by Peter Nestler
It was mail correspondence rather than collaborations and discussions that I had with Günter Peter Straschek during the years 1967 up until the mid 70s. But we had friends in common: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The first time we met was in 1972 in Baden-Baden, where Jean-Marie and Danièle were to shoot scenes with us in a recording studio. It concerned the film Einleitung zu Arnold Schönbergs Begleitungmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (1973). We both read a text: Günter a letter that Schönberg had written to Wassily Kandinsky in 1923, in which he put an end to their long friendship because of an anti-Semitic statement from Kandinsky that Schönberg had heard about; and I quoted an excerpt from Bertolt Brecht’s text «Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit».[i] I was a bit older than Günter. When he started to make films as a student at the then recently founded Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB), I was already «finished» in West-Germany: I had made seven documentaries. I had reached the end of the line, and couldn’t find any ways to fund future projects. At the offices of the public service channels I was regarded as non-adaptable, that I couldn’t or didn’t want to work according to the rules of television, and perhaps also that I with some of my films had shown a dangerous inclination of «fouling one’s own nest» with my historical retrospections on the crimes of Nazi-Germany. Filmecho/Filmwoche, the weekly newspaper of the film industry, had called my seventh documentary Von Griechenland (1965) a «communist botchwork» [kommunistisches Machwerk]. In a public letter of protest to the newspaper, Jean-Marie Straub wrote that by employing the, in West-Germany deadly, word communist, they wanted to rule out all funding for my future projects. In 1966 I moved to my mother’s native country Sweden, where I hoped to find a way to fund my own productions or to make films for Sveriges Radio/TV, which then aired the only television channel in the country.
At the end of the 60s, Günter worked together with Holger Meins on a film project in Frankfurt am Main. Together with high school students they analysed and produced films. He used some of my short films for this project. In a letter to me, written December 11, 1968, he speaks of a screening of my films Aufsätze (1963) and Mülheim (Ruhr) (1964):
The students are at the moment working in groups with 8mm equipment, and they are preparing a 16mm film, On Organisation, for early 1969. It is not until these agitational films are to be shown that the fuzz will commence (through the parents, for example); generally we in the SDS[ii] are exploring, almost experimentally, the agitational and elucidatory possibilities of visual media, and how this could be employed in political struggle. At the Film Academy in West-Berlin (where I was for a while) 18 students, almost all leftists, have been thrown out (GmbH status![iii]), and during a Go-In at the office of the executives we found not only important documents (according to which the relegation of the students had months earlier been agreed upon by the interior minister Benda), but also my Ein Western für den SDS (1968) that I had filmed a year ago and that Leiser and Rathsack[iv] had reported as ‹stolen› in February 1968, but which we now found in their locker …
We have screened Aufsätze and Mülheim (Ruhr) a few times (without requiring any entrance fees, hence I can’t pay you any royalties) and everybody greatly admired Aufsätze.
Concerning the student project in Frankfurt am Main, Günter wrote in Filmkritik:
In 1968/69, after my final relegation from DFFB, I went to Frankfurt am Main in order to arrange the project Schülerfilm. It was based on ideas about target audience film work that Holger M. and I had developed. This term became fashionable then, and many unqualified imitators appeared; and since then it belongs to the many attempts towards socialist work in film that hasn’t yet been thoroughly developed. Despite that the project couldn’t be finished, many results that we arrived at were successful and important. In general I remember this period in Frankfurt as pleasant; my apologies, but this was the last phase of non-fractionised and communicational camaraderie. We (with Holger M. as the link to DFFB, from which he hadn’t yet been fired) provided groups of high school students with 8mm equipment and technical guidance, and they were supposed to film themes they found interesting and to bring these into the school agitation. Up until the editing they were working quite intensely, afterwards the interest declined (caused by the ‹art is bullshit› politics of certain groups that were close to Marxist-Leninism; many of our elderly colleagues had their offices scribbled with the slogan ‹theoreticians to the concentration camp›). Without the students being aware of it, the results were sometimes great, and in general very successful. This concept of filmmaking also contributed to the need of a more concrete perspective on the problems at hand: it was easy to discuss and to print flyers about ‹society›, the ‹repressive parental home›, the ‹pressure to perform›, but how was one supposed to ‹film› them without them losing their abstract content. We let ourselves be guided by the student movement of the day, but we left it because it was headed by people more concerned about their future political careers within the university than the interests of their co-students. Instead we turned to the so-called base, to those who were much less politicized. We were conscious of these deficiencies in our work. The project was supposed to be carried through with apprentices, but due to my lack of experience I thought myself incapable of doing that.[v]
In August 1973, Günter heard that I had declined a short-termed teaching position at the DFFB, and with the following argument he tried to persuade me to accept the offer:
I have studied at the DFFB (1966–68, was relegated twice) and for the last few years I have been teaching in Munich, Hamburg, Braunschweig, Kassel (film courses at the Art Acadamy and at the Academy of Film and TV in Munich, respectively). I am sick and tired and no longer want to struggle with the pseudo-radical political film fools [Politfilmfritzen], but I wouldn’t want to be without these experiences. It would also be nice to have you here in Berlin (West), a place that I, after ten years, now want to leave, probably for London. I am under time-pressure, I’m writing a book and in the fall I will shoot a TV film with several episodes about the German-speaking film emigration during the 30s. In relation to that I would be grateful if you could find out if the scriptwriter Paul Baudisch (born 1899) and the actor/scriptwriter Adolf Schütz (born 1895) are still living in Stockholm and if so where, if and when they passed away, and which relatives eventually could give information.
