Life goes on - the last film of the Third Reich

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Life goes on - The Last Film of the Third Reich is a book documentary published in 1993 by director and film historian Hans-Christoph Blumenberg about the unfinished German propaganda film Life Goes On (1945). Blumenberg reconstructs the genesis of the lost film on the basis of scripts, production notes and statements from contemporary witnesses. In 2002, the docu-drama of the same name, Life goes on , based on Blumenberg's book, was released.

content

In the book, Blumenberg tries to describe the genesis of the film and also to address parallels between the content of the film and the course of the shooting, such as the time pressure towards the end and the loss of the war. He also illustrates how the production of the last cinematic wonder weapon “[turned into] an absurd spectacle. What was planned as a heroic epic turned into a tragicomic farce. ”To clarify all of this, he placed a short excerpt from the film's script before each chapter of the book.

Emergence

For the 75th birthday of Ufa , a film was made in Babelsberg in February 1992 with many of the Ufa stars of the thirties and forties. Was present among other things, the film composer Norbert Schultze , who is also the music for Veit Harlan's film " Kolberg " had written, which until then was still considered the last large-scale production of the Third Reich. However, he mentioned a previously unknown film title to Blumenberg, Life goes on , with well-known stars such as Hilde Krahl and Marianne Hoppe , Gustav Knuth and Viktor de Kowa , Heinrich George and Friedrich Kayßler . Frank Roell , who was assistant production manager at the time, was also involved in the shoot. He now also began to talk about the film and still had material and was in contact with contemporary witnesses. He had a document that had existed for about 49 years, a memo from November 6, 1944. It deals with the placement of 1,100 extras in the event of an air raid.

In April 1992, Blumenberg and Roell began researching the film. Over time, more and more "exciting, bizarre, unbelievable" facts came about about Ufa film no. 205. That was how Dr. Joseph Goebbels to have been involved as a secret author. The director Wolfgang Liebeneiner is said to have tried to "secretly shoot a peace film during the turmoil of the last months of the war", and a committed National Socialist, Karl Ritter , was booted out in 1944.

After intensive research, Blumenberg tried to reconstruct the history of the making of the film between April 1944 and April 1945 "as completely as possible". For this purpose, files from the Reich Ministry of Propaganda , the Reichsfilmintendanz , the management of Ufa-Filmkunst and the two production diaries of the production manager Karl Ritter were available.

literature

  • Hans-Christoph Blumenberg: Life goes on . The last film of the Third Reich. 1st edition. Rowohlt-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-87134-062-6 .
  • Hans-Jürgen Tast: Helmut Käutner - In those days. 1947 (= googly eyes . Volume 33). Kulleraugen, Schellerten 2007, ISBN 978-3-88842-034-4 , pp. 4–10

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Christoph Blumenberg: Life goes on . The last film of the Third Reich. 1st edition. Rowohlt-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-87134-062-6 , foreword, p. 10 .
  2. ↑ Hans-Christoph Blumenberg: Life goes on . The last film of the Third Reich. 1st edition. Rowohlt-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-87134-062-6 , p. 9 .