Background
Martin Sperr was born on September 14, 1944 in Steinberg, Germany; the son of teachers.
Penzinger Str. 9, 1140 Vienna, Austria
From 1962 to 1964 Martin Sperr attended the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, which he himself said he had to leave "due to lack of talent".
Martin Sperr
Martin Sperr
Johann Lang and Martin Sperr in Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern.
Martin Sperr
Martin Sperr was born on September 14, 1944 in Steinberg, Germany; the son of teachers.
Martin completed his primary studies at the Algasing boarding school in Dorfen. He also attended the Sabel School of Commerce in Munich and graduated from Trausnitz-Handelsschule in Landshut in 1961.
On September 1, 1961, he began an apprenticeship in industrial commerce at the Siemens company, in Munich, which he interrupted at the end of February 1962, since from 1961 he began taking acting classes in Munich, debuting as an actor in 1962 at the Theater44 in the play Of Mice and Men.
Between 1962 and 1964 Sperr attended the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, which he left, according to him, for lack of talent. At that time he wrote the first versions of Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern. In 1964-1965 he attended the Genzmer School of Drama in Wiesbaden (Wiesbadener Schule für Schauspiel), passing his final drama exams in 1965 in Frankfurt. In collaboration with the Editorial Suhrkamp, Martin completed Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern.
After Martin quit the Max Reinhardt Seminar, he took a series of odd jobs and wrote his first play. That work, Jagd auf Außenseiter: Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern, would be the first of his Bayrische Trilogie ("Bavarian Trilogy") plays. When it premiered in 1966, Sperr was just twenty-one years old. The play caused a sensation in Bremen in 1966 and was subsequently staged to enthusiastic critical reception throughout West Germany. It was even translated into English and produced in London and New York City in the early 1980s.
Sperr’s next work in the trilogy, Landshuter Erzählungen, brought the genre up to more contemporary times by depicting moral and economic conflicts among the West German middle classes in 1958. First produced at the Münchner Kammerspiel in 1967, the play appeared in English translation two years later as Tales from Landshut. The plot revolves around a young man, Sorm, whose father owns Landshut’s longtime contracting business.
The final work in Sperr’s Bayrische Trilogie came in 1971 with the Düsseldorf premier of Münchner Freiheit. The play’s title takes its name from a famed city square on the north end of Munich, a neighborhood that had long been the nucleus for Munich’s bohemian circle of artists and writers, many of whom went on to international renown. The play is set in 1968, a time when major building projects connected to the 1972 Summer Olympic Games were underway in the Bavarian capital.
Münchner Freiheit was less of a success for Sperr than the other two in the trilogy. What the critics disliked may have been indicative of his growing disenchantment with the medium of theater itself. He turned to a new medium, television, that seemed to restore his creative energies. With Reinhard Hauff he wrote a script, Der Räuber Mathias Kneissl ("The Robber Mathias Kneissl"), which was published in 1970 and aired on the country’s major broadcasting network the following year. The title character was a figure from Bavarian folklore, an Alpine Robin Hood whose criminal roots are chronicled in the play.
In addition to a few adaptations of English plays for the West German stage, Sperr also wrote the 1970 play Koralle Meier, which is the only one of his works to be set during the Third Reich. The title character is a prostitute who attempts to leave the profession behind by opening a small vegetable store in her town, but the community shuns her and the business.
Sperr suffered a brain hemorrhage in 1972 that left him with a severely diminished capacity to write at his previous pace. After working as a cook and at a massage school, he returned to the theater as an actor in 1974. He did adapt a play he had written earlier for television, Adele Spitzeder, for a 1978 production in Munich titled Die Spitzreder, in which he played the title role. The work revolves around a nineteenth-century Bavarian woman who began a savings bank but then embezzled from her depositors to support her lavish lifestyle.
In 1983 Martin joined the group of the Munich Volkstheater. He translated theatrical texts from German to Bavarian. In addition, he was also an actor in the Telfs Tiroler Volksschauspiele.
In 1968 Martin Sperr married Monika Sperr. They divorced in 1969. Later, he married actress Katja Barwich. This marriage produced one child - Felicitas Sperr-Burger.