Werner Krauss

Werner Krauss was born on June 23, 1884 in Gestungshausen, Sonnefeld, Bavaria, Germany. He was an actor, known for The Cabinet of Dr.

He attended from 1901 the teacher's college at Kreuzburg (Kluczbork). After it became known that he worked as an extra at the Breslau Lobe theatre, he was suspended from classes and decided to join a traveling theatre company.

Son of a postal worker, on stage from 1903, ten years later joining Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Film debut in 1914. Specialist in complex, obsessive or tortured characters. Became a key interpretor of villainy in the German expressionist silent cinema, noted for his bravura performances in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Full Sound (1920), as Jack-the-Ripper and Spring-heeled Jack in Waxworks (1924) and as the mephistophelean Scapinelli in The Man Who Cheated Life (1926).

By the agency of Alexander Moissi, in 1913 he met the theatre director Max Reinhardt, who took Krauss to his Deutsches Theater in Berlin. However, Krauss initially only gained minor and secondary roles like King Claudius in Shakespeare's Hamlet or Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, wherefore after his military discharge as a midshipman of the Imperial German Navy in 1916 he also pursued a career as a film actor.

Because he got only smaller parts at the theater most of the time he turned to the film business in 1916 where he was usually employed as a villain or other unpleasant character.

Caligari Full Sound (1920), Paracelsus (1943) and Robert Koch: The Battle Against Death (1939). He was married to Liselotte Graf, Maria Bard and Paula Saenger.

He was prominently featured in Paul Leni's Waxworks (1924), Ewald Andre Dupont's Varieté (1925), F.W. Murnau's Herr Tartüff, and The Student of Prague (1926). He still appeared on stage of the Deutsches Theater, as in Strindberg's A Dream Play filling five roles or as Wilhelm Voigt in the 1931 premiere of Carl Zuckmayer's The Captain of Köpenick, and guest performances even brought him to London and New York.

In the second half of the '20s, Werner Krauss played in other important milestones of the German film history. Movies like "Die freudlose Gasse" (1925), "Der Student von Prag" (1926), and "Napoleon auf St. Helena" (1929) emphasized his important position in the film business.

To his well-known movies in 30's and 40's belong "Yorck" (1931), "Robert Koch, der Bekämpfer des Todes" (1939), "Jud Süss" which is considered to be the most detrimental movie during the Nazi time, and "Paracelsus" (1943).

Krauss was an unapologetic anti-Semite who supported the Nazi party and its ideology. In 1933 Krauss joined the Vienna Burgtheater ensemble to perform in Campo di Maggio (German: Hundert Tage), a drama written by Giovacchino Forzano together with Benito Mussolini, where-after he was received by the Italian dictator and also made the acquaintance of German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.

His decision to appear in the Nazi propaganda piece 'Jud Suess' (1940), led to Goebbels naming him an 'actor of the state' and appointing him vice president of the Reich Theatre Chamber. Though he claimed after the war to have been coerced into playing the part, he was convicted in court as a minor war criminal, fined and forced to move to Austria. This effectively curtailed his film career and thereafter, he only appeared occasionally on stage in Vienna until his rehabilitation to Germany in 1954.

He also played Shylock in Lothar Müthel's production of The Merchant of Venice staged at the Burgtheater in 1943.

In 1944, Krauss was added to the Gottbegnadeten-Liste, a list of important German artists, which exempted him from military service, including service on the home front.

After the war, Krauss was banned from performing on stage and in films in Germany. His films were proscribed and he was ordered to undergo a de-Nazification program from 1947 to 1948. Ultimately, he was rehabilitated to the extent of being invited to German film festivals.

Only in 1951 he got back the German nationality and in 1954 he was rehabilitated for good with the award of the "Bundesverdienstkreuz".

In 1954, he was awarded the Order of the Federal Republic of Germany; in 1955, he received the High Decoration of the Republic of Austria.

In 1958, Krauss published his autobiography titled Das Schauspiel meines Lebens (The Play of my Life).

Krauss died in relative obscurity in Vienna, Austria in 1959. He was cremated.