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.

In “The Life and Many Deaths of Houdini”, Ruth Brandon makes a solid case for the belief that Houdini was constantly in search of father figures. His own father seems to have let him down, even if Harry praised him as a beloved parent and a scholar, and the great Robert-Houdin let him down as well when Harry discovered that his celebrated tricks weren’t of his own devising. When Houdini knocked his former idol off the pedestal with “The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin”, he dedicated the book to his father. Two birds felled with one stone. There were other father figures.

Above is a satellite image of the Royal Theatre Carré, seemingly afloat on the Amstel in Amsterdam. When it was built in 1887 by the Franco-German Carré dynasty, long famed for their equestrian skills, it was home to the circus of Oscar Carré, at least from November through May. When the weather warmed they hit the road, as any good circus should.

Tagging along with them in September 1903 was Houdini, and it was during Circus Carré’s appearance in Dordrecht, Holland, that Harry finally received permission to visit Professor Wiljalba Frikell, and an extraordinary tale began — even by Houdini’s standards.

Sometimes billed as “Physician to the Emperor and Empress of Russia”, Frikell had been one of Europe’s most celebrated magicians of the previous century, and Harry knew his story well. He was one of the pioneers who dispensed with the cumbersome stage trappings like heavy draperies and elaborate apparatus that were once part and parcel of magic shows, the better to conceal trickery. Houdini decided that Frikell had in fact been the first to jettison the junk, long before Robert-Houdin was applauded for doing so, though even Harry had to admit that Frikell first went with a bare stage because he had to: All of his gear was lost in a fire.

While in Russia he’d learned that Frikell was still alive at age 87 and living in Kotschenbroda, Germany (a town evidently not far from Dresden but unknown to the Internet). Houdini dutifully made the pilgrimage — it was his habit to cultivate the friendship of past masters — and, having arrived in the middle of the night, even waited on a park bench for a decent hour to knock at Frikell’s door.

He was refused entry — the old man just wanted to be left alone — and for all his trouble Harry left with nothing save a photo of the house. He’d hired a photographer to get the great man’s picture, but settled for a tourist’s snapshot of the Villa Frikell. (It turned out that Frikell believed Harry might be his illegitimate son.)

Undeterred, Houdini wrote several times to Frikell from Moscow and sent gifts, and gradually coaxed an invitation from him. A date was set during Houdini’s engagement in Dresden, but Frikell didn’t wait. He came to Dresden unannounced to look for Harry, and was ironically turned away at the theatre without Harry knowing of it. He and his wife went to a nearby cafe and Harry went looking for him in turn, saw an elderly couple that was indeed them and thought nothing of it, and the opportunity was missed.

On the Saturday Houdini travelled again to Kotschenbroda to keep his appointment, and found to his shock that Frikell had died two and half hours earlier! Having gone to great lengths to prepare for his visitor, including having a new photograph taken with his wife (seen here), the old man had had a heart attack and “was not cold yet”, Harry wrote his brother Theo. “Mr and Mrs Frikell had dressed up especially to meet me, but Death forestalled my visit … There lie the man who had sworn he would not see any stranger as long as he lived — and Fate compelled him to keep his word.”

Houdini had much better luck with Ira Davenport, who with his brother William had been world-famous as a medium in the 1850s and ’60s.

There are scholars online who still quaintly blame Houdini for “ruining the Davenport brothers’ reputation”. In fact, despite the unshakeable faith that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and many others maintained in the brothers’ psychic powers, Ira told Houdini flat out that it was all a sham, and that he and William had never claimed to have supernatural gifts. Of course, they didn’t deny it, either — there was a lot of money to be made.

Conan Doyle produced plausible evidence that Ira, at least, considered himself a genuine believer in spiritualism, but Sir Arthur’s claim that the brothers were never exposed was patently false. They were caught out on several occasions and very nearly lynched.

In 1854 the Davenports — Ira was 15 and Bill 13 — followed Maggie and Katie Fox into the realm of superstar mediumship by apparently communicating with the dead via mysterious rapping, automatic writing, flying dishes and cutlery and even levitation (all in the dark, if not the imagination), as well as through spirit guides named George Brown and John King.

They played theatres across America and Europe, producing a wide range of “spiritual manifestations” while tied to their chairs inside a “spirit cabinet”. The violins, guitars, concertinas and tambourines placed next to them played and glowing hands waved through windows in the cabinet doors.

William died while they were touring Australia in 1877, and when Houdini was performing there 33 years later he made it his business to have the unkempt grave tidied up. Just before Houdini went Down Under, yet another of the old greats of magic, Harry Kellar, told him that Ira was still alive and retired to Mayville, New York (not “Maysville”, as some biographies have it).

Houdini promptly wrote to Ira and, when he returned from Australia, visited him on July 11, 1911, at his house on Blanchard Street in Mayville. This is when Ira spilled the beans about the brothers’ tricky ways, something he hadn’t even confessed to his own children.

There’s not a lot to see in Mayville, as the Google Earth image below shows. Blanchard Street has only a few houses, others having no doubt been swallowed up by a shopping mall. The Mayville Cemetery, where Ira was presumably interred, is indicated where several sources say it should be, though it’s not apparent on Google Earth. The other image shows brother William’s resting place in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery, at 700 acres the biggest in southern hemisphere. Almost a million people have been buried there since it opened in 1867.
Ira died in 1911, not long after they the two conjurors met, clearing the way for Houdini to eventually share the spilled beans, in his 1924 book “A Magician Among the Spirits”.

There’s a rather engaging “biography” of the brothers online here, written while they were still alive.