The book he was writing was titled Handbuch wider das Kino [«Handbook Against the Cinema»] and was published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1975. Günter didn’t have anything against the cinema, he loved it, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of cinema, and especially the history of film production in many parts of the world. Compiled in the book are materials on the economies of feature film production and of cinema theatres, divided into particular national film industries. The conditions under which film productions have emerged, developed, been used and exploited are discussed in a lexical way. He sent me a copy of the book, with a handwritten dedication on the first page: «Peter Nestler, with kind regards, G. P. Straschek, 75-03-31», and on the second page a note on how the publisher had treated the manuscript: «A by the publishing house politically censored and neglectfully composed edition – the author.» While working on the book, Günter realised that there were almost no research at all on the film emigration from Nazi Germany. Materials and documentations were scarce.
In 1975, Günter abandoned his career as a filmmaker and devoted himself completely to his research and to establish the archive of «The History of the German-Speaking Film Emigration, 1933–1945».
The same year he finished a documentary series in which he had searched for film emigrants (or their relatives, if they had passed away) in primarily Europe and the United States, and filmed their stories, their testimonies.
Below is a quote from a longer conversation between the film scholar Imme Klages (of the Johannes-Gutenberg University in Mainz) and Karin Rausch, Günter Peter Straschek’s spouse and co-worker during the research project about the film emigration of the 30s, when the Nazis had taken power in Germany and were persecuting Jews and political opponents. This archival work started in 1975 and went on up until his death in 2009.
Imme Klages: How did you locate the individuals?
Karin Rausch: I first started to collaborate with Günter after finishing my dissertation. He already had the questionnaires, which worked on a snowball system. If you asked one person you'd get plenty of tips.
IK: And how were the search lists drawn up?
KR: Günter searched and nosed around everywhere. He worked his way meticulously through the lists of theatre staff in the Bühnenjahrbücher – the German stage almanacs – and looked for people who were no longer mentioned after 1933. In some instances we searched for years without making any headway. One example was the screen author Jane Bess [Beß] from Berlin. There was a lead on her in Holland, then someone had seen her in Argentina, we found quite a bit about her life, but even after thirty-five years of searching we never found her. I don’t even want to think how many hours, days, and weeks we spent on that search.
IK: How were the interviews for you?
KR: Sometimes really awful. Suddenly I was «the German». And yet I had always regarded myself as cosmopolitan. No way did I want to be German. I was born in 1949. Always the Greeks and Romans at school, and then it all ended shortly before World War II. My eyes were only first opened with the arrival of the student movement. But then in England I was suddenly brought face to face with the German past. Not rarely I had to go to the bathroom during the interviews and cry.
I still remember the first time I travelled back to Germany, to my parents in the Ruhr region, I had the feeling on the streets of being surrounded by loads of Nazis. Who could I shake hands with? I didn’t like going home anymore.
IK: And how did Straschek react?
KR: Günter had a different attitude because he had been involved with it for so long. He could remain calmer. He wanted to know what had happened to the families.
IK: And with the research into the families the project kept broadening out.
KR: Every interview brought a couple of new people. I felt reminded of the Straub/Huillet film Die Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), which I had seen in 1970 in Berlin: all the children who had been born and died are counted – and with that I realised that music is work, that it is connected with life, with the children and also with dying. That gave me the creeps. The people who have been born and died became real somehow, just because they had been counted.
