Carl Zuckmayer

Carl Zuckmayer was a German writer and playwright. His older brother was the pedagogue, composer, conductor and pianist Eduard Zuckmayer.

Zuckmayer was born in Nackenheim in Rhenish Hesse, he was the second son of Amalie and Carl Zuckmayer. When he was four years old, his family moved to Mainz. With the outbreak of World War I, he finished school with a facilitated "emergency"-Abitur and volunteered for military service. During the war he served with the German Army's Field Artillery on the Western Front. In 1917, he published first poems in the pacifist journal Die Aktion and he was one of the signatures of the Appeal published by the Antinational Socialist Party after the German Revolution of 9 November 1918. By this time Zuckmayer held the rank of a Leutnant der Reserve “Reserve Officer”.

After the war, he took up studies at the University of Frankfurt, first in humanities, later in biology and botany. In 1920, he married his childhood friend Annemarie Ganz, but they were divorced just one year later, when Zuckmayer had an affair with actress Annemarie Seidel.

His first ventures into literature and theatre were complete failures. His first drama Kreuzweg (1921) fell flat and was delisted after only three performances, and when he was chosen as dramatic adviser at the theatre of Kiel, he lost his new job after his first, controversial staging of Terence's The Eunuch. In 1924 he became dramaturg at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, jointly with Bertolt Brecht. After another failure with his second drama Pankraz erwacht oder Die Hinterwäldler he finally had a great public success with the rustic comedy Der fröhliche Weinberg ("The Merry Vineyard") in 1925, written in his local Mainz-Frankfurt dialect. This work won him the prestigious Kleist Prize two years after it was awarded to Brecht, and launched his career.
Also in 1925, he married the Austrian actress Alice Herdan, and they bought a house in Henndorf near Salzburg in Austria. Zuckmayer's next play Der Schinderhannes was again successful. In 1929, he wrote the script for the movie Der blaue Engel (starring Marlene Dietrich) based on the novel Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann. That year, he was also awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, another prestigious German language literary award.

In 1931, his play Der Hauptmann von Köpenick premiered and became another success, but his plays were prohibited when the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933; Zuckmayer's maternal grandfather had been born Jewish and converted to Protestantism. Zuckmayer and his family moved to their house in Austria, where he published a few more works. After the Anschluss, he was expatriated by the Nazi government, and the Zuckmayers fled via Switzerland to the United States in 1939, where he first worked as a script writer in Hollywood before renting Backwoods Farm near Barnard, Vermont in 1941 and working there as a farmer until 1946. In 1943/44 he wrote "character portraits" of actors, writers and other artists in Germany for the Office of Strategic Services, evaluating their involvement with the Nazi regime. This became known only in 2002, when the approximately 150 reports where published in Germany under the title Geheimreport. The family's Vermont years are narrated in Alice Herdan Zuckmayer's Die Farm in den grünen Bergen (The Farm in the Green Mountains), a best seller in Germany upon its 1949 publication.

In January 1946, after World War II, Zuckmayer was granted the US citizenship he had applied for already in 1943. He returned to Germany and traveled the country for five months as a US cultural attaché. The resulting report to the War Department was first published in Germany in 2004 (Deutschlandbericht). His play Des Teufels General ("The Devil's General"; the main character is based on the biography of Ernst Udet), which he had written in Vermont, premiered in Zürich on 14 December 1946. The play became a major success in post-war Germany; one of the first post-war literary attempts to broach the issue of Nazism. It was filmed in 1955 starring Curd Jürgens.

Zuckmayer kept writing: Barbara Blomberg premiered in Konstanz in 1949 and Das kalte Licht in Hamburg in 1955. He also wrote the screenplay for Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach, the German-language version of Otto Preminger's 1953 film The Moon is Blue. Having shuttled back and forth between the U.S. and Europe for several years, the Zuckmayers left the U.S. in 1958 and settled in Saas Fee in the Valais in Switzerland. In 1966, he became a Swiss citizen, and he published his memoirs entitled Als wär's ein Stück von mir ("A part of myself"). His last play Der Rattenfänger (music by Friedrich Cerha) premiered in Zürich in 1975. Zuckmayer died on January 18, 1977 in Visp. His body was interred on January 22 in Saas Fee.

