Karl Ritter (director)
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Karl Ritter (born November 7, 1888 in Würzburg , † April 7, 1977 in Buenos Aires , Argentina ) was a German illustrator , commercial artist , director , screenwriter and film producer .
Life
Ritter's mother was an opera singer, his father a professor at the conservatory. After graduating from high school, Karl Ritter became a career officer in the Bavarian army .
A visit to the ILA in Frankfurt am Main in 1909 gave him the idea of trying to build an airplane. He was encouraged to do so by Paul von Gans-Fabrice (1866–1915), the father of Countess Einsiedel, who later flew with Ernst Udet . At that time Gans-Fabrice was in the process of setting up the Bavarian flight school on Munich's Oberwiesenfeld and promised the young aircraft enthusiast to help him with the flight tests.
Ritter began to design the aircraft in the winter of 1910 with the help of his battalion commander. At the end of February 1911, Ritter flew his new shoulder monoplane for the first time , and on September 30th of this year he successfully passed his flight test in front of the German Airship Association. He got the German license number 121.
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Five days before his pilot's exam he married Erika, née one year older. Ritter (no relatives), a great niece of Richard Wagner . He had hardly returned when he received the news that the Bavarian army had decreed that married officers were forbidden from now on to devote themselves to military aviation. Ritter thus had to stay with the pioneers, a branch of arms in which he was promoted to major. He did not give up flying and was a member of the traditional old eagle community until the end of his life .
After the end of the war he began to study architecture in Munich and then turned to painting and graphics. As an illustrator, he worked for the magazine Der Orchideengarten in 1920 and 1921 . Enthusiastic about National Socialism through his wife's family , he joined the NSDAP in 1925 (membership number 23.040).
In 1925 he had his first contact with film as a commercial artist for Südfilm AG in Berlin. He was entrusted with the production management of various films and he began to write scripts. His brother Rudo Ritter, actually a composer, also wrote screenplays to earn a living. In 1932 he became head of production for the “Reichsliga”, for which he made a short film with Karl Valentin that same year . In 1933, Ufa hired him as a producer; his first film in this capacity was Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), one of the few Nazi films that openly advertised joining the Hitlerjugend . He chose Hans Steinhoff as director , who, alongside himself and Veit Harlan, became one of the most exposed directors of the Third Reich .
In 1936 Ritter began his career as a director with the comedy Frauenregiment . Due to an instruction from Goebbels to include actors and directors in the management of the film production companies in order to improve the quality of German films, Ritter joined the supervisory board of Ufa in 1937 together with the actors Eugen Klöpfer , Paul Hartmann , Mathias Wieman and the director Carl Froelich called. In 1938, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Ritter was appointed professor at the Film Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg. In the next few years he was one of the busiest directors of national-ideological films such as Patrioten , Pour le Mérite , GPU and Kadetten . He also shot musical comedies such as Capriccio (with Lilian Harvey ) and Bal paré . The last productions of the National Socialist film industry in which Ritter was involved were Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Life Goes On and Gerhard Lamprecht's comrade Hedwig , which remained unfinished at the end of the war.
Towards the end of the war, Ritter was drafted into the Air Force and became a Soviet prisoner of war, from which he was able to flee to Bavaria. During the denazification he was classified as a follower and therefore did not receive a filming license in the French occupation zone . In May 1949 he went with his family to Argentina, where, through Winifred Wagner's mediation, Germans living there should enable him to set up a film production. For the Eos-Film in Mendoza he shot in 1950/51 with the participation of numerous other Germans, including his three sons, the film El Paraíso , which was released in 1953, but remained unsuccessful.
In June 1953 Ritter returned to the Federal Republic. In Wiesbaden he shot public prosecutor Corda , the story of a lawyer who falls in love with a defendant; the main role was played by Paul Klinger . With his second production Ball der Nations he returned to the genre of light musical comedy, which resulted in the unusual collaboration between Zsa Zsa Gabor , Gustav Fröhlich and Alexander Golling . In 1955 he founded "Karl Ritter Filmproduktion GmbH" and announced his plan to film Frank Wedekind's drama Die Büchse der Pandora . However, the project did not materialize.
