Albrecht Joseph

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Albrecht Joseph (also Al Joseph ; born November 20, 1901 in Frankfurt am Main ; died April 28, 1991 in Los Angeles ) was a German - American theater and filmmaker .

Life

Albrecht Joseph's father was a lawyer and in-house lawyer in Frankfurt am Main, where Joseph graduated from Realgymnasium and Goethe-Gymnasium without any particular success . He began as a directing student at the Schauspiel Frankfurt with Gustav Hartung and Richard Weichert . At Curt Elwenspoek at the theater in Kiel he made friends with the dramaturge Carl Zuckmayer . Elwenspoek and Zuckmayer were fired in 1923 for a provocative staging. Because his inexperience had exceeded the trial budget, Joseph was also released. In the mid-1920s he was assistant director to Leopold Jessner in Berlin and directed a. a. Georg Kaisers From morning to midnight . Joseph then took up studies and received his doctorate in German studies with Fritz Strich at the University of Munich in 1929 with a dissertation on baroque poetry . He translated plays by Paul Claudel , which, however, only went to print after the National Socialist era , revised by others.

Joseph's friend Zuckmayer achieved his breakthrough as an author with the play The Merry Vineyard in 1925 and he involved Joseph and his brother Rudolph S. Joseph in the work of his bestseller company. Joseph and Zuckmayer wrote a joint children's play Kakadu-Kakada , which, however, failed. 1930 both worked in Zuckmayers summer in Henndorf the Captain of Koepenick , which premiered in 1931, Joseph was officially co-author of the screenplay for the film Captain of Koepenick . Joseph, whose parents lived nearby on Lake Tegernsee , was also one of Zuckmayer's literary Henndorfer Kreis . For Richard Billinger he staged the world premiere of the peasant theater play Das Verlöbnis in Egern in 1932 . Joseph worked in 1932 on the scripts of the films Peter Voss, Die Millionendieb and Das Lied einer Nacht .

After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, Joseph first fled to Austria and from there to Italy, Great Britain, France in 1938 and finally to the USA in 1939 . In California he worked as an unnamed screenwriter and made his way as the private secretary of the German exiles Emil Ludwig , Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel . In 1943 he got the editing of Love Happy (The Marx Brothers in the theater) . With Emil Ludwig he wrote the screenplay for Hitler's Madman in 1943 about the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich , which Douglas Sirk filmed relatively unsuccessfully, also in competition with the similar film Hangmen Also Die! .

In 1945 he also changed languages ​​in his private life and from then on wrote his diary and his literary attempts in English. While he could not find a publisher for a novel or a study on the (anti-Semite) Ludwig Thoma , he was at least able to invoice the orders for the translation into German of a book by Alistair Cooke and a work, Ornament und Kunst , by Ernst Gombrich . His translation of the huge Mahler biography Henry-Louis de La Granges into German stayed in the publisher's drawers, Joseph had to go to the courts for the translator's fee.

In the film industry in Hollywood Joseph found regular employment and income than in the 1950s, editor of the TV series Gunsmoke (Gunsmoke) . Under the Americanized name Al Joseph, he worked in ancillary technical functions of film production on a large number of Hollywood films.

In 1942 Joseph married Lella (Magdalena) Saenger (1907–1991), a daughter of Samuel Saenger . Lella Saenger had studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Arthur Schnabel , had to emigrate in 1933 and since 1937 worked in Hollywood as a pianist for MGM for film music. After the divorce, which did not formally take place until 1958, she was married to the film composer Franz Waxman until 1965 .

