Fritz Fischer (General Manager)
Fritz Fischer (born June 16, 1898 in Backnang , † February 9, 1985 in Munich ) was a German theater director , director and actor .
Life
Fritz Fischer went to the USA as a young actor and was engaged at the German Theater Milwaukee in 1923 , which he took over as director a little later. He became so well known through guest appearances in Chicago and New York that he was finally hired as the “final director” for the Ziegfeld Follies (a glamorous number revue in the style of the Folies Bergères). In 1929 Fischer returned to Germany. He took over the Dresden comedy , but at the time of the Great Depression he was out of luck and the private theater went bankrupt in 1932. Fritz Fischer worked as a film actor (including Jim Boy in Die Blume von Hawaii ), but his engagements both in film and on stage decreased after the National Socialists came to power because he was unable to provide proof of Aryan due to his mother's illegitimate birth . He joined the NSDAP, but could only work in the background, especially for the great Berlin variety theater Scala . Under the protection of the Bavarian Gauleiter Adolf Wagner , Fischer was appointed artistic director of the Munich Gärtnerplatztheater in 1938, where his staging of Franz Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow in the style of a bombastic number revue (musical direction: Ernst Kreuder, star: Johannes Heesters ) made Adolf Hitler rave about. Although Fischer's later productions were more in the tradition of the Berlin revues of the last years of the Weimar Republic , which were hated by the regime (including jazz elements and nude dances), the National Socialists initially let him go. There was strong criticism from cultural circles. Richard Strauss called Fischer a "revue smear director" in a letter. The theater ensemble proved loyal to the line when it visited the Dachau concentration camp on May 21, 1941 . The question of whether the artists, including Johannes Heesters, sang on stage there was still the subject of court proceedings in 2008.
Collisions with the authorities were caused by Fischer's lavish performance as director, who was even reprimanded by the Bavarian Court of Auditors, through his own luxurious lifestyle and sexual debauchery (Fischer is said to have raped a 19-year-old dancer). Although he was initially protected from imprisonment by Wagner, he had to go to war in the navy at the personal order of Adolf Hitler, where he was dismissed six months later as unfit for service.
After the Second World War, Fritz Fischer tried again to succeed in the revue business. With the exception of a few productions (for example the ice revue Der Kaiserwalzer in Düsseldorf's Apollo Theater ), most of the revue and superlative “reinterpretations” of operettas were financial disasters - such as the touring performance of Csárdásfürstin 1950, the play Käpt'n Bay Bay 1950 or Eine Night in Venice 1953 in Hamburg's Ernst-Merck-Halle .
As an informant for the Gehlen Organization , the forerunner of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), he monitored the writer Erich Kästner from 1946 under the code name F33 .
Filmography (selection)
- 1932: They - or none
- 1932: Escape to Nice
- 1933: The Flower of Hawaii
- 1933: a woman like you
- 1933: Midsummer Night
- 1934: One night in Venice
- 1934: Business flourishes
- 1935: As you to me - as I to you
Web links
- Fritz Fischer in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stefan Frey: Dasreal Zeittheater , in: Marie-Theres Arnbom / Kevin Clarke / Thomas Trabisch: World of Operetta , Brandstätter, Vienna 2011
- ^ Letter to the artistic director Clemens Krauss dated January 24, 1940, quoted from Stefan Frey: Dasreal Zeittheater , in: Marie-Theres Arnbom / Kevin Clarke / Thomas Trabisch: Welt der Operette , Brandstätter, Vienna 2011
- ^ Ernst Klee : Cultural Lexicon in the Third Reich , Frankfurt a. M., Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2007
- ↑ Die Welt, December 16, 2008
- ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 26, 2012
- ^ Der Spiegel, August 26, 1953
- ↑ Monitored for years: Erich Kästner and the spies . In: bild.de . ( bild.de [accessed October 4, 2018]).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fischer, Fritz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German theater director, director and actor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 16, 1898 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Backnang |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 9, 1985 |
| Place of death | Munich |