Charly Baumann was the German trainer of tigers and an author of books about tigers. Charly was also a director of Ringling Brothers and Bamum and Bailey Circus.
Background
Ethnicity:
Baumann’s father had a Jewish ancestry. Baumann is indeed a common Jewish name. His mother was gentile. In any case, Heinz was not technically a Jew.
Baumann was born on September 14, 1928, in Berlin. He was born in a family connected to show business and animals, albeit not to the circus: Charly’s father was a movie stuntman, who worked with horses for UFA in Berlin, then Germany’s major movie studio. As a child, Charly appeared in a dozen German films. During the second world war, his parents were thrown into concentration camps after Baumann's father had helped a wealthy Jewish family flee to Spain. His father died in a gas chamber, but his mother was allowed back to Berlin, while their son was held in an orphanage and later worked on an eastern German farm. Charly escaped this brutal regime, only to be drafted into the navy and captured by the Americans weeks before the end of the war.
Education
Baumann learned lion training from Willi Hagenbeck, the German trainer, at Circus Bügler, who did not use physical force but taught his animals their tricks by rewarding them with morsels of meat.
Career
During World War II Charly was sent to a Nazi orphanage, and then he works on a farm. Then in postwar Berlin, Baumann's mother took him to an old friend, Paula Busch, who was reviving her once-prosperous circus at Berlin Zoo. He was employed as a groom and made his first appearances in the ring trying to ride the unrideable mule - in a long dress and bonnet.
In 1946, Baumann joined Circus Williams, in Cologne, as an assistant horse-trainer. There he learned the secret of infinite patience in animal training from the proprietor, Harry Williams, as well as the unremitting toil of hard work on a travelling circus. Circus Williams included a chariot-racing scene, in which Baumann played one of the charioteers, and this was brought to London's Harringay Arena in 1950 for Tom Arnold's Circus. The building was so big that Baumann wrote that "the famous London fogs seeped into the vast, cavernous interior".
In 1957 Baumann first acquired and began training tigers. In London, in 1961 he starred in a charity performance by Billy Smart's Circus in which he was joined by the singer Dorothy Squires. His tigers were used in such circus performances as the Ringling Brothers and Bamum and Bailey Circus from 1964 to 1984.At the beginning of 1984, Baumann served as Ringling Brothers’ performance director, where he remained until his retirement in 1991.
In 1975, he related his experiences in the circus world in his autobiography “Tiger, Tiger: My Twenty-Five Years With the Big Cats”. In his 1980 book ''Behind the Big Top,'' David Lewis Hammarstrom cited ''the gracious Charly Baumann'' as a fine example of ''civilized behavior between man and beast.''
''Lions were heavy'' and teaching them tricks required ''sharp, deliberate movements,'' Charly wrote. But tigers were ''light'' and responded best to ''delicate, smooth'' gestures. Training tigers was slow and difficult because unlike lions, which live together in communities, tigers are solitary beasts, living alone in the wild and generally avoiding one another's company except in the mating season.
Charly talks about tigers having very distinct personalities and actually reading his emotions and acting accordingly. Supposedly they can't speak human obviously but they can communicate very effectively and can read our state of mind and will react to it.
Comparing lions with tigers was akin to ''studying the difference between hard and soft,'' Charly wrote in his 1975 autobiography, ''Tiger, Tiger.''
Personality
Baumann liked to display the abilities of the animals rather than his own skill at subjugating them, and was the first to train four tigers to roll over in the ring simultaneously.
But Mr. Baumann belonged to the world of animals and adjusted his tactics. In Britain during the 1950's he was prohibited from taking a whip into the tiger cage, so he ostentatiously exchanged it for the orchestra conductor's baton before each performance and ''conducted'' his tigers instead.
Quotes from others about the person
''Charly Baumann belonged to a dying breed. There aren't many animal trainers left.'' - Ernest Albrecht, editor of Spectacle, a circus magazine.
Connections
Charly Baumann was married to Roger Moore in 1961. Then Araceli Rodriguez became his wife. Charly also had a mistress Ada Auredan.