Biography
Gerhard Scheumann, born December 25, 1930, in Ortelsburg in East Prussia, visited a NaPoLa elite school of the Nazi regime. After finishing school in 1949, he started to work as a reporter for the magazine "Thüringer Volk". Soon, a colleague encouraged him to move to Berlin where he found work as an author and political editor at Berliner Rundfunk. From 1953 to 1955 he worked as a lecturer at Weimar's Fachschule für Rundfunkwesen. For the following seven years, Scheumann became the head editor of departments of cultural policy and science at Deutschlandsender.
In 1962, Scheumann joined Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF) as an editor and was in charge of several successful formats as an initiator, author, and host, including "Prisma", a comparatively critical program about domestic politics. Nevertheless, Scheumann left DFF after only three years because he considered the working conditions as "politically constrained" – a stance he put down in written form under the title "Prisma Testament".
In 1965, Scheumann met documentary filmmaker Walter Heynowski and together they started a long-time collaboration. With more than 70, often award-winning, films, they rank among the most important GDR documentary filmmakers who had a major influence on the country's film history. In 1969, they even set up their own documentary film studio "H&S" (a remarkable privilege for GDR filmmakers) that helped to augment their international recognition. But critics often reacted ambivalently to the duo's films: On the one side, they praised their films as intense studies; on the other side they accused Scheumann and Heynowski of using unfair practices to create anti-Western and anti-capitalist propaganda. This style is most obvious in films such as "Piloten im Pyjama – 1. Teil: Yes, Sir" (1968), "Der Krieg der Mumien" (1974), or "Ein Vietnamflüchtling" (1979).
In 1982, Gerhard Scheumann fell out of favour with the GDR regime when he criticized the government in a speech at the congress of the association of film and TV professionals. As a consequence, "H&S" studio was closed and integrated into DEFA and Scheumann was dispossessed of his passport. It was not before 1986, until Scheumann and Heynowski were able to do their work without restrictions again und were able to publish their films under their sign "Werkstatt H&S" again.
Until the end of "H&S" in 1991 (in the course of the liquidation of DEFA), both directors finished a series of much noticed but controversial political documentary films, including "Kamerad Krüger" (1988) about a former SS storm unit leader, now living in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Scheumann served as an associate member in the fine arts section of East Berlin's Akademie der Künste from 1969 to 1972 and as a fellow from 1972 to 1991. From 1974 to 1978 and again from 1986 to 1991, he was the secretary of the fine arts section of East Berlin's Akademie der Künste.
On May 30, 1998, Gerhard Scheumann died in Berlin after suffering from cancer.
The contents of this entry were funded with the support of the DEFA-Stiftung.