Max W. Kimmich

Max Wilhelm Kimmich (b. 04 November 1893 in Ulm, d 16 January 1980 in Icking am Ammersee) was a German filmmaker, film director and screenwriter during the first half of the 20th century. He also was brother-in-law to Joseph Goebbels.

Early life (1893 - 1933)

He was born in Ulm in West Germany to the painter, art teacher and author Karl Kimmich senior and his wife Christine, née Autenrieth. He also had an older brother, also named Karl Kimmich, who was thirteen years his senior. While the latter started a bank career after finishing school, Max Kimmich first visited several military academies in Karlsruhe and Berlin after passing his school leaving exams and later fought as an regular officer in World War I. After the war he studied a few terms of medicine, but soon became attracted to the theatre and film, especially the American film. Therefore he worked as an assistant and dramatic adviser in several branches of the German Cinema Company. After that he became associate producer and, later on, producer with the Rochus Gliese film company. In 1924, he went to Hollywood, where he worked at Universal Studios as a screenwriter and director. But as he could not really gain ground in the USA, in 1929, he went back to Germany. The following year, he composed the music to his first sound film Waves of passion (dt. Wellen der Leidenschaft). In the next few years, he edited screenplays for cloak-and-dagger films like Under false flag (1931/1932), The invisible front (1932) or On Secret Service (1933) with various partners.

During the Nazi era (1933 - 1945)

Kimmichs career really began to boom only after the Nazis reached power in 1933, especially since 1938, when he had married the youngest sister of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He wrote the screenplays for several adventure films - sometimes with a nationalistic touch like Hangmen, Women and Soldiers (dt. Henker, Frauen und Soldaten) from 1935 - and worked for directors like Harry Piel and Paul Wegener. In 1938, he started his first film as director, a crime movie that was also produced as radio drama via the broadcasting station of Breslau the following year. He also became an expert for anti-British propaganda films during this time, e.g. My life for Ireland from 1940/1941 or the biographical movie Germanin from 1942, which shows the development of a medicine against the sleeping sickness. While Nazi film magazines praised the film high, today it is considered to be a rather weak movie. His last film, Peanuts (dt. Kleinigkeiten), which he started in 1944 with Tobis, could not be finished anymore due to the end of the war. It is considered that for working on this movie, Kimmich was in Vienna in spring 1945 and saw the invasion of the Allies, while Goebbels-biographer Curt Riess states he actually was in Berlin and escaped from the nearly encirceled town with his wife and mother-in-law on April 19th, 1945.

Until his death (1945 - 1980)

After the German surrender, Kimmich moved to the small village of Icking in Upper Bavaria with his family (he also had become father in late 1944 or early 1945). He seems to have got off de-nazification cheaply: Although the Allies had banned his films My life for Ireland, The fox of Glenarvon (another anti-British propaganda film) and Germanin at first, this ban was lifted in the early 1950s by the - then again independent - German film industry, so the films could be presented in cinemas again. During the following years, he worked as an author, produced several screens for radio and television broadcasts and - until the late 1950s - also worked for the German film-ring (a Munich film company). He died on 16 January, 1980 at the age of 86 in Icking.

Sources

Cinegraph: Encyclopedia for german-speaking film. Ed. by Hans Michael Bock. Edition Textkritik. 1984ff.
Wer ist wer? The German "Who-is-who". Part 13, 1958.
Weniger, Kay: The big people´s encyclopedia for films. Part 4, 2004.