EIt’s a sentence that you rarely hear from a company leader these days, especially in the cultural sector. “We are developing excellently, we are growing well and the market is growing well,” announced Managing Director Johannes Züll recently at the summer birthday party on the Studio Hamburg premises in Tonndorf. Around 750 guests, primarily from the company’s own ranks, including 90-year-old pensioners who had witnessed the beginnings of the production company, came.
The cultural sector is struggling to restart after the pandemic, for a lack of income and viewers who have turned away. But Studio Hamburg comes with different tones – and tangible successes. There are the series: “Die Toten von Marnow”, for example, was the most successful series of the past year in Germany with more than twelve million views in the media library. With its subsidiary Real Film Berlin, Studio Hamburg realized the award-winning series “Unorthodox” for Netflix, and is currently shooting “Sleeping Dogs”, also for Netflix.
Studio Hamburg sold “Bad Banks” for ZDF all over the world. Cinema productions like “Lindenberg. Do your thing” and “I’m your man”, the latter was in the Oscar race this year, are in the portfolio as well as long-lived television productions such as “Rote Rosen” or “Großstadtrevier”.
75 years ago such a success seemed highly unlikely. Back then, Walter Koppel and Gyula Trebitsch laid the foundation for Studio Hamburg by founding the film production company Real-Film GmbH. They wanted to create a Hollywood up north. Their own lives were good material for several blockbusters: Koppel, who was born in Cologne, fled through half of Europe as a Jew and was finally imprisoned in Hamburg. Trebitsch, who was born in Hungary and was also a Jew, was sent to various concentration camps after forced labour.
Both survived and nevertheless built their companies in the country of the perpetrators. Privately they were strangely connected. In the year it was founded, Trebitsch and Koppel married each other’s ex-wife. Koppel later came under suspicion of communism. Celebrities, including Hamburg’s Mayor Max Brauer, backed Real-Film and its founders. Koppel and Trebitsch did not film their own life stories, but concentrated on fictional entertainment films – with a portion of life-affirmation, despite everything.
Walter Koppel (left) and Guyla Trebisch with Hildegard Knef in 1957 at the reception on the occasion of the 7th Berlin International Film Festival
Source: picture-alliance/pa/dpa/Günter Bratke
Her first film, “Arche Nora” was about two war veterans who save a girl from suicide. This was followed by popular successes such as “The Devil’s General” with Curd Jürgens, “The Heart of St. Pauli” with Hans Albers and “The Beautiful Liar” with Romy Schneider. In 1956, Real-Film entered the Oscar race for best foreign language film with Heinz Rühmann in “Hauptmann von Köpenick”.
At that time, television was already on the rise, and going to the cinema became rarer. “Television is becoming a big thing,” Trebitsch is quoted in biographies, coupled with “Television doesn’t get a meter of film from me.” The producer duo broke up. Koppel failed with his cinema productions, Trebitsch, together with the NDR and the advertising subsidiary NWF, transferred the Tonndorfer Studio with all its trades to a new operating company and renamed it Studio Hamburg.
A separation that is unthinkable for Studio Hamburg today. “Movie. TV. Streaming” is the current slogan. “Soon it will no longer be possible to distinguish between linear and non-linear television,” says Züll, Managing Director of Studio Hamburg. He does not see the two playout channels as competing, nor does he see streaming services and traditional television.
“Highlights for me are formats such as ‘Rote Rosen’, ‘Notruf Hafen Kante’, ‘Die Pfefferkörner’, ‘Großstadtrevier’ and ‘Die Kanzlei’, which have been successful for years because they are constantly being further developed and thus keep their finger on the pulse,” says Züll.
Studio Hamburg Managing Director Johannes Züll
What: picture alliance / rtn – radio tele nord
The producers of the Studio Hamburg Production Group are responsible for the creative developments. “They are constantly looking for new material, authors, new formats,” says Züll, who has managed the holding company with locations in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Lüneburg, Kiel, Schwerin and London for eight years.
Michael Lehmann, Managing Director of that Production Group, thinks he can spot a certain trend: “Currently in Venice, before that in Cannes at the film festival, I was able to experience director’s cinema told in a very cinematic way. I believe that our films have left sober times behind and that playful creativity is being given more space again.”
First of all, however, it is necessary to master the reality, to counteract the shortage of skilled workers and to defy the looming recession. “They would also hit us hard through our clients,” says Züll – despite all the spirit of optimism.