Edgar Bennert

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Bennert in July 1953

Edgar Bennert (born September 16, 1890 in Düsseldorf , † April 6, 1960 in Berlin ) was a German actor , director , dramaturge , journalist and artistic director .

biography

Bennert was born the son of a military economist and businessman. He grew up in a middle-class family. After his father's company went bankrupt in 1902, the financial means were no longer sufficient to send Bennert, like his five older siblings, to higher school.

Bennert completed his apprenticeship as an interior designer in 1908, but then decided to become an actor. He first played at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and was then engaged at the Rheinische Volksbühne from 1910 to 1914 .

In August 1914 he was drafted into the military and wounded several times. During his military service he opened up to the labor movement through the terrible experiences of the war. During the November Revolution he came into closer contact with revolutionary workers for the first time. He began to study the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and four years later, in the winter of 1922, he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in which he led various agitprop groups. He saw his main task in educating the population. He began to stage many plays against the Weimar class justice system and was imprisoned for this reason in 1925. By 1933 he was to be arrested seven times for his political and artistic activities.

In Bremen he was local editor of the Bremer Arbeiter-Zeitung , from 1928 to 1933 its editor-in-chief. In 1929/30, he also headed the Bremen agitprop group Blue Blouses .

After the takeover of the Nazis Bennert was 1933 KZ Mißler in Bremen-Findorff and then for two and a half years in Luebeck prison detained. After serving his sentence, he was taken into protective custody and taken to the Esterwegen concentration camp . Most recently he was a prisoner in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for almost nine years, from the summer of 1936 until the liberation in 1945 . At the end of 1942 he was appointed head of the camp library, which had already become a center of political resistance in the camp under his predecessors Wilhelm Guddorf , Karl Schirdewan and Hellmut Bock. In this capacity Bennert organized literary circles with other prisoners.

Bennert survived the death marches to the north that began in April 1945 when the camp was evacuated and was liberated near Schwerin in May 1945. There he was employed as a ministerial official in the first cultural administration of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in August 1945 was a member of the founding board of the Mecklenburg Cultural Association .

Memorial plaque on the house, Kleiner Moor 11, in Schwerin

As early as June 1945 Bennert worked as an actor, dramaturge and deputy to general manager Werner Bernhardy at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin . Among other things, he sponsored the Schwerin translator Rudolf Schaller, whose translation of Antigone premiered in 1949 and whom Bennert encouraged to do his series of Shakespeare translations, the first of which ( The Merry Wives of Windsor ) premiered in 1952.

After Bernhardy's departure and the sudden death of Bernhardy's successor Josef R. Lorandt in 1947, a board of trustees took over the management of the house to which Bennert belonged until 1948. In November 1949 Bennert succeeded Otto Kähler as acting director , then in 1951 director of the house and headed the theater until his death in 1960. One focus of his work was the promotion and popularization of contemporary opera. Among others, Rudolf Wagner-Régeny's The Favorite (1950), Werner Egks Columbus , Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring (1959) and the world premiere of Dieter Nowka's The Inheritance were staged . Under Bennert's directorship and thanks to musical directors such as Rudolf Neuhaus (1950–1953), Karl Schubert (1953–1958) and Kurt Masur (1958–1960), the Mecklenburg State Orchestra became a renowned orchestra.

Since 1953, the districts have also been played, mainly with pieces in Low German dialect, which were rehearsed by the Fritz Reuter stage directed by Richard Spethmann . In order to further strengthen the connection between the state theater and the people, Bennert also had theater buses used to bring visitors from all over the north of the GDR to Schwerin . With Hedda Zinner's The Vicious Circle , the stage made a successful guest appearance in early 1955 in Lübeck , Hamburg , Elmshorn and Eckernförde .

Bennert (sitting right) at a premiere of The Troublemakers in Leipzig

In addition to his work as artistic director, Bennert directed ten performances and took part in 26 productions as an actor. His only leading role in the cinema was the teacher Bohle in Wolfgang Schleif's DEFA children's film The Troublemakers, based on a script by Hermann Werner Kubsch and Wolfgang Kohlhaase . Most of the film was shot in Schwerin in 1952/53.

Eulogy

Hans Reupert, former director of the Parchim State Theater , described Bennert as follows:

“He wasn't a loud speaker. His work was unpathetic, realistic and deeply kind, full of understanding for the contradictions of life. For us, who were half his age at the time, he was comrade, friend, spiritual father, in short a role model that will work well into the future over the years. "

- Hans Reugert 1980

Honors

Filmography

literature

  • Barbara Kühle, Heinz Neumann: Edgar Bennert. Artist fighter communist. A chronicle of his life . Schwerin District Council, Schwerin 1985.
  • Grete Grewolls: Who was who in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania? A dictionary of persons . Edition Temmen , Bremen and Rostock 1995, ISBN 3-86108-282-9 .
  • Horst Zänger: 170 years of Mecklenburg State Theater Schwerin: From the theater life . Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2005, ISBN 3-8334-2786-8 .
  • District commission for research into the history of the local labor movement at the Schwerin district management of the SED and the Schwerin district committee of the GDR historians' society: Revolutionary fighters - memories and biographical sketches . Series of publications on the history of the labor movement in Mecklenburg and in the Schwerin district, Schwerin 1979.

References and comments

  1. ^ Edgar Bennert's curriculum vitae, taken from the Schwerin State Archive
  2. ↑ Klaus Drobisch , Günther Wieland : System of the Nazi concentration camps: 1933–1939 . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-000823-7 , p. 322.
  3. ↑ See Torsten Seela: Books and Libraries in National Socialist Concentration Camps. The printed word in the prisoners' anti-fascist resistance . KG Saur, Munich etc. 1992, ISBN 3-598-22174-6 , p. 144 f.
  4. ^ Karl Heinz Jahnke: Antifascists: Inconvenient witnesses of the 20th century, Bonn: Pahl Rugenstein, 1994, ISBN 3-89144-203-3
  5. ↑ The board also included Erich Venzmer, who also worked in cultural administration, the pastors Heinrich Schwartze, Karl Kleinschmidt and Aurel von Jüchen as well as Willi Bredel , Ehm Welk , Adam Scharrer and Hanns Anselm Perten . Cf. Beatrice Vierneisel: Strangers in the country. Aspects of the cultural integration of resettlers in Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania 1945 to 1953 . Waxmann Verlag, 2006, ISBN 978-3-8309-1762-5 , p. 169.
  6. ↑ The other co-directors were Lucie Höflich , Karl Köhler and Manfred Hinzpeter.
  7. ↑ Intendant in turbulent times  ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.das-capitol.de   . Schweriner Volkszeitung, December 28, 2006, quoted in the press review of the Capitol cinema .
  8. ↑ Hans Reupert: He was a comrade, friend, spiritual father to us . On the 20th anniversary of Edgar Bennert's death. In: Schweriner Volkszeitung, 1980

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Bennert, Edgar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor, journalist and artistic director
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH April 6, 1960
Place of death Schwerin