Artur Brauner, a Polish-born, Holocaust survivor who became one of the world’s most famous post-WWII film producers, died Sunday at the age of 100.
Brauner family said he died in Berlin, the German news agency dpa reported.
Minister of Culture Monika Gruetters said that Germany lost one of the most important film producers in the post-war years, saying it was “a great gift for our country” that Brauner chose to make films in Germany and support its democratic undergoing reconstruction. It also pays tribute to her efforts over the past decades to ensure that the victims of the Holocaust have not been forgotten.
Brauner has produced hundreds of movies. They included 1960s, several times of the “Dr. Mabuse” movie crime and other hits such as “Young Girls in Uniform” with Romy Schneider.
Many of the films he produced had the Holocaust theme, including Agnieszka Holland’s Golden Globe winner “Europa Europa” about a boy in Nazi Germany joining the Hitler Youth to try to hide the fact that he is Jewish.
His “Babi Yar” in 2003, centered on the 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine, in which several of Brauner’s parents were killed. Brauner was disappointed by the film box office’s lack of success in Germany, saying: The test of “the fact that German public cinema has become politically more mature” has “clearly negative” results.
He also had a part in the production of “The Garden of Finzi-Continis”, located in Benito Mussolini, Italy, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1972.
Brauner describes “Morituri,” a 1948 film about a group of concentration camp inmates helped escape by a Polish doctor near the end of the war, his most important work of the film. He received a negative reception on time but Brauner called “virtually the first film that deals with the issue of Nazi victims. “
Brauner believed his lighter post-war movies matched the taste of the public.
“People wanted to be entertained after the terrible war, and I had a feeling for the needs of the public,” he told the Funke newspaper group in 2018.
His persistence helped. He recalled the 36-fold communist conduct in East Germany from Berlin to Munich, in his wobbly Volkswagen to convince actress Maria Schell to play the role of a penniless woman in the 1955 theatrical “Les Rats “, one of his favorite movies.
Brauner says there was no one in the cinema, he would never work again with him, but there was a lot he would like another chance to work with among them the former director of Fritz Lang, “if he wants keep it for my target budget. “
In recent years, Brauner has been worried by the rise of right-wing populism in Europe.
“I can only recommend to young people that they do not fall into the clutches of populists around the world and defend with all their might for nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia – now and not when it is already too late, “he told the press agency in 2018.
The son of a Jew, a lumber merchant, he was born as Abraham Brauner on August. 1, 1918, in the Polish city of Lodz. Brauner discovered his love of cinema at an early age and often went straight from school to a prior exam. After finishing school in 1936, he joined an expedition of young documentary filmmakers for the Middle East, then studied in Lodz, until Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
Brauner, his parents and four siblings fled the east and survived the war.
later, his parents emigrated to Israel. Brauner himself planned to emigrate to the United States, but his brief return to Lodz, then moved to Berlin with his brother, the Wolf.
In West Berlin, Brauner co-founder of Central Cinema Co., which would become one of Europe’s largest production companies, increasingly growing television in the 1960s.
Even when he turned 100, he was discussing scripts almost daily with his daughter Alice. “As soon as I’m gone, I can stop working,” he says.
Brauner’s wife, Maria, whom he married in 1947, died in 2017. He is survived by their four children, Fela, Alice, Sammy and Henry.