Paul Wegener (actor)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul Wegener in 1932
Paul Wegener (around 1900)
Tilla Durieux and Paul Wegener as Judith and Holofernes (around 1915)
Paul Wegener as Nathan (1945)

Paul Wegener (born December 11, 1874 in Arnoldsdorf , West Prussia , † September 13, 1948 in Berlin ) was a German theater and film actor and film director . He was also a producer and screenwriter .

life and work

Paul Wegener was the son of an East Prussian cloth manufacturer. Six weeks after his birth, the family moved to Bischdorf (today Sątopy-Samulewo in Gmina Bisztynek ) in the Rößel district , where the palace of the Prince-Bishops of Warmia , used as a summer residence and hunting lodge, stood until it was destroyed by French troops in 1807 . The father had bought the resulting domain and the Bischdorf am Zainsee manor. Although his mother died when Paul Wegener was only two years old, he experienced his unbound childhood in the vastness of the estate as a "primal rulership". His father had him recite poems at an early age and put on theater scenes with his four siblings. After attending the Catholic district grammar school in Rößel , he went to the Kneiphöfische grammar school in Königsberg, where he deepened his inclination for the theater and founded the dramatic circle "Melpomene" together with fellow students. In 1894/95, at the request of his father, he studied law , philosophy and art history in Freiburg im Breisgau and Leipzig , but broke off his studies and sought his luck in acting. The father then refused him financial support.

He finally came to Hamburg through smaller engagements in Leipzig, Rostock, Wiesbaden and at the Bernarts Theater in Aachen and played in one of the first German performances of Maxim Gorki's Nachtasyl . This performance moved Max Reinhardt to bring him to his theater in Berlin. Now the great time of Paul Wegener began with roles like Richard III. , Macbeth , Othello or Mephisto between 1906 and 1920.

During the First World War he served as a lieutenant in the Landwehr in Flanders, where he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class in 1914 and was seriously wounded.

Paul Wegener speaks to a stranger during a guest performance in Amsterdam , 1924

Paul Wegener was a pioneer in film. His early commitment to the new medium had a decisive influence on the acceptance of film as an art form in Germany. In 1913 his first film The Seduced had its premiere. A special incentive for Wegener was to appear on the cinema screen with his own mirror image, i.e. twice at the same time, due to the image division possible in the film.

The Golem from 1914 dealt with a character from an old Jewish legend who is found and exploited by a criminal in the present day. The success with the character of the Golem led Wegener to set up his own film company. After the First World War he was a completely independent actor and director. Paul Wegener produced two more films about the Golem. In 1920 he shot the internationally acclaimed classic The Golem as He Came into the World , which is based on the original legend from the Prague ghetto.

Wegener was considered an imaginative director and actor; During the First World War he directed three fairy tale films ( Rübezahl's wedding in 1916, Hans Trutz in Schlaraffenland in 1917, The Pied Piper in 1918). Wegener liked to portray people from other cultures, for example in Der Yoghi 1916, Sumurun 1920, The Wife of Pharaoh 1921 and Living Buddhas 1924. With the latter project, for which he was responsible as a director and producer, Wegener had taken on himself so that he thereafter only worked as an actor in other people's productions. His films, especially The Golem How He Came Into the World , also enjoyed success in the USA , which enabled him to work in Hollywood . In 1926 he shot there for Rex Ingram The Magician .

Wegener appeared as a guest in lucrative leading roles on various Berlin stages and also went on tour with theater productions. In 1929 he performed in South America with his then wife Greta Schröder .

The new era of talkies and the simultaneous rise of the National Socialists did not diminish his importance as a film and theater maker. During National Socialism he was initially engaged at the Schiller Theater Heinrich Georges and later with Gustaf Gründgens at the State Theaters of Berlin. Paul Wegener never made a secret of his anti-National Socialist attitude. He repeatedly donated money for resistance groups, hid people at multiple risk in his apartment and, as an old, seriously ill man, went out on the streets at night to shout slogans like "Down with Hitler" and the like. to write on the house and ruin walls.

Although Wegener had worked in several Nazi propaganda films, most recently in Veit Harlan's Kolberg in 1945 , he received permission from the Soviet occupation forces to appear again after the Second World War .

After the end of the war, he protected a dozen women from possible rape by Soviet soldiers. His house on Binger Strasse had developed into a meeting place for Russian officers in the Rheingauviertel , with whom Wegener got drunk on the ground floor while the women from the surrounding houses hid in his attic.

On September 7, 1945 Paul Wegener opened the Deutsches Theater with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise, with him as Nathan. It was to be his last major theater role. After a fit of weakness, he could no longer perform.

Death and grave

Honorary grave of Paul Wegener in the cemetery Heerstraße with Buddha statue

Paul Wegener died on September 13, 1948 at the age of 73 in Berlin. He was buried in the Heerstraße cemetery in today's Berlin-Westend district. The widow Elisabeth born Rohwer (1903–1989) is buried there. The simply designed tomb consists of a slab of shell limestone bearing the names and dates of the deceased, and behind it a small statue of the young Buddha , accompanied by a lion , who with a smiling face shows the dead the way to nirvana . The sculpture is a reminder that Wegener was a connoisseur and collector of East Asian art. There is now a copy on the grave, the damaged original of the statue is kept in the cemetery administration building.

By decision of the Berlin Senate , the last resting place of Paul Wegener in the Heerstraße cemetery (grave location: Waldsonderstelle 4-B) has been dedicated as an honorary grave of the State of Berlin since 1975 . The dedication was extended in 2001 by the now usual period of twenty years.

