In Dresden in 1900 Houdini jumped shackled into the Elbe River. It was a new stunt for him, pulling a big crowd to see him free himself underwater and bob to the surface. Everyone loved it except the police, who’d already been unnerved when he threw off their leg irons and manacles at Mathilda Gasse Prison. They tried to bring various charges against him to bring him down a peg in the public’s view, but the only crime he ever committed was walking on the grass. So they fined him for that.

It was typical of the problems he would have in the authoritarian states of Germany and Russia, but every time he bettered the police he became a bigger hero in the average man’s eyes. Houdini was seen as a freedom fighter, but in his mind — or at least in his subconscious — he was defying more than authority: he was defying life.

Much has been written about how Freudians would regard (indeed, did regard) a man who every night wanted to be locked up in a box and submerged in water. The return to the womb is the obvious angle. We’ll be seeing more of Houdini’s mother as this biography continues.

Later that same September Houdini had Berlin’s famous Wintergarten Theatre waiting for him, but first he made sure everyone knew he’d arrived by, yes, challenging the local cops to lock him up. They confidently obliged, 300 policemen looking on as he was stripped naked, cuffed and put in a cell. He was out again in six minutes. The Berlin police were embarrassed, but evidently took it better than their colleagues in Dresden.

The Wintergarten was a Crystal Palace-style jardin de plaisanterie in the Central Hotel on nightlife-intensive Friedrichstrasse until it was levelled by Allied bombs in 1944.

Checkpoint Charlie sprang up nearby when the hot war gave way to the cold one.

Like the Central in Dresden, the Wintergarten wanted to keep Houdini around after his sold-out month, and bought out his November contract with the Ronacher Theatre in Vienna. The 2,000-square-metre Wintergarten was unique in its day, festooned with palm trees, evergreen shrubs and creepers, fountains and grottoes and a “starry sky” overhead that was a technical marvel. To perform there was considered not just a career necessity but an honour.

Harry next toured Germany and Holland with the Corty-Althoff Circus and the Circus Caree. In May 1901 he was at the Colosseum in Essen and proved such a hot ticket that his 10-day run was extended to a month and sections of the building were expanded to meet the demand for seats. He accepted a challenge from the workmen of the Krupp steel-making plant at Essen and freed himself from specially constructed shackles before tens of thousands of people — almost all of them Krupp employees. The other citizens of Essen weren’t happy about the steelworkers monopolising the theatre and rioted outside, quelled only when Harry promised another show the next night for the general public.

This is Essen’s Colosseum Theatre on Altendorferstrasse, which the Krupp company built in 1899 as a workshop; it was later used as an industrial exhibition hall. Today it hosts popular musicals like “Phantom of the Opera” and “Mamma Mia” (website here).

A little bit more about that factory in Essen: In “The Secret Life of Houdini”, William Kalush and Larry Sloman (more on the biography throughout this website, but especially here) suggest that Harry had an ulterior motive for accepting the challenge in the Ruhr industrial heartland — he was snooping around for German military secrets, as per his clandestine arrangement with the British and American spy agencies. Krupp, the authors point out, was also a munitions plant. Ironically, Houdini was so popular in Germany that some people in Britain and the US wondered if he wasn’t a German spy!

Elsewhere on the same tour Houdini was almost brought up short by a challenge — a particularly secure straitjacket that took him nearly 90 minutes to shed. “The pain, torture, agony and misery of that struggle will forever live in my mind,” he said.

In Holland in 1902 he was chained to a windmill’s vane, but the vane broke and nearly crushed him. An allusion to Don Quixote seems appropriate. In Dortmund he escaped from heavy iron stocks in which a murderer had been beheaded three days earlier. The Corty-Althoff, famed for its equestrian acts, took him to Bochum, Osnabruck and back to Cologne before he started headlining his own sell-out shows in Prague, Hanover, Copenhagen, Mannheim and Bremen, and from there he was off to Paris’ Olympia Theatre for two and a half months.

Back in inhospitable Cologne, though, a particularly earnest policeman named Werner Graff published an article accusing Houdini of fraud and the magician duly sued him for libel. The case went through three trials starting in July 1902, and Houdini twice proved he could escape any restraints. He’d done his homework on German confinement: During his two-month stint at the Wintergarten in Berlin he “apprenticed” himself to a local locksmith and spent most of his days wrestling with chains and shackles.

At the third trial, a weary judge told him to go open the safe in his chambers, and Houdini thought he’d finally been caught out. What did he know about German safes? To his amazement — and his triumph — however, he discovered that the safe had not been locked. The case was won, and his accuser had to pay all the court costs.