Bernhard Wicki

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Bernhard Wicki (born October 28, 1919 in St. Pölten , Lower Austria , † January 5, 2000 in Munich ) was a Swiss actor , photographer and film director .

Life

Bernhard Wicki's father was a Swiss engineer and partner in a machine factory, his mother an Austrian with Hungarian ancestors. During his school days at the Ludwigsgymnasium in Koethen he became a member of the German Youth Union 1/11, a communist group within the Bündische Jugend , at the age of 13 .

After graduating from high school in Bad Warmbrunn ( Silesia ), he first studied art history , history and German at the University of Breslau . But since he had decided on an artistic career, he switched to Gustaf Gründgens in 1938 at the drama school of the Staatliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin.

In 1939 he was imprisoned for several months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp because of his membership in the Bündische Jugend ( dj 1.11. ) . After his release, he first moved to Vienna, where he studied acting and directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar . He moved to Salzburg . He was a member of the beating pennalen fraternity Borussia Vienna and the Pennalverbindung Cheruskia Salzburg.

Here he also gained his first experience with the film. Bernhard Wicki was an extra in the 1939/40 film Der Postmeister . He played Urfaust at the Schönbrunn Palace Park Theater , and other engagements included in Bremen from 1941 to 1943 and at the Bavarian State Theater in Munich from 1943 to 1944. At the Salzburg Festival , he performed the pylades in Goethe's Iphigenia on Tauris

Further engagements followed from 1944 in Basel and until 1950 in Zurich . At the beginning of 1945 he married the actress Agnes Fink , both left Germany before the end of the war and went to the Schauspielhaus Zurich . In Zurich he also took on Swiss citizenship. There he got to know the playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt , with whom he had a lifelong friendship.

At the beginning of 1950, Bernhard Wicki returned to the Staatsschauspiel in Munich. In the same year he made his actual debut as a film actor in The Falling Star and in Young Heart Full of Love .

It followed u. a. The Last Bridge (1953), in which he presented his best acting performance in the role of Serbian partisan officer Boro, and It happened on July 20 (1955). After seeing a photography exhibition by the Magnum agency in Lucerne in 1952 , he decided to learn photography as well. He asked the director Helmut Käutner to work as a camera assistant on his film Monpti (1957).

In 1958 he directed the documentary Why Are They Against Us? . He became internationally famous in one fell swoop in 1959 with the anti-war film Die Brücke, based on the novel by Manfred Gregor , in which he tells the tragic story of the senseless defense of a bridge by young people at the end of the Second World War. Wicki directed this film. In the following years, Wicki continued to work as a film director. As a photographer, he published the illustrated book “Two grams of light” in 1960. But as a theater director he was also one of the greats in this field. For example, he staged the Shakespeare play “Antonius und Cleopatra” at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich and “Der Sturm” at the Vienna Burgtheater, also by William Shakespeare .

In 1962, Bernhard Wicki co-directed the German sections of the American film The Longest Day , one of the most lavish war films and the last major black-and-white cinema.

From 1975 Bernhard Wicki worked on the film adaptation of Günter Herburger's novella "The Conquest of the Citadel". After that, he returned to television in 1978. Here he created a portrait of his friend Curd Jürgens with the title "Curd Jürgens - The film star who came from the theater". Together with Wolfgang Kohlhaase , also a long-time friend, he worked from 1984 in the DEFA studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg. You shot the film "The Green Stone Variation" here, in which three people of different origins come closer to each other while playing chess in a cell. The film is a classic study of remembering and forgetting about the subject of fascism. His last directorial work (1986–1989), the film adaptation of the novel Das Spinnennetz by Joseph Roth , can also be seen as his legacy: Here Wicki shows the danger of the German bourgeoisie becoming entangled in right-wing extremist ideology and the anti-Semitism of the Weimar Republic . In 180 minutes he describes the terrible career of a bourgeois monster. One of the main actors, Richard Münch, died during the filming. But even for Wicki himself, the tedious work on the film was not without consequences. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in Prague while filming, but still completed the project. The premiere took place on May 8, 1989 in Cannes.

In his second marriage, after the death of Agnes Fink, Wicki was married to the actress Elisabeth Endriss since 1995 . Elisabeth Wicki-Endriss later portrayed the life and work of Bernhard Wicki in the documentary Disturbance - and a Kind of Poetry (2007).

