2005 Moore, Sarah C

							                        Moore, Sarah Caroline
     The Image of the New Woman in Olga Wohlbrück's Street Films
         Faculty Mentor: Robert McFarland, German and Slavic Department



        My ORCA proposal concerned Olga Wohlbrück, a German female scriptwriter and
director from Weimar Era Germany, and her works. I approached my proposed work by
traveling to Vienna with the BYU Study Abroad Program and, while taking courses there, also
participated in research at the film archives there in Vienna. I searched through their materials
for information concerning Wohlbrück and where I could find her films.


        My research didn’t turn out as I hypothesized it would. The biggest problem I ran into
was that Olga Wohlbrück’s films are extremely hard to get ahold of. The staff at the Film
Archives was very helpful and friendly, but still even they had absolutely no idea where to find
her films. I got in contact with some people at a film archive in Berlin, Germany, where it may
actually be possible to view Wohlbrück’s films, but my time in Europe ran out before I was able
to change my pans to travel to Berlin.


        After I realized that studying Wohlbrück’s films in video form would not be possible, I
began searching for scripts to her movies and other written materials concerning her. If I could
not analyze her films as I had originally planned, I at least wanted to be able to contribute more
of her works to the Sophie Project, which acquires texts and other materials from German-
speaking female authors before the early-mid 1900’s and digitizes those works. I did find a
couple of works by Wohlbrück in the Austrian National Library, however these works are
already being studied and digitized by students connected with the Sophie Project. After finding
that researching Olga Wohlbrück’s works was largely a dead end for me in Vienna, I decided to
focus on Luise Kolm, a native of Vienna, who wrote and directed films in Vienna from 1910
until the 1940’s. I returned to the Film Archives to research Kolm, but again found that her
films, too, cannot be viewed because they simply do not exist any more. The only information I
found concerning Kolm was a book that listed the titles of her movies and the actors and
actresses who played roles in them.


        As is evident by my findings in Vienna, or rather, lack thereof, this topic definitely needs
further research and development. This research, however, cannot be done in Vienna, since the
necessary materials to perform the research cannot be located there. Because of this fact, I am
not very close to completing the research on Olga Wohlbrück that needs to be done. In the
future, however, I would recommend that students wanting to study Wohlbrück and her films
take their research to Berlin, where more resources on this subject are available.