Wegener's written estate is in the archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

family

Paul Wegener was married five times. His third marriage was with the actress Lyda Salmonova , his fourth with the actress Greta Schröder , whom he married shortly after her divorce from the dancer Ernst Matray in October 1924.

His son Peter Wegener (1917-2008) was a physicist, professor at Yale University and a specialist in hypersonic gas dynamics and its wind tunnels.

Paul Wegener is a cousin of the meteorologist, polar researcher and geoscientist Alfred Wegener .

Filmography

theatre

Radio plays

Wegener's publications

  • The galley convict: after the film novel (= film novels. Vol. 2). Edited by Erich Effler. Knoblauch, Berlin 1920.
  • The Golem as he came into the world. A story in 5 chapters. Scherl, Berlin 1921.
  • Flanders diary 1914. Rowohlt, Berlin 1933.

literature

  • Monty Jacobs : Paul Wegener (= The Actor. Vol. 6, ZDB -ID 530322-9 ). Reiss, Berlin 1920.
  • Ludwig Goldstein : Paul Wegener (= picture books of the German East. Vol. 1, ZDB -ID 570900-3 ). Gräfe & Unzer, Königsberg 1928.
  • Kai Möller (Ed.): Paul Wegener. His life and roles. A book by and about him. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1954.
  • Herbert Pfeiffer: Paul Wegener (= Rembrandt series stage and film. Vol. 1, ZDB ID 1337639-1 ). Rembrandt-Verlag, Berlin 1957.
  • Wolfgang Noa: Paul Wegener. Henschel, Berlin 1964.
  • Hans Günther Pflaum : Kinetic Poetry. PW's "Rübezahls Hochzeit" 1916. In: Peter Buchka (Ed.): German Moments. A sequence of images on a typology of the film (= off-texts. Vol. 1). Belleville, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-923646-49-6 , p. 16 f., P. 17: Scenography, (first: SZ 1995).
  • Hans Günther Pflaum: Into your own heart. PWs “Student von Prag” 1919. In: Peter Buchka (Ed.): German moments. A sequence of images on a typology of the film (= off-texts. Vol. 1). Belleville, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-923646-49-6 , pp. 20 f., P. 21: Scenography, (first: SZ 1995).
  • Heide Schönemann: Paul Wegener. Early modernity in film. Edition Menges, Stuttgart et al. 2003, ISBN 3-932565-14-2 .
  • Kurt Fricke: Playing on the Abyss - Heinrich George. A political biography. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2000, pp. 137–141. ISBN 3-89812-021-X

Film documentaries

  • Our parents' favorites: Paul Wegener. A portrait of the character actor. German TV documentary from 1964.
  • Classic film art - Paul Wegener. Documentation of the television of the GDR from 1981.
  • Paul Wegener. The man who was the golem. German TV documentary from 1981.

Web links

Commons : Paul Wegener  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Paul Wegener: Memories of the “primordial existence”. In: Kai Möller (Ed.): Paul Wegener. His life and roles. A book by and about him. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1954.
  2. ↑ Satopy-Samulewo - Bischdorf on Ostpreussen.net, accessed on May 20, 2015.
  3. ^ Paul Wegener: Flandrisches Tagebuch 1914. Rowohlt, Berlin 1933.
  4. ↑ Gwendolyn von Ambesser : The rats enter the sinking ship. The absurd life of the actor Leo Reuss. Verlag Edition AV, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-936049-47-5 , pp. 185-203.
  5. ^ Boleslaw Barlog: Theater for life. Universitas-Verlag, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-8004-1003-6 , pp. 290-298.
  6. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 496. Wegener's grave . In: Jörg Haspel, Klaus von Krosigk (Ed.): Garden monuments in Berlin. Cemeteries . Imhof, Petersberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-86568-293-2 . P. 38.
  7. ↑ Senate Department for Environment, Transport and Climate Protection: Honorary Graves of the State of Berlin (Status: November 2018) (PDF, 413 kB), p. 91. Accessed on November 13, 2019. Submission - for information - about the recognition and further preservation of graves Well-known and deserving personalities as honorary graves in Berlin (PDF, 158 kB). Berlin House of Representatives, printed matter 14/1607 of November 1, 2001, p. 5. Accessed on November 13, 2019.
  8. ↑ Paul-Wegener-Archiv inventory overview on the website of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
  9. ^ Filmworld telegrams. Die Filmwelt, No. 34, Vienna, October 17 or 24, 1924, p. 2.
  10. ^ Obituary from Yale University: In Memoriam: Peter Wegener, Helped Develop Hypersonic Wind Tunnels , accessed on May 20, 2015.
  11. ^ Alfred Wegener Institute : Alfred Wegener and his parents' house ( Memento of the original from March 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed May 20, 2015. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.awi.de

Remarks

  1. ↑ “In the Paul Wegener biography by Kai Möller (Hamburg 1954) it is said on page 116 that Paul Wegener had his first film The Seduced destroyed. That is not true. The film was censored and also ran in theaters. The negative was not destroyed; it is listed in an original negative list by Bioscop from 1918. ”( Gerhard Lamprecht : Deutsche Stummfilme. 1913–1914. Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin 1969, p. 113.)
personal data
SURNAME Wegener, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor and director
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Arnoldsdorf , West Prussia
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 1948
Place of death Berlin