Godfrey Ridout

Godfrey Ridout was a Canadian composer, conductor, music educator, and writer. He contributed articles to numerous Canadian music publications, notably serving as the assistant editor of both Canadian Music (1940–1941) and Canadian Review of Music and Art (1942–1943). From 1973–1984 he was the author of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's program notes. As a conductor he served as the music director of the Eaton Operatic Society from 1949–1958. He was also highly involved with the Toronto Gilbert & Sullivan Society of which he was made an honorary vice-president. As a composer, Ridout is chiefly remembered for his symphonic and choral works. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes him thus:

"Essentially an eclectic, Ridout yet did not lack for individuality. His music, though intensely felt, is prevailingly sunny and affirmative; it eschews the 'doom and gloom' manner and self-conscious profundity of much 20th-century concert fare. Ridout liked fun in music and could not easily resist concluding a work with a 'good tune'. He saw no need to strive for ever-new styles, or for a progress through styles, or for the role of musical inventor; style for him was a means of communication, not the 'message' itself. In this aloofness from contemporary conformity, Ridout may be perceived to be more original than many innovators and one of the determined communicators of his day."

Ridout was a pupil of Ettore Mazzoleni (conducting), Weldon Kilburn (piano), and Charles Peaker (organ and counterpoint) at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. He then taught on the conservatory faculty from 1940 to 1948. He left there to join the faculty at Toronto University, where he taught until 1982. Among his notable pupils were Walter Babiak, Walter Buczynski, Hugh Davidson, Alan Detweiler, Ben McPeek, Welford Russell, Alfred Strombergs, and Charles Wilson.

Ridout died on November 24, 1984 in Toronto, Canada at the age of 66.

Hugh Hefner

Hugh Marston Hefner was an American businessman, magazine publisher and playboy. He was the editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, which he founded in 1953. He was also the chief creative officer of Playboy Enterprises, which is the publishing group that operates the magazine. An advocate of sexual liberation and freedom of expression, Hefner was a political activist and philanthropist in several other causes and public issues.

Hefner was born during the Prohibition era in Chicago, Illinois, on April 9, 1926. He was the first child of Grace Caroline (née Swanson; 1895–1997) who worked as a teacher, and Glenn Lucius Hefner (1896–1976), an accountant. His parents were from Nebraska. He had a younger brother, Keith (1929–2016). Hefner's mother was of Swedish descent, and his father had German and English ancestry. Through his father's line, Hefner stated that he was a direct descendant of Plymouth governor William Bradford. He described his family as "conservative, Midwestern, and Methodist". His mother had wanted him to become a missionary.

He attended Sayre Elementary School and Steinmetz College Prep, then served from 1944 to 1946 as a U.S. Army writer for a military newspaper. Hefner graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a double minor in Creative Writing and Art. He earned his degree in two and a half years in 1949. After graduation, he took a semester of graduate courses in Sociology at Northwestern University, but dropped out soon after.

In January 1952, Hefner left his job as a copywriter for Esquire after he was denied a $5 raise. In 1953, he took out a mortgage, generating a bank loan of $600, and raised $8,000 from 45 investors, including $1,000 from his mother, to launch Playboy, which was initially going to be called Stag Party. The first issue, published in December 1953, featured Marilyn Monroe from her 1949 nude calendar shoot and sold over 50,000 copies. Hefner, who never met Monroe, bought the crypt next to hers at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in 1992 for $75,000.

After the Charles Beaumont science fiction short story "The Crooked Man" was rejected by Esquire magazine in 1955, Hefner agreed to publish the story in Playboy. The story highlighted straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. After the magazine received angry letters, Hefner wrote a response to criticism where he said, "If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too." In 1961, Hefner watched Dick Gregory perform at the Herman Roberts Show Bar in Chicago. Based on that performance, Hefner hired Gregory to work at the Chicago Playboy Club; Gregory attributed the subsequent launch of his career to that night.

On June 4, 1963, Hefner was arrested for promoting obscene literature after he published an issue of Playboy that featured nude shots of Jayne Mansfield. The case went to trial and resulted in a hung jury.

During the civil rights era in 1966, Hefner sent Alex Haley to interview George Lincoln Rockwell, much to Rockwell's surprise because Haley was black. Rockwell had founded the American Nazi Party and would be later described by some as the "American Hitler". Rockwell agreed to meet with Haley only after gaining assurance from the Playboy writer that he was not Jewish, although Rockwell kept a handgun on the table throughout the interview. The interview was recreated in Roots: The Next Generations in 1979, with James Earl Jones as Haley and Marlon Brando as Rockwell; Brando won a Primetime Emmy Award for his portrayal of Rockwell. Haley had also interviewed Malcolm X in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966 for the newly established 1962 "playboy interview"; all three interviewees would be assassinated by 1968.
In 1970, Hugh Hefner stated that "militant feminists" are "unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes" and ordered a hit piece in his magazine against them.

