New German newsreel

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The Neue Deutsche Wochenschau , or NDW for short , was a newsreel in the cinemas of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1950 to 1977 .

history

Hamburg, Heilwigstraße 116 - The first editorial building for the New German Weekly News

As part of National Socialist propaganda , the centralized and synchronized German newsreel was produced in the German Reich from 1940 to 1945 and shown in the cinemas before the main program. The German newsreel was discontinued with issue 755 from March 22, 1945. Shortly after the end of the war, the Allies tried to establish new newsreels in their zones of occupation.

At the end of 1949 the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau GmbH was founded in Hamburg and production of the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau began. The former villa of the art and cultural historian Aby Warburg at Heilwigstrasse 116 in Hamburg-Eppendorf , today's Warburg House, served as the editorial and production building . The first edition of the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau was released on February 3, 1950. Off-speaker for the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau was Hermann Rockmann from 1950 to 1963 . Harry Giese , spokesman for the Nazi newsreel, had tried unsuccessfully to become the spokesman for the New German Newsreel .

After moving to the West, Paul Hach , a former employee of the Office for Interzonal and Foreign Trade , who had been commercial director at Wien-Film from 1938 to 1944, became managing director in 1950 . In 1958 Manfred Purzer became editor-in-chief and managing director of the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau. In 1960 the editorial office moved to an empty officers' mess on Hamburg's Sieker Landstrasse. In 1963, the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau was renamed “ Zeit unter der Lupe” (sometimes referred to as slow motion for short ).

At the end of 1977 the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau was discontinued because the concept of the weekly newsreels was outdated and the spread of television with its daily news programs meant that there was no longer any need.

Orientation and style

The first episodes of the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau were produced on 35 mm film tape. A new episode of ten minutes long appeared every week.

The focus of the program was varied: one focus was entertainment, a lot of space was given to sensations and catastrophes, politics only played a subordinate role. The world of work was present, with diligence and pride in reconstruction dominating, strikes and labor disputes playing a very subordinate role. While the newsreel “ Der Augenzeuge ”, produced in the GDR, reported 17 times on strikes in West Germany between 1950 and 1954, the issue of industrial action in the NDW was only taken up twice during the same period. Instead, there was plenty of room for Curiosities: The first edition was dedicated to, for example, among other things, the choice of a grapefruit - Queen in California . As in the previous weekly newsreel from the Nazi era, the newsreel was opened by a fanfare, through which a voice-over commented. The image of a rotating globe, wrapped in a tape with the words NEUE DEUTSCHE WOCHENSCHAU, served as the opening credits .

Aftermath

17 million meters of film material with 3,000 newsreels from the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau has been preserved in a Hamburg archive. The film material is owned by the Federal Archives as archive material and is made publicly available by Deutsche Wochenschau GmbH, which was privatized in 1978. The individual episodes of the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau are available in the film library of the Federal Archives.

Appreciation

Minister of State for Culture Bernd Neumann paid tribute to the Neue Deutsche Wochenschau on the occasion of its 60th anniversary in 2009: “With their contributions, magazines such as the 'Neue Deutsche Wochenschau' [...] contributed a lot to the creation of a new self-confidence and a new national identity in the still young Federal Republic at. Today, Deutsche Wochenschau GmbH has developed from a former producer into an important film archive that very successfully markets the unique fund of historical film documents owned by the Federal Archives. "

Web links

Literature and Sources

  • Dieter Oeckl: Weltbilder - German / German newsreel stories . Documentation 60 ', WDR / 3sat 1996.
  • Sigrun Lehnert: work, leisure and strike in the cinema newsreel in West and East Germany from the 1950s to the mid-1960s . In: Work - Movement - History , Issue I / 2018, pp. 110-133.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Uta Schwarz: Wochenschau, West German identity and gender in the fifties, page 103
  2. ↑ Harry Giese , dievergessenenfilme.de, accessed on January 11, 2018.
  3. ↑ Winterdom in the Kinowochenschau , hamburg.de, accessed on January 11, 2018.
  4. ↑ The “eyewitness”, on the other hand, highlighted strikes in the Federal Republic separately for propaganda reasons and suggested that they were predominantly political strikes. Cf. Sigrun Lehnert: Work, Leisure and Strikes in the cinema newsreel in West and East Germany from the 1950s to the mid-1960s . In: Work - Movement - History , Issue I / 2018, pp. 110-133, here s. 130.
  5. ↑ Speech on the 60th anniversary of the founding of Deutsche Wochenschau GmbH in Berlin, quoted from the press release , bundesregierung.de, accessed on January 11, 2018.