Werner Hochbaum

Biography

Werner Paul Adolph Hochbaum was born in Kiel on March 7, 1899. In 1927 he began working as a film critic, and the following year he made his directorial debut for Vera-Filmwerke with the short documentary "Vorwärts". A short time later, he founded his own production company and directed (based on his own script) his first feature film: "Brüder" ("Brother", 1929), a drama about the Hamburg dockworkers' strike of 1896/97, initiated by the German Transport Union and shot with real dockworkers. After its premiere, the film soon fell into oblivion, only to be rediscovered by film historians decades later, who considered it significant to film history, not least because of its montage, which was inspired by Soviet cinema (e.g. Eisenstein). In addition, "Brüder" is one of the important documents of the working-class culture of the late 1920s.    

After "Brüder", Hochbaum made two election commercials for the German social democrats (SPD) in 1929, but it took almost three years, before he made his second feature film: the social drama "Razzia in St. Pauli" premiered in May 1932 and received favorable reviews. The film magazine Lichtbild-Bühne, for example, judged it to be "a milieu film created with a strong temperament and obvious talent, which gives rise to the best hopes for the new director's upcoming production."    

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hochbaum still made the love and social drama "Morgen beginnt das Leben" ("Life Begins Tomorrow", 1933) in Germany, participated in Heinrich George's "Schleppzug M 117" ("Tugboat M 117", 1933) and directed "Menschen im Sturm" (1933), the German version of the Hungarian film "Itel a Balaton" ("Judgment of Lake Balaton" or "Balaton Condemned"). But after "Razzia in St. Pauli" was banned by the Nazi censors at the end of 1933, he initially found no more work.  

Hochbaum turned to Austria, where in 1934 he made "Vorstadtvarieté. Die Amsel von Lichtental" ("Suburban Cabaret"), one of the most critical and formally interesting films of those years. In the medical drama "Die ewige Maske" ("The Eternal Mask", CH/AT 1935) Hochbaum also used the technical possibilities (montage, set design, camera tricks) to visualize hallucinations and schizophrenia. The film magazine Österreichische Film-Zeitung wrote: "The author Leo Lapaire, together with the director Werner Hochbaum, has made an attempt to make visible in film the obsessions and dream fantasies of a person suffering from split consciousness. They have understood how to give these fantasies something uncanny, dreamlike and at the same time plastic (...)". At the Venice Film Festival, "Die ewige Maske" received an award for "Best Psychological Study," and the U.S. National Board of Review voted it Best Foreign Film of the Year.   

From mid-1935 Hochbaum was also able to work in Germany again. He directed the circus musical "Leichte Kavallerie" ("Light Cavalry", 1935) with Marika Rökk in her first German-language role, the lavish historical epic "Der Favorit der Kaiserin" (1936) and the love triangle story "Man spricht über Jacqueline" ("Talking About Jacqueline", 1937). With "Ein Mädchen geht an Land" (1938), he made another social drama set in Hamburg after "Brüder" and "Razzia in St. Pauli." Before that, in 1936, Hochbaum made the melodrama "Schatten der Vergangenheit" (1936) and the romantic drama "Hannerl und ihre Liebhaber" (1936) in Austria.  

In 1939 he was commissioned in Germany to stage "Drei Unteroffiziere" ("Three Non-Coms"), a propagandistic paean to soldierly virtues. "Drei Unteroffiziere" was given the ratings "valuable in terms of state policy" and "popular education," and is still considered a 'Vorbehaltsfilm' in Germany today, meaning the public distribution and exhibition of the film is prohibited, unless it is accompanied by an introduction and discussion which is led by person who has a formal competence in media science and the history of the Holocaust. At a Hochbaum retrospective at the German Historical Museum in Berlin in 2015, the program text read: "[Hochbaum's] film assiduously performs the prescribed Wehrmacht propaganda, yet finds gentle, lyrical moods for the 'wehrkraftzersetzende' (undermining the military spirit) romance. Subversive would be an exaggeration, but the underlying tone is brooding (...)."  

Possibly because of these tendencies, Hochbaum was expelled from the Reichsfilmkammer in 1939 and drafted for military service. However, he was discharged before the end of the war due to a lung ailment. After the end of the war in 1945, he became involved in building up the film industry. His declared goal was a "psychological impressionism" that would portray people, "crystal clear and transparent". However, he was only able to get two short films off the ground as a producer: On April 15, 1946, Werner Hochbaum died at the age of only 47 as a result of his long-standing lung condition. An appreciation of his complete oeuvre did not take place until many years later. Film historian Ulrich Kurowski, for example, called him "the most important German film director after Murnau, Lang, Lubitsch and Ophüls".