Staudte, Wolfgang

Born Oct. 9, 1906, in Saarbrücken. German stage and motion-picture director of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

Staudte became an actor in the Volksbühne Theater in 1926 and worked in the companies of M. Reinhardt and E. Piscator. He began his film career in 1931, first as an actor and later as a director. In 1943 he directed Hooray for the Acrobat, a comedy film about the fate of an honest performer, a clown named Charlie, in Nazi Germany. In 1946, Staudte and the directors S. Dudow, K. Maetzig, and F. Wolf formed the motion-picture studio DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft) in Babelsberg, near Berlin, German Democratic Republic. This studio produced such antifascist films as The Murderers Among Us (1946; released in the USSR as They Won’t Be Able to Hide), Rotation (1949, Soviet release, The Brown Spiderweb), and The Loyal Subject (1951, after a work by H. Mann). In the mid-1950’s, Staudte began working in the film studios of the FRG. His best works, several of which warn of the danger of a rebirth of Nazism and revanchism, include Roses for the Public Prosecutor (1959), The Fair (1960), A Get-together With the Boys (1964), and The Commissar (1971).