Angel Wagenstein

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Angel Wagenstein

Angel Wagenstein ( Bulgarian Анжел Вагенщайн ; born October 17, 1922 in Plovdiv ) is a Bulgarian novelist , screenwriter and documentary filmmaker .

Life

Angel Wagenstein was born as a Sephardic Jew in Plovdiv , Bulgaria , and grew up in Paris . His family had emigrated for political reasons. Wagenstein returned to Bulgaria and fought as a partisan in the anti-fascist resistance, was betrayed, arrested and sentenced to death. He was transferred because of the bombing of Sofia and the sentence was not carried out due to the advance of the Red Army .

After the war, he studied film dramaturgy at the Moscow School of Film . He worked with well-known directors such as Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Staudte and made documentaries from Vietnam, among others , for the SFB . His film Stars was selected for the Cannes Film Festival competition in 1959 and won the Jury Prize. The Moscow International Film Festival awarded the film Goya , directed by Konrad Wolf, for which Wagenstein wrote the script, the special prize of the jury in 1971.

He was one of the notable actors in the 1989 coup.

It was not only because of the decline of the Bulgarian film industry after 1989 that he developed into a renowned novelist who was particularly well received in France. Wagenstein still attaches great importance to addressing the history of the Jews in Europe: So far, the novel Pentateuch or The five books Isaaks (1999) and Lebwohl, Shanghai (2010), which received the Jean Monnet Prize in 2004, have been published in German of European literature . The novel "Far from Toledo" has not yet been translated into German, but has already been awarded the "Alberto Benveniste" Prize for Literature Sepharade in France .

biography

The American director Andrea Simon shot the documentary "Angel Wagenstein - Art is a Weapon" about the life of Angel Wagenstein (USA / Bulgaria, 85 minutes; OmU; 2017). It has been shown at several film festivals, but has not yet found a distribution. It is currently only available through the production company Arcadia Pictures.

Scripts (selection)

literature

  • An expert for upheavals in: Achim Engelberg : But where does Europe end? - Cross-border commuters between London and Ankara . Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02132-0 .
  • Stars and princes on the way to knowledge. The friend Angel Wagenstein, in: Antje Vollmer / Hans-Eckardt Wenzel: Konrad Wolf. Chronicler in the century of extremes. The other library, Berlin 2019, pp. 319–348

Web links

Commons : Angel Wagenstein  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Art is a Weapon" - The life of Angel Wagenstein. Retrieved October 19, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Wagenstein, Angel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Вагенщайн, Анжел (Bulgarian); Vagenstajn, Anzel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bulgarian novelist, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH October 17, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Plovdiv