Spiess, Eberhard

Film historian

Born: 04.11.1925 in Berlin

died: 24.02.2007 in Wiesbaden

Spiess was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 before finishing his regular schooling, which he completed at a humanistic grammar school in Berlin-Zehlendorf with an emergency Abitur, and was deployed in Italy, in the Alban Hills near Rome. Towards the end of the war, he was taken prisoner by the British, which he spent in Egypt until 1949.

He then began working for a film advertising company in Mainz, where he joined a student theater group led by rhetoric professor and translator Wilhelm Leyhausen (1887-1953). In 1956 he began working at the German Film Institute-DIF e.V., Film Archive in Biebrich. From 1960 until his retirement in 1991, he was its deputy director. In this role, he built up an international network of film archives and related institutions and was instrumental in the founding of the Caligari Film-Bühne.

He published filmographic and biographical works on Hans Albers and Heinz Rühmann as well as on the screenwriter Carl Mayer. He was co-author of the German Feature Film Almanac and published in specialist journals. In addition to the films of the Weimar Republic, he was particularly interested in Italian silent films. He was involved in the compilation of the multi-volume standard work "International Directory of Cinematographers, Set- and Costume Designers in Film".