Slatan Theodor Dudow (Bulgarian:Златан Дудов,Zlatan Dudov; 30 January 1903 – 12 July 1963) was a Bulgarian-born Germanfilm director and screenwriter who made a number of films during theWeimar Republic and inEast Germany.[1]
Dudow was born inZaribrod,Bulgaria (todayDimitrovgrad, Serbia). In 1922, he emigrated to Berlin with the intention of becoming an architect. He gave up this plan and began studying theatre in 1923, first under Emmanuel Reicher, and then, from 1925 to 1926, as a theatre studies student underMax Herrmann at the university. He worked withLeopold Jessner andJürgen Fehling, served as a chorus member underErwin Piscator, and was a director's assistant toFritz Lang on the production ofMetropolis. During this time, Dudow also ran a bookstore with his wife and worked as a foreign correspondent for a Bulgarian newspaper. In 1929, he visited theSoviet Union, where he metVladimir Mayakovsky andSergei Eisenstein inMoscow and eventually,Bertolt Brecht. After his return from the USSR, Dudow directed Brecht's theatrical piece,The Decision (Die Massnahme), and began his film directing career. He was commissioned by the left-wing, Soviet-German production companyPrometheus-Film to direct a short film,Wie der Berliner Arbeiter wohnt (1929), as part of thedocumentary seriesWie lebt der Berliner Arbeiter? Dudow's first feature,Kuhle Wampe (To Whom Does the World Belong?, 1932) was a collaboration with Brecht[2] (who provided the script and helped finance the project),Hanns Eisler, andErnst Ottwalt. It was banned because it was perceived as being politically subversive.
A member of theCommunist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), Dudow was arrested by the Nazis shortly after theytook power in January 1933. He was soon expelled from Germany as a Bulgarian citizen, but was unable to return to Bulgaria for reasons unknown (and to which Brecht alludes in a July 1933 letter to the Russian playwrightSergei Tretyakov). He made his way to France sometime in 1934, and remained there under constant threat of expulsion until 1939/1940, when he went to Switzerland. In Paris, Dudow completed the filmSeifenblasen, which he had begun working on in Berlin, and also staged Brecht'sFurcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs. He also began working on his comedyDer Feigling. In Switzerland, Dudow continued work on three further dramatic comedies,Das Narrenparadies,Der leichtgläubige Thomas, andDer Weltuntergang. Several of his plays, along with theoretical writings on drama, were later published in theGerman Democratic Republic (GDR) under the pseudonymStefan Brodwin.
After returning to Berlin in 1946 as one of the founding directors of theDEFA studios, Dudow began adapting his playDer Weltuntergang for the screen. Despite the symbolic capital Dudow brought to DEFA as a renowned Weimar-era left-wing filmmaker, this first project was shelved by the authorities apparently because the film was deemedformalist. Dudow soon after produced asocialist realist melodrama,Our Daily Bread (1949), and withKurt Maetzig, took on the direction of another socialist realist family drama,The Benthin Family (1950). Dudow's 1952 filmFrauenschicksale, his first film incolor, which he both wrote and directed, was popular with audiences, but was criticized by bothParty authorities and communist women's organizations for its depiction of women. It features a cast of important actresses of various generations (includingLotte Loebinger,Maly Delschaft, andSonja Sutter) and shows the circumstances of a divided Berlin, still in the early postwar period. In 1953, Dudow submitted a treatment for a socialist realist film dealing with the issue of a divided Germany,Singende Jugend, but the film was never made. His next film,Stärker als die Nacht (1954), was written by the communist writersKurt Stern andJeanne Stern; it deals with the communistresistance in Germany during theThird Reich and is apparently based on the Sterns' own experience.The Captain from Cologne (1956), a rather bleak satire featuringRolf Ludwig,Christel Bodenstein, andErwin Geschonneck, was adapted by Dudow, along withHenryk Keisch andMichael Tschesno-Hell, fromCarl Zuckmayer's playDer Hauptmann von Köpenick. The film delivers a blistering critique ofWest Germany's military buildup underKonrad Adenauer and its institutional continuity with the Third Reich. Dudow's most famous East German film,Love's Confusion (1959), is a big-budget, color(ful), Shakespearean romp written by Dudow and starring the youngAngelica Domröse,Annekathrin Bürger, andWilli Schrade. In it, he directs somewhat gentler satiric energies toward the GDR itself. Dudow was widely considered a "film school of one" during the 1950s, and was a mentor to bothGerhard Klein andHeiner Carow. Dudow's final film,Christine (1963), which he also wrote, was shot inblack-and-white and takes a much darker look at social problems and the position of women in the GDR. Dudow died in a car crash in Berlin while Christine was still being shot, and the film was never finished. (A partial reconstruction, based on a very rough cut, was undertaken in the 1970s and "premiered"—in one screening only—in 1974.)
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