Wolfgang Staudte

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Wolfgang Staudte, 1955

Wolfgang Georg Friedrich Staudte (born October 9, 1906 in Saarbrücken ; † January 19, 1984 in Žigarski , SR Slovenia , Yugoslavia ) is considered one of the most important German film directors of the post-war period . He also appeared as a voice actor and actor .

Life

Until 1945

Staudte was the son of the actors and actresses Fritz Staudte and Mathilde Firmans and grew up in Berlin from 1912 . After secondary school , he began an apprenticeship as a car mechanic, drove car races and, from 1923, completed a two-year engineering course at the Oldenburg Engineering Academy and a two-year internship at Mercedes-Benz and the Hansa works . From 1926 to 1932 he was also first an extra , then an actor at the Volksbühne Berlin .

In 1930, Wolfgang Staudte gave the dubbing voice for the soldier Franz Kemmerich, who played the leading role in the American film adaptation of In the West . This film had a strong impact on the young Staudte. After the seizure of power by the National Socialists was revoked in 1933 because of "progressive type" work permit as an actor. That's why he worked as a voice actor and broadcaster for fairy tales and commercials.

His career as a director began when he made advertising films from 1935 and from 1941 produced four internal studio films as a “talent test” for young talent for the semi-state Tobis Filmkunst GmbH . He also appeared again as an actor , including in Veit Harlan's propaganda strip Jud Suss (1940). He directed his first feature film Akrobat schö-ö-ö-n in 1942/1943. In 1944 Staudte's film The Man whose Name was Stolen was banned for an unknown reason. He then lost his leave from military service . Only after the intervention of the artistic director of the Berlin Schiller Theater, Heinrich George , who insisted on Staudte's direction of his film The Girl Juanita , could the assignment to the front be prevented at the end of 1944.

After 1945

In the first few years after the end of the Second World War , Staudte reached the height of his artistic skills, according to the critics. By the SMAD supported first DEFA - feature film Murderers Among Us created Staudte 1946 the first German post-war film ever. In the years that followed and after the two German states were founded, Staudte , who lived in West Berlin, worked mainly as a cross-border commuter for the East German DEFA until 1955 , for example at Rotation (1948/1949) and Der Untertan (1951), initially for Falk Harnack was to be the director. In both films, Staudte primarily attacked the narrow-mindedness of the apolitical petty bourgeois in German history.

After the premiere of the subject called him Der Spiegel a "political child head" and "confused pacifists". The film remained banned in the West for five years and was then only allowed to be shown in abridged form until 1971. In 1952, while filming Poison in the Zoo, Staudte was urged by the Federal Ministry of the Interior to sign an undertaking not to work for DEFA in future. He did not comply with this request and was therefore withdrawn from the director and produced, The Story of Little Muck, a color film that brought DEFA great success. The film Poison in the Zoo was continued by Hans Müller .

In 1955 Staudte left DEFA for good and stayed permanently in the Federal Republic of Germany . One reason for this change of job may have been his disappointment with the behavior of the DEFA management in his conflict with Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel about the film adaptation of Brecht's mother Courage and her children .

In the West he was initially not given the opportunity to stage his socially critical concerns. Founded between 1958 and 1960, he ran together with Harald Braun and Helmut Käutner the Free Film Produktion GmbH , also in 1958, he married actress Ingmar Zeisberg ; the marriage lasted until 1964. It was not until 1959 that he succeeded again with the public prosecutor's roses with roses . In addition, this film was one of only a very few West German films from the 1950s that featured the National Socialist past. In 1960 he was awarded the Federal Film Prize for this film ; However, Staudte did not accept the award.

Regarding his experiences with the film industry in the West, Staudte said: "It is difficult to make the world a better place with the money from people who find the world in order." He found new job opportunities on television and made his first television film, Die Rebellion, in 1962, the Set standards. In 1964 Staudte 's Herrenpartie was released in cinemas, a mixture of political satire and fate tragedy. The film deals with the state of coming to terms with the past in the post-war period and was therefore rejected by the public and critics.

“Oscillating between political satire and fate tragedy, the superbly played film is a remarkable contribution to the unresolved past of both peoples. No less interesting is the look at the history of the reception of the film at that time, which was defamed as "bad nest pollution " and ended Staudte's career in cinema as a committed social critic. "

- Lexicon of international film

According to the Oberhausen Manifesto , in which a new generation of West German filmmakers declared “Papa's cinema” dead and formulated their own claim to the “cinema of the present”, Staudte was considered out of date at the end of the 1960s.

In 1968 Staudte founded the production company Cineforum GmbH, with which he produced the film Secrecies . The film failed the audience and Staudte was in debt until the end of his life. As a result, he was forced to work for television, of which he still claimed in 1968: “I have a disturbed relationship with television. I'm not particularly interested in these dwarf fates. "

In 1972 he directed the dubbing of the film Clockwork Orange on behalf of Stanley Kubrick .

For television , he directed, among others, numerous episodes of the crime series Tatort and the Commissioner , and was for the ZDF - Adventure Vierteiler The Sea Wolf (1971) and lure of gold in charge (1975). In 1977 he shot the extremely successful eight-part ARD family series MS Franziska , which depicted the life of a family of inland waterwaymen on the Rhine.

In 1975 he was awarded the gold film ribbon for “many years of outstanding work in German film”; In 1978 he received the Federal Cross of Merit . Staudte lived in Berlin-Steglitz until his death. Wolfgang Staudte died of heart failure in 1984 while shooting his last five-part series for television The Iron Way . On March 3, 1984, Wolfgang Staudte's ashes were handed over to the North Sea.

Appreciation

  • From the 1990 Berlinale onwards , the Berlin International Film Festival awarded the Wolfgang Staudte Prize for a film by the International Forum of Young Cinema every year in his memory .
  • On October 9, 2006, a memorial plaque was unveiled at his birthplace at Mainzer Straße 11 in Saarbrücken with the inscription: "Cowardice makes every form of government a dictatorship."
  • On April 11, 2016, Wolfgang Staudte-Platz near Saarbrücken Central Station was opened to the public. At the same time, the Saarland Society for Cultural Policy erected a stele in memory of the artist at the same location
  • A street is named after him in the Drewitz district of Potsdam

Movies

Director

In addition to his feature films, Wolfgang Staudte shot over 100 advertising and short films .

presentation

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zoomorde: Des Müller's Lust Der Spiegel 50, December 12, 1951
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Staudte. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  3. ↑ Eva Orbanz: Wolfgang Staudte . ISBN 3-920889-53-3 , p. 106
  4. ↑ Hamburger Abendblatt , June 28, 1968, page 9
  5. ↑ Info from the Filmhaus Saarbrücken ( Memento from October 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ^ Commemorative stele for Wolfgang Staudte . In: Saarbrücker Zeitung of April 13, 2016, page B4, accessed on April 13, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Staudte, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Staudte, Wolfgang Georg Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German film director
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Saarbrücken , Rhine Province , Prussia , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 1984
Place of death Žigarski , SR Slovenia , Yugoslavia