Dates

• Existence: 1903 - 1999

Biography

Circus Busch was established by Jakob Busch (1879-1948) in Nuremberg, Germany in 1903.

Jakob was born on 5 November 1879 in Würzburg, into a family of fairground entertainers, who owned a small menagerie. Jakob started working in the family business as a child and eventually developed a strongman act. In 1903, Jakob left the family business to establish his own hybrid circus/travelling menagerie show, ‘Wild-Animal Show Circus Busch’.

The initial circus was a small outfit with a strong focus on showing animals, nevertheless it gained popularity and progressed to become one of the largest travelling circus in Europe by the mid-1900s.

By the 1920s, the circus was employing some of the most celebrated European and international circus acts of the time, it had incorporated an unusual travelling water spectacular to the show and it was touring around Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Italy.

At the end of the Second World War, Circus Busch, which was located in Saxony (Eastern Germany), found itself under communist ruling. Although initially it was allowed to operate as a private company, it was nationalised in 1951 and incorporated into the VEB Zentral-Zirkus, the State circus company of the German Democratic Republic in 1960. In spite of this the name Circus Busch retained its popularity and continued existing until the fall of the German Democratic Republic in 1990, when it was bought out by the Western German Circus Busch-Roland.

Parallel to this, in 1953, Carl Stelzenmüller, an alleged illegitimate son of Jakob Busch created the Carl Busch circus, which was bought by circus director Alfred Scholl in the early 1980s and later by Alfons Willeam (1941-2009), from the Wille circus family, who manage it today.

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