Albrecht Becker (production designer)

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Production designer Albrecht Becker, Würzburg , around 1930

Walter Albrecht Becker (born November 14, 1906 in Thale ; † April 22, 2002 in Hamburg ) was a German set designer .

Life

The son of master baker Otto August Becker (1877–1961) and his wife Charlotte, née Grosse (1877–1952), attended school from 1913 to 1921 and took a commercial apprenticeship in Quedlinburg from 1921 to 1924 , after which he spent two and a half years at the technical center for Textile active in Reutlingen .

In the autumn of 1924 he moved to Würzburg, where he found a permanent position as a window dresser in the fashion store "Rom und Wagner". In 1926 he attended the decoration school in Munich. At the beginning of 1935 he was arrested in Würzburg together with his older friend, Joseph Friedrich Abert (1879-1959), the director of the Würzburg State Archive , for offenses against Section 175 of the Criminal Code and sentenced to three years in prison, which he served in Nuremberg. In 1940 he volunteered as a war volunteer and from the beginning of 1941 acted as a radio operator on the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1942 he was wounded in the arm. During this time he started tattooing himself.

During a convalescence leave in 1944, he met the budding film architect Herbert Kirchhoff , with whom he became a close friend. After the war Becker first worked as an interpreter, then as a draftsman. When he learned in the spring of 1947 that Kirchhoff was able to gain a foothold in the film business, he became its assistant.

From 1951 Becker worked as an equal partner of Kirchhoff on numerous films, preferably for real films and for productions by Helmut Käutner . Twice they won a federal film award in recognition of their achievements . It was not until 1960 that Becker began to work increasingly without Kirchhoff's participation, mostly for the NDR . Apart from the feature films, he also set out many industrial and educational films .

After the end of his active time as a film architect, he started training African film outfitters in the Hamburg studio in the mid-eighties . After the death of his partner Kirchhoff in 1988, he bequeathed his estate along with his own material to the Deutsche Kinemathek and the German Film Museum .

Becker is also known as an early representative of the tattoo and fetish culture.

Commemoration

In the exhibition of the Imperial War Museum in London on the Holocaust , the persecution of Albrecht Becker and Joseph Friedrich Abert is thought of as an example of the persecution of homosexuals in the “ Third Reich ” based on some of the documents on display .

In 2005 Rosa von Praunheim published the interview with a vital 90-year-old for his series "Gay Witnesses of the Nazi Era", the film "Love and Sorrow - Albrecht Becker".

Filmography

Awards

  • 1957: Film tape in gold (best architecture) for Der Hauptmann von Köpenick
  • 1961: Film tape in gold (best architecture) for the glass of water

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tim Geyer: How this tattoo pioneer survived the Nazis and became a body positivity symbol . VICE Media GmbH. January 2, 2019. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Becker, Albrecht
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Becker, Walter Albrecht (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German production designer
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Thale
DATE OF DEATH April 22, 2002
Place of death Hamburg