Karl Georg Egel

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Karl Georg Egel (born December 8, 1919 in Briest , Angermünde district , † February 13, 1995 in Berlin ) was a German writer . He was best known for his radio plays and scripts.

Life

Egel, son of a pastor, graduated from high school in Berlin and studied medicine there from 1938 to 1942. In 1944 he was promoted to Dr. med. PhD. During the Second World War , he was taken prisoner by the British on February 7, 1945 as an assistant doctor in Grenadier Regiment 982 in the Eifel . Until 1946 he was imprisoned in the Ascot camp , where he worked on BBC broadcasts for German prisoners of war, then he worked as a journalist for the NWDR in Cologne and Hamburg and for the BR in Munich . At the beginning of 1948, Egel escaped arrest on suspicion of doing intelligence work for the Soviet GRU while fleeing to East Berlin . There he was initially an employee of the Berliner Rundfunk , then first editor-in-chief of the Deutschlandsender and from 1950 to 1952 a research assistant at the Social Hygiene Institute of the Humboldt University .

After the end of the war, Egel began his literary work with political radio plays such as The Forgotten Land (1946), Never Again War? (1948) and Dresden: The fall and resurrection of a city (1949, together with Maximilian Scheer ) began. His radio play Hauptbuch der Solvays , broadcast in 1950 , he then worked with Richard Groschopp into his first film script Secret Files Solvay . The DEFA film was made in 1952 under the direction of Martin Hellberg . In July 1952, Egel founded the Film Section of the German Writers' Association together with Kurt Stern , Count Alexander Stenbock-Fermor and Paul Wiens . From 1953 to 1956, Egel was the successor to Hans Robert Bortfeld's chief dramaturge at DEFA. Since 1956 he worked as a freelance writer. In addition to further scriptwriting work for film and television, he also taught at the German Academy for Film Art in Babelsberg .

In the second half of the 1950s, Egel wrote the scripts for four films by Konrad Wolf (partly together with Paul Wiens ) . In cooperation with Wolf and Wiens, the film Sonnensucher was made in 1958 , which deals with uranium mining by SAG Wismut in 1950 and was only premiered in the summer of 1971 due to an objection by the Soviet government. The film People with Wings , which premiered in 1960, deals with efforts to build up the GDR aircraft industry and was later not shown again after these efforts were completely stopped.

Egel was also friends with Konrad Wolf's brother Markus and occasionally took on commissioned work for the Ministry of State Security . This is how the five-part television series Ich - Axel Caesar Springer came about at the end of the 1960s with the help of the Stasi. At the beginning of the 1970s, Egel, who was run as IM “Engel”, established contact between Markus Wolf and Bernt Engelmann , which was to lead to material deliveries from the MfS for Engelmann's non-fiction books.

Egel's most successful film was his adaptation of Erik Neutsch's bestselling novel, Spur der Steine . Ironically, the film made in 1965 under the direction of Frank Beyer was banned in July 1966 after only three days in theaters and was only able to conquer the cinema audience after the fall of the Wall . Even before the ideological aftermath of the XI. At the ZK plenary , Egel's popular five-part television series Dr. Schlueter with Otto Mellies in the title role: While the first four parts ran unopposed on television at the beginning of December 1965, part 5 was only broadcast after revisions at the end of March 1966. According to Trace of the Stones , Egel worked almost exclusively for television; his only cinema work during this time was the comedy Anton der Zauberer , directed by Günter Reisch , in 1978 , which was a great cinematic success in the GDR.

Egel was awarded the FDGB Literature Prize in 1956; later he received three times, each as a collective, the national price of the GDR : 1959 (2nd class for Das Lied der Sailors ), 1966 (2nd class for Dr. Schlueter ) and 1970 (3rd class for Ich - Axel Caesar Springer ). In 1969 he was awarded the Order Banner of Labor , in 1979 again collectively with the Heinrich Greif Prize (1st class for Anton the Magician ) and finally twice with the Patriotic Order of Merit (1980 in silver, 1985 in gold). Since 1969 Egel was a full member of the Academy of Arts of the GDR .

His written estate is in the archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

Radio plays

  • 1946: The Forgotten Land (first broadcast: NWDR, September 1946)
  • 1948: never again war? (First broadcast: December 1948)
  • 1949: Dresden. Fall and Resurrection of a City (first broadcast: 1949)
  • 1949: And mountains are moved / Peace (with Maximilian Scheer ; first broadcast: January 24, 1950)
  • 1950: Hiroshima - Five Years Later (first broadcast August 17, 1950)
  • 1950: The main book of the Solvays - A documentary radio play. Director: Gottfried Herrmann (first broadcast: December 12, 1950)
  • 1951: One of Our Days (first broadcast April 13, 1951)
  • 1951: Das Lied von Helgoland (with Peter Martin Lampel ; first broadcast: September 4, 1951)
  • 1951: We choose Germany (first broadcast: 1951)
  • 1951: Dr. Lienhardt behaves strangely (first broadcast: 1952)
  • 1955: The recovery (3 parts; with Paul Wiens ; first broadcast: December 7, 1957)

Filmography

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ His medical dissertation on the question of the organized fight against cancer was published in 1952.
  2. ↑ Stalin never laughed like that . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 2001 ( online ).
  3. ↑ focus.de
  4. ^ An agent as a key witness . In: Berliner Zeitung , May 8, 2000
  5. ^ Political cinema spook in East Berlin . In: Die Zeit , No. 31/1966
  6. ↑ Originally, Egel had intended Wolfgang Kieling, who was then based in Munich , for the title role, but this was ultimately rejected by the management of the German TV broadcaster. See Ralf Schenk: The man who went through the wall . In: Berliner Zeitung of March 29, 2008.
  7. ↑ Cf. Thomas Beutelschmidt, Henning Wrage: “The book for the film, the film for the book”: Approaching the literary canon on GDR television . Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, 2004, ISBN 3-937209-19-0 , p. 156.
  8. ^ Karl-Georg-Egel-Archiv Inventory overview on the website of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
  9. ^ As stated in: Erika Pick (Ed.): Writer and Film: Documentation and Bibliography. From the collections of the Literature and Language Maintenance Section . Academy of Arts, 1979.
personal data
SURNAME Egel, Karl Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Egel, Karl-Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Briest
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1995
Place of death Berlin