Isidore Ostrer

Isidore Ostrer (born June 17, 1889 in London , † September 3, 1975 in Sunningdale , Berkshire) was a German financier and film producer.

Life and activity

Ostrer was the third of five sons of Nathan Ostrer († 1932) and his wife Francesca Fanny († 1932). The father was a Jewish emigrant from Ukraine who fled to Great Britain in the 1870s before the anti-Jewish pogroms widespread in Tsarist Russia and who settled in London. He grew up in poor conditions in the east end of town.

Ostrer began his career as a clerk in the office of a broker in the City of London. During the First World War, he became wealthy through trading in textiles, and eventually founded a commercial bank with two of his brothers around 1920.

In 1922, Ostrer and his brothers Mark and Maurice acquired the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation , a subsidiary of the French Gaumont Film Company founded in 1898 , which originally specialized in organizing the distribution of French silent films in Great Britain, but after gradual expansion into the production business itself got on board and founded Britain's first major film studio in 1914. After the company was taken over by the Ostrers, the company initially shifted its focus to founding and operating movie theaters. Within a very short time, British Gaumont was able to expand at an excessive pace in the era of the emerging sound film, so that by the early 1930s it developed into the British cinema chain dominating the British market (Gaumont-British Cinemas). At the time of the Gaumont-British wedding in the 1930s, it comprised around 350 movie theaters. As the front man of the group - which also accommodated the two remaining brothers Harry and David - Isidore Ostrer's brother Mark Ostrer appeared, while he kept himself discreetly in the background, but realiter, like his son-in-law, the actor James Mason , in his own Autobiography formulated, was the real and only "brain" of the brothers and sisters ( the five of them had one opinion and one brain ).

Around 1932, Ostrer expanded his media empire into the field of print media by acquiring the Sunday newspaper, Sunday Referee .

Encouraged by the success of his cinema houses, Oster also tried himself as a producer by expanding British Gaumont to include his own production department (Gainsborough Pictures). This operated the studio complexes Lime Grove Studios , Shepherd's Bush Studios (closed in 1937) and Islington Studios . The employees of his studio included the young Alfred Hitchcock , who made his first directorial work here, and actors such as Rex Harrison and Margaret Lockwood . While Isidore Ostrer was President of the film studio he created, his brothers Mark and Maurice became Managing Director and Assistant Managing Director. The eldest brother, David, ran the studio's overseas operations, and brother Harry, a home teacher, ran the writing department.

The film production activities of the British-Gaumont proved to be unsuccessful in the long run, which was based in particular on the inability of their production company to gain a foothold in the non-British, especially the important American, market. Accordingly, the production of its own films was practically discontinued in 1937 and from then on the company concentrated on operating cinema houses.

Ostrer, who is described as a far-fetching entrepreneur, saw television as the mass medium of the future in the early 1930s, which then only existed on a conceptual level: Following this view, he made early efforts to promote and accelerate the development of television technology and to prepare after the practical establishment of television as a real consumer medium, which he expected in the 1940s, to own and control his own transmitter: in February 1932 he acquired control of the Baird Television Company (BTC). In 1933 the company set up an experimental television station with a shortwave transmitter in the Crystal Palace near Sydenham in south London. In 1936, BTC already employed 382 people.

In October 1941, Ostrer finally gave up control of Gaumont-British by selling his shares to businessman Arthur J. Rank , who through this and a few similar deals became the British post-war media mogul. According to the change of ownership, the Gaumont cinemas were converted into houses by Rank's company and henceforth operated as Odeon Cinemas . The sale of his company, which was diametrically opposed to his previous business philosophy - in previous years, Ostrer had gone to great lengths to ensure that control of the company was inextricably in his hands - is pointed to by most authors who address this question poor health of his wife and the resulting frequent stays of the couple in the climatically particularly favorable Arizona of his wife .

After a temporary permanent move to the United States, Ostrer returned to Great Britain in later years, most recently focusing his business activities again on the textile industry.

Ostrer as a target of anti-Semitic hostility

Ostrer was a frequent target of attacks by British fascists and due to his Jewish descent and his anti-Semitic stereotypes of the sphere of activity of a "business and finance Jew" (according to a polemic in the Illustrierte Beobachter from 1941) Anti-Judaists and - especially since the outbreak of the war between Great Britain and the German Reich in autumn 1939 - also the German National Socialists.

Ostrer himself had no real self-image as a Jew - he had little interest in the Mosaic religion and Jewish cultural traditions and did not openly live his Judaism; But he saw himself challenged by the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists: He reacted to this, among other things, by having his studio produce the film Jew Süss (not to be confused with the German film of the same name by Veit Harlan), a historical satire, in 1934 has anti-Nazi undertones.

The importance that the rulers in Germany ascribed to Ostrer is also reflected in the fact that in 1940 he was listed on the so-called special wanted list compiled by the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin in the spring of 1940 , a directory of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the German Wehrmacht should be arrested automatically and primarily by SS-Sonderkommandos.

family

One of Ostrer's children was the writer and actress Pamela Ostrer (1916–1998), who became known as Pamela Mason after she married the actor James Mason .

Fonts

• The Conquest of Cold , 1932.
• Modern Money and Unemployment: And the Law of Barter , 1964.

literature

• Allen Eyles: Gaumont British Cinemas. 1996, ISBN 0-85170-519-7 .
• Robert Murphy: Ostrer, Isidore (1889–1975). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X .
• Nigel Ostrer: The Ostrers & Gaumont British. 2010, ISBN 978-0-9564822-1-1 .
• Jeffrey Richards: The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s. 2010, ISBN 978-1-84885-122-1 .
• John Trumbour: Selling Hollywood to the World: US and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950. Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-04266-6 , pp. 177f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ For example, Ostrer had divided the shares of his group into two types of shares (type A and type B shares), of which only one (type A shares) was entitled to vote on the board, and stipulated that 51% of the type A had to remain in family ownership in order to prevent hostile takeovers of the company by competitors who would try to buy the majority of the company's shares.
2. ↑ For the anti-Semitic attacks on Ostrer, cf. exemplarily the article Also of a Dynasty. In: Illustrier Beobachter. Volume 16, Issues 1-26, 1941, p. 293.
3. ↑ Special wanted list G: B. (Entry on Isdor Ostrer) on the Imperial War Museum website.