Biography

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 273-276. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

A member of the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), Dudow was arrested by the Nazis shortly after they took power in January 1933. He was soon expelled from Germany as a Bulgarian citizen, but was unable to return to Bulgaria for reasons unknown (and to which Brecht alludes in a July 1933 letter to the Russian playwright Sergei Tretyakov). He made his way to France sometime in 1934, and remained there under constant threat of expulsion until 1939/1940, when he went to Switzerland.

In 1929, he visited the Soviet Union, where he met Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow and eventually, Bertolt Brecht. After his return from the USSR, Dudow directed Brecht's theatrical piece, The Decision (Die Massnahme), and began his film directing career.

He worked with Leopold Jessner and Jürgen Fehling, served as a chorus member under Erwin Piscator, and was a director's assistant to Fritz Lang on the production of Metropolis. During this time, Dudow also ran a bookstore with his wife and worked as a foreign correspondent for a Bulgarian newspaper.

In 1922, he emigrated to Berlin with the intention of becoming an architect. He gave up this plan and began studying theatre in 1923, first under Emmanuel Reicher, and then, from 1925 to 1926, as a theatre studies student under Max Herrmann at the university.