Bernhard Wicki made his last public appearance in October 1999 on the occasion of an homage on his 80th birthday. Sitting in a wheelchair, his health visibly damaged, he accepted the award from numerous friends and companions. After a long, serious illness, he succumbed to heart failure on January 5, 2000 in Munich. Wicki was buried in the Nymphenburg cemetery in Munich (grave no. 4-1-23).

Bernhard Wicki grave, Munich, Nymphenburg cemetery.

After his death, the Bernhard Wicki Memorial Fund was founded in Munich in 2001 . This has been awarding the Peace Prize of German Film - Die Brücke since 2002 . A Bernhard Wicki Film Prize, currently endowed with 10,000 euros, has been awarded in Emden, East Frisia, since 2000. Bernhard Wicki was an ideal sponsor of the Internationales Filmfest Emden-Norderney, which was held for the first time in 1990 .

Filmography

Actor (selection)

Director

Voice actor (selection)

  • 1952: Le Plaisir, directed by Max Ophüls
  • 1953: O Canganceiro, directed by Limo Barreto
  • 1957: The twelve jurors

Awards

literature

About life, work and individual aspects
  • Richard Blank: Beyond the bridge. Bernhard Wicki. A life for the film. 1999 ISBN 3-430-11473-X .
  • Elisabeth Endriss-Wicki: The film legend Bernhard Wicki. Disturbance - and a kind of poetry. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89487-589-3 .
  • Film Festival North Rhine-Westphalia (ed.): Meekness and violence - the director and actor Bernhard Wicki. Filmography, biography, essays, interview. With contributions by Robert Fischer (foreword), Alexander Kluge , Laurens Straub , Wilhelm Roth, Friedrich Dürrenmatt , Hans Abich , Gunther Witte , Hermann Barth. edition filmwerkstatt, Essen 2004, ISBN 3-9807175-6-9 .
  • Uli Jung: [Article] Bernhard Wicki. In: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Film directors. Biographies, descriptions of works, filmographies. 3rd, updated and expanded edition. Reclam, Stuttgart 2008 [1. Ed. 1999], ISBN 978-3-15-010662-4 , pp. 822-826 [with references].
  • Inka Graeve Ingelmann (Ed.): Bernhard Wicki. Photographs. Dumont Literature and Art Verlag, Cologne 2005, hardcover, ISBN 3-8321-7570-9 , exhibition catalog.
  • Michel Quint: The terrible gardens. btb-Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-442-75068-7 , (translation by Elisabeth Edl), original edition Effroyables Jardins. Editions Joelle Losfeld, Paris 2000.
  • Andreas Weber (Ed.): He can let fly. Conversations and texts about Bernhard Wicki. Literature edition Lower Austria, St. Pölten 2000, ISBN 3-901117-47-4 .
  • Kay Less : 'In life, more is taken from you than given ...'. Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 658 ff.
  • Peter Zander: Bernhard Wicki. Bertz + Fischer Verlag , Berlin 1995, 2nd revised edition, ISBN 3-929470-04-7 .
Interviews and discussions
  • Gero von Boehm : Bernhard Wicki. October 12, 1989. Interview in: Encounters. Images of man from three decades. Collection Rolf Heyne, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-89910-443-1 , pp. 218-228.

documentary

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernhard Wicki in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available), accessed on November 26, 2012
  2. ↑ Biography ( memento from December 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) at the Bernhard Wicki Memorial Fund, accessed on November 26, 2012
  3. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , p. 724.
  4. ↑ With me the tatters always flew . Die Zeit , December 23, 1994
  5. ↑ Founded April 27, 1907. 1926 merger with fachstud. B! Nibelungia Vienna in the CDC. (Source: "Studiosus Austriacus 2007", p. 209)
  6. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , p. 724.
  7. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Bernhard Wicki
  8. ↑ Cineman Bernhard Wicki: The wrong weight, FRG 1971
  9. ↑ Kulturamt Düsseldorf laudator: Charlotte Kerr , film director and publicist
  10. ^ "Disturbance - and a kind of poetry" ( Memento of May 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) - Official film site
personal data
SURNAME Wicki, Bernhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian actor and film director
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Pölten , Lower Austria
DATE OF DEATH January 5, 2000
Place of death Munich