Wolfgang Zilzer

Biography

Cincinnati, 20 January 1901: a boy draws his first breath in the American Midwest, unaware that his voice will one day echo through Ufa studios, Nazi-era thrillers, and post-war German television. As Wolfgang Zilzer he would scamper across silent-film Weimar—stealing scenes in Fyodor Ozep’s Thérèse Raquin (1928)—then slip into the shadows of anti-Nazi cinema, slipping poison into Joseph Goebbels’s on-screen portrait as the cringing Dr. Fuellgrabe in Enemy of Women (1944) and dodging Gestapo bullets in Vincent Sherman’s Underground (1941). Between takes he sharpened scripts the way others sharpened bayonets, writing for stage and screen under sundry pseudonyms when his own sounded too German for wartime producers. After the guns fell silent he crossed the Atlantic again, settled in Berlin, and married fellow refugee actress Lotte Palfi Andor. The curtain finally rang down on 26 June 1991 in that reunited city, leaving a filmography that bookends the most tumultuous century Europe ever survived.