The sculptor Anna Mahler came from exile in London in 1950 to live with her mother Alma Mahler-Werfel in Los Angeles to help her move to New York. Joseph had seen her at Werfel's in Vienna in 1933 and was now hoping to see her again. The two lived together from 1951, they married in 1970, it was Anna Mahler's fifth marriage and the last of the two. His "mother-in-law" Alma Mahler-Werfel disagreed with her daughter's liaison and ignored Joseph in her autobiographical writings. Joseph produced two documentaries with Anna Mahler, A Stone Figure (1954) and Tower of Masks (1965), as well as Alma Mahler-Werfel (1956), the only film document that shows Alma Mahler, in which the daughter is only through behind the powerful mother Image flits. For the film A Stone Figure , Joseph received a Diplôme de d'honneur at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964 . From 1969 Mahler and Joseph lived mainly in Spoleto , where both became honorary citizens. In 1975 Joseph contributed the biographical part and most of the photos to an illustrated book about Anna Mahler at Belser-Verlag . Since 1985 she worked without Joseph in London near her daughter Marina and died in 1988 after 38 years of being together with Joseph at last.

Joseph's memoirs , which he wrote in German in 1985, were authorized by him after editing, but they were only published posthumously . He let the text end in 1951 when he met Anna Mahler again.

Filmography (selection)

script

cut

Fonts

  • Odes of Horace in German translations from the 17th century. A contribution to the analysis of the baroque style of language . Uhlschmid, Rottach am Tegernsee 1930 (also dissertation at the University of Munich 1929).
  • A table at the Romanoffs. From expressionist theater to western series. Memories . With an afterword by Stefan Weidle , Juni-Verlag, Mönchengladbach 1991, ISBN 3-926738-22-7 .
  • Portraits . Part 1: Carl Zuckmayer, Bruno Frank . Edited and translated by Rüdiger Völkers. Alano, Aachen 1993, ISBN 3-89399-174-3 .
  • The last curtain . From the American. trans. and with an afterthought by Rüdiger Völckers. Weidle, Bonn 1997, ISBN 3-931135-23-3 .
  • Gunther Nickel (Ed.): Carl Zuckmayer. Albrecht Joseph. Correspondence: 1922–1972 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0104-7 .
  • Albrecht Joseph's estate in the German Exile Archive 1933–1945

literature

  • Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than is given ..." Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. Acabus, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 584. There also a short biography of the younger brother Rudolph S. Joseph (1904–1998)
  • Marlene Streeruwitz : Posterity. A travel report . Novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-10-074424-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Albrecht Joseph: Ein Tisch bei Romanoffs , 1991, p. 21
  2. ^ Gunther Nickel: Briefwechsel , 2007, p. 683ff
  3. ↑ Gunther Nickel: Briefwechsel , 2007, p. 682
  4. ^ Gunther Nickel: Briefwechsel , 2007, p. 687
  5. ↑ Andreas Heckmann: On the archeology of the literary media worker. The correspondence between Carl Zuckmayer and Albrecht Joseph , review, in: Am Erker
  6. ↑ Albrecht Joseph: Portraits , 1993, p. 260 ff.
  7. ↑ Albrecht Joseph: Ein Tisch bei Romanoffs , 1991, p. 206f
  8. ↑ Andreas Stuhlmann: Desiderata of exile film research. The example of Hitler's Madman by Douglas Sirk , exilographer. Newsletter of the Walter A. Berendsohn Research Center for German Exile Literature No. 1208, summer 2013
  9. ↑ a b c d e f Stefan Weidle: Afterword , in: Albrecht Joseph: Ein Tisch bei Romanoffs , 1991, pp. 243–246
  10. ^ A b c d e Gunther Nickel: Briefwechsel , 2007, therein: Annotated list of names , pp. 460–464
  11. ↑ Karen Monson: Alma Mahler-Werfel. The indomitable muse . Heyne, Munich 1985, p. 311
  12. ↑ Barbara Weidle, Ursula Seeber (Ed.): Anna Mahler. I am at home in myself . Weidle, Bonn 2004, ISBN 3-931135-79-9
  13. ↑ Review Streeruwitz: Nachwelt , with Dieter Wunderlich
personal data
SURNAME Joseph, Albrecht
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Joseph, Al
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American theater and film maker
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH April 28, 1991
Place of death los Angeles