- 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.
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