Erich Pommer

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Erich Pommer (left) with Carl Zuckmayer and Emil Jannings in his UFA office in 1929

Erich Pommer (born July 20, 1889 in Hildesheim ; † May 8, 1966 in Los Angeles ) was a German film producer who was at times one of the most powerful figures in the German film industry. As a producer of films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari , The Last Man , Metropolis and The Blue Angel made film history.

Life

Berlin memorial plaque on the house at Carl-Heinrich-Becker-Weg 16–18, in Berlin-Steglitz
Memorial plaque on my parents' house in Hildesheim

Erich Pommer, son of the Jewish lingerie dealer Gustav Pommer and his wife Anna b. Jacobson was born on July 20, 1889 in Hildesheim. In 1896 the family moved to Göttingen, where their father took over the Göttingen canning factory. Pommer attended grammar school in Göttingen. In 1905 the Pommer family moved to Berlin.

Erich Pommer completed a commercial apprenticeship here and in 1907 became a salesman in the Berlin branch of the French Gaumont group. In 1910 he took over the management of the Gaumont branch in Vienna. After his military service in 1912, he moved to the French film company Eclair and became its representative based in Vienna and from 1913 in Berlin.

In the First World War he received the Iron Cross, 2nd class. After being wounded, he worked on newsreels from 1917 and later as head of the film department of the censorship office of the Romanian military administration.

As early as 1915 he and other partners in Berlin were among the founders of the Decla-Film-Gesellschaft Holz & Co. While Rudolf Meinert was acting as a producer, Pommer was in charge of the foreign agency. In November 1921 Decla merged with Universum Film (Ufa), but remained part of the Ufa group with Pommer as director. In February 1923 Pommer joined the board of directors of Ufa and was first chairman of the leading organization of the film industry (SPIO) from 1923 to 1926.

During these years Pommer created some classics of the German silent film. Metropolis was the most visually influential silent film of all and at 5 million Reichsmarks the most expensive film in German film history. Fritz Lang directed the work, which premiered in 1927 . The reconstructed version of the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation has been declared a World Document Heritage by UNESCO .

Not least because of the enormous cost of this film, Pommer's contract was not extended. In 1926/27 he worked in the USA for Paramount and then for MGM . In November 1927 he was contracted again as a producer by Ufa.

Another masterpiece was created in 1930 under the direction of Josef von Sternberg : The Blue Angel with the actors Emil Jannings (Professor Unrat), Marlene Dietrich (Lola Lola) and Hans Albers . The script of the film wrote Carl Zuckmayer after the novel The Blue Angel by Heinrich Mann . Pommer is considered to be the discoverer of Marlene Dietrich.

After the handover of power to the National Socialists , in March 1933 he was asked to join Ernst Hugo Correll , Wilhelm Meydam, Hermann Grieving, Alexander Grau and Berthold von Theobald in the Ufa management team and asked about his religious affiliation. Pommers contract with Ufa was terminated because he was considered a Jew. After 1933 he worked first for Fox Film in Paris and later in Hollywood . At the beginning of the 1940s, Pommer got into economic hardship after illness and worked with his wife Gertrud Ley in a porcelain factory. In 1944 he was naturalized in the United States and in 1946 he returned to Germany as chief film officer in the American military government, where he remained until 1949. In this function he designed, together with Horst von Hartlieb (managing director of the Association of Film Distributors in Wiesbaden) and Curt Oertel (documentary film director, chairman of the Hessian producers' association), in early 1948, based on the American Production Code or Hays Code of 1930/34 Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (FSK).

After further productions with varying success both in Germany and in the USA, Erich Pommer died in Los Angeles in 1966.

Pommers son John Pommer also worked in the US in the film industry.

Appreciation

Caroline Lejeune wrote about Pommer in 1931: “His name for a film usually stands for a box office success, but at the same time it also means a promise with regard to the intelligence of a film.” In his 40 years of activity, Pommer achieved a total of around 200 Film titles, which in turn received a cinematic monument in the television report Das Kabinett des Erich Pommer by Hans-Michael Bock and Ute T. Schneider.

In 1989 the Berlin International Film Festival dedicated a comprehensive retrospective to the producer on his 100th birthday . In 1998, the Erich Pommer Institute for Media Law and Media Economics at the University of Potsdam was founded in Potsdam-Babelsberg . It observes and accompanies current developments in the film, TV and music industries. In addition to practice-oriented research and university teaching, it conducts industry-specific training and in-depth media-specific advice. In Potsdam , Erich-Pommer-Strasse also commemorates the film producer.

Until his emigration in 1933, Pommer lived on the Steglitzer Fichtenberg , a residential area with pretentious villas that was preferred as early as the 19th century . The city of Berlin put a memorial plaque on the former residential building in Carl-Heinrich-Becker-Weg .

After Hildesheim, the city of Pomerania, had a long hard time honoring it, Erich-Pommer-Strasse was named on May 7, 2001 in the Moritzberg district and on October 1, 2004 a memorial plaque was attached to the house where he was born at Altpetristrasse 7.

Filmography (selection)

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Erich Pommer  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karen Thomas (Director): Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood . Warner Home Video, Burbank, CA 2007.
  2. ↑ Viktor Gertler: Az én filmem , 1942, p. 108 f, quoted in: René Geoffroy: Hungary as a place of refuge and place of work for German-speaking emigrants (1933–1938 / 39) . Frankfurt am Main: Lang 2001, p. 273
personal data
SURNAME Pommer, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German film producer (Metropolis, The Blue Angel)
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Hildesheim
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1966
Place of death los Angeles