Filmmaker Brauner donates works to Jewish Museum
March 7, 2016
Speaking on Monday ahead of a ceremony in Berlin, where he found a home after World War II, Brauner, 97, dedicated the productions to the victims of the Holocaust, of which himself is a survivor.
Born to a Jewish family in Poland, Brauner emigrated first to the Soviet Union to escape persecution during the war. Upon its end, he founded the production company CCC Films (Central Cinema Company) in Berlin's American sector. He went on to become one of Germany's leading film producers.
Many films no longer publicly available
The donation, marked on Monday with a special screening of his 1982 film "The Passerby," was monumental as many of Brauner's films are no longer publicly available.
Prior to this, only the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel had been granted rights to the films, which include "Europa Europa," the story of a Jewish boy's escape in Nazi Germany, which won a Golden Globe in 1990 for best foreign language film.
Although Brauner's body of work was a reflection of standard German film fare in the post-war era, vacillating between historical dramas, comedies and detective stories, he also confronted Germany's deadly past in his films.
Other powerful works that address the Holocaust, now added to the Jewish Museum's media library, include "Morituri" (1948), which addresses the harassment and murder of European Jews, "Zeugin aus der Hölle" ("Witness out of hell") (1966) and "Eichmann und das Dritte Reich" ("Eichmann and the Third Reich") (1961).
cat/cmk (dpa)