Berthold quarter

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Berthold Viertel (born June 28, 1885 in Vienna ; † September 24, 1953 ibid) was an Austrian writer , dramaturge , essayist , translator and film and theater director who worked in Germany, the USA and Great Britain. His son was the screenwriter Peter Viertel .

life and work

Text from Viertel in the memorial for the victims of the Austrian struggle for freedom 1938 - 1945 in Vienna

Through his acquaintance with Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg, Viertel worked on Kraus' Die Fackel from 1910 to 1911 .

Burial place of Berthold Viertel

After the First World War , Berthold Viertel was invited by Graf von Seebach to work as a director at the Royal Theater in Dresden. From 1918 to 1921 Viertel worked as a director in Dresden and staged the world premiere of Walter Hasenclever's Jenseits (with Walter Bruno Iltz ) and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream at the Schauspielhaus . His volume of poetry Die Bahn was also created in Dresden and was published in 1921. Likewise the Bachantinnen of Euripides , the comedy The Beautiful Soul and The Bread of Mercy .

Appointments as a director and dramaturge took him to Dresden , Berlin (1924 Hans Kaltneker's sister at the Goethe stage) and Zurich . In July 1927 he received an offer from the Twentieth (20th) Century Fox Film Corporation to go to Hollywood for three years as a screenwriter and director . There he wrote u. a. the scripts for Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's circus film Four Devils (1928) and its social study Our daily bread (1930) . The last silent film that Fox produced, The One Woman Idea (1929), he directed and shortly thereafter moved to the Warner Brothers studio , where he and William Dieterle wrote the German version of The Sacred Flame ( The Sacred Flame ) in 1931 based on an artwork by William Somerset Maugham . This was followed by other directorial work such as The Magnificent Lie (1931), The Wiser Sex (1932) and The Man from Yesterday (1932), all for Paramount . From then on, Viertel traveled a lot between the American west and east coasts, appeared as a poet, shot in Great Britain ( Rhodes of Africa , 1935) and staged plays across Europe. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933 he worked as an actor and director in Berlin, had to emigrate to France because of his Jewish origins and worked again in England and the USA. In 1944 in New York he co-founded Wieland Herzfeld's Aurora publishing house .

In 1947 he returned to Europe, first working in London for the BBC , then from 1948 as a director in Zurich and from 1949 back in Vienna.

Viertel was a translator of important dramas by Tennessee Williams , which he also worked on at the Vienna Akademietheater - u. a. Endstation Sehnsucht with Curd Jürgens as Stanley Kowalski - staged. He was also known as a poet and author.

Berthold Viertel was with Salka Viertel from 1918 to 1947 . Helmsman, married and had three sons with her, Hans, Peter (1920–2007) and Thomas (* 1925). From the summer of 1940 he lived with the actress Elisabeth Neumann , whom he married in 1949.

The quarter is buried in a grave of honor in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 0, row 1, number 104). In 1959, in the 10th district of Vienna, Favoriten , the Berthold-Viertel-Gasse was named after him.

Filmography

Works

  • The track. Poems. Kurt Wolff, Leipzig 1913.
  • Karl Kraus: A character and time. Rudolf Kaemmerer, Dresden 1921.
  • The train. Poems. Jakob Hegner, Hellerau 1921.
  • The bread of grace. Stories. Jakob Hegner, Hellerau 1927.
  • Do not be afraid! New poems. Barthold Fles , New York 1941.
  • The résumé . Aurora Publishing , New York 1946.
  • Seals and documents . Poems, prose, autobiographical fragments. Kösel, Munich 1956.
  • Writings on the theater. Kösel, Munich 1970.
  • Overcoming the superman . Exile writings. Publishing house for social criticism, Vienna 1989. ISBN 3-85115-104-6 .
  • Childhood of a cherub . Autobiographical Fragments. Publishing house for social criticism, Vienna 1991. ISBN 3-85115-125-9 .
  • The gray cloth . Poems. Publishing house for social criticism, Vienna 1994. ISBN 3-85115-174-7 .

literature

  • Katharina Prager: Berthold Quarter. A biography of Viennese modernism . Vienna: Böhlau 2018, ISBN 978-3-205-20503-6 , online .
  • Kerstin Hagemeyer: Jewish life in Dresden. Exhibition on the occasion of the consecration of the new Dresden synagogue on November 9, 2001 . Saxon State Library - Dresden State and University Library, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-910005-27-6 .
  • Irene Jansen: Berthold Quarter. Life and artistic work in exile. Peter Lang, New York 1992. ISBN 0-8204-1501-4 .
  • Salka Viertel: the incorrigible heart. Claasen, Hamburg 1970. ISBN 3-546-49363-X . From American English:
    • The Kindness of Strangers. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1969. ISBN 0-03-076470-X .
  • Berthold quarter. For the 80th anniversary of his birthday. Kösel, Munich 1965.
  • J. Mayerhöfer (Ed.): Berthold Viertel. Director and poet, 1885–1953. Vienna 1975.
  • Siglinde Bolbecher (Ed.): Dream of Reality: B. Viertel Döcker, Vienna 1998. ISBN 3-85115-229-8 .
  • Siglinde Bolbecher, Konstantin Kaiser : Viertels Welt. The director, poet, essayist Berthold Viertel. Austrian Theater Museum, Vienna 1988
  • Friedrich Pfäfflin : Tribune and Aurora. Hase & Koehler, Mainz 1990. ISBN 3-7758-1215-6 .
  • Friedrich Pfäfflin (edit.): Berthold Viertel in American exile. Marbacher Magazin. Vol. 9. Marbach 1978.
  • Friedrich Pfäfflin (Red.): Berthold Viertel, 1885–1953. A documentation. Kösel, Munich 1969.
  • Peter Roessler, Konstantin Kaiser (Ed.): Dramaturgy of Democracy. Theater concepts of the Austrian exile. Promedia, Vienna 1989. ISBN 3-900478-24-4 .
  • Julia Danielczyk: Berthold district . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 3, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 2007 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hagemeyer, p. 194 (8.29 Berthold Viertel "Das Gnadenbrot".)
  2. ↑ K. Kaiser on BV see also web links
personal data
SURNAME Quarter, Berthold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian director and writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 28, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 1953
Place of death Vienna