Louis Edmund Hagen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Louis Edmund Hagen (also: Louis Hagen and Lewis Haig) (born May 30, 1916 in Potsdam ; died August 17, 2000 in Oslo ) was a writer and film producer . After imprisonment in a concentration camp, he emigrated to England in 1936. In the same year, his German citizenship was revoked. He took part in the failed airborne operation around the Arnhem Bridge and wrote books about the Third Reich. He also produced several films by the animated film pioneer Lotte Reiniger .

Childhood and youth

Villa Louis Hagen, Potsdam

Louis Edmund Hagen grew up as the son of the banker Louis Hagen together with four siblings in the Villa Hagen on Potsdamer Bertinistraße . His tutor was Lotte Reiniger, who from 1923 to 1926 created the first long animated film in film history, The Adventures of Prince Achmed , together with Walter Ruttmann on the grounds of his father's "Villa Louis Hagen" . Hagen's father supported cleaners with money and rooms, and her son helped her make paper cuttings.

In 1934 he was sent to the Lichtenburg Castle concentration camp because he had made a Nazi joke to his sister on a postcard ("Toilet paper is now banned. Now there are more brown shirts"). After the father of a school friend, a high-ranking Nazi, obtained his release, he emigrated to England in 1936.

activity

For the British in September 1944 he took part with the Glider Pilot Regiment in the failed Market Garden airborne operation to capture the Arnhem Bridge . His book Arnhem Lift (1945) became an international bestseller and served as the basis for the first Arnhem film, Brian Desmond Hurst's Their's Is The Glory .

At the end of 1944, Hagen was transferred to Southeast Asia. In 1946 he wrote the book Indian Route March about his experiences with the paratroopers in India . Hagen also worked for the Phoenix Army magazine . He is said to have been the first western journalist to have conducted an interview with Ho Chi Minh . In 1946 he went to ruined Berlin as a correspondent for the Sunday Express . He interviewed nine "average" Germans, acquaintances from before 1936, about their life in the Third Reich. In 1951 Ein Volk, Ein Reich: Nine Lives Under the Nazis was published . In 1956, Louis Hagen published the autobiography of Walter Schellenberg , the last head of Hitler's foreign intelligence service, at Verlag André Deutsch . The secret war on German soil appeared in 1971 , a book about espionage during the Cold War, which dealt with the Gehlen organization , the Otto John case or the Lüdke affair in 1968.

He also worked as a film producer for his old teacher Lotte Reiniger. Like him, she had emigrated to England, where he and his company Primrose Film-Productions brought out 25 paper- cutting fairy tales such as Kalif Storch and The Brave Little Tailor . The latter received the Silver Dolfin for best short film at the Venice Biennale in 1955.

Because Hagen had a new 16 mm negative made from the only surviving film positive of Prince Achmed's adventures, the classic cartoon was restored by the German Film Museum in Frankfurt in 1989 and "experienced a happy resurrection after almost half a century". Louis Edmund Hagen died on August 17, 2000 in Oslo.

Works (selection)

  • Arnhem lift: Diary of a glider pilot . London and New York 1945 (1993). ISBN 978-0850523751 .
  • Indian Route March . London 1946.
  • Follow my leader . London 1951 (New publication 2011: Ein Volk, ein Reich: Nine lives under the Nazis . ISBN 978-0-7524-5979-0 ).
  • The Schellenberg memoirs . Edited and translated by Louis Hagen. London 1956. Also known as: The Labyrinth .
  • The secret war on German soil: the great espionage cases . Munich 1971.

literature

  • Hagen, Louis , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 449

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Melanie McFadyean: Obituary Louis Hagen. The Guardian, September 22, 2000, accessed August 15, 2012 .
  2. ↑ John Grant: Animated Film. Facts, figures and fun. Wisley (Surrey) 2006, pp. 41/42.
  3. ↑ a b Christel Strobel: Portrait of Lotte Reiniger. lottereiniger.de, accessed on August 15, 2012 .
  4. ^ Caroline Hagen-Hall: My father Louis Hagen. The History Press, February 3, 2011, accessed August 15, 2012 .
  5. ^ Newcomer to India. Louis Hagen: Indian Route March. IN: The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 9, 1946, p. 3.
  6. ↑ Der Spiegel, No. 6/1970, p. 132: Closer to the Führer. Louis Hagen: Business is business. Nine Germans under Hitler . See also: Hans-Joachim Schröder: The stolen years. Narrative stories and stories in an interview. The Second World War from the perspective of former team soldiers . Tübingen 1992, pp. 41/42.
  7. ↑ Alexander Rost: Spies, Agents, Soldiers. Secret services, not all that secret. Die Zeit, November 28, 1969, accessed August 15, 2012 .
personal data
SURNAME Hagen, Louis Edmund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hagen, Louis; Haig, Lewis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Potsdam
DATE OF DEATH August 17, 2000
Place of death Oslo