There are lots of reasons why Günter never finished, but three of them were decisive: first the deluge of data. We were in any case veritably drowning in data, new information was flowing in every day from people, archives, administrative bodies – and then came the opening of the East. Suddenly hundreds of archives could be accessed, and Günter was unable at that point to make a clean break after all of his research. Secondly the computer: Günter began using a computer in the late 1980s, but it was impossible for him to transfer twenty years of research to a computer all on his own. Not to mention the Internet, which increased the amount of data yet again. And thirdly Günter’s meticulous approach. We often wondered whether we shouldn't get some outside help, but he couldn’t employ anyone because he felt he would have to check everything and end up doing the work twice over. Then at some point it all got to be too much.
IK: What were the most important questions for Straschek in the questionnaire?
KR: The biographical questions, about what jobs the emigrants did, questions about exile, the route. One always had to think: What is fact, what is fiction or a false memory? That someone just managed to board ‹the last boat›, we heard that so often the boat would have sunk with that many people on board, but it was simply the feeling of getting away by the skin of their teeth.
Then there are the myths about film history: so many directors discovered Marlene Dietrich … What does memory mean, what is right? If an interviewee couldn’t recall when something occurred, Günter would help by asking for instance what they were wearing that day or what the weather was like.
What always really interested him was how their colleagues had acted after 1933. I did research at the Document Center, which in those days was still in Berlin-Dahlem, and through the university I was able to view the documents from the Reichsfilmkammer – the Reich Chamber of Film – which were full of denunciatory letters. We called it ‹the third-raters' revolt›. Obviously, there were not only friendships but also old animosities between the emigrants, which at times they took with them. […] The so-called reparations which the West-German state paid the emigrants also occupied us a lot. We were able to get data from different restitution offices. Those who had had nothing scarcely got a thing. Every single fork had to be itemized separately when they listed all the things that had been left behind. Compensation for lost wages was calculated to the penny. But how does one ‹settle up› for days spent in a concentration camp? The whole business from filling out an application to possible payment generally took a very long time, too long for many. In Austria the attempt to make reparations began very late. Incidentally, there were also emigrants who refused the payments. Some never wanted to set another foot on German soil. The film composer Bronisław Kaper told us he would never step into a Volkswagen again. But very few were that strict. The older the people became, the more they thought of returning.
Later a lot of the emigrants were invited by the city of Vienna. Günter was angry at how the emigrants were fobbed off with a certificate of honour and the title of professor. He would have welcomed it if one of them had refused the ‹honour›. But the majority accepted, and some even stayed.
Filmemigration aus Nazideutschland (1973–75), a series in five parts, around 50 minutes each, became Günter’s last and very extensive film. It was produced by the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) in Cologne. The head of the film department, Werner Dütsch, was an old acquaintance from the years in Berlin at the end of the 60s, and who at that time worked at the Deutsche Kinemathek. He and Günter watched and discussed numerous films together. In general, they had the same preferences. They both admired Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet’s work.[vi]
The titles of the five episodes of the series:
- Wer klug war, ging schnell raus («Those Who Were Smart Got Out Quick»).
- Wir waren aufgescheucht und vogelfrei («We Were Startled and Outlawed»)
- Aus Europa draußen und in einer gewissen Sicherheit («Away from Europe, and to Some Safety»)
- Unter Palmen und blauem Himmel («Under Palm Trees and Blue Sky»)
- Man wusste ja nie wem man die Hand geben konnte («You Never Knew Who You Could Shake Hands With»)
Part one starts with a long sequence depicting a soccer game. One hear the original sound, and then Günter’s voice-over:
This film is called Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt [‹The Führer Offers a City to the Jews›]. In 1944, the Berliner actor Kurt Gerron[vii] was forced to shoot the film in the concentration camp Theresienstadt.[viii] Barely any of the actors and soccer players have survived. Almost all were murdered. The director was gassed to death in Auschwitz. Before the national socialists took power in 1933, the Jewish population in Germany consisted of half a million citizens. At the end of the war: 23,000. 170,000 German Jews had been murdered. 270,000 were forced into exile, among them about 900 from the film industry.[ix]
Then one sees the audience leaving the square, the players going into the shower room at the «Central Bath». One hears the voice-over: «Ein Schwimmbad steht der Bevölkering zur Verfügung» (the people have a public bath at their disposal).