In the 1993 The Simpsons episode "Krusty Gets Kancelled", Hefner guest-voiced himself. In 1999, Hefner financed the Clara Bow documentary, Discovering the It Girl. "Nobody has what Clara had. She defined an era and made her mark on the nation," he stated. Hefner guest-starred as himself in the 2000 Sex and the City episode "Sex and Another City". In 2005, Hefner guest-starred on the HBO TV shows Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. Hefner guest-starred as himself in a 2006 episode of Seth Green's Robot Chicken on the late-night programming block Adult Swim. In the 2007 Family Guy episode "Airport '07", Hefner guest-voiced himself. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for television and made several movie appearances as himself on the small screen. In 2009, he received a "worst supporting actor" nomination for a Razzie award for his performance as himself in Miss March. On his official Twitter account he joked about this nomination: "Maybe I didn't understand the character."

A documentary by Brigitte Berman, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, was released on July 30, 2010. He had previously granted full access to documentary filmmaker and television producer Kevin Burns for the A&E Biography special Hugh Hefner: American Playboy in 1996. Hefner and Burns later collaborated on numerous other television projects, most notably on The Girls Next Door, a reality series that ran for six seasons (2005–2009) and 90 episodes.

In 2012, Hefner announced that his youngest son, Cooper, would likely succeed him as the public face of Playboy.

Hefner died at his home in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California, on September 27, 2017, at the age of 91. The causes were cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, sepsis and an E. coli infection.

He is interred at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, in the $75,000 crypt beside Marilyn Monroe.

Frank Zarb

Frank Gustave Zarb is an American businessman and former Republican politician. He is perhaps best known as the Chairman and CEO of the NASDAQ stock exchange during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. He is also known for his role as the "Energy Czar" under President Gerald Ford during the 1970s energy crisis.

Frank Zarb was born to Maltese immigrant parents Gustave Zarb and Rosemary (Antinoro) Zarb in Brooklyn, New York. In 1957 he received his Bachelor of Business Administration at Hofstra University, then known as Hofstra College, on Long Island. Following his time in the army, he went on to earn a Master of Business Administration from Hofstra in 1962.

Following a term of service in the army from 1957 to 1958, Frank started at CITGO, then known as Cities Service Oil Co, as a management trainee. Leaving that post in 1962, he became a general partner at Goodbody and Company. In 1969 he became the executive vice president of CBWL-Hayden Stone.

In 1971 Frank went into public service, serving first as Assistant Secretary of Labor (1971–1972), then as Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (1973–74). Finally in 1974 he was appointed "Energy Czar" by President Ford, holding dual appointments in the Energy Resources Council and the Federal Energy Administration until 1977.

After leaving the federal government in 1977, Zarb became a senior partner at Lazard (1977–1988), CEO and Chairman of Smith Barney (1988–1993), and group chief executive of Travelers Group (1993–1994). In 1994, he was appointed CEO of insurance brokerage company Alexander & Alexander Services, Inc. and then oversaw that company's sale to Aon Corp. in 1997.

Shortly after crafting the LIPA Purchase of LILCO in 1998 (as the chairman of LIPA) Zarb became the Chairman and CEO of the National Association of Securities DealersFrom 1997 to 2001, (NASD) and head of the NASD's stock exchange, the NASDAQ.

Following his retirement from NASD, Zarb became a managing director of Hellman & Friedman, which subsequently acquired a controlling stake in Nasdaq shortly after it was spun off from NASD.

In 2005, Zarb replaced his long-time friend Maurice Hank Greenberg as head of the American International Group, in what Greenberg termed as a "palace coup." At the time, Greenberg was battling charges by then-New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, who (along with the SEC) was investigating AIG for potentially engaging in accounting improprieties.

In 1974, Hofstra University gave Zarb the Distinguished Scholar award in recognition of his contributions to the University. In 1975 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Hofstra in recognition of his contributions to the University. In 1994, the School of Business at Hofstra was renamed the Frank G. Zarb School of Business in recognition of his service as the Chairman of the University's Board of Trustees. In 2008 the Zarb School alumni association was created in his honor.

Zarb serves as an "Executive in Residence" at Columbia Business School, the graduate school of business at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Jan Teulings

Johannes Marinus Antonius (Jan) Teulings was a Dutch actor. He appeared in more than thirty films from 1936 to 1987.

