Frank-Burkhard Habel

Frank-Burkhard Habel is a German scholar of the film and television industries. Since the 1970s he has worked as a film-journalist and, more broadly, as a commentator and lecturer on the films sector. He has worked as a screenwriter and, having made his stage debut as a child actor in the 1960s, has appeared in a succession of television dramas but only, as an actor, in supporting roles. After reunification he switched to freelance work, taking on a number of the jobs that he previously performed within the East German state directed movie industry. Since the 1990s he has written a number of books on cinema and television history. Currently he is a regular columnist on the daily (still) left-wing newspaper Junge Welt.

Life Frank-Burkhard Habel was born at around the same time as the 1953 East German uprising: he grew up in the Prenzlauer Berg district of East Berlin. While still at school he gained stage experience as a child actor. While still young received stage training from a number of members of the East German stage and film establishment, including Benno Besson, Fritz Decho and Rudolf Ulrich. Without pausing - at this point - to obtain university-level qualifications, in 1971 he joined the theatre company of Berlin's "Theater im 12. Stock", and sustained his association with this theatre (subsequently rebranded as the Zimmertheater Karlshorst) till 2005. After he started to work in television he very quickly became something of a part-timer at the theatre, however. As a graduate of it, he retained his links with the Film Academy at Babelsberg. He appeared in a number of student films during the later 1980s. Particularly noteworthy was his appearance in what sources identify as a "James Bond parody", entitled "Live and Let Die", and directed by Dror Zahavi who was a student contemporary at the academy. At the 1984 (so-called) "Potsdam International Student Film Festival", Habel's performance earned him that year's "best actor" prize. Ahead of 1995, he also teamed up with Wim Wenders to organise the "First hundred years of cinema in Berlin" association as a way to organise celebration of the centenary identified. Since 2002, Habel has been deputy chair of the "Berlin Film and Television Association". In addition, between 2009 and 2013, and again since 2019, he has served as alternating president of the Kurt Tucholsky Association.

Frank-Burkhard Habel has pursued a parallel career as a film journalist since the later 1970s. More recently he has also authored a number of books. He wrote regularly for Die Weltbühne and then for its post-reunification successor publication Das Blättchen. He also writes or has written for Sonntag, Film und Fernsehen, Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft and various daily newspapers. He founded the film review magazine "Filmklub-Kurier" in 1990 and ran it till 1993. Since the mid 1990s, he has published more than a dozen books Another theme to which he returns in several of his books is the history of cinema and television in East Germany (1949-1989).