Leo Bieber

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Leo Bieber (born November 27, 1904 in Breslau , German Reich ; died August 22, 1981 in Nuremberg ) was a German stage , film and television actor.

Life

Bieber grew up in Berlin and there, in the early days of the Weimar Republic , gained his first acting experience at the German theater and the Rose Theater in the capital. At the age of 19 he started his professional career in the role of “youthful hero”, from then on played in Halle (Mitteldeutsches Landestheater 1924/25) and Eisenach, in Neuss (at the Rheinisches Städtebundtheater 1925-28) and at the Schauspielhaus Köln (from 1928 to 1931). A detour also took him to Königsberg in East Prussia. Because of his agitprop activities, the left-wing Jew was wanted by the Gestapo when the National Socialists came to power in 1933 . In 1933 Bieber managed to escape to Vienna, where he played theater again here and in Salzburg. For example, he was seen in June 1933 as Raimon in a production of Friedrich Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orléans at the Austrian Volksbühne. In the 1934/35 season Leo Bieber was part of the ensemble of the German-speaking city theater of Mährisch-Ostrau. In 1935 Bieber left Austria again and went to the Soviet Union, where he appeared with other communist emigrants such as Erwin Geschonneck , Curt Trepte and Gerhard Hinze in the German regional theater of Dnepropetrovsk. Immediately afterwards, Bieber went to Odessa, where he also worked as a set designer (e.g. for Friedrich Wolf's The Trojan Horse (1937)). In 1938 Bieber traveled on to Czechoslovakia, and in 1939 he finally managed to escape to England.

There and then in Australia he was interned until 1941 after the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and Hitler's Germany. In that year Bieber returned to England and was able to play theater again on a German-speaking emigrant stage. He also appeared in the Austrian emigrant cabaret Laterndl. His most important plays in those years of exile include Der Lechner-Edi looks ins Paradies (1940, based on Jura Soyfer ) and Die Dreigroschenoper (1940, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht ). At a performance of Heinrich von Kleist's Amphitryon in 1944, Leo Bieber was also employed as a set designer and set designer. From the middle of the war Leo Bieber was now regularly used in English-language plays and completed appearances in Thunder Rock (1943), They Came to a City (1944) and Bunbury (1946, by Oscar Wilde ). In addition, he also took part as a spokesman for German-language BBC broadcasts and had small roles in British films since 1947. In 1957, at the instigation of Kurt Ehrhardt , Leo Bieber returned to Germany (to the Federal Republic) and initially settled in Hanover, where, after a few early guest engagements, he was committed to the regional theater there from 1959 to 1966. Bieber grew more and more into the character role subject of the "pères nobles". From 1966 to 1979 Leo Bieber worked at the Nuremberg City Theater. After his retirement at the age of 75, he also spent his old age there. When Bieber died in 1981, his colleague Erich Ude wrote in Bieber's obituary in the Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch: “He was versatile, committed and interested, open to events and developments in the artistic and political arena. His horizons were wide and open, not least because of the bad and painful experiences he had to go through while forced to emigrate. "

Filmography

literature

  • Trapp, Frithjof; Mittenzwei, Werner; Rischbieter, Henning; Schneider, Hansjörg: Handbook of the German-speaking Exile Theater 1933–1945 / Biographical Lexicon of Theater Artists. Volume 2, pp. 90 f., Munich 1999
  • German Stage Yearbook, 1982, p. 747 (obituary)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bieber, Leo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German stage, film and television actor
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Breslau , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH 22nd August 1981
Place of death Nuremberg