Little Known Spaghetti Western actors ~ Karl Dannemann

[These daily posts will cover little known actors or people that have appeared in more recent films and TV series. Various degrees of information that I was able to find will be given and anything that you can add would be appreciated.]

Karl Dannemann was born on March 22, 1896, in Bremen, Theuringen, Germany. The son of an innkeeper Johann Albert Dannemann and his wife Clara Marie Caroline Dannemann. Karl was the youngest of seven children, Karl did not get to know his father. At the age of seven, he got his first paint box. But probably at the insistence of his mother, he first completed an apprenticeship with a master painter and then trained as a stage designer at the Bremen Theatre and attended the Bremen School of Arts and Crafts in the evenings – a forerunner of the Bremen University of the Arts. While still a student, he was drafted as a soldier in 1916 and did not return from Russia until the spring of 1918. On February 14, 1920, he married Erna Margarete Noeren.

As a master student of Max Slevogt, he realized some of his most striking works in Bremen in the 1920s. He created frescoes in the Bacchus Cellar of the Bremen Ratskeller and in the Bell, the painting Hindenburg Banquet in the Bremen Town Hall, as well as various stage sets, portraits, seascapes, still life’s, city and landscape paintings.

On January 1, 1932, he joined the NSDAP. That same year, Dannemann began his career as an actor, first on stage, then in film, where he appeared in a total of about 50 productions, in entertainment films as well as in National Socialist propaganda films. Most of the time, he was a concise supporting actor who portrayed everyday people or played the hero's sidekick. He received the most attention in 1941 with his role alongside Hans Albers in “Carl Peters”. In the same year, he wrote the screenplay for the short film “Somewhere in a Wide Country” (based on The Bear by Anton Chekhov) and directed it for the first time. The film was not intended for public screening but as a directorial test. He had been exempted from the war effort as indispensable and was on the list of the divinely gifted.

Dannemann committed suicide in 1945 at the age of 49 to avoid capture by Soviet troops. His wife Erna Dannemann died childless on March 2, 1975, in Potsdam-Babelsberg in an old people's home on the Allee to Glienicke.

Karl Dennemann’s only Euro-western was in “Wasser für Canitoga” (Water for Canitoga) in 1939 as Dyke.

DENNEMANN, Karl (aka Carl Dannemann) [3/22/1896, Bremen, Theuringen, Germany – 5/4/1945, Berlin, Berlin, Germany (suicide)] – painter, director, writer, film actor, married to Erna Margarete Noeren [1892-1975] (1920–1945).

Water for Canitoga – 1939 (Dyke)