Ula Stöckl is a German feminist film maker and director, screenwriter
and occasional actress.She believes passionately that there should be
more women exerting their influence in the film business.Ula Stöckl
was born in Ulm a few weeks before the (largely uncontested)
incorporation of Austria into an enlarged Germany. Alfons Stöckl, her
father, was a professional orchestral clarinettist. He was sent away
to fight in the war, but survived. After the war the wages of the
players in her father's orchestra were halved, and in order to support
the family budget Ula's mother, born Katharina Kreis, took factory
work in the textiles sector. Katharina Stöckl-Kreis had grown up in
an orphanage, looked after by nuns who had solicitously educated her
in a formidable range of house-wifely skills, and brought a steely
practicality to the challenges of raising a family on her own during
the war years. But as her daughter later recalled, during the first
four decades of her life she had not been well prepared for factory
work: her fingers were almost always bandaged. Many of Ula's most
vivid childhood memories relate to her family's experiences of the
wartime bombing of Ulm, clutching one of her mother's hands while her
younger sister clutched the other and night after night they watched
the city burn. Their home and the surrounding area were destroyed on
17 December 1944: collateral damage included three dead siblings, but
both her parents had survived. She never thought to ask whether they
were paying any rent for the succession of little rooms in which they
were accommodated over the next few months. Subsequent memories
included the flu epidemic and starvation winter in 1946. The birth of
another sister in 1948 meant that she was no longer her parents' only
surviving child and represented some kind of a new beginning for the
family. Stöckl quit school in 1954 and trained for secretarial work,
which would remain her principal source of paid employment till 1963.
In February 1958 she embarked on languages courses in Paris and
London. Between 1961 and 1963 she worked as a trilingual executive
secretary. Between May and August 1963 she worked as an editorial
assistant with the publishers DM-Verlag at Sandweier (at that time
still just outside Baden-Baden, into which the little town has
subsequently been subsumed).In 1963 Stöckl enrolled as a student at
the "Institut für Filmgestaltung" (loosely, "Institute for Making
Films"), a department of the School of Design ("Hochschule für
Gestaltung") which had been set up ten years earlier in Ulm, and which
had built a reputation for its innovative approach to teaching. She
was the first female student to be admitted to the course, which she
completed in 1968.
and occasional actress.She believes passionately that there should be
more women exerting their influence in the film business.Ula Stöckl
was born in Ulm a few weeks before the (largely uncontested)
incorporation of Austria into an enlarged Germany. Alfons Stöckl, her
father, was a professional orchestral clarinettist. He was sent away
to fight in the war, but survived. After the war the wages of the
players in her father's orchestra were halved, and in order to support
the family budget Ula's mother, born Katharina Kreis, took factory
work in the textiles sector. Katharina Stöckl-Kreis had grown up in
an orphanage, looked after by nuns who had solicitously educated her
in a formidable range of house-wifely skills, and brought a steely
practicality to the challenges of raising a family on her own during
the war years. But as her daughter later recalled, during the first
four decades of her life she had not been well prepared for factory
work: her fingers were almost always bandaged. Many of Ula's most
vivid childhood memories relate to her family's experiences of the
wartime bombing of Ulm, clutching one of her mother's hands while her
younger sister clutched the other and night after night they watched
the city burn. Their home and the surrounding area were destroyed on
17 December 1944: collateral damage included three dead siblings, but
both her parents had survived. She never thought to ask whether they
were paying any rent for the succession of little rooms in which they
were accommodated over the next few months. Subsequent memories
included the flu epidemic and starvation winter in 1946. The birth of
another sister in 1948 meant that she was no longer her parents' only
surviving child and represented some kind of a new beginning for the
family. Stöckl quit school in 1954 and trained for secretarial work,
which would remain her principal source of paid employment till 1963.
In February 1958 she embarked on languages courses in Paris and
London. Between 1961 and 1963 she worked as a trilingual executive
secretary. Between May and August 1963 she worked as an editorial
assistant with the publishers DM-Verlag at Sandweier (at that time
still just outside Baden-Baden, into which the little town has
subsequently been subsumed).In 1963 Stöckl enrolled as a student at
the "Institut für Filmgestaltung" (loosely, "Institute for Making
Films"), a department of the School of Design ("Hochschule für
Gestaltung") which had been set up ten years earlier in Ulm, and which
had built a reputation for its innovative approach to teaching. She
was the first female student to be admitted to the course, which she
completed in 1968.
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