Walter Ohm

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Walter Albert Ohm (born February 12, 1915 in Greifenberg , Western Pomerania ; † September 10, 1997 in Husum ) was a German radio play and theater director who also worked as an actor until the end of the war .

biography

Walter Ohm was born in Greifenberg in the back of Pomerania. He grew up first in Czechoslovakia and then in Berlin , where he also went to school and graduated from high school. He then studied theater studies , art history and German studies for a few semesters . After that, however, he attended the directing class of the drama school at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. During the two-year course he also worked as assistant director to Heinrich George at the Schillertheater .

Since he initially wanted to work as an actor, he left Berlin for Munich in 1936/37 and joined the Bayerische Landesbühne , a touring theater that gave guest performances throughout the Free State. During the war he was temporarily stationed in Munich as a soldier, so that he was able to appear again and again as an actor at the Münchner Kammerspiele . Ohm, who described himself as a bad actor, now switched his artistic activity entirely to directing.

In 1945, immediately after the end of the war, he worked as a director for the theater maker Eugen Felder , who had opened the new theater as a temporary facility in a former gymnasium in the Nymphenburg district of Munich . However, his plan was to found his own youth theater, because he believed that he could reach young people with a progressive theater and, to a certain extent, influence them in an educational way. Ohm, who described himself as politically left-wing and had sympathy for communism , also saw theater work as an educational task, without which theater would be pointless. For financial reasons, however, he was unable to realize his plans.

In 1946, when preparing the founding of his theater project, he met the American control officer Klaus Brill, who was part of the Radio Control Branch . Brill, who was also responsible for the cultural area of ​​Radio Munich, the forerunner of Bavarian Radio , offered Walter Ohm to work for Radio Munich after his theater had failed. There they were looking for new unencumbered employees such as Fritz Benscher , who was also hired by Brill. He agreed, although he was not particularly interested in radio and radio drama. According to his own statements, he would have preferred to work as a theater director, but since there was nothing corresponding, working on the radio was better than nothing, especially at the time.

So in the spring of 1946 he started working as a freelancer at Radio Munich in the radio play department. Neither then nor later did his political attitude have a negative impact on him. He quickly found recognition from Klaus Brill, which led to the fact that he was soon receiving a fixed monthly salary. In addition to his work as an editor, he was increasingly employed as a radio play director. He delivered his first major directorial work in 1946. On January 1, 1950, he was permanently employed by Bayerischer Rundfunk, where he stayed until his retirement in 1980.

In the 1960s he was also at the Munich reading stage “Art. 5 ”worked as artistic director, who wanted to put political and socially critical plays and topics up for discussion with staged readings and documentations. The name of the stage alluded to Article 5 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany , which guarantees freedom of expression and information. The program advisory board included the leading intellectuals and artists of the time. Only in this activity was his left political stance visible to the outside world.

His career as a radio play director was marked by clear ups and downs. In 1958/59 he led an ultimately unsuccessful labor law suit against Bayerischer Rundfunk. He sued for compliance with his contract from 1950, in which he was assured of directing 12 major radio play productions per year.

His extensive works include numerous theater adaptations and novels of world literature edited for funk, such as Schuld und Atonement by Fjodor Dostojewski from 1949 with Peter Lühr , Maria Nicklisch and Marianne Kehlau or two women by Honoré de Balzac , in which Elfriede Kuzmany alongside again Maria Nicklisch and Peter Lühr spoke the main roles. For the original radio play Philemon and Baucis from 1955 with Carl Wery , Lina Carstens and Hanns Stein , the author Leopold Ahlsen was awarded the renowned war blind radio play prize the following year . In 1956 René Deltgen , Agnes Fink and Fritz Strassner were the main actors in the radio play adaptation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck . In contrast to many of his directing colleagues such as Fritz Schröder-Jahn , Eduard Hermann , Kurt Meister , Heinz-Günter Stamm or Otto Kurth , he himself never appeared as a radio play speaker.

In the 1930s, Walter Ohm actress married Else Wolz , which a few years after the war to the Berliner Ensemble of Bertolt Brecht in the former East Berlin went. Ohm lived until the end in the Munich district of Schwabing , near the place where he wanted to found his youth theater in 1946.

He died in Husum in September 1997. His granddaughter is the actress Rahel Ohm .

Radio plays (selection)

literature

  • Franziska Reichenbacher : The radio play director Walter Ohm - theater adaptation in radio in the fifties and sixties and its relevance in radio play programs today; Section: 3.1 Biography and professional career of Walter Ohms. Master's thesis in theater studies, submitted at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich in March 1997; Excerpts obtained from the sound archive of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation.
  • The internet database of the ARD radio play archive (all information on radio play productions, accessed on January 29, 2012)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dates of death according to the sound archive of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, confirmed by the cemetery administration in Husum
personal data
SURNAME Ohm, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ohm, Walter Albert (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor, radio play and theater director
DATE OF BIRTH February 12, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Greifenberg , Western Pomerania , Germany
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 1997
Place of death Husum , Germany