Teulings passed the MULO and subsequently received education in art history and literature of Wijnand Frans . He came in contact with the company De Rotterdammers of Louis Chrispijn where he made his debut in the season 1923/1924. Although he subsequently joined a large number of companies, he did not really start in the mid-thirties. He continued playing until he left Switzerland in 1977. After that he was no longer on the shelves.

His greatest fame was thanks to his many appearances on television, in series and games. In the 1967-1969 he played twelve times the role of inspector Maigret in the same television series (the role was previously played by Kees Brusse ). He was also featured in almost all series of Willy van Hemert . In the eighties he played his last roles in editing stories by Herbert Reinecker . Teulings died at the age of 84 and was cremated in Rotterdam .

George Grosz

George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, and became a naturalized citizen in 1938. Abandoning the style and subject matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at the Art Students League of New York. In 1956 he returned to Berlin where he died.

George Grosz was born Georg Ehrenfried Gross in Berlin, Germany, the son of a pub owner. His parents were devoutly Lutheran. Grosz grew up in the Pomeranian town of Stolp (now Słupsk, Poland), where his mother became the keeper of the local Hussars Officers' mess after his father died in 1901. At the urging of his cousin, the young Grosz began attending a weekly drawing class taught by a local painter named Grot. Grosz developed his skills further by drawing meticulous copies of the drinking scenes of Eduard von Grützner, and by drawing imaginary battle scenes. From 1909 to 1911, he studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, Raphael Wehle, and Osmar Schindler. He subsequently studied at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik.

In November 1914 Grosz volunteered for military service, in the hope that by thus preempting conscription he would avoid being sent to the front. He was given a discharge after hospitalization for sinusitis in 1915. In 1916 he changed the spelling of his name to "de-Germanise" and internationalise his name – thus Georg became "George" (an English spelling), while in his surname he replaced the German "ß" with its phonetic equivalent "sz". He did this as a protest against German nationalism and out of a romantic enthusiasm for America – a legacy of his early reading of the books of James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte and Karl May – that he retained for the rest of his life. His artist friend and collaborator Helmut Herzfeld likewise changed his name to John Heartfield at the same time.

In January 1917 Grosz was drafted for service, but in May he was discharged as permanently unfit. In the last months of 1918, Grosz joined the Spartacist League, which was renamed the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in December 1918. He was arrested during the Spartakus uprising in January 1919, but escaped using fake identification documents. In 1921 Grosz was accused of insulting the army, which resulted in a 300 German Mark fine and the destruction of the collection Gott mit uns ("God with us"), a satire on German society. In 1928 he was prosecuted for blasphemy after publishing anticlerical drawings, such as one depicting prisoners under assault from a minister who vomits grenades and weapons onto them, and another showing Christ coerced into military service. According to historian David Nash, Grosz "publicly stated that he was neither Christian nor pacifist, but was actively motivated by an inner need to create these pictures", and was finally acquitted after two appeals. By contrast, in 1942 Time magazine identified Grosz as a pacifist.

In 1922 Grosz traveled to Russia with the writer Martin Andersen Nexø. Upon their arrival in Murmansk they were briefly arrested as spies; after their credentials were approved they were allowed to meet with Grigory Zinoviev, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Vladimir Lenin. Grosz's six-month stay in the Soviet Union left him unimpressed by what he had seen. He ended his membership in the KPD in 1923, although his political positions were little changed.

Bitterly anti-Nazi, Grosz left Germany shortly before Hitler came to power. In June 1932, he accepted an invitation to teach the summer semester at the Art Students League of New York. In October 1932, Grosz returned to Germany, but on January 12, 1933, he and his family emigrated to the United States. Grosz became a naturalized citizen of the U.S. in 1938, and made his home in Bayside, New York. In the 1930s he taught at the Art Students League, where one of his students was Romare Bearden, who was influenced by his style of collage. He taught at the Art Students League intermittently until 1955.

In America, Grosz determined to make a clean break with his past, and changed his style and subject matter. He continued to exhibit regularly, and in 1946 he published his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. In the 1950s he opened a private art school at his home and also worked as Artist in Residence at the Des Moines Art Center. Grosz was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician in 1950. In 1954 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Though he had U.S. citizenship, he resolved to return to Berlin, where he died on July 6, 1959, from the effects of falling down a flight of stairs after a night of drinking.

Brett Weston

Brett Weston was an American photographer. Van Deren Coke described Brett Weston as the "child genius of American photography." He was the second of the four sons of photographer Edward Weston and Flora Chandler.

