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UFA GmbH, shortened to UFA (), is a film and television production company that unites all production activities of the media conglomerate Bertelsmann in Germany. The original UFA was established as Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft on December 18, 1917, as a direct response to foreign competition in film and propaganda. UFA was founded by a consortium headed by Emil Georg von Stauß, a former Deutsche Bank board member. In March 1927, Alfred Hugenberg, an influential German media entrepreneur and later minister of the economy and minister of agriculture and nutrition in Adolf Hitler's cabinet, purchased UFA and transferred ownership of it to the Nazi Party in 1933.
In 1942, as a result of the Nazi policy of "forcible coordination" known as the Gleichschaltung, UFA and all of its competitors, including Tobis Film, Terra Film, Bavaria Film and Wien-Film, were bundled together with Nazi-controlled foreign film production companies to form the super-corporation UFA-Film GmbH (Ufi), with headquarters in Berlin. After the Red Army occupied the UFA complex in 1945 in Babelsberg, and after the privatization of Bavaria and UFA in 1956 in West Germany, the company was restructured to form Universum Film AG and taken over by a consortium of banks. However, in film production and distribution, it failed to revive and went into receivership.
In 1964, Bertelsmann's Chief Representative, Manfred Köhnlechner, acquired the entire Universum Film AG holdings from Deutsche Bank, which had previously been the main UFA shareholder and which had determined the company's business policy as head of the shareholders' consortium. Köhnlechner bought UFA, which was heavily in debt, on behalf of Reinhard Mohn for roughly five million Deutschmarks. (Köhnlechner: "The question came up as to why not take the entire thing, it still had many gems.") Only a few months later, Köhnlechner also acquired the UFA-Filmtheaterkette, a movie theater chain, for almost eleven million Deutschmarks.Klappe zu, Der Spiegel 3/1964 article from January 15, 1964 (German)Bertelsmann - Zwei an der Kurbel Der Spiegel 31/1965 article from July 28, 1965 (German)
In 1997, UFA and the Luxembourgish rival CLT established the joint venture CLT-UFA, which, following the takeover of British rival Pearson Television, was restructured as RTL Group in 2000. Now, UFA GmbH (UFA) works as a subsidiary of RTL Group's production division Fremantle, which had been formed out of Pearson TV, and is responsible for all production activities of Bertelsmann and Fremantle in Germany. Until August 2013, eight subsidiaries operated under the UFA umbrella: UFA Fernsehproduktion, UFA Entertainment, Grundy UFA, Grundy Light Entertainment, UFA Cinema, , Phoenix Film and UFA Brand Communication.
In August 2013, UFA underwent an organizational restructuring that simplified the company down to three production divisions. Today, UFA Fiction, UFA Serial Drama, UFA Show & Factual and UFA Documentary are the four units responsible for production.
The plans envisaged by the German General Staff – especially those of Erich Ludendorff – went far beyond the creation of Bufa. Ludendorff foresaw a large-scale, state-controlled film corporation that would serve national interests. In this spirit, Universum-Film AG (UFA) was founded as a consolidation of private film companies on December 18, 1917 in Berlin. The company's starting capital was 25 million Reichsmark (equivalent to million €): among the contributors were the German government, the War Ministry and Deutsche Bank. The board chairman of the new company was Deutsche Bank director Emil Georg von Stauß.
Prior to establishing the company, the General Staff had considered taking over the e. V. (DLG), which had been founded in 1916. This agency was too much under the influence of heavy industry and, in particular, of Alfred Hugenberg, chairman of Krupp. Hugenberg would later take over UFA in 1927.
Three main film companies formed the nucleus of UFA from the end of 1917:
UFA continued to sign production agreements with various independent producers:
The mission of UFA at the time of its founding was the production of films – feature films, documentaries, cultural films and weekly headline (newsreel) films – designed to function as propaganda for Germany abroad. However, after mounting tensions between the company's founding members, Deutsche Bank was able to prevail and implement their approach to film production as a business rather than for military objectives. Instead of propaganda films, UFA now produced elaborate entertainment films such as Sumurun (Ernst Lubitsch, 1920).
UFA was already in 1921 producing the lion's share of German feature films, and in that year it was privatized. Starting in 1922, large ateliers in Neubabelsberg (today's Babelsberg Studio) and on Oberlandstraße in Berlin-Tempelhof were made available for film production. In 1926, the facilities were expanded by means of the construction of the largest studio hall in Europe at the time. In 1923, after Decla-Bioscop AG and others were taken over, Erich Pommer became head of all production operations and discovered and fostered many stars, including Emil Jannings, Pola Negri, Conrad Veidt and Lya de Putti. During this era UFA was a leader in the time of the German Expressionism, experienced a further boom, and emerged as a direct competitor to Hollywood with films such as Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Variety (1925) and Faust (1926).
At first, nothing changed in UFA's production policy. In 1928, Erich Pommer was replaced as head of production by Ernst Hugo Correll, who led the company through the transition to talking pictures or "talkies". UFA gained an advantage over smaller companies in the realm of talkie production as a result of a contract with Tobis-Klangfilm, which simplified the licensing situation for UFA.
Nevertheless, UFA has recorded unsurpassed artistic successes with films such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, the first film thus distinguished) and Woman in the Moon to this day. Asphalt ( German Realism) or entertainment movies such as Melody of the Heart or the musical film The Three from the Filling Station are produced by the UFA. In 1930, the company enjoyed worldwide success with the film The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings, directed by Joseph von Sternberg.
