Heinrich Breloer

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Heinrich Breloer, 2005

Heinrich Breloer ([ ˌbʀeˈløːɐ̯ ], born February 17, 1942 in Gelsenkirchen ) is a German author and film director . Breloer played a major role in the conception of the documentary drama film genre , thus, in a combination of feature film and documentary film, he mainly dealt with topics relating to recent German history and has received numerous awards for this.

life and work

Breloer's parents were hoteliers who ran the Hotel Loemühle in Marl . He got to know the world of film through the hotel, as celebrities from film and television stayed there during the Ruhr Festival and the awarding of the Grimme Prize . In the 1950s, his father sent him to the strictly Catholic Canisianum boarding school in Lüdinghausen , "which meant hell for him." He was only allowed to return to Marl once a month, "although at home there was paradise." Then Breloer met with his circle of friends, to which the later lawyer and Green politician Hans-Christian Ströbele and the future film director Bernhard Sinkel belonged. When Breloer was twelve years old, his father died of cancer. In the 1980s, he processed his experiences as a boarding school student on film with the two-parter A Closed Society (1987).

From 1961 to 1970 he studied literature and philosophy in Bonn and Hamburg. As early as February 2, 1962, he presented himself on the Bonn stage for sensual perception - KONZIL with photographic work. In 1976 he received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg with a dissertation in literature and theater studies, Personal Experience and Aesthetic Abstraction, on Georg Kaiser's drama Die Koralle .

He has been working as a freelance author since 1972. Initially, Breloer wrote film and television reviews for a Hamburg daily newspaper as well as radio reports. In 1978 he made his first longer film together with director Horst Königstein . Breloer's central theme is recent German history. What initially began as a pure documentary film developed over the years into a documentary drama genre . At first he called the mixture of film documents, interviews and game scenes, which they developed together with Königstein and which they first practiced in 1982 in Das Beil von Wandsbek , “Open Form”. They refined this composition to a synthesis in which the recreated game scenes were given the same status as the documentation. The multiple Adolf Grimme Prize winner brought this to perfection with his three-part film Die Manns about the family of the German writer Thomas Mann . Elisabeth Mann Borgese , the youngest daughter of Thomas Mann, travels with Breloer as an interviewer on the trail of her family history through Europe and America. Conversations with other family members and companions of the Mann children complement the documentary background of the scenes in which Armin Mueller-Stahl as Thomas Mann and Monica Bleibtreu as his wife Katia as well as many other film and theater stars act.

Heinrich Breloer, 2009

Under the title Speer und Er , Breloer realized a television docudrama in 2005 about the architect Albert Speer , in particular about his relationship with Adolf Hitler . Sebastian Koch played Speer, Tobias Moretti the "Führer" . Breloer's preoccupation with this biography began in 1981 when he met Speer personally shortly before his death. The film confronted Speer's children with their father's career as an artist, as a technocrat, as a war criminal. Conversations with contemporary witnesses and statements from specialist historians supplemented the scenic life story. Critics attested that Breloer had designed a nuanced picture by Speer, which was as clearly differentiated from the lying self-portrayal of Hitler's near-friend in his memoirs as from the idea of ​​the good Nazi Speer, which historical scholarship refutes but public opinion was still predominant. On the other hand, the contemporary historian Wolfgang Benz judged that Breloer got too involved in Speer's perspective. Speer biographer Gitta Sereny, on the other hand, accused the film of exaggerating Speer's complicity in the expulsion and extermination of European Jews. Breloer replied that he was more interested in "searching television" than "judgmental television".

Breloer's penultimate project was the literary film adaptation of Buddenbrooks based on Thomas Mann 's novel of the same name . With over 1.2 million viewers, the film was an audience success in the cinema, and it was shown as a two-parter on television.

After several years of research and preparation, he published his second film about Brecht in 2019 - after his early work Bi und Bidi in Augsburg (1978) . Breloer got to know and appreciate Brecht “when I started to break free from the prison of a Catholic boarding school student. Every verse from the " Hauspostille " was a cut in the still firmly established Catholic heaven. "

Breloer is married to the director Monika Winhuisen for the second time. He has two children and lives in Cologne .

Letters to the Deutsche Kinemathek

In 2011, Breloer donated part of his private production archive to the Berlin Foundation Deutsche Kinemathek . Up until then there were 130 boxes that the archive has been trying to make continuously accessible on the Internet since 2012. For reasons of data protection, some of the documents in the archive were not yet put online in 2012. Later, his two-part Wehner biography Wehner - the untold story was published .

Films (selection)

Awards

Breloer at the inauguration of his star on the Boulevard der Stars in Berlin with Mayor Wowereit (2012)

