful corner of which his bar is located, when he can leave it as often as possible to go to Tokyo, New York or the south of France . Sometimes he even makes it to Berlin; then he sits in the “Grill Royal” and mocks the glass refrigerators in which the meat is slowly maturing for everyone to see, and even more so at the prices.
Helmut Dietl had to move to California so that he got the strong homesickness that drove him to invent the “Monaco Franze”. The legend goes that Charles Schumann was working in the south of France when he realized that he had to open an “American Bar” in Munich. In Dietl's “Quite Normal Wahnsinn” you can still see him mixing the drinks in “Harry's New York Bar”. But that's the prehistory; the real story begins in literature. It begins with Luis Buñuel's wonderful souvenir book “My Last Sigh”, in which the Catholic and surrealist Buñuel virtually declares drinking a martini to be a sacrament and dreams of opening the most expensive bar in the world.
It begins in the first third of Raymond Chandler's “Long Farewell”, where Philip Marlowe prefers to visit a bar in Hollywood late in the afternoon: “It was so quiet in 'Victor's Bar' that you could even hear the temperature drop when you came in.” One of those Charles Schumann imagined a literary place - and his achievement and at the same time a miracle is that the magic did not disappear after two or three years, yes that even the smoking ban, which lifted the veils and fog of the fictional out of the bar, nothing to this magic could have on.
If you are a regular, it can happen that you get a call from a literary scholar: He was doing research on literary life in Munich in the eighties, and there was constant talk of this bar;
why it is so important for writers.
Everything that pops
Michael Althen wrote a long time ago in his obituary for Jörg Fauser, who celebrated his 43rd birthday at “Schumann's” before he entered the east of Munich on the autobahn, that lies between the dream of America and the German reality is an ocean of alcohol Vice caught and killed.
And when Rainald Goetz created his legendary Spiegel essay “Everything that pops” as a narrative from this bar in 1992, he provoked a “Schumann's” debate: The Zeit editor Iris Radisch resisted, in the name of the entire German feuilleton, so to speak. against Goetz's accusation of being dreary and civil servant and incapable of new ideas.
Whiskey, vodka, intoxication, life, nothing but non-literary objects.
Charles Schumann, who used to speak very little and now, since he has seen a lot and would like to report about it, a little more; but who can't stand gossipers and intellectual show-offs - Charles Schumann wanted it all. If he liked students who had little money and found them interesting, maybe there was a soup in the kitchen or a lagavulin on the house. And when these students became adult writers or filmmakers: then, it revealed Schumann's feeling for people.
When the FAZ-Magazin visited the bar in February 1985, the masculinity simulators of the cultural scene still dominated there, people with stubble, whose sentences wore cowboy boots. Even then, Charles Schumann was far too modern for retro productions like this - and when he started working as a part-time model, he was around sixty, had gray hair, a boxer nose and lots of wrinkles. “Separates the men from the boys” was the saying in the clip for an eau de toilette, and the creators of the video may have taken it seriously. Charles Schumann grinned as if he wanted to say that for someone like him it's not about separating, but about the opposite: that's why he runs his bar.
Charles Schumann, the son of a farmer from the Upper Palatinate and owner of a bar, with whose fame the bar of the "Algonquin" in New York can compete, is at the same time the most down-to-earth and cosmopolitan person one can imagine. And a very literary figure in the unbelievable presence and existence of it. But when he is there, you can also order a beer from him. Today he is eighty years old.