Ferdinand Bonn

Biography

December snow muffled the bells of Donauwörth the day Ferdinand Bonn first opened his eyes—20 December 1861. The boy who listened to the Danube’s rush became the man who let audiences hear their own heartbeats: in 1914 he stalked across the screen as the calculating Detective Brown, the same year he hypnotized moviegoers in Svengali, and six years later he invited them to Salome’s deadly dance in 1920. Between these flickers of light, he sharpened words on paper as deftly as he carved characters on stage and celluloid. When Berlin’s autumn dusk settled on 24 September 1933, the city that had watched him invent villains and visionaries dimmed its lights for the last time.