Wofgang Staudte was born on October 9, 1906 in Saarbruecken. He began his career on stage, working for Max Reinhard and Erwin Piscator. Towards the middle of the twentieth century, Staudte began working at the DEFA. The film with which he became widely known was The Murderers are Among Us (Die Moerder sind unter uns, 1946), which was the first German postwar feature film. Other films of his include Rotation (1949), The Kaiser's Lackey (Der Untertan, 1951), and Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck (1953). Staudte was forced to compromise with commercial demands when he decided in 1955 to continue his work in the West. His films created there include Roses for the State Prosecutor (Rosen fuer den Staatsanwalt, 1959) and Stag Party (Herrenpartie, 1964). In these films, he again resumed a critical viewpoint, connecting the present-day West Germany with the fascist past. Wolfgang Staudte died on January 19, 1984 in Zigarsk, Slovenia.
