Wolfgang Staudte was born in Saarbrücken, in 1906, to parents who were both actors. Six years later, his family moved to Berlin. He trained to be an engineer before he began performing at the Volksbühne in Berlin, where he worked with Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator from 1926 to 1932.
Wolfgang Staudte is one of the few important German directors of the postwar years. Die Mörder sind unter uns , the first German postwar film, remains today among the director’s best works. In the film, a surgeon, Hans Mertens, returns home from the war, becomes an alcoholic, and lives hopelessly among the ruins. His girlfriend Susanne has survived a concentration camp and attempts to help him overcome his apathy. The apathy is quickly dispelled by the appearance of an industrialist, formerly a Nazi, whose outlook remains unchanged and who, just as before the war, uses deceptive phrases to justify the new situation.
This contemporary material was realized by Staudte in a thoroughly realistic… read more
Wolfgang Staudte was born in Saarbrücken, in 1906, to parents who were both actors. Six years later, his family moved to Berlin. He trained to be an engineer before he began performing at the Volksbühne in Berlin, where he worked with Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator from 1926 to 1932.
Wolfgang Staudte is one of the few important German directors of the postwar years. Die Mörder sind unter uns , the first German postwar film, remains today among the director’s best works. In the film, a surgeon, Hans Mertens, returns home from the war, becomes an alcoholic, and lives hopelessly among the ruins. His girlfriend Susanne has survived a concentration camp and attempts to help him overcome his apathy. The apathy is quickly dispelled by the appearance of an industrialist, formerly a Nazi, whose outlook remains unchanged and who, just as before the war, uses deceptive phrases to justify the new situation.
This contemporary material was realized by Staudte in a thoroughly realistic style with expressionistic strokes in a manner that suggests analogies with Rossellini’s Paisà. An English critic identified the director as a successor to Lang and Pabst. A phrase in the film—"The murderers are among us"—became a symbolic expression for the spirit of the time, in which progressive German intellectuals sought every means to reckon with the fascist past. It was not by chance that the film was made in the Soviet sector of Berlin and produced by the newly founded DEFA studios. Staudte’s efforts to interest cultural officials in the western zones in his project met with no success. This was also the case with Rotation and Der Untertan , a satiric version of Heinrich Mann’s novel of the same title, set in an actual embassy.
Staudte was a political artist because, as he said, he was a political person. He had perfect command of a variety of means of expression and narrative forms, and used a rich palette of symbolic images in realistically-structured filmic space. His films often led to comparisons with René Clément and Rossellini. Only his own country—the media and public as well as the authorities—could not accept him and systematically and conclusively thwarted him.
In the beginning Staudte was repeatedly labelled a communist because of his association with DEFA. He was urged to make West German films. In 1951 he decided to do so, and so began an unhappy period for him which consisted of attempts “to improve the world with the money of people who already find the world to be just fine.” He was regularly reproached for fouling his own nest, and was reluctantly reduced to making entertainment films. In its headlong rush toward economic development, West German society wanted to see neither fundamental analysis of the Nazi past, nor pessimistic mistrust directed against the new, American-oriented NRD-model.
Years of harassment by the press and cultural authorities went by with Staudte working away, often in vain, writing unengaging comedies. He nevertheless made a few masterpieces: Rosen für den Staatsanwalt, Kirmes, and Herrenpartie. These films are united by Staudte’s conviction that the present and the past are bound together and that man today remains inseparable from yesterday. The most imposing of these films is Herrenpartie : it confronts two worlds—that of today’s German bourgeoisie, which would gladly bury Nazi memories, and that of a village of Yugoslavian widows who, despite everything, are better able to behave humanely than the Germans.
In the latter part of his career, Wolfgang Staudte directed television detective stories. His case demonstrates that the new German cinema has worthy predecessors who nevertheless remain unappreciated even by their colleagues. —defafilmlibrary.com
