Günter Peter Straschek

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Günter Peter Straschek (born July 23, 1942 in Graz ; † September 29, 2009 in Vienna ) was an Austrian film historian and filmmaker who researched the exile of filmmakers from National Socialist Germany .

Life

Straschek, who felt uncomfortable in Graz , the former “city of popular uprising” , and in a country where the Nazi past lived on, was initially primarily interested in literature. Together with Barbara Frischmuth and Peter Orthofer he founded the ( hectographed ) magazine reflexe (1959/60). In 1961 he left Austria and hitchhiked through Europe and Asia Minor , working in a kibbutz in Israel . He came to West Berlin via Amsterdam , where in the autumn of 1963 he applied to move to the GDR , which, however, was refused by the responsible GDR authorities. From 1964 to 1966 he studied with Friedrich Knilli at the film seminar of the Institute for Language in the Technical Age of the TU Berlin .

In 1966 he enrolled to study film directing at the newly founded German Film and Television Academy in Berlin , where he was dismissed in 1967 with six other fellow students after an examination. Five of the seven dismissed students were current or former student representatives; all were politically active. They were resumed after protests, but Straschek was relegated again in the spring of 1968 for political reasons . In the same year he and his friend Holger Meins , in cooperation with the Frankfurt AUSS (Action Center for Independent and Socialist Students), carried out a film project with students. It was supposed to be a model for "revolutionary film work". After another 18 fellow students, including Hartmut Bitomsky , Harun Farocki and Holger Meins, were expelled from the academy on November 27, 1968, Straschek was unable to continue his studies.

After his “failure in this industry”, Straschek, who had previously also worked for television companies, gave up filmmaking in the mid-1970s and limited himself to journalism and research.

His interest in the emigration of filmmakers from National Socialist Germany had already been announced in 1967. This resulted in decades of research, during which he and his wife, the translator Karin Rausch , conducted over 1000 interviews with emigrants and their relatives and researched them in libraries and archives in North and South America and Europe.

At the end of 1975 Straschek and Rausch moved to London , first living in Golders Green , then in the countryside in East Sussex , from the mid-1980s onwards they moved to Vienna , lived in Shanghai from 1990 to 1993 and in Delhi from 1993 to 1997 .

Straschek was buried at the Grinzinger Friedhof (group 1, row B, number 157) in Vienna.

plant

Straschek's first own film, Hurra für Frau E. (1967), paints the sympathetic portrait of a woman "who got by with her children, worked in a nightclub (...), violated social rules". This and even more his next two short films are examples of formally strict political interventions.

His handbook against the cinema (1975) analyzes the "rise and fall of the capitalist cinema industry" in fact-rich studies organized by country. The author goes to court with both the pretensions of artistic and socially critical films. While Burkhard Bütow in the time the manual "tough, seasoned with stale SDS jargon data, numbers and Namensbrei" one called, according to an obituary on Straschek "This unjust swan song of cinema, it is more just than all apologies. "

From his life's work on the emigrants of German cinema, only ancillary works have become known: the five-hour television documentary Film Emigration from Nazi Germany (1975), in which he and a large number of emigrants, including Lotte H. Eisner , George Froeschel , Dolly Haas , Anatole Litvak and Franz Marischka , speaks, three features for radio and a few articles. Three volumes were planned, the first of which was to contain a “critical history”, and volumes two and three were to contain a manual on the subject with biographies, bibliographies and filmographies. Straschek pursued the ambitious plan to commemorate "all the emigrants we knew", not just the directors, but all the film staff up to the film lawyers and copy plant managers, a total of 3,000 people (1,500 full-time filmmakers and 1,500 only marginally involved Film had to do). The work is preceded by the assessment that “German-language film has not recovered from this exodus and will never recover”, it also has personal motives: “I wanted to examine a professional group, not to let their sufferings and experiences be forgotten, but also provide information for us in areas that interested me from early childhood, thanks to my socialist father: fascism, resistance, emigration, morality and revenge. "

The Emigranten-Handbuch, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) , was never published. References to the work are provided by the numerous references to "see Straschek film biographies" in the International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , which now go nowhere. Volume II (Munich, New York, London, Paris 1983).

