Gerd Oswald
Director, director’s assistant, Screenwriter, Producer, actor
* in Berlin
† in Los Angeles
Gerd Oswald made an impact in film and theatre as a child actor and began assisting his father, director Richard Oswald, when he was only 13. Persecuted and driven out of Germany in 1933, he and his parents – his mother was the actress Käte Waldeck – emigrated to the United States in 1938, where Oswald pursued a career as a director’s assistant, director and producer.
About the Estate
The inventory related to Gerd Oswald consists of a private photograph album from the postwar period, which he gave to the Kinemathek in 1980 along with his father’s estate. The object, captioned by hand, documents his transatlantic journey to Germany and France in 1947.
The album focuses on a visit to the film set of Billy Wilder’s ‘A Foreign Affair’ (USA, 1948) in Berlin and documentation of the destructions of German cities during the Second World War. Similar to the film, Oswald’s photographs show towering landscapes of rubble from the viewpoint of the returning émigré without adopting a decidedly documentary perspective. The photos of bombed-out movie theatres around Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, including the former Richard-Oswald-Lichtspiele cinema at Kantstraße 163, are captioned with laconic comments such as “Temporarily closed ‒ for the next 1000 years”. The photos include other locations with biographical references to Oswald’s family, but they also show the New Reich Chancellery as the iconic centre of National Socialist power.
Oswald’s own film oeuvre is not represented in the photo album – for instance, the western ‘The Brass Legend’ (USA, 1956) or the West German beatnik film ‘Am Tag als der Regen kam’ (1959). (Text: Julia Riedel)
Content
Script, Photography, Paper documents
Dimension
approx. 0.2 Shelf meter
Inv. No.
198053
Credit LineGerd-Oswald-Archiv, Deutsche Kinemathek
