Arno Hauke

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arno Hauke (* 1921 in Breslau ; † after 1970) is a German business economist and from 1956 to 1960 chairman of the board of the film production and distribution company UFA .

Live and act

The 1.92 meter tall Lower Silesian had studied economics in his hometown of Wroclaw at the beginning of the Second World War, before he was drafted and transferred to the Russian front during the course of the war. His last rank was that of a lieutenant in a fog thrower division. Shortly after the end of the war, Hauke ​​began working as a tax auditor in September 1945 (until the end of 1946). There he was responsible for the supervision of the financial and operational accounting as well as the tax and insurance system of different companies. At the beginning of 1947 he switched to the Deutsche Treuhand Gesellschaft. In the summer of 1949 Hauke ​​came to Varenholz Castle in Westphalia, where the UFA management had relocated all of their business documents in the last days of the war. On behalf of the British occupation authorities, the Deutsche Treuhand was supposed to first take stock of the UFA files. The aim of the Allies was to break the once powerful German state-owned company into several parts. Hauke ​​determined that the UFA assets remaining in the west were significantly larger than expected, and so his employer appointed their auditor as general trustee for the UFI assets in the British zone. In the years to come, Hauke ​​successfully succeeded in thwarting the Allied plan to break up the UFA-UFI.

As the head of the UFA parent company UFI in Düsseldorf, Hauke ​​prepared the next step: the return to film production. For this purpose, Capitol-Film GmbH was founded in March 1953, which, with its range of products, made a loss of around 5 million marks in a very short time. At the end of 1955, Capitol-Film stopped production. In April 1956, a consortium of banks led by Deutsche Bank bought the Ufa-Theater AG, which had been combined to form new stock corporations, and Universum-Film AG with the Afifa copier and the studios in Berlin-Tempelhof. Arno Hauke ​​was appointed CEO of both companies. At the end of November of the same year, Hauke submitted an offer to the so-called small television commission of the WDR to produce 40- to 55-minute feature films for the television program. Six UFA television films were made. But the quality of these films, including Volker von Collande's productions "The Master Thief", "Cardillac, the Goldsmith of Paris" and "Wanted is Murderer X" as well as Thomas Engel's "My Lord knows how to help" , did not always match that of the television makers expected quality, and so only the aforementioned four of the agreed six UFA TV films were broadcast.

Hauke ​​then decided in the spring of 1958 to resume the cinema film production that had been forcibly discontinued at the end of the war in 1945 with the UFA. Around 20 films were made in just two years, but most of them turned out to be box office flops and artistically did not live up to expectations. In August 1960, UFA's majority shareholder, Deutsche Bank , pulled the rip cord and dismissed Hauke. At the end of July, when the general meeting of Universum-Film AG and Ufa-Theater AG was being held in Berlin, Deutsche Bank had voted to grant discharge to Hauke ​​for his management, even though the group made a net loss in 1959 under his leadership of 5.4 million marks and bank and bill debts of 22 million marks were on the books. After his inglorious departure, Arno Hauke, until then anything but shy of the public, almost completely disappeared from the public eye. In 1970 he worked as an interview partner and contemporary witness on the TV documentary "What became of Goebbels' Ufa?" of the film critic Reinhold E. Thiel with.

Private

Hauke ​​married the former television announcer and film actress Ingrid Ernest on Christmas Eve 1958 . Both became parents of a son in the fall of 1959.

Filmography

Films made under his aegis (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The balance sheet as of August 31, 1949 was fixed assets of 9.5 million marks, current assets of 12.7 million marks and equity of 15 million marks and a bank balance of 6.4 million marks, of which 6.2 Millions of marks were freely available. Other assets were 15 intact and playable Ufa theaters, of which only three were confiscated or forcibly leased, four Ufa leased theaters that were just being re-directed, and a reservoir of 693 feature films with a total of 1630 copies that were made in the period of June 1945 By August 31, 1949, in the British Zone alone, had made 96.2 million Reichsmarks and 5.8 million D-Marks, as well as a stock of 679 film copies that had not yet been shown.
  2. ↑ Cover story The Resurrection in: Der Spiegel 4/1959
  3. ^ The UFA after 1945 on filmportal.de
  4. ↑ The resurrection in: Der Spiegel 4/1959
  5. ^ The discharge in: Der Spiegel 35/1960 of August 24, 1960
  6. ↑ Der Spiegel 32/1960 of August 3, 1960
  7. ↑ Short message in: Der Spiegel 46/1959 of November 11, 1959
personal data
SURNAME Hauke, Arno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German business economist and film company manager
DATE OF BIRTH 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Breslau , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH after 1964