Karl Hartl

Karl Hartl was born on May 10, 1899 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary as Karl Anton Hartl.

His film career already began in 1918 when he worked as a director assistant for Alexander Korda, at the same time he was also active as an editor.

Austrian director, who began as a production manager and assistant to Alexander Korda in 1919. He was under contract to Ufa Studios from 1930, turning out both popular entertainments and more off-beat films (F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1932), Gold (1934)). After the war, he set up the Neue Wiener Filmproduktionsgesellschaft, featuring Austrian stars in productions like Der Engel mit der Posaune (1948).

As a production manager, he in the 1920s accompanied Korda to Berlin, until in 1926 he returned to Vienna to work for his former class-mate director Gustav Ucicky.

With the rise of the sound film he could realise his first movie as a director and made his direction debut with "Ein Burschenlied aus Heidelberg" (1930) and with young Billy Wilder as a screenwriter.

With "F.P.1 antwortet nicht" (1932) he captured one of the greatest adventure movies with science fiction elements on the big screen and became a star.

He was a director and writer, known for Two Merry Adventurers (1937), The Life and Loves of Mozart (1955) and Der Engel mit der Posaune (1948). He was married to Marte Harell.

After most of the talented directors, technicians, actors had been forced to leave in the course of the 1938 Anschluss annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Hartl became director of production for Wien-Film, the newly created and indirectly[sic] stated-owned body through which the UFA, and beyond them the Nazi government represented by Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels, controlled the Austrian film industry. In this role, which he retained until the end of the war, Hartl seldom undertook work on individual films himself but was nevertheless involved at a senior level with some of the most significant entertainment films of the Nazi period.

Karl Hartl's flight was stopped by the outbreak of the war. In the wartime he only realised the movies "Operette" (1940) and "Wen die Götter lieben" (1942), afterwards he could not continue his work till the end of war.