Biography
Arthur Pohl, born March 22, 1900, in Görlitz, at first completed an apprenticeship as a bank clerk and then studied painting at Breslau"s Kunstakademie from 1918 to 1919 on a scholarship from his bank, before he went to Berlin"s Hochschule für bildende Kunst (today: Universität der Künste). After his graduation, he started a career as set designer and worked in this job at Hessisches Landestheater in Darmstadt from 1923 to 1927. He then switched to Deutsches Theater Berlin where he worked for a year.
In June 1928, Pohl went to Vereinigte Städtische Bühnen Düsseldorf to start a new career: In Düsseldorf, Pohl not only worked as a set designer, but for the first time also as a director. Although Pohl directed several classic plays, he only stayed for a brief period of time because his productions deviated too far from middle-class conventions. Furthermore, his plans to put Bruckner"s "Die Verbrecher" and Brechts "Die Dreigroschenoper" ("The Threepenny-Opera") on stage, aroused resentment with the Deutschnationale Volkspartei in the Düsseldorf city parliament. After a failed attempt to lay off Pohl for "moral misconduct", Pohl voluntarily left Städtische Bühnen in 1929 and returned to Berlin.
In Berlin, Pohl worked as a set designer again at Krolloper but also tried to set foot in the movie business at the beginning of the 1930s by sending treatments and exposés to several production companies. From the mid-1930s on, Pohl then became the screenplay writer for large movie productions including "Der Tiger von Eschnapur" ("The Tiger of Eschnapur", 1938) and "Das indische Grabmal" ("The Indian Tomb", 1938)
After serving in the military from 1941 to 1945, Pohl made his debut as a movie director in 1949 with the drama "Die Brücke" ("The Bridge") – thus raising a precarious topic: "Die Brücke" is the only film produced in the GDR that thematizes forced displacement. When the GDR"s "Hauptverwaltung Film" criticized the anti-western film "Die Spielbank-Affäre" (1957) as being too "positive" in its depiction of capitalism, Pohl went to West Germany – where he did not get any movie assignments because of his past in the GDR.
In 1960, the SFB put him in charge of directing the film "Das Haus voller Gäste", thus provoking strong criticism from conservative circles. That again effectively ended Pohl"s career as a director before it had even started. During the following years, Pohl was only occasionally assigned as a screenplay writer for trivial early evening TV series.
On June 15, 1970, Arthur Pohl died in Berlin.
The contents of this entry were funded with the support of the DEFA-Stiftung.