Trivia

Father of actress Ellen Schwanneke.

The transition to the sound film was no problem for him and he impersonated other roles in front of the camera till to his early death.

He was also a member and served on the Board of the Cooperative German National Stage.[.

Viktor Schwanneke was born in the small village of Hedwigsburg in the municipal bounds of Kissenbrück, in the district of Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony.

In addition to his theatre work, Schwanneke was also an active member of the actor's union and he committed himself the social concerns of his colleagues.

When national unrest broke out in during the German Revolution of 1918-1919 and the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic was created, Schwanneke was the interim director of the Bavaraian State Theatre and State Opera.

The actor Viktor Schwanneke began his professional career as a bank clerk before he decided to become an actor.

In 1920 he went back to Berlin where he remained in the next years. He not only appeared as a stage actor but also realised several plays as a director.

In Stetten he appeared in a 1907-1908 stage production with Emil Jannings titled Seine Hoheit (English: His Highness), billed as Viktor Schwanneke-Willberg.

In 1908 he went to Munich where he held a position at the Bavarian State Theatre. There, he honed his skills as a comedian, best known for his roles as the theater director Striese in The Rape of the Sabine Women and in a popular production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

One of his greatest successes came late, shortly before his death, at Max Reinhardt's directorship in Der Schwierige, a comedy penned by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

In 1913 he coauthored a book with Paul L. Fuhrmann titled Dr. Fix: Bluff in 3 Aufz and from 1916 until 1918 he wrote a number of booklets celebrating the histories of various German theaters.

From March 1922 until his death, he was the owner of a wine bar on Rankestraße in Berlin. The bar became a popular meeting place for artists and film and theatre people.

In 1920 he settled permanently in Berlin and worked first as an actor and director at the 'Little Theatre' (German: Kleinen Schauspielhaus) in Charlottenburg.

In 1916 he was asked by director Maximilian Sladek for to be a guest performer onstage in Berlin. Here he succeeded in the Robert Forster-Larrinaga penned comedy Der Floh im Panzerhaus: Schicksals-Groteske.

He made his stage debut in 1904 and it followed engagements at smaller theaters like Rudolfstadt. Finally he became established as a stage actor and he acted in Frankfurt, Stettin and Munich.

One of his more noteworthy achievements was as a director of the Anton Dietzenschmidt penned play Vom Lieben Augustin in 1926 at the Volksbühne Theatre am Bülowplatz. The cast included actor Alexander Granach.

In the interwar period of the Weimar Republic he began a career in film. From 1922 until just before his death in 1931, he assumed a variety of character actor and supporting roles opposite such popular film actors of the era as Margarete Schön, Lya De Putti, Anny Ondra, Paul Bildt and Carl de Vogt.

His daughter Ellen Schwanneke became an actress too.