Weston began taking photographs in 1925, while living in Mexico with Tina Modotti and his father. He began showing his photographs with Edward Weston in 1927, was featured at the international exhibition at Film und Foto in Germany at age 17, and mounted his first one-man museum retrospective at age 21 at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in January, 1932.

Weston's earliest images from the 1920s reflect his intuitive sophisticated sense of abstraction. He often flattened the plane, engaging in layered space, an artistic style more commonly seen among the Abstract Expressionists and more modern painters like David Hockney than other photographers. He began photographing the dunes at Oceano, California, in the early 1930s. This eventually became a favorite location of his father Edward and later shared with Brett's third wife Dody Weston Thompson. Brett preferred the high gloss papers and ensuing sharp clarity of the gelatin silver photographic materials of the f64 Group rather than the platinum matte photographic papers common in the 1920s and encouraged Edward Weston to explore the new silver papers in his own work. Brett Weston was credited by photography historian Beaumont Newhall as the first photographer to make negative space the subject of a photograph. Donald Ross, a photographer close to both Westons, said that Brett never came after anyone. He was a true photographic equal and colleague to his father and "one should not be considered without the other."

"Brett and I are always seeing the same kinds of things to do - we have the same kind of vision. Brett didn't like this; naturally enough, he felt that even when he had done the thing first, the public would not know and he would be blamed for imitating me." Edward Weston - Daybooks - May 24, 1930.

Brett Weston used to refer to Edward Weston lovingly as "my biggest fan" and there was no rivalry between the two photographic giants. Brett and his wife Dody loyally set aside their own photography to help Edward after he was unable to print his own images due to Parkinson's disease, which claimed Edward's life in 1958.

Brett Weston married and divorced four times. He had one daughter, Erica Weston. Brett Weston lived part-time on the Big Island of Hawaii and in Carmel, California for the final 14 years of his life. He maintained a home in Waikoloa that was built by his brother Neil Weston, and later moved to Hawaii Paradise Park. He died in Kona Hospital on January 22, 1993 after suffering a stroke.

Frederick IX

Frederick IX was King of Denmark from 1947 to 1972.

Born into the House of Glücksburg, Frederick was the eldest son of King Christian X and Queen Alexandrine of Denmark. He became crown prince when his father succeeded as king in 1912. As a young man, he was educated at the Royal Danish Naval Academy. In 1935, he was married to Princess Ingrid of Sweden and they had three daughters, Margrethe, Benedikte and Anne-Marie. During Nazi Germany's occupation of Denmark, Frederick acted as regent on behalf of his father from 1942 until 1943.

Frederick became king on his father's death in early 1947. During Frederick IX's reign, Danish society shook off the restrictions of an agrarian society, developed a welfare state and, as a consequence of the booming economy of the 1960s, women entered the labour market. Denmark modernized, bringing new demands on the monarchy and Frederick's role as a constitutional monarch. Frederick IX died in 1972, and was succeeded by his eldest daughter, Margrethe.

Zygmunt Bauman

Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of Poland by a political purge in 1968 engineered by the Communist government of the Polish People's Republic and forced to give up his Polish citizenship in order to move to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971 and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was one of the world's most eminent social theorists, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.

Bauman was born to non-observant Polish Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland, in 1925. When Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and by the Soviet Union, in 1939, his family escaped eastwards into the USSR. Bauman then enlisted in the Soviet-controlled First Polish Army, working as a political instructor. He took part in the battles of Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg) and of Berlin. In May 1945 he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour. After World War II he became one of the Polish Army's youngest majors.

According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, from 1945 to 1953 Bauman was a political officer in the Internal Security Corps (KBW), a military unit formed to combat Ukrainian nationalist insurgents and part of the remnants of the Polish Home Army. Later Bauman worked for military intelligence from 1945-48. However, the nature and extent of his collaboration remain unknown, as well as the exact circumstances under which it was terminated.

In an interview with The Guardian, Bauman confirmed he had been a committed communist during and after World War II and had never made a secret of it. He admitted that joining the military intelligence service at age 19 was a mistake although he had a "dull" desk-job and did not remember informing on anyone. While serving in the KBW, Bauman first studied sociology at the Warsaw Academy of Political and Social Science. In the KBW Bauman, already in the rank of major, was suddenly dishonourably discharged in 1953, after his father had approached the Israeli embassy in Warsaw with a view to emigrating to Israel. As Bauman did not share his father's Zionist tendencies and was indeed strongly anti-Zionist, his dismissal caused a severe, though temporary estrangement from his father. During the period of unemployment that followed, he completed his M.A. and in 1954 became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw, where he remained until 1968.

