Konrad Wolf

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Konrad Wolf, 1970.
Konrad Wolf (right) with jury president AM Brousil (left) and Frank Beyer at the Karlovy Vary film festival in 1964
Funeral of Konrad Wolf on March 12, 1982 - among the mourning guests (1st row) his brother Markus and Erich Honecker
Grave of Konrad and Markus Wolf in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin

Konrad Wolf (born October 20, 1925 in Hechingen , Hohenzollernsche Lande , † March 7, 1982 in East Berlin ) was a German film director in the GDR .

Life

Konrad Wolf is the second son of the doctor and writer Friedrich Wolf with his wife Else Wolf. His older brother is Markus Wolf , who has been the head of the GDR's foreign intelligence service for many years . In 1933 the family first emigrated to France and from there later to Moscow . There he attended the German Karl Liebknecht School and acquired Soviet citizenship. During this time Konrad Wolf came into close contact with Soviet film . At the age of ten he played a supporting role in the exile film Borzy (Fighters) by director Gustav von Wangenheim in 1936 .

At seventeen he joined the Red Army and in 1945 at the age of nineteen belonged to the troops that took Berlin. For a short time in April 1945 he was the first Soviet city commandant of Bernau near Berlin . From 1945 to 1947 he was responsible for the performing arts for the SMAD (Soviet Military Administration) in Wittenberg and Halle (Saale) . From 1949 to 1954 he studied at the Moscow Film School, founded in 1919 .

He then worked as a director at DEFA , where he mainly shot challenging and critical contemporary films. He later described his war experiences in the film I was nineteen (1968). The relationship between Germans and Russians occupied him throughout his life. In his late work, more and more critical tones against the influence of the authorities on art are loud - for example in his Goya epic or in the quiet film The naked man on the sports field . His feature film Solo Sunny , which he directed together with his long-time screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase , shows the life of an outsider of GDR society in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin.

Most recently, he worked as artistic director on a 6-part documentary film project Busch singt , which, based on the biography of the communist actor and singer Ernst Busch , was intended to provide a cross-section of the political and artistic development of the first half of the 20th century in Germany.

From 1965 to 1982 he was President of the Academy of the Arts in the GDR . Wolf supported the expatriation of Wolf Biermann , while over 100 cultural workers in the GDR signed a protest note against the expatriation. Biermann was going "another political path", he was serving the counterrevolution.

Konrad Wolf was married to the costume designer Annegret Reuter from 1955 to 1960, and to the actress Christel Bodenstein from 1960 to 1978 . His son Mirko, born in 1961, is an animator and illustrator trained as an animator from this relationship. The brothers Konrad and Markus Wolf have several half-siblings from relationships between their father and various women, including the physicist Thomas Naumann .

Konrad Wolf died of cancer in Berlin at the age of 56 . His urn was in a on 12 March 1982 state funeral in the grave conditioning Pergolenweg the Memorial of the Socialists in the Central Cemetery Friedrichsfelde in Berlin-Lichtenberg buried. His extensive written estate is in the archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

Filmography

Individual consequences:
  • 1935 or The Barrel of Pandora
  • Aurora - dawn
  • Only the minute matters
  • In Spain
  • A dead man on vacation
  • And because man is a man

Awards

Star by Konrad Wolf on the Boulevard der Stars in Berlin

Konrad Wolf is an honorary citizen of the city of Bernau near Berlin . Since 1985 the University of Film and Television Potsdam (today the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf ) and a street in the Lichtenberg district and a street in Potsdam-Drewitz have been named after him. The Konrad Wolf Prize is named after him.

Own publications

  • Konrad Wolf in dialogue. Arts and politics. Edited by Dieter Heinze. Dietz, Berlin 1985
  • Right in the head and heart. Records, speeches, interviews. by or with KW- Henschel, Berlin 1989 ISBN 3-362-00415-6
  • Encounters with directors: Kurt Maetzig , Günter Reisch , Joachim Hasler , Konrad Wolf. Henschel, Berlin 1974 (KW = pp. 129–186)
  • But I saw for myself, that was the war: War diary and letters 1942–1945 , Edition Die Möwe, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3000505478

literature

Web links

Commons : Konrad Wolf  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. Heinz Kersten, article from March 1, 2002 from Der Freitag , the East-West weekly newspaper , title: Thinking as a life need online
  2. Junge Welt , November 22, 1976, p. 3 f.
  3. ^ "A picture of a man", Berliner Zeitung from March 29, 2005 online
  4. Konrad Wolf Archive Inventory overview on the website of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.