Fonts

  • Georg Kaiser's drama "The Coral". Personal experience and aesthetic abstraction. With a biographical outline. Lüdke, Hamburg 1977, 504 pp., University of Hamburg, dissertation (1976).
  • with Horst Königstein: blood money. Materials on a German story. Prometh Verlag, Cologne 1982, 149 pp.
  • Heinrich Breloer (ed.): My diary: stories of survival 1939–1947. Verlagsgesellschaft Schulfernsehen, Cologne 1984, 528 pp.
  • with Frank Schauhoff: Mallorca, one year. An island novel. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1995, 306 pages, ISBN 978-3-462-04021-0 .
  • Death game. From the Schleyer kidnapping to Mogadishu. A documentary narrative. Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1997.
  • Heinrich Breloer (Ed.): Geheime Welten. German diaries from 1939 to 1947. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1999, Die Andere Bibliothek series , 281 pages, ISBN 978-3-8218-4484-8 .
  • with Horst Königstein: The Manns. A novel of the century. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, 578 pp., Ill., ISBN 3-10-005230-7 .
  • On the way to the Mann family. Encounters, conversations, interviews. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, 558 pp., Ill., ISBN 3-10-005231-5 .
  • Speer and Er. Hitler's architect and armaments minister. Propylaea Berlin 2005, 415 pp., Ill., ISBN 3-549-07193-0 .
  • On the way to the Speer family. Encounters, conversations, interviews. Propylaea Berlin 2005, 608 pages, ISBN 3-549-07249-X .
  • with Rainer Zimmer: The Speer Files. Traces of a war criminal. Propylaea, Berlin 2006, 512 pp., Ill., ISBN 978-3-549-07287-5 .
  • Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks". A film book by Heinrich Breloer. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2008, 384 pp., Ill., ISBN 978-3-10-005234-6 .

documentation

  • Thoughts on glittering wings. The filmmaker Heinrich Breloer. Documentary, Germany, 2010, 43 min., Written and directed: Inga Wolfram , production: DOKfilm, WDR , arte , first broadcast: December 19, 2010 on arte, summary by arte, ( memento from March 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  • WDR story (s) - Heinrich Breloer. 90 min., Script and direction: Klaus Michael Heinz , first broadcast: March 26, 2020 on WDR television, unlimited in the WDR media library.

literature

  • Tobias Ebbrecht, Matthias Steinle: Documentary drama in Germany as historical event television - an approach from a pragmatic perspective. In: Christian Hissnauer: The docu-drama in Germany as a journalistic policy television - an approach and reply from television historical perspective , in: MEDIA science , stoking Verlag , Marburg 2008, no. 3, ISSN  2196 to 4270 , pp 250-265, doi : 10.17192 / ep2008.3.25 , online article.
  • Christian Hißnauer: History games on television. The documentary play as a form of hybrid histotainment of the 1960s and 1970s. In: Klaus Arnold et al. (Ed.), History Journalism. Between information and staging. Lit, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10420-5 , pp. 293-316, limited preview in the Google book search
  • Christian Hißnauer: Hybrid forms of remembering: forerunner of the docu-drama in the 1970s. In: Monika Heinemann, Peter Haslinger et al. (Ed.), Media between Fiction-Making and Reality. Constructions of historical memories. Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-944396-10-1 .
  • Joanna Jambor, Christian Hißnauer, Bernd Schmidt: Horst Königstein: Daring TV game. A consideration in the spectrum of traditional and current forms . In: Christian Hißnauer (Hrsg.): The West German television game of the 1960s and 1970s. Special issue 3–4 / 2011 of the magazine Rundfunk und Geschichte , pp. 60–75, online file.
  • Christian Hißnauer, Bernd Schmidt : milestones of television documentarism: the Hamburg schools . UVK, Konstanz 2013, ISBN 978-3-86764-387-0 .

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Breloer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Heinrich Breloer  - Quotes

Portraits

conversations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Interview: Heinrich Breloer: I live in the luxury hotel Bayerischer Hof. In: tz .de , March 8, 2009.
  2. ↑ Fritz Wolf: The friendly thick skull. In: Handelsblatt , August 6, 2004.
  3. ↑ Angelika Wölke: Breloer and the untold story. In: DerWesten , February 15, 2012.
  4. ↑ a b c dpa : Brecht brings new plans for the 70th Breloer. In: HAZ , February 16, 2012.
  5. ↑ Stefan Reinecke : Ströbele: The biography . Berlin Verlag, Munich / Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-8270-1281-4 , pp. 32f., Limited preview in the Google book search.
  6. ↑ See From Experiment to Form. Third evening: 'stage for sensual perception' , in: Bonner Rundschau , February 6, 1962; it says that in the world premiere of “emphase 3” (UM NOP), a multimedia piece by Gerd Hergen Lübben , “to the word this time photo (H. Breloer) and film ( Hilgert / Schmidt )” was added and the Language "gained in urgency" through the attachment to locations (in the photos) and through the suggestive power of the expressively guided camera (noteworthy the reversal of the black and white values ​​of the film!).
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Benz : Promised too much. Breloer did not disenchant Speer's myth. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 17, 2005.
  8. ↑ Gitta Sereny : How much did Speer know? In: Tagesspiegel , May 9, 2005.
  9. ^ Documentary: Thoughts on glittering wings. ( Memento of December 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: arte , December 19, 2010.
  10. ↑ A conversation with Heinrich Breloer about his Brecht film. In: Das Erste , March 30, 2019.
  11. ^ Doris Priesching: Euphorically praised Moretti fan. In: Der Standard , May 17, 2005.
  12. ^ Karen Krüger: He and he and again: Heinrich Breloer has given the Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin his private production archive. But it raises more questions than it tries to answer. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , February 26, 2012, only beginning of article.
  13. ↑ Archive. In: breloer.deutsche-kinemathek.de , enter keyword Wehner , accessed on May 6, 2019.
  14. ↑ Information from the Office of the Federal President
personal data
SURNAME Breloer, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German film director
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Gelsenkirchen