Answald Kruger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Answald Krüger (born August 23, 1918 in German Reich ; † January 5, 1977 ) was a German theater director and screenwriter .

Live and act

As a theater director

The son of a Leipzig theater director came to Hamburg in 1945 as a refugee from East Germany and founded, together with some local enthusiasts, the "Junge Bühne", whose artistic director he became and which modern, international authors such as the French Jean Cocteau and Armand Salacrou felt obliged. The program began at the end of 1945 and, in Will Quadflieg, was even able to win a respected star from the time before 1945. The very young Hardy Krüger also earned his first theatrical spurs here. Despite general enthusiasm, the small company, which was not supported by the state, could not hold up for long and, after the currency reform had finished the Junge Bühne, it had to file for bankruptcy in early 1949. Krüger then switched to film and initially hired himself as an assistant director, in 1953 he can already be proven as dramaturgical director of Deutsche London-Film. The following year he began to write a film script for the first time, initially in collaboration with two colleagues.

As a screenwriter

Krüger's most productive and successful creative period began after he teamed up in 1957 with the German remigrant Maria Matray , a former actress who had returned from exile in Hollywood. The successful duo initially wrote only for feature films, but since the early 1960s has concentrated entirely on work for quality television, where both of them mainly converted historical material into screenplays with great success, but were also not too bad for serial crime entertainment. "With an intense interest in clearing up the past, M./Krüger took part in an attempt at a television-specific journalistic form of fictional film, the documentary play, which is supposed to bring important things from recent history to a broad audience."

Numerous ambitious Matray / Krüger television games tried to meet this quality requirement, such as Waldhausstrasse 20 (about the rescue of persecuted people from Hitler's Germany by Swedish pastors), The Carl von O trial . (about the attempts already made in the Weimar Republic to criminalize Carl von Ossietzky's uncomfortable journalism), The Hitler / Ludendorff Trial (about the legal blindness of the German state in the Weimar Republic to the putschists of 1923), Bernhard Lichtenberg (a portrait about the priest of the same name , who took a courageous stand against Nazi barbarism, with an excellent Paul Verhoeven in the title role), the Dreyfus affair (about the infamous show trial in France at the end of the 19th century, which was accompanied by anti-Semitisms), court martial (about the indulgent attitude of the Federal German judiciary towards former Nazi criminals) and The Klaus Fuchs case (about the German nuclear spy of the same name who is in Soviet service).

This fruitful collaboration ended with Krüger's sudden death in early 1977. Both of the last joint scripts were Ein Winter auf Mallorca , a film about an encounter between George Sand and Frédéric Chopin .

Filmography

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Swan song on the Alster" in Der Spiegel , 8/1949
  2. ^ Glenzdorf's international film lexicon , p. 914.
  3. ↑ Egon Netenjakob: TV film lexicon: directors, authors, dramaturges 1952–1992, Frankfurt am Main, p. 254 f.

literature

  • Johann Caspar Glenzdorf: Glenzdorf's international film lexicon. Biographical manual for the entire film industry. Volume 2: Hed – Peis. Prominent-Filmverlag, Bad Münder 1961, DNB 451560744 , p. 914.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Kruger, Answald
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH German Empire
DATE OF DEATH 5th January 1977