Publications (selection)

  • “Before, during and after Schicklgruber”, kino , 6 / November 1967
  • "Flugschrift II", film , October 1968 (with M. Lukasik and Holger Meins )
  • “Against moralism, for consumption”, film , March 1969
  • “Pesaro, Cinema and Politics”, film , November 1969
  • Straschek 1963–74 West Berlin. In: film review . 212/1974
  • Manual against the cinema . Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 1975
  • "Stalin, Heinz Goldberg and (Heinrich Heine)", exile research . An international year book, Vol. 1/1983, pp. 147–158

Filmography

  • 1967. Situations by Johannes Beringer (15 minutes; participation)
  • 1967. Hurray for Ms. E. (7 minutes; screenplay and direction)
  • 1967/68. A western for the SDS. (21 minutes; screenplay, direction, editing)
  • 1970. On the concept of “critical communism” in Antonio Labriola (1843–1904). (18 minutes; screenplay, direction)
  • 1972. Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's music accompanying a film scene by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (15 minutes; actors)
  • 1975. Everyone dies, however ... (Documentary about Holger Meins) by Renate Sami (60 minutes; interviewee)
  • 1975. Film emigration from Nazi Germany. TV documentary WDR / SFB (five parts of approx. 60 minutes each; script, director, interviewer)

Radio features (selection)

  • German speakers. Experiment on acoustics and politics. SFB 3 , November 4, 1966 (together with Friedrich Knilli . Partial reprint in: Friedrich Knilli: German loudspeakers. Attempts at a semiotics of radio. Stuttgart 1970)
  • I still work every day. From correspondence with Hollywood veterans. SFB 3, May 1, 1972
  • Ideas don't fall from the sky. About Antonio Labriola. SFB 3, March 13, 1973
  • The cinema. SFB 3, June 12, 1973 (under the name of Johannes Beringer)
  • Visit me in the reading room. Experiences with material memory. Two parts. SFB 3, March 21 and 22, 1988
  • "I gave the lady no time to squeal". 100 years of Jack the Ripper. SFB 3, October 25, 1988

literature

  • Julia Friedrich (Ed.): Günter Peter Straschek. Emigration - Film - Politics. Emigration - Film - Politics. (HERE AND NOW at Museum Ludwig , March 4th - July 1st, 2018). Cologne 2018
  • Julia Friedrich (Ed.): Günter Peter Straschek. A western for the SDS. With a text by Stefan Ripplinger , a series of photos from the Christopher Williams class and Günter Peter Straschek's production documents. Cologne 2018

Web links

Notes and individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Günter Peter Straschek: Visit me in the reading room. ( SFB 3 , March 21, 1988).
  2. ↑ The magazine had the subtitle art and culture from a youth perspective. The interview by Hans Haider with the writer Barbara Frischmuth, "The discovery of language as material", Wiener Zeitung , August 16, 2008, explains the genesis .
  3. ^ Günter Peter Straschek: Straschek 1963–74 West Berlin. In: film review . 212/1974, p. 354.
  4. ^ Günter Peter Straschek: Straschek 1963–74 West Berlin. In: film review . 212/1974, p. 355.
  5. ↑ Step down. In: Der Spiegel. 21/1967.
  6. ^ Günter Peter Straschek: Straschek 1963–74 West Berlin. In: film review . 212/1974, p. 358. His film A Western for the SDS (1967/68) had been confiscated by the academy management and a ban was imposed on the negative. See Straschek's comment on: Christian Deutschmann: “Production of a Molotov cocktail and a western for the SDS”, in Language in the Technical Age , 27/1968, p. 271.
  7. ↑ Karl-Heinz Stenz: Kampfplatz Kamera - The film-cultural significance of the film students '68 generation using the example of protest activities at the newly founded German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb). Diploma thesis, Norderstedt 2007, pp. 41–44.
  8. ^ Werner Kluss: A Berlin local posse. The crisis at the Berlin Film and Television Academy. In: The time. December 13, 1968.
  9. ↑ On this Johannes Beringer: “Fragmentarisches. On Günter Peter Straschek “, New Film Review , December 4, 2009, s. Web links.
  10. ↑ Johannes Beringer: (Obituary for Straschek) In: shomingeki , 22/2010.
  11. ^ Günter Peter Straschek: Handbook against the cinema. Frankfurt / M. 1975, p. 54.
  12. ↑ Burkhard Bütow: Critique in Brief. In: The time. 39/1975. Reviews also appeared in the Tages-Anzeiger Zürich, July 25, 1975, and in Die Tat. September 19, 1975, Der Landbote. September 20, 1975 as well as in The Argument. 99/1976, pp. 853-855.
  13. ↑ Stefan Ripplinger : "Straschek". Jungle World, Gesternblog , December 8th, 2009. Further obituaries: Fritz Göttler: In individual combat. On the death of film researcher Günter Peter Straschek. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. No. 279, December 3, 2009;
    Thomas Koebner : Günter Peter Straschek. In: film-dienst , 1/2010;
    Wilhelm Roth: Günter Peter Straschek. In: epd film , 1/2010.
  14. ↑ "I still work every day", "The daily walk to the consulate" and "Nazi officers and waiters", see list of radio features.
personal data
SURNAME Straschek, Günter Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian publicist and filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH July 23, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Graz
DATE OF DEATH September 29, 2009
Place of death Vienna