During a spell at the London School of Economics, where his supervisor was Robert McKenzie, he prepared a comprehensive study on the British socialist movement, his first major book. Published originally in Polish in 1959, a revised edition appeared in English in 1972. Bauman went on to publish other books, including Socjologia na co dzień ("Everyday Sociology", 1964), which reached a large popular audience in Poland and later formed the foundation for the English-language text-book Thinking Sociologically (1990). Initially, Bauman remained close to orthodox Marxist doctrine, but influenced by Antonio Gramsci and Georg Simmel, he became increasingly critical of Poland's Communist government. Owing to this he was never awarded a professorship even after he completed his habilitation but, after his former teacher, Julian Hochfeld, was made vice-director of UNESCO's Department for Social Sciences in Paris in 1962, Bauman did in fact inherit Hochfeld's chair.

Faced with increasing political pressure connected with a political purge led by Mieczysław Moczar, the Chief of the Polish Communist Security Police, Bauman renounced his membership of the governing Polish United Workers' Party in January 1968. The March 1968 events culminated in a purge that drove many remaining Communist Poles of Jewish descent out of the country, including those intellectuals who had fallen from grace with the communist government. Bauman, who had lost his chair at the University of Warsaw, was among them. Having had to give up Polish citizenship to be allowed to leave the country, he first went to Israel to teach at Tel Aviv University, before accepting the chair of sociology at the University of Leeds, where he intermittently also served as head of department. After his appointment, he published almost exclusively in English, his third language, and his reputation grew. Indeed, from the late 1990s, Bauman exerted a considerable influence on the anti- or alter-globalization movement.

In a 2011 interview in the Polish weekly, "Polityka", Bauman criticized Zionism and Israel, saying Israel was not interested in peace and that it was "taking advantage of the Holocaust to legitimize unconscionable acts". He compared the Israeli West Bank barrier to the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto where hundreds of thousands of Jews had died in the Holocaust. The Israeli ambassador to Warsaw, Zvi Bar, called Bauman's comments "half truths" and "groundless generalizations."

Buaman was a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which advocates for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.

Bauman was married to writer Janina Bauman, née Lewinson; 18 August 1926 – 29 December 2009. They had three daughters, painter Lydia Bauman, architect Irena Bauman, and professor Anna Sfard, a leading theorist of education at the University of Haifa. His grandson Michael Sfard is a prominent civil rights lawyer and author in Israel. Zygmunt Bauman died in Leeds on January 9, 2017.

Rolf Hoppe

Rolf Hoppe is a German film and stage actor.

Hoppe was born as son of a master baker in Ellrich, Thuringia, Germany. After his apprenticehip as a baker, he worked from 1945 to 1948, as a coachman. He then started an actors’ training in Erfurt and worked in the circus Aeros. He later engaged at Thalia Theater in Halle (Saale) and at the Young World Theatre in Leipzig. He acted at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and the Salzburg Festival. He was internationally active in Switzerland, Italy, Poland and China.

In the East German DEFA movies, Hoppe often played villains, e.g., in different Osterns. One of his most notable roles was that of the Tábornagy (Hermann Göring) in Mephisto, which was awarded the 1981 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Hoppe lives in Weißig in Dresden. He is married and has two daughters. His youngest daughter, Christine Hoppe (1968), is also an actress.

Manfred Krug

Manfred Krug was a German actor, singer and author.

Krug was born in Duisburg in 1937. After moving to East Germany at the age of 13, Krug worked at a steel plant before beginning his acting career on the stage and, ultimately, in film. By the end of the 1950s he had several film roles, and in 1960 he appeared in Frank Beyer's successful war movie Fünf Patronenhülsen (Five Cartridges). Many more film roles followed, with Krug often cast as a socialist hero. Krug also achieved notability as a popular jazz singer, often in collaboration with composer Guenther Fischer.

In 1976 the East German government forbade Krug to work as an actor and singer because he participated in protests against the expulsion and stripping of GDR citizenship of Wolf Biermann. On 20 April 1977 he requested to leave the GDR and as soon as he got the approval he left the GDR and moved to Schöneberg in West Berlin.

After moving back to West Germany he very soon got new roles as an actor but very rarely sang in public for a long time. In 1978 Krug appeared as one of the male leads of the action-drama television series Auf Achse, and would continue to appear on the series until 1995, one year before the show ended its long run. Krug's various television roles even included a two-year stint on the children's program Sesamstraße, the German version of the American children's program Sesame Street. In the 1980s and 1990s, he also starred as Hauptkommissar Paul Stoever in the Tatort series of TV crime movies, which would eventually run for forty installments in total. He died on 21 October 2016 in Berlin.

