German Oscar winner: film architect Rolf Zehetbauer died

Rolf Zehetbauer has died: The Munich film architect died on January 23, as reported by the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. He was 92 years old.

He won one of the few Oscars that ever went to German artists in 1973 for Bob Fosse’s film musical “Cabaret”. With the buildings for this film and those for Ingmar Bergman’s “Schlangenei” four years later, Zehetbauer had a lasting impact on the image that the world still has of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s – all of this was created on the grounds of the Bavaria Studios in the Munich suburb Geiselgasteig.

Those were expensive films – but Zehetbauer proved in the 1960s that Zehetbauer could also get by with small budgets, as a set designer for the series “Space Patrol Orion”, where he put together futuristic spaceship interiors from the most banal of everyday objects.

Zehetbauer also worked for Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jerzy Skolimowski, Wolfgang Petersen and Delbert Mann. With its historic buildings in particular, it not only shaped the look of German film in the 1970s and 1980s. But also the image that Germans and the international public have of Germany.