Trivia

The director and writer Hans Karl Breslauer began his career as a stage actor in Colgone, it followed engagements in Wiesbaden and Vienna.

He already joined the film business as a screenwriter in 1910 but his first works are no longer documented.

Besides his activity in the film business he also wrote numerous novels and short stories and he sometimes used the pen names James O'Cleaner and Jenny Romberg.

Hans Karl Breslauser was also responsible as a movie director. To his works of the 10s belong "Lena oder Lene" (1918), "Ihre beste Rolle" (1918) and "Am See der Erlösung" (1919).

For few movies Hans Karl Breslauer was also the producer like "Lieb' mich und die Welt ist mein" (1923) and "Strandgut" (1924). Once he also appeared in front of the camera as an actor for "Zu spät gesühnt" (1916).

Hans Karl Breslauer was born in Vienna, the son of the proprietor of a coffee-house, which it was intended he should take over. Instead he became an actor.

He produced about 40 filmscripts for the film companies Duskes, Messter, Vitascope, Mutoscope and Biograph.

From 1910 Breslauer was active in Berlin as a screenwriter.

From 1914 he is supposed to have had his first directing job with Sascha-Film in Vienna, but this has been called into question because of the lack of evidence about directing in these years. He can be shown however to have had an acting role in the Viennese Regent-Film production Zu spät gesühnt (1916).

Success eluded him, and he died impoverished in Salzburg Hospital on 15 April 1965.

Between 1934 and 1939 he regularly wrote amusing contributions for the Grenzboten in Bratislava (then Pressburg), from 1936 to 1942 for Das kleine Blatt in Vienna and additionally from 1938 to 1944 for the Kleine Volks-Zeitung, also in Vienna.

After the end of World War II Breslauer and his wife moved to Loibichl near Mondsee in Upper Austria, where they rented rooms in a guesthouse.

He continued to publish after the war, now writing mostly short fiction under his own name and the pseudonyms "Jenny Romberg" and "James O'Cleaner".

From 1940, the same year in which he joined the Nazi Party,[4] he contributed light pieces to newspapers across the entire Third Reich, for example the Breslauer Neueste Nachrichten, the Essener Allgemeine Zeitung and the Leipziger Tageszeitung.

From the 1930s Breslauer was very active as a writer. He was a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer ("Reich Chamber of Authorship") and published under the pseudonym "Bastian Schneider".

After Die Stadt ohne Juden no further film work by Breslauer is known. The film newspaper Mein Film reports of his directing on a Sascha-Film production Der fliegende Haupttreffer, but this apparently never came to anything.

His departure from the film world may well be explained by the crisis caused across the entire European film industry by the massive expansion of the cheap American film market from Hollywood, which put most European film producers under enormous pressure, including those in Austria, where most film production companies went out of business.

From 1921 Breslauer regularly directed for Mondial-Film, under whose roof he set up his own production company, H.K.B.-Film. Its first films were Lieb' mich, und die Welt ist mein (1924) and Strandgut (also 1924), which he shot in 1923 on Corsica and the French Riviera.

In October 1925 Breslauer married the actress Anna (or Anny) Milety, who had taken the female lead in many of his films.