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Horst Koegler (22 March 1927 – 11 May 2012) was a German dance critic, journalist and writer. He was the editor and author of books on the ballet scene in Germany, as well as the author of essays in journals and introductions to illustrated books. As a reviewer of German and English-language books, he formed a bridge between American and German dance research.
Born in Neuruppin, Koegler studied musicology, German and art history in Kiel from 1945 to 1946 and directing, dramaturgy and acting at the newly founded Staatliche Hochschule für Theater und Musik Halle in Halle an der Saale from 1947 to 1949. He then received a three-year engagement at the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater Görlitz-Zittau as assistant dramaturg and director. Since moving to West Berlin in 1951, he worked as a freelance journalist and writer, increasingly for English-language magazines. A stay of several months in the US followed in 1964. He first gained access to his later focus on dance as a reporter of Berlin opera performances. From 1957 to 1959 he was a critic for Die Welt. In 1959 he moved from Berlin to Cologne and in 1977 from Cologne to Stuttgart. There he wrote about the Stuttgart Ballet and, from 1977 to 1992, as music editor, left his mark on the dance reviews of the Stuttgarter Zeitung. However, he did not pursue his task as a critic exclusively in the field of dance, but also remained active as a music and opera critic. From 1965 onwards, he published an annual chronicle of the ballet year and published several ballet encyclopaedias. During his lifetime, he donated his dance-related document collection to the German Dance Archive Cologne as the Horst Koegler Archive.[1] From 2001 until his death, he ran his blog, the koeglerjournal, on the internet dance portal tanznetz.de. In it, he published reviews and thoughts on events in the dance world, detached from the press.
With his writing about and for ballet in particular, "Horst Koegler [...] made dance journalism a serious business again"[2] and he was considered one of the most important dance critics of his time in Germany. Thus Koegler "prepared the way for the choreographer Hans van Manen by writing"[3] and wrote in Stuttgart "with an always nimble, often flickering and always espritful pen at close quarters about the Stuttgart ballet miracle under Cranko".[4] For Koegler, the future of dance lay in ballet and his credo "I believe in beauty as the true virtue of classical ballet"[5] was combined with a negative attitude towards the dance theatre developing at the end of the 1960s. As a consequence, "an artificially imposed schism between ballet and dance theatre [...] arose that was nowhere else pursued as doggedly as in this country".[6]
Koegler died in Stuttgart at the age of 85.
