Heinz Paul

This article is about the director and producer Heinz Paul. For the composer and conductor see Heinz Dieter Paul .

Heinz Paul , actually Heinrich Egid Robert Paul , (born August 13, 1893 in Munich , † March 14, 1983 in Karlsfeld-Rotschwaige ), was a German film director and producer.

Life

Heinz Paul began his film career presumably in 1920 at Terra Film in Berlin , where he directed and directed production in films in which the Russian Hella Moja played the leading female role . From then on, Paul almost always worked with his wife Hella Moja, who from 1926 also wrote the scripts for his films again and again, for example for the film Being a student when the violets are in bloom .

After the introduction of the sound film, Heinz Paul broke with the genre of the colossal film and began to direct war films. It started with two semi-documentary feature films - The Somme (1930) and Douaumont (1931) - dedicated to the veterans and fallen soldiers of the Second World War . Purely fictional war films followed, such as The Other Side (1931), in which Wolfgang Liebeneiner plays a young British lieutenant who is worn down by the horrors of the world war. A film that showed the human needs of the former opponents of the war was quite unusual in Germany in the interwar period. The next film - Tannenberg (1932) - is about an East Prussian Rittmeister ( Hans Stüwe ) who, as the Russian front approached, was ordered to bombard his own estate. The adventure film Trenck (1932) shows scenes from the life of the Prussian officer who had a love affair with Frederick II's sister during the Silesian Wars .

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists in 1933, Paul became a member of the NS factory cell organization of film directors of German origin . The first film that Heinz Paul then directed was the historical drama Wilhelm Tell , which was converted from a Swiss piece of freedom into a Nazi propaganda film in the studios of the politically far-right Terra-Film AG . The main roles were played by Hans Marr , Conrad Veidt and Friedrich Ettel . Emmy Sonnemann , who later became the wife of Hermann Göring , played the role of Tell's wife . The military swank The Four Musketeers (1934), which received the rating of "popular education" from the film testing agency , was classified as a propaganda film after 1945 because of its patriotic tones. Paul's youth film Wunder des Fliegens (1934/35) received the title “State-politically valuable”. The film was about a seventeen year old ( Jürgen Ohlsen ) who made his dream of flying come true through the acquaintance of Ernst Udet . Although the film did not contain any direct Nazi propaganda, it was part of the advertising strategy aimed at getting young people excited about their involvement in the planned war of conquest. In 1935 Heinz Paul founded his own production company , Paul-Filmproduktion KG Berlin, which produced three comedies by 1936.

In 1937/38 Heinz Paul shot his fourth and last Nazi propaganda film for Terra Film AG, the naval film Comrades at Sea , which shows a group of young officers who get into clashes with communists during their training off the Spanish coast during the Spanish Civil War . Paul Wagner and Jaspar von Oertzen played the main roles in this film, which today is only available to the public to a limited extent as a reserved film . After Heinz Paul had directed a few unimportant film pleasure games and at times withdrew completely from the film business, he changed the genre again and shot a serious romance film for the first time with Schicksal am Strom (1944). Karin Hardt and Ernst von Klipstein were the main actors in this film, the action of which was set in the Elbe shipping environment .

Schicksal am Strom was Heinz Paul's last film before the end of World War II . His only directorial work in the following ten years was the comedy Glück aus Ohio , which Paul directed in 1950 for the small Munich Merkur-Film GmbH. It wasn't until 1954 that he made a comeback with the war film Company Edelweiß . The film, starring Joachim Mock and Albert Hehn, was set in the mountains of the German armed forces occupied Norway during the Second World War , where opposing soldiers are faced with the decision whether it is their human duty to save each other's lives . By 1963, Heinz Paul directed six more films with his own company - HP-Filmproduktion GmbH - that belonged to a wide variety of genres typical of the time.

Heinz Paul's grave is located in the north cemetery in Munich .

Filmography

Director, unless otherwise stated:

• 1920: Countess Walewska - production manager
• 1920: The dancer from Tanagra
• 1922: Felicitas Grolandin - production manager
• 1922: The beautiful girl - production manager
• 1925: The road to oblivion
• 1925: The dice game of life - director, screenplay
• 1926: The department store princess
• 1927: U 9 ​​Weddigen
• 1927: The False Prince - director, screenplay
• 1927/28: The Carousel of Death - director, screenplay
• 1928: The woman of yesterday and tomorrow
• 1928: The midnight waltz
• 1929: Three days of life and death
• 1930: The love market
• 1930: be a student when the violets bloom
• 1931: Shadow of the ring
• 1930: name marriage. Discretion a matter of honor
• 1930: The Somme. The grave of the millions
• 1931: Douaumont. The hell of Verdun
• 1931: The other side
• 1932: Tannenberg - director, screenplay
• 1932: Trenck - director, screenplay
• 1932: Marshal Forward
• 1933: The castle in the south / Château de rêve - production management
• 1934: Wilhelm Tell - director, screenplay
• 1934: The Four Musketeers - direction, line producer, screenplay
• 1935: Wunder des Fliegens - director, screenplay
• 1935: Immortal Melodies
• 1936: Paul and Pauline - production company
• 1936: Hilde and the 4 HP production company
• 1936: The Unknown - Manufacturing Company
• 1936: The little Hermännchen. No, no, what not there
• 1937: Rooster in the basket
• 1938: Comrades at sea
• 1940: Tip on Amalia
• 1941: Rügen (short documentary film)
• 1944: come back to me!
• 1944: Destiny on the river
• 1950: happiness from Ohio
• 1954: Edelweiß company
• 1956: Where the torrent rushes
• 1956: No marriage - director, producer
• 1959: Hula-Hopp, Conny - director, producer, screenplay
• 1958: The elephant in the china shop
• 1960: Oriental Nights - director, producer
• 1963: How beautiful are you ... - director, producer

Web links

• Heinz Paul at filmportal.de
• Heinz Paul in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Sören Ahlhaus: Making Peace with War - The First World War in the late Weimar cinema based on selected examples

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Somme. The Grave of the Millions ( Memento of the original from April 14, 2016 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. at arte.tv  
2. ^ 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. 450.