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Artur Brauner – 90 Years Old
By Ron Holloway | August 2, 2008
Celebrating his 90th birthday on August 1st (on the same day as the Swiss National Holiday), Artur Brauner, Berlin’s legendary film producer, can look back on more than 250 productions from 1948 onwards under his CCC (Central Cinema Company) logo. A remarkable achievement for the son of a Polish wood-merchant born in Lodz, particularly when one notes that dating from those immediate postwar years his CCC is the only one of 119 production companies to survive up to the present day.
Indeed, in 1958 alone, 18 feature films were produced under his name at the CCC Studios in Berlin-Haselhorst. In the 1960s, he rode the box office charts with Karl May and Edgar Wallace hits. Over the years he had furthered the careers of Romy Schneider and Heinz Rühmann, Katharina Valente and Harald Junke, Lex Barker and Pierre Brice, Robert Siodmak and Fritz Lang, Kirk Douglas and Orson Welles, among countless other screen personalities Among his numerous awards as producer, he can count Golden Bears at the Berlinale (Robert Siodmak’s adaptation of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Ratten, 1955) and German Film Awards (Falk Harnack’s Der 20. Juli, 1955). His 20th of July film, about Graf von Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler, currently commands attention today if only because Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie on the same theme will open the 2009 Berlinale.
Artur Brauner devoted much of his career to producing films on the Holocaust. Narrowly escaping the Holocaust himself – he fled to the Soviet Union at the outbreak of the Second World War – he is well aware that members of his family were not as fortunate. Consequently, up to the present day, Brauner has been producing films on and about the Holocaust. According to reports, he plans to donate these films to the Yad Veshem Memorial in Jerusalem. The best known of this remarkable Holocaust series, Hitlerjunge Solomon (1990), directed by Agnieszka Holland, received a British Film Award Nomination in the Foreign Fim category.
– Ron Holloway
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