Gerhard fever

Gerhard Fieber (born October 20, 1916 in Berlin ; † January 6, 2013 in Walluf , Hessen ) was a German animation pioneer, film director , producer and caricaturist .

Life

Gerhard Fieber was born in Berlin in 1916. His passion for drawing began when he was still at school, where he caricatured the teachers. He trained in graphics and printing technology in Berlin and worked as an advertising and humor artist for the press. He owed his start as an animated film producer to the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels , who made him chief draftsman and artistic director of the Deutsche Zeichenfilm GmbH , founded in 1941 and a subsidiary of UFA . His task was to bring the German animation film to Disney level. Fieber summed up his first impression like this:

“At a time of war, such a start was very depressing, even oppressive for us film artists. But the task set us up: The drawing film! "

- Gerhard fever

In 1943, Fieber's 18-minute short film Armer Hansi was released , which tells of the adventures of a canary who escaped from its cage to freedom and longs for all sorts of dangerous experiences to return to the security of captivity. Goebbels wrote in his diary:

"The first drawing film ... still shows a lot of weaknesses, but it is a good start."

- Joseph Goebbels

The drawn “Perseverance Film” was awarded the German Culture Film Prize at the Reichswoche for German cultural film in Munich and received the title of “artistically valuable”. The film was later shown as a supporting film for Die Feuerzangenbowle .

Due to increasing bomb damage and production difficulties in Berlin, an alternative studio was relocated to Dachau in Upper Bavaria in 1944 , where Fieber completed the short film Purzelbaum into Leben with around 20 Berlin illustrators . The second film takes place in a dog family and describes the experiences of a puppy . After the finished film was stored in Berlin, the material was bombed and was restored by Fieber - with very limited resources - in 1946 at Deutsche Film AG (DEFA).

Fieber's controversial activity for the Zeichenfilm GmbH is the subject of the book Bienenstich und Hakenkreuz (Frankenthal 2020) by Rolf Giesen.

After the end of the Second World War , Fieber founded the drawing film studio EOS-Film GmbH in Göttingen in 1948, which developed into the largest German drawing film studio during the economic boom . This is where the film Tobias Knopp, The Adventure of a Bachelor , the first full-length cartoon from German production was made in 1949/50, based on the story of the same name by Wilhelm Busch . The voices were spoken by well-known German actors such as Erich Ponto , Günter Lüders , Grethe Weiser and René Deltgen .

At the beginning of the 1960s, Fieber dealt with the cinematic implementation of the ZDF - Mainzelmännchen designed by Wolf Gerlach . In 1969 the head office of EOS-Film GmbH was relocated to Wiesbaden and it was merged with Franz Thieß's Neue Filmproduktion (NFP). The NFP animation belonging to Neue Filmproduktion tv GmbH continued the “Mainzelmännchen” created by Fieber and EOS-Film for ZDF. Fieber also created the animated clips based on the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians for Radio Bremen and Ute, Schnute, Kasimir, also invented by Wolf Gerlach , for WDR . In addition to other films, he also produced commercial separators for other public broadcasters .

Gerhard Fieber, who had lived in Schlangenbad for a long time, died on January 6, 2013 at the age of 96 in a nursing home in Walluf in the Rheingau-Taunus district .

Filmography (selection)

Director

• 1945: Somersault into life (short film)
• 1949: The ghost mill
• 1950: The championship
• 1951: The big bear
• 1952: a forbidden excursion!
• 1953: Out of line
• 1955: The little locomotive
• 1957: Once upon a time - a true story seen from a higher ornithological station (short film, 11 min.)
• 1960: Paulchen II
• 1960: Exuberance is rarely good
• 1962: The Brownies (short film, 11 min.)
• 1965: The wave

Screenwriter

• 1943: Poor Hansi (short film, 18 min.)
• 1949/50: Tobias Knopp - Adventure of a Bachelor

More work

• 1976: Three ladies from the grill (opening credits)

Web links

• Gerhard fever in theInternet Movie Database(English)
• Literature by and about Gerhard Fieber in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Who is who? The German Who's Who. 46th edition 2007/2008, Verlag Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 2007, p. 322.
2. ↑ The animated film in the Third Reich. Retrieved January 8, 2013.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} animation in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. An inventory , p. 10. ( Memento of the original from October 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 7, 2013.  
4. ↑ 1948. EOS-Film founded in Göttingen. In: German Institute for Animated Film. diaf.tyclipso.de, archived from the original on February 17, 2013 ; accessed on May 7, 2015 . 
5. ↑ Animation in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. An inventory , p. 11. ( Memento of the original from October 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved January 8, 2013.  
6. ↑ ^{a b} Gerhard Fieber died.  ( Page no longer available , 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. In: Wiesbaden Courier . Retrieved January 8, 2013.  
7. ↑ ^{a b c} Animated film pioneer Fever dies in the Rheingau. In: The world . Retrieved February 11, 2016.
8. ↑ Boris von Borresholm: Once upon a time - Tribute to Boris von Borresholm. In: dok-leipzig.de. DOK Leipzig , archived from the original on February 17, 2013 ; accessed on February 11, 2016 . 
9. ↑ Boris von Borresholm: The Brownies - Homage Boris von Borresholm. In: dok-leipzig.de. DOK Leipzig , archived from the original on February 17, 2013 ; accessed on February 11, 2016 .