Robert Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his role as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project: the World War II effort to develop the first nuclear weapons at the secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. For this reason he is remembered as "the father of the atomic bomb". In reference to the Trinity test in New Mexico, where his Los Alamos team first tested the bomb, Oppenheimer famously recalled the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

After the war Oppenheimer was a chief advisor to the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby for international control of atomic energy and to avert the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken political opinions during the Red Scare, he had his security clearance revoked in a much-publicized and politicized hearing in 1954. Though stripped of his direct political influence Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and work in physics. A decade later President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation.

As a scientist Oppenheimer is remembered most for being the chief founder of the American School of Theoretical Physics while at the University of California, Berkeley. At the Institute for Advanced Study he would hold Einstein's old position of Senior Professor of Theoretical Physics. Oppenheimer's notable achievements in physics include the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, work on electron-positron theory, the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, quantum tunneling, relativistic quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, black holes, and cosmic rays.

He died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey in February 1967, at age 62.

Max Ophüls

Maximillian Oppenheimer known as Max Ophüls was a German-born film director who worked in Germany (1931–1933), France (1933–1940 and 1950–1957), and the United States (1947–1950). He made nearly 30 films, the latter ones being especially notable: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), The Earrings of Madame de... (1953) and Lola Montès (1955).

Max Ophüls was born in Saarbrücken, Germany, the son of Leopold Oppenheimer, a Jewish textile manufacturer and owner of several textile shops in Germany, and his wife Helen. He took the pseudonym Ophüls during the early part of his theatrical career so that, should he fail, it wouldn't embarrass his father.

Initially envisioning an acting career, he started as a stage actor in 1919 and played at the Aachen Theatre from 1921 to 1923. He then worked as a theater director, becoming the first director at the city theater of Dortmund. Ophüls moved into theatre production in 1924. He became creative director of the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1926. Having had 200 plays to his credit, he turned to film production in 1929, when he became a dialogue director under Anatole Litvak at UFA in Berlin. He worked throughout Germany and directed his first film in 1931, the comedy short Dann schon lieber Lebertran (literally In This Case, Rather Cod-Liver Oil).

Of his early films, the most acclaimed is Liebelei (1933), which included a number of the characteristic elements for which he was to become known: luxurious sets, a feminist attitude, and a duel between a younger and an older man.

Predicting the Nazi ascendancy, Ophüls, a Jew, fled to France in 1933 after the Reichstag fire and became a French citizen in 1938. After the fall of France to Germany, he travelled through Switzerland and Italy to the United States in 1941, only to become inactive in Hollywood. He eventually received help from a longtime fan, director Preston Sturges, and went on to direct a number of distinguished films.

His first Hollywood film was the Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. vehicle, The Exile (1947). Ophüls' Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), derived from a Stefan Zweig novella, is the most highly regarded of the American films. Caught (1949), and The Reckless Moment (1949) followed before his return to Europe in 1950.

Back in France, he directed and collaborated on the adaptation of Schnitzler's La Ronde (1950), which won the 1951 BAFTA Award for Best Film, and Lola Montès (1955) starring Martine Carol and Peter Ustinov, as well as Le Plaisir and The Earrings of Madame de... (1953), the latter with Danielle Darrieux and Charles Boyer, which capped his career. Ophüls died from rheumatic heart disease on 26 March 1957 in Hamburg, while shooting interiors on The Lovers of Montparnasse, and was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. This final film was completed by his friend Jacques Becker.

Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson was a French film director. Known for his ascetic approach, Bresson contributed notably to the art of cinema; his non-professional actors, ellipses, and sparse use of scoring have led his works to be regarded as preeminent examples of minimalist film.

Bresson is among the most highly regarded French filmmakers of all time. His works A Man Escaped (1956) and Balthazar, at Random (1966) were ranked among the 100 greatest films ever made in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll. Other films of his, such as Mouchette (1967) and L'Argent (1983), also received many votes. Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.

Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth (née Clausels) and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and turned to painting after graduating. Three formative influences in his early life seem to have a mark on his films: Catholicism, art and his experiences as a prisoner of war. 

Robert Bresson lived in Paris, France, in the Île Saint-Louis.

Initially also a photographer, Bresson made his first short film, Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs) in 1934. During World War II, he spent over a year in a prisoner-of-war camp−an experience which informs Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped). In a career that spanned fifty years, Bresson made only 13 feature-length films.

