Artur "Atze" Brauner (born Abraham Brauner; 1 August 1918 – 7 July 2019) was a German film producer and entrepreneur of Polish origin. He produced more than 300 films from 1946.
Life and career
He was born the oldest son of a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland. His father was a timber wholesaler. Brauner attended a general education liceum in Łódź, where he took the matura final exam, and then studied at a local polytechnic technical school until the German attack on Poland in September 1939.[3] With his parents and four siblings, he fled to the Soviet Union and survived the Holocaust.[4] Following the war, he and his brother, Wolf Brauner emigrated to Berlin;[5] his parents and three of his siblings emigrated to Israel.[3] Twelve of his relatives were killed at Babi Yar,[6] among forty-nine who died at the hands of the Nazis.[7]
Brauner married Theresa Albert, called Maria, in 1947. They had four children.[3]
As a young man, he saw Fritz Lang's film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which affected him greatly, making him interested in film. In September 1946, he founded the Central Cinema Company or CCC Films in the American sector of Berlin. He produced Sag' die Wahrheit, one of the first films produced in Germany after the war, followed by Morituri, which was a commercial failure and threw him into debt. Brauner realised that to produce critically successful films he had to make up their losses by producing critically derided films that were appreciated by the public. He lured back many Germans who had experience in Hollywood such as Robert Siodmak and later Fritz Lang who started a revival of Dr. Mabuse.[8]
In 2009, Yad Vashem received a donation of 21 of Brauner's productions having to do with the Holocaust, including Die Weiße Rose, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler (Der 20. Juli) and Man and Beast (Mensch und Bestie). In 2010, Yad Vashem opened a media center in Brauner's name.[9] Brauner called it the "crowning achievement of my film career".[10]
^Bock, Hans-Michael; Bergfelder, Tim, eds. (2009). The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema. New York: Berghahn Books. p. 60. ISBN978-1-57181-655-9.
^Kalat, David: German Trash Cinema: The Story of Artur Brauner in: The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five Novels. McFarland (2005), pp. 131–142
^Thrower, Stephen (2015). Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco: Volume 1:1959-1974. Strange Attractor Press. p. 262. ISBN978-1-907222-31-3.
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