06/02/2023
Wir trauern um Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, die am 31. Januar 2023 gestorben ist. Sie war 2004 die erste Reinhold Schünzel-Preisträgerin beim cinefest und hinterließ uns damals ihre umfangreiche Pressematerial-Sammlung für unser Archiv.
We are saddened to share that Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart passed away in Berlin on January 31, 2023. With her passing, we lose a beloved supporter and friend of the DEFA Film Library.
Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart was born in Wuppertal-Barmen in 1930. At the age of six, her parents moved the family to Berlin, where she experienced the war. As a young woman she moved to New York, where she spent the next 60 years. She was the cultural programmer of the Goethe-Institute in New York from 1962 to 1995. After her retirement, she was involved in The Fassbinder Foundation in New York.
Though the international network of the Goethe-Institutes only promoted West German films before 1989, Scheib-Rothbart respected DEFA filmmakers and knew their work. In the early 1980s, she and Barton Byg (DEFA Film Library founding director) collaborated on a list of East and West German films for distribution in the US. In 1988, they co-organized a tour for the West Berlin filmmaker Helga Reidemeister, which became a model for the tour Byg set up for director Helke Misselwitz, Thomas Plenert (cameraman) and Gudrun Steinbrück (editor) with WINTER ADÉ in the fall of 1989.
At the 1990 Berlin Film Festival, the film enthusiasts Byg, Scheib-Rothbart, Sharon Rivo (National Center for Jewish Film) and Rudi Winter (Progress Filmverleih) brainstormed about setting up a DEFA Film Library. Just three years later, in September 1993, the DEFA Film Library was officially founded at UMass Amherst. Scheib-Rothbart encouraged Byg to license two of Konrad Wolf’s classics, SUN SEEKERS (1958/71) and DIVIDED HEAVEN (1964), for North American distribution; she later helped bring theatrical prints from the Goethe-Institute and other organizations that distributed DEFA films in the US to UMass Amherst. These materials began an extensive film print collection hosted by our DEFA Film Library.
In 2020, after the death of her husband, Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart returned to Berlin to be close to her German family.
Photo: 2019 © Goethe-Institute New York, Daniel Albanese