Despite his belief in “the recovery of German film” and his endeavors to “create films whose themes are universally valid”, Ritter was unable to assert himself in the German film industry. He eventually returned to Argentina, where he died in 1977.
Ritter had three sons: Heinz (1912–1958), Gottfried and Hans.
Filmography
- 1928: The Spreewald Girl (screenplay)
- 1929: return! Forgive everything! (Script)
- 1929: Miss Lausbub (screenplay)
- 1931: The zinc worker (production manager)
- 1932: Do you have to get a divorce right away? (Production Manager)
- 1932: In the photo studio (director)
- 1932: Melody of Love (production manager)
- 1933: Rivals of the Air (line producer)
- 1933: Love must be understood (production management and production management)
- 1933: Hitler Youth Quex . A film about the spirit of sacrifice among German youth (line producer)
- 1934: Decoy (production manager)
- 1934: Love, Death and the Devil (production manager and line producer)
- 1934: Enjoy your life (line producer)
- 1934: The island
- 1935: The Foolish Virgin (line producer)
- 1935: Die Insel (production manager)
- 1935: Königswalzer (production manager)
- 1935: marriage strike (production manager)
- 1936: The Last Four from Santa Cruz (line producer)
- 1936: Women's Regiment (direction and production management)
- 1936: Traitor (director, production manager and line producer)
- 1937: Vacation on word of honor (director, production management and line producer)
- 1937: Company Michael (direction, screenplay and production management)
- 1937: Patrioten (idea, direction, scriptwriting, production management and production management)
- 1938: Pour le Mérite (director, screenplay and line producer)
- 1938: Capriccio (direction and line producer)
- 1939: The Honeymoon (Director, Screenplay and Production Management)
- 1939: In the fight against the world enemy (direction and line producer)
- 1939: Legion Condor (direction, screenplay and line producer)
- 1940: Bal paré (director, screenplay and line producer)
- 1941: Stukas (director, screenplay and line producer)
- 1941: ... About everything in the world (direction, screenplay, production management and line producer)
- 1941: Kadetten (direction, screenplay and line producer)
- 1942: GPU (direction, screenplay and production management)
- 1943: Crew of Dora (direction, screenplay and line producer)
- 1943: Love letters (line producer)
- 1944: Summer Nights (direction and line producer)
- 1945: Comrade Hedwig (production manager)
- 1945: Educator wanted (production manager)
- 1945: Life goes on (script and line producer)
- 1950: who drove the gray Ford? (Production Manager)
- 1953: El Paraíso (production and direction)
- 1953: Public Prosecutor Corda (director and screenplay)
- 1954: Ball of Nations (direction and screenplay)
literature
- Gerke Dunkhase: Karl Ritter. In: Hans-Michael Bock (Ed.): CineGraph - Lexicon for German-language film. Lfg. 1st edition text + kritik, Munich 1984.
- William Gillespie: Karl Ritter. His Life and "Zeitfilms" under National Socialism. Expanded 2nd Edition. German Films Dot Net Publishers, 2014. ISBN 978-0-9808612-2-8 .
- William Gillespie: The Making of The Crew of the Dora ( crew Dora ). German Films Dot Net Publishers, 2016. ISBN 978-0-9808612-3-5 .
- Wolfgang Jacobsen: Knight, Karl Hermann Josef. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , pp. 666-668 ( digitized version ).
- Ernst Klee : Karl Ritter. In: 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 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Karl Ritter in the catalog of the German National Library
- Karl Ritter at filmportal.de
- Karl Ritter in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Adolf Sennewald: German book illustrators in the first third of the 20th century. Materials for bibliophiles . Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 1999, ISBN 3-447-04228-1 , p. 160 ( Google Books )
- ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 489.
- ↑ a b Biography ( Memento of the original from October 16, 2017 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. on film-zeit.de, accessed on October 15, 2017
- ↑ El Paraíso in the Internet Movie Database (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ritter, Karl |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German director, screenwriter and film producer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 7, 1888 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wurzburg |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 7, 1977 |
| Place of death | Buenos Aires , Argentina |