Heinrich Umlauff

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Heinrich Christian Umlauff (born November 17, 1868 in Hamburg ; † December 22, 1925 there ) was a German businessman, ethnography operator, costume designer and film architect for silent films .

Live and act

Umlauff came from a Hamburg merchant family. A few months after Heinrich was born, his father Johann Gustav Friederich Umlauff founded a family-owned company in the Hanseatic city in 1869: a natural produce store and a shellfish factory. Later other branches of business were added, especially the trade in ethnographic goods from distant (Asian and African) countries.

Company founder Johann GF Umlauff married a sister of the animal dealer, Völkerschau operator and later founder of the Hamburg Zoo , Carl Hagenbeck . From this marriage Heinrich Umlauff emerged as one of three sons. He kept the ties between the two families Umlauff and Hagenbeck close together for a lifetime and eventually specialized in the ethnographic part of the company. Umlauff collected artefacts from all over the world in order to set up a so-called “world museum” and, in the tradition of his grandfather Hagenbeck, also organized national shows and exhibitions. Like Britta Lange in her book Echt. Fake. Lifelike. Writes images of people in circulation , “the production and sale of ethnographic figures (...) became a specialty of the company, which had a particularly formative effect on the museum presentation of foreign cultures. For all German ethnological museums, the Umlauff company was an important source of income for both ethnographics and materials for exhibition design, especially up until the First World War. " Umlauff produced entire dioramas to embody cultural stereotypes , which were shown at colonial exhibitions until the interwar period.

This activity earned him the reputation of being an expert in depicting foreign worlds. As a result, even during the First World War, the film industry began to be interested in the bustling Umlauff and its work. Ethnographic supplies or specific, ethnographic equipment of films known by name up to 1918 are currently not verifiable, but Umlauff's work for the celluloid industry began to rapidly gain in importance with the dawn of the Weimar Republic . Particularly fruitful collaborations came about between Umlauff and the Decla production company run by Erich Pommer .

In the years 1919 to 1923 Umlauf designed the costumes and the buildings for some of the most important early works by Fritz Lang , especially The Tired Death and The Nibelungs . He also supplied these films with ethnographic props several times, giving them a touch of the exotic that was so much in demand at the time. The early long productions of 1919, Die Spinnen and Harakiri , were practically created right away on Umlauff'schem family terrain: in Hagenbeck's zoo in Hamburg-Stellingen . A continuation of this fruitful collaboration between Lang and Umlauff was made impossible by the early death of the hamburger shortly before Christmas 1925.

Umlauff's granddaughter was the painter and graphic artist Gisela Bührmann (1925–2011).

Filmography

literature

  • Britta Lange: Really. Fake. Lifelike: Images of People in Circulation , Kadmos , Berlin 2006, ISBN 9783931659813 , (At the same time: Berlin, Humboldt University, dissertation, 2005, table of contents ),
  • Hilke Thode-Arora (1992): The Umlauff family and their companies - Ethnographica dealers in Hamburg . In: Messages from the Museum für Völkerkunde Hamburg . NF, Vol. 22, pp. 143-158

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date of birth, place of birth and full name according to the Kay Less film archive
  2. ↑ According to the entry in the death register in the Hamburg State Archives, December 22, 1925 at 5.15 a.m.
  3. ↑ Britta Lange: Really. Fake. Lifelike. Images of people in circulation.
  4. ↑ Britta Lange: Stuttgart: The colonial exhibition of 1928 , in: Ulrich van der Heyden, Joachim Zeller (ed.): Colonialism here in Germany - A search for traces in Germany. Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-86680-269-8 , pp. 343-347.
  5. ^ Book review . In: Paideuma . Communications on cultural studies . No. 54 , 2008, p. 296 ff . ( einsnull.com [PDF]). Book review ( Memento of the original dated February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ssl.einsnull.com
personal data
SURNAME Umlauff, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Umlauff, Heinrich Christian (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German merchant, folk show operator, film architect, costume designer, prop master
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH December 22, 1925
Place of death Hamburg