Walter Dörfler

This article deals with the stage and production designer Walter Dörfler. For the geneticist and virologist of the same name, see Walter Doerfler .

Walter Dörfler (born June 30, 1922 in Meiningen ; † July 17, 2000 in Starnberg ) was a German stage and production designer.

He was the son of the German writer and local poet Anton Dörfler .

At the beginning he worked as an assistant to Heinz Grete at the Nuremberg Opera House , after which he completed his studies with Emil Pirchan at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna .

After military service and an adventurous return, he made his debut as a set designer on June 25, 1946 for the Bavarian State Theater in Munich in the then alternative theater “Theater im Brunnenhof der Residenz” with Antigone by Jean Anouilh .

Dörfler later worked at many large German-speaking theaters, such as the Münchner Kammerspiele , the Bavarian State Theater , Thalia Theater Hamburg, Renaissance Theater Berlin, Volksbühne Berlin , Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf , Theater Bonn , Volkstheater Wien , the Wiener Festwochen and the Salzburg Festival . He worked several times for the Bayerische Staatsschauspiel with Ingmar Bergman . (e.g. "Three Sisters" 1978)

He also designed various equipment for film and television. He was employed at Bayerischer Rundfunk from the very beginning of television. On the first day of broadcasting on Bavarian television, November 6, 1954, he was responsible for the set design (the term set design did not yet exist) for the program “Charivari”. In 1955 he was also responsible for the production design (according to the credits) for the film adaptation of the famous one-act first class by Ludwig Thoma . Dörfler helped to shape the adaptation of stage material for the then new medium, as it was practiced very successfully until the 1970s.

Dörfler's rooms were almost always developed on paper as a sketch. These are characterized by the generous brushwork of the ink stroke and the lively coloring and were style-defining for the generation of stage designers from the 1950s to 1970s. Other techniques, such as B. He used woodcuts for illustration. Today these sketches are popular collector's items in professional circles.

He worked with directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Karl Paryla , Rudolf Noelte , Michael Kehlmann , Paul Verhoeven , Fritz Umgelter and Otto Schenk .

In 1992, on his 70th birthday, Bayerischer Rundfunk honored him with a large exhibition on his work entitled “100 sheets from my workshop, Walter Dörfler, set design for television and theater”.

Web links

• Walter Dörfler in the Internet Movie Database (English)