In addition, as a result of the nationalist German spirit that already dominated the company, UFA was perfectly suited to serve the goals of National Socialist propaganda in film. Hugenberg had been named Reich Minister of Economics immediately following the Nazi takeover of January 30, 1933, and made UFA openly available for Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine, even though Hugenberg was removed from his post shortly thereafter (June 1933) under pressure from Hitler. In an act of anticipatory obedience to the Nazi regime, UFA management fired several Jewish employees on March 29, 1933. In the summer of 1933, the Nazi regime created the Film Chamber of the Reich, which adopted regulations officially excluding Jewish filmmakers from all German studios.
At the time of its nationalization, among the production facilities belonging to UFA were 27 film studios, nine of which were in Neubabelsberg (Potsdam-Babelsberg), and seven of which were in Berlin-Tempelhof, including three that belonged to Carl Froelich-Film GmbH in name only. UFA also had two dubbing studios, a mixing studio, two animation studios, two ateliers for advertising films, one for cartoons and a small training atelier.
At this point, the UFA staff hierarchy was reorganized according to the Nazi Führer principle. The coordination of individual sub-groups of the UFI Corporation was the job of the newly appointed Reich Film Director-General. The production heads worked for the administrative director general and were responsible for the overall planning of annual programming and content design all the way up to the actual shooting of the film: these heads were also responsible for giving instructions to the film line producers and directors. It was subsequently fully nationalized in mid-1944.
The Soviet military government, which was in favour of a speedy reconstruction of the German film industry under Soviet supervision, incorporated the Babelsberg ateliers into DEFA, the state-run film studio, subsequently the GDR's state film studio, on May 17, 1946. The Murderers Are Among Us was the first German feature film in the post-war era and the first so-called "Trümmerfilm" ("Rubble Film"). It was shot in 1945/46 by DEFA in the Althoff Studios in Babelsberg and the Jofa ateliers in Berlin-Johannisthal. Wolfgang Staudte directed the film and also wrote the screenplay. Additionally, the Soviets confiscated numerous UFA productions from the Babelsburg vaults and dubbed them into Russian for release in the USSR; and simultaneously began importing Soviet films to the same offices for dubbing into German and distribution to the surviving German theaters.
In contrast, the main film-policy goal of the Allied occupying forces, under American insistence, consisted in preventing any future accumulation of power in the German film industry. The Western powers also had more interest in opening up the German film market for their own products rather than in letting the national film industry regain its foothold. Thus the reorganization of Germany's film industry outside the Soviet zone was very slow, in spite of the "Lex UFI" law issued in September 1949 by the American and British military regime and the Dissolution Law (June 1953) issued by the German Bundestag. The status of UFA was furthermore controversial, with doubts about whether it should be allowed to resume operations at all because of its identification with Nazi film production. Motion pictures produced after the war in the Allied zones were, for a decade, made by other, fledgling companies.
It was 1956 by the time Bavaria was outsourced and the remaining UFA re-privatized. A bank consortium led by Deutsche Bank was behind the founding of the new Universum-Film AG, whose production facilities included the Afifa-Kopierwerk and the ateliers in Berlin-Tempelhof. Its first board chairman was Arno Hauke who, until then, had been the General Trustee for UFI assets in the British zone. The first film made by Universum-Film AG, a short documentary film called Am Seidenen Faden, came out in 1955. In 1958, the first UFA feature film Stefanie came out: it starred Sabine Sinjen and was directed by Josef von Baky, who had directed the UFA's large-scale 25th anniversary film Münchhausen in 1942. In 1969, after ten further feature films directed by leading artists such as Curtis Bernhardt, William Dieterle, Helmut Käutner and Wolfgang Liebeneiner – as well as such newcomers as Peter Beauvais, Rolf von Sydow and Georg Tressler – feature film production at UFA was ended.
The production companies belonging to UFA Berlin have been under the management of Wolf Bauer, Norbert Sauer and Axel Reick since autumn 1991. Using the rhombus logo again, this team developed UFA Film & TV Produktion into the largest production company in Germany, now written in capital letters UFA. UFA's many prize-winning TV films, light entertainment formats, popular soap operas, long-running TV series, sitcoms and non-fiction programs have made it the leader on the German television market. The company broadcasts over 2,800 hours of content each year. In early 1997, the holding society UFA Hamburg (today Cologne) merged with CLT in Luxemburg to form CLT-UFA. April 2000 saw a merger with Pearson TV and the creation of the RTL Group, in which Bertelsmann has held the majority (90.4%) since late 2001. All worldwide production activities of the RTL Group are consolidated in FremantleMedia, and UFA is the holding company of all FremantleMedia's production activities in Germany. UFAInteractive, a small subsidiary directly associated with the holding company, was created to fulfill UFA's need for constant innovation (e.g. program content for mobile devices and special-interest channels) as well as to assist the larger companies independently in an advisory function.
On August 9, 2013, the company underwent a major restructuring based on the new strategic goal and concept of "One UFA". UFA's organizational structure was simplified down to three production units.
Between 1933 and 1942, the following were house directors at UFA: Carl Boese, Eduard von Borsody, Peter Paul Brauer, Karl Hartl, Georg Jacoby, Gerhard Lamprecht, Herbert Maisch, Paul Martin, Karl Ritter, Reinhold Schünzel (until 1936), Douglas Sirk (until 1937), Hans Steinhoff, Robert A. Stemmle, Viktor Tourjansky, Gustav Ucicky und Erich Waschneck.
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