Gerhard Menzel (writer)

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Gerhard Menzel (born September 29, 1894 in Waldenburg ; † May 4, 1966 in Comano ) was a German writer and screenwriter .

Life

Pieter the Droll (1971)

Menzel's father was the businessman and cinema owner Paul Menzel, his mother was his wife Emma nee. Luscher. After graduating from high school, he completed a bank apprenticeship and began studying music. From 1916 to 1918 he served as a soldier at the front.

After the war he first worked as a banker. From 1922 to 1925 he took part in a jewelry store in Waldenburg. In 1925 he bought a cinema in Gottesberg , where he accompanied the silent films shown there with music on a harmonium.

At the same time he tried his hand at writing. In 1927 he surprisingly received the Kleist Prize for his war drama Toboggan . Since then, Menzel has lived as a freelance writer in Berlin . He wrote several plays that were also performed on renowned theaters.

In October 1933 he was one of 88 writers who had signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler .

However, Gerhard Menzel achieved greater importance as a screenwriter. With his debut Morgenrot (whose script was based on the U 202 war diary of the U-boat commander in World War I and writer Edgar von Spiegel ), he heroized the German U-boat war. Menzel, who had lived in Vienna since 1939, provided, among other things, the script for the literary film adaptation of The Postmaster to Pushkin and for the notorious propaganda film Homecoming . Most of the time he worked with director Gustav Ucicky , and once he directed it himself. Menzel's works were broad stories of suffering with an implicit call for a savior.

In the German Democratic Republic , Menzel's work Die Fahrt der Jangtiku was placed on the list of literature to be discarded in 1953 . He continued his career in the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote the screenplay for Die Sünderin mit Hildegard Knef together with Georg Marischka, the film that sparked heated discussions because of the positive portrayal of suicide. It tells the story of a young woman who takes her own life together with her terminally ill lover.

Gerhard Menzel's first marriage was to Marthe Florimant Servais from 1921, then to Lieselotte Ammann.

Works

  • 1928: Far East (drama)
  • 1928: Tobbogan (drama)
  • 1931: Bork (acting)
  • 1932: How much love does a person need?
  • 1933: refugees. Experience of home in distant lands (novel)
  • 1933: what will we do then? (Two novels)
  • 1933: Liebhabertheater (comedy in three acts)
  • 1936: Appassionata (play in three acts)
  • 1937: Scharnhorst (acting)
  • 1937: The journey of the Jangtiku
  • 1940: The Immortal (play in three acts)
  • 1940: twenty years (acting)
  • 1952: Return, Dawn (novel)
  • 1954: Karlchen (drama)
  • 1956: Tauern Affair (stage play)
  • 1959: Alexander Puschkin: The Postmaster (play in three acts, with Hans Schweikart )

Filmography

literature

  • Jörg Schöning: Gerhard Menzel ; in CineGraph , Lg. 8 (1987)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 405.
  2. ↑ Cf. Nils Grosch (Ed.): Aspects of Modern Music Theater in the Weimar Republic . Waxmann Verlag, Münster 2004, p. 268; Jörg Friedrich Vollmer: Imaginary battlefields. War literature in the Weimar Republic - a literature-sociological investigation . Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin 2003 (Chapter 5, p. 413) online edition
  3. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-m.html
personal data
SURNAME Menzel, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Waldenburg
DATE OF DEATH May 4th 1966
Place of death Comano TI