Friedrich Luft

Die Neue Zeitung, founded in 1947 by the American occupying power, took him into service as head of the feature section of its Berlin edition, as a theatre and film critic, until it ceased publication in 1955.

In 1959, he wrote the subtle 27-page preface to the autobiography Spiel im Dasein by Max Ophüls, the theatre and film director (Lola Montez, Letters from an Unknown) from Saarbrücken.

[1] Every Sunday at noon, from the first broadcast on 9 February 1946 – at that time still on DIAS (wire radio in the American sector) – until 28 October 1990 shortly before his death, he spoke in this capacity about Berlin theatre premieres of the previous week.

As rhetoric peculiarities were his quick and sometimes breathlessly choppy speech, a sometimes drastic mode of expression combined with baroque squiggles as well as the same recurring farewell formula from the listeners: We'll talk again in a week.

Luft also wrote the German dialogue book on the David Lean's classic The Bridge on the River Kwai from 1957.

He lived and worked for 50 years until his death near the Nollendorfplatz in the Schöneberg Maienstraße 4, where a plaque commemorates the critic, who was very popular in Berlin at the time.