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Tamara Trampe (1942-2021)
Photo: Seeliger / IMAGO
Tamara Trampe, one of the most important authors and dramaturges in the German documentary scene, is dead. She died last week at the age of 78 in Berlin, the Academy of the Arts announced on Monday, citing her partner, the filmmaker Johann Feindt.
Born in 1942 in Voronezh in the Soviet Union, Trampe moved to Halle an der Saale at the age of 7.
After studying German and working as a journalist, she switched to DEFA in 1970, where she helped develop and oversee numerous film projects as a dramaturge for 20 years.
From 1990 she began to realize her own projects.
In 1992 the documentary »The Black Box« was made, an examination of the Stasi surveillance regime based on a self-declared »desk perpetrator«.
This was followed by »White Ravens - Chechnya Nightmare« about the devastation of the Chechen war, for which she was awarded the Grimm Prize in 2005.
Younger people sought their advice
After »Lullabies« from 2012, »My Mother, a War and Me« (2014) became the last film she completed during her lifetime.
In it she traces her personal family history and also takes up her improbable birth in the middle of a war on a Soviet snowfield.
She was honored with the Heiner Carow Prize for the film.
Trampe always made her films with her partner, the director and cameraman Johann Feindt.
Until shortly before her death, she advised other filmmakers, including many younger ones, on their work.
According to companions, she is said to have worked as a dramaturge on around 90 projects.
In 2018 she received the DEFA Foundation award "for outstanding achievements in German film".
In February 2021, Trampe was awarded the Honorary Prize of the Association of German Film Critics.
She had "created a work that is unique in its moral complexity, its ruthlessness, but also empathy towards its protagonists," it said in the explanation.
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