Then follows silent scenes from a newsreel from 1933 in which leading Nazis move around and take their seats at the first governmental meeting together with representatives from right-wing parties and big finance that had made the Nazi dictatorship possible, and had been appointed ministerial posts but were thrown out the year after. One hears Günter’s voice describing the origin of the film series:
A few years back the author started to investigate the history of German-speaking film emigration. This episode had been almost totally neglected by scholarly research, and the source materials were correspondingly insufficient. Furthermore, the project was almost started too late. Most of the film emigrants had passed away, and many of those that are still alive are old, isolated and have weak memories. Numerous films have been studied, authorities, institutes and archives have been visited, and many estates have been examined. And many of the film emigrants have been interviewed in order to document the lives of the almost thousand persons – actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, directors of photography, editors, architects, first assistant directors, critics, economists and agents – that were forced to leave Germany due to Nazism.
Then they begin to speak, those who were driven out of the country or fled for their lives across the borders to the neighbouring states of Nazi-Germany. During the filming they remember what had happened 40 years earlier. These witnesses, chosen by Günter, have far from «weak memories». Günter did put together a fantastic montage using all these voices, newsreels from the 30s, film sequences in which the emigrants had participated as actors or as creators behind the camera – directors, film photographers, assistant directors, composers, song writers, screenwriters, editors and producers. He also inserted sequences and statements that had been recorded a few years earlier by German public service TV, above all with Fritz Lang, whose words are a highlight, unforgettable.
In her Paris apartment the film historian, curator and critic Lotte Eisner – who had immigrated to France in 1933 – recounts how her life had been threatened in the newspaper of the Nazi party, Völkischer Beobachter. For a whole year, the journalists of the newspaper had subjected her to hateful attacks, and now, when the Nazis had taken power, they reacted to a critical text by Eisner on a Nazi propaganda film published in Film-Kurier. Eisner: «‹Film-Kurier tears its mask off, the bolshevist Jew journalist Lotte Eisner writes as follows …› And in another article: ‹Later on, when heads will roll, then this head shall also roll.› After that I naturally went away at once … Voilà!»
Günter’s series is a fantastic act of preserving personal testimonies. In its entirety it offers a rich variety of personal fates and experiences (often shaking, upsetting, touching, affecting), but thanks to Günter’s wise montage and his sensitivity, an image emerges of the difficulties of exile, its complexity and its contradictions. Testimonies are posed against and interweaved with newsreel segments that shed light on the Nazis’ well-planned preparations for mass-murder and later genocide. Günter doesn’t make it easy for us to deal with the reality he encountered and started to understand. And he didn’t have it easy during the shooting, when he met the emigrants in Hollywood and New York. In a typewritten letter from November 1974 to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, there is a handwritten supplement in the margins: «Here, I was at first regarded as ‹very young with long hair›, then as a ‹Nazi that wanted to take people’s reparations [Wiedergutmachung] from them›, and now – and on this they have agreed – as a ‹communist spy!›»
In the same letter, Günter wrote:
During the morning I visited the now almost blind Fritz Lang, 84 years old. It was really an experience even if FL gave a wretched impression. He got excited when I asked him about the cave allegories in his films: no one had asked him about that before. He was very friendly towards the end, and he held my hands.
They couldn’t record that meeting with Fritz Lang, but Günter managed to include him in his series by using a fantastic recording that the German television company ZDF had made in 1968. In the sequence, he recounts captivatingly – gesticulating and walking back and forth– that he, in 1933, after the Nazi’s accession to power, had been invited for dinner with a very mannerly Goebbels, who after a while introduced him to Hitler. They made a suggestion to Lang – this internationally acclaimed master director – that he should create and lead the national socialist film production of the future (despite the fact that Goebbels had banned Lang’s most recent work Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933). Both Hitler and Goebbels admired Lang’s earlier films Die Nibelungen I-II (1924) and Metropolis (1927). During the conversation, Fritz Lang was sweating in fear and had only one thought in mind: «I have to go to the bank to retrieve my money!» It was too late to go to the bank that day, but the morning after Lang left Germany and went to the United States.
A list of 28 names of emigrants are shown and Günter says:
Only a few left Nazi Germany without being forced to it. No matter how honourable the motives of these so-called «Aryans» – of which the majority are mentioned here – were, no emigration took place because of political views. Against the few anti-fascists stand all those that were forced to leave Germany because of the Nazis’ concept of race, and not due to their work or their political convictions. Unprepared and unorganised, many Jews hoped for change. Already in 1933, the actor Peter Capell had emigrated to the United States. In 1955, he returned to Munich.
