Zerlett, Hans Hellmut

Actor, Author, Director

Born: 17.08.1892 in Wiesbaden

Died: 06.07.1949 in Buchenwald

Zerlett first became an actor at the Residenztheater in Wiesbaden. This was followed by engagements in Frankfurt (Oder), Guben and Sondershausen. Discharged from military service early due to health problems, he continued his career in Berlin from 1916, where he appeared in operettas and popular theater. At the beginning of the 1920s, he made a name for himself as a playwright of entertaining plays and began a close collaboration with Rudolf Nelson, the "king" of the Berlin revue theater scene, whose in-house playwright he became.

In 1927, Zerlett switched to the film business, initially writing screenplays (including for the joint production company of Anny Ondra and Carl Lamac) and making his debut as a director in 1934 with the film adaptation of the Karl Valentin one-act play "Im Schallplattenladen". In the following ten years, he wrote and directed more than two dozen feature-length films. His specialty became subjects from the theater or artist milieu, e.g. "Truxa" (1936) or "Es leuchten die Sterne" (1938). In the summer of 1937, Zerlett became head of production at Tobis-Film, but resigned from this position shortly afterwards in order to work only creatively in the future.

As a concession to Nazi film policy, he made the anti-Semitic musical "Robert and Bertram" in 1939, a film that was rejected by Joseph Goebbels. Venus in Court" (1941), a satire about "degenerate art" in the so-called system era, also failed. After the beginning of the Second World War, Zerlett fought against increasing exclusion on the part of his clients and was only able to realize films with relatively modest budgets. Nevertheless, he was one of the busiest German directors of the 1930s and early 1940s.

Accused of being a "propagandist", Zerlett was arrested by the Soviet secret service at his home in Bad Saarow (Brandenburg) in January 1946. After several stints in internment camps in the Soviet occupation zone, he died in "Special Camp No. 2" on the site of the former Buchenwald concentration camp. In posthumous denazification proceedings, he was classified as "not incriminated".