Bresson was sometimes accused of an "ivory tower existence". Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, an admirer of Bresson's work, argued that the filmmaker was "a mysterious, aloof figure", and wrote that on the set of Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) the director "seemed more isolated from his crew than any other filmmaker I've seen at work; his widow and onetime assistant director, Mylene van der Mersch, often conveyed his instructions."

Bresson's early artistic focus was to separate the language of cinema from that of the theater, which often relies heavily upon the actor's performance to drive the work. With his 'actor-model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw. This, as well as Bresson's restraint in musical scoring, would have a significant influence on minimalist cinema. In the academic journal CrossCurrents, Shmuel Ben-gad writes: There is a credibility in Bresson's models: They are like people we meet in life, more or less opaque creatures who speak, move, and gesture [...] Acting, on the other hand, no matter how naturalistic, actively deforms or invents by putting an overlay or filter over the person, presenting a simplification of a human being and not allowing the camera to capture the actor's human depths. Thus what Bresson sees as the essence of filmic art, the achievement of the creative transformation involved in all art through the interplay of images of real things, is destroyed by the artifice of acting. For Bresson, then, acting is, like mood music and expressive camera work, just one more way of deforming reality or inventing that has to be avoided.

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Bresson's directorial style resulted in films "of great passion: Because the actors didn't act out the emotions, the audience could internalize them."

Some feel that Bresson's Catholic upbringing and belief system lie behind the thematic structures of most of his films. Recurring themes under this interpretation include salvation, redemption, defining and revealing the human soul, and metaphysical transcendence of a limiting and materialistic world. An example is A Man Escaped (1956), where a seemingly simple plot of a prisoner of war's escape can be read as a metaphor for the mysterious process of salvation.

Bresson's films can also be understood as critiques of French society and the wider world, with each revealing the director's sympathetic, if unsentimental, view of its victims. That the main characters of Bresson's most contemporary films, The Devil, Probably (1977) and L'Argent (1983), reach similarly unsettling conclusions about life indicates to some the director's feelings towards the culpability of modern society in the dissolution of individuals. Indeed, of an earlier protagonist he said, "Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations." Bresson published Notes sur le cinématographe (also published in English translation as Notes on the Cinematographer) in 1975, in which he argues for a unique sense of the term "cinematography". For him, cinematography is the higher function of cinema. While a movie is in essence "only" filmed theatre, cinematography is an attempt to create a new language of moving images and sounds.

Bresson is often referred to as a patron saint of cinema, not only for the strong Catholic themes found throughout his oeuvre, but also for his notable contributions to the art of film. His style can be detected through his use of sound, associating selected sounds with images or characters; paring dramatic form to its essentials by the spare use of music; and through his infamous 'actor-model' methods of directing his almost exclusively non-professional actors. He has influenced a number of other filmmakers, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, Jim Jarmusch, the Dardenne brothers, Aki Kaurismäki, and Paul Schrader, whose book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer includes a detailed critical analysis. Andrei Tarkovsky held Bresson in very high regard, noting him and Ingmar Bergman as his two favourite filmmakers, stating "I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman". In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky describes Bresson as "perhaps the only artist in cinema, who achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand."

Bresson's book Notes on the Cinematographer (1975) is one of the most respected books on film theory and criticism. His theories about film greatly influenced other filmmakers, such as the French New Wave directors.

Opposing the established pre-war French Cinema (Tradition de la Qualité) by offering his own personal responses to the question 'what is cinema?', and by well-formulating his ascetic style, Bresson gained a high position among Founders of the French New Wave. He is often listed (along with Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin) as one of the main figures who theoretically influenced the French New Wave. New Wave pioneers often praised Bresson and posited him as a prototype for or precursor to the movement. However, Bresson was neither as overtly experimental nor as outwardly political as the New Wave filmmakers, and his religious views (Catholicism and Jansenism) would not have been attractive to most of the filmmakers associated with the movement.

In his development of auteur theory, François Truffaut lists Bresson among the few directors to whom the term "auteur" can genuinely be applied, and later names him as one of the only examples of directors who could approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes, using the film narrative at its disposal. Jean-Luc Godard also looked back at Bresson with high admiration ("Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music.") Screenwriter and director Alain Cavalier describes Bresson's role as pivotal not only in the New Wave movement, but for French cinema in general, writing, "In French cinema you have a father and a mother: the father is Bresson and the mother is Renoir, with Bresson representing the strictness of the law and Renoir warmth and generosity. All the better French cinema has and will have to connect to Bresson in some way."