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Peter Fleischmann (1937-2021)
Photo: Bernd Kammerer / dpa
He was one of the directors of New German Films who wanted to completely turn post-war cinema inside out.
Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Volker Schlöndorff, Peter Fleischmann started filmmaking in the second half of the 1960s.
In "Autumn of the Gammler" from 1967 he portrayed the counterculture of youth.
His social drama »Hunting Scenes from Lower Bavaria« (1969) seemed like an antithesis to the homeland film that had been popular for years: instead of tranquility and idyll, narrow-mindedness and exclusion prevailed in the village that Fleischmann talked about.
Angela Winkler and Hanna Schygulla, who later became stars, drew attention to themselves as young actresses in this film.
In 1979, Fleischmann's thriller “The Hamburg Disease” was released in cinemas, describing the spread of an epidemic with astonishing far-sightedness - and the attempts to contain it.
His most elaborate film, the adaptation of the novel "It's not easy to be a god", was not well received by either the public or the critics in 1990.
After the reunification, the director was in charge of Studio Babelsberg and was one of the founding members of the German Film Academy.
In 2008, Fleischmann's novel »Die Zukunftsangst der Deutschen« was published.
As his family confirmed on Thursday, the director and writer died on Wednesday as a result of a fall.
According to the information, Fleischmann last lived in Werder near Potsdam.
First of all, the »Tagesspiegel« reported.
praise / dpa