His short statement in Günter’s film has a charged sharpness, but is in line with the research of the psychoanalyst Ludvig Igra.[x] Peter Capell:
As Jews we had it relatively easy … That is, we had difficulties there, on the other side. But our relationship to Hitler was crystal clear: he was the archenemy. The others had it significantly more difficult, and I respect that. And I don’t know what would have happened – earlier I had said that I absolutely wanted to become a German actor – if I could have had the Aryan certificate. I hope that I would’ve been a hero, that I would’ve landed in a concentration camp and voiced myself against Hitler. But I don’t think so.
A sequence from the series is very striking, very affecting: Günter shows a sequence from the operetta film Der Kongress tanzt (The Congress Dances, 1931) with the original sound (a song). The film is a masterpiece – funny, romantic, playful, sentimental in a good way and with distance. Lilian Harvey plays the principal role of Christel, a sales girl in a glove store, whom the visitor of the Wien Congress, Tsar Alexander, falls in love with, and I’m reminded of the lovely Catherine Hessling in Jean Renoir’s Nana (1926). What one sees and hears is Christel’s ride in the luxurious carriage that was given to her by the Tsar. She sings a song I often heard being sung by adult women around me in my childhood years during the war. The refrain is as follows: «Das gibt’s nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder, das ist die wahrste Träumerei. Das kann’s im Leben nur einmal geben, vielleicht ist’s morgen schon vorbei …».[xi] A long sequence, professional, with a fantastic fluency and choreography; funny as well as sentimental. After a while the music and the original sound are cut off, the carriage continues, the distance increases, a long shot.
Günter’s voice:
The UFA film Der Kongress tanzt was in 1931–32 the most commercially successful sound film in Germany. A year later the emigration began, and five years later the Nazis banned this film. The director Erik Charell emigrated to Hollywood, the producer Erich Pommer emigrated to Hollywood. The scriptwriter and the UFA dramaturge Robert Liebmann emigrated to Paris. The composer Werner Richard Heymann emigrated to Hollywood. The songwriter Robert Gilbert emigrated to New York. The costume designer Ernst Stern emigrated to London. The director’s assistant Alfredo Crevenna emigrated to Mexico. The editor Viktor Gertler returned to Budapest. The actor Conrad Veidt emigrated to London, later to Hollywood. The actress Lilian Harvey emigrated to France and to the United States. The actor Otto Wallburg emigrated to the Netherlands, was captured there by the Nazis and murdered in Auschwitz.
Translation from Swedish: Stefan Ramstedt & Anders Karlin.
Originally published in Magasinet Walden no. 13/14 (2019). Thanks to Andy Rector.
[i] «5 Difficulties When Writing the Truth», a speech that Brecht gave in Paris in 1935, at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture. The text was first published in English in Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (Grove Press, 1966).
[ii] SDS = Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund.
[iii] GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung) = «private company with limited liability», a corporate form common in Germany and the equivalent of the private limited company in the UK, and the limited liability company (LCC) in the US.
[iv] The documentary filmmaker Erwin Leiser was at the time the artistic director of DFFB, and Heinz Rathsack was the administrative director.
[v] Günter Peter Straschek, «Straschek 1964–74 Westberlin» in Filmkritik no. 212 (1974), 363.
[vi] Werner Dütsch (1939–2018) also made it possible for me, after eight years of absence, to make a film for West-German TV (WDR): Spanien! (Spain!, 1973).
[vii] Kurt Gerron (1897–1944), was up until 1933 a popular actor, and film and theatre director.
[viii] The shooting location, Theresienstadt, was a former fortress and garrison town from the late eighteenth century, and had been reshaped by the Nazis into a concentration camp and Jewish ghetto. During the first years, Theresienstadt was used as a demonstration camp (Vorzeigelager), which welcomed representatives from organisations such as the Red Cross. The film that Kurt Gerron was forced to make was supposed to be a propaganda film destined to be screened primarily in «neutral» countries such as Ireland, Switzerland, and Sweden. Günter copied a long sequence from this film that depicts a soccer game in the big courtyard of a fortress where the audience is sitting around the field or standing at the balconies and watches through the windows.
[ix] After many years of research, Günter realised that the number of film emigrants or refugees from Nazism was in fact more than double that, 1,800 people; see Günter’s letter to the former emigrant Egon Eis, written in September 1982 and published in the catalogue Günter Peter Straschek: Emigration Film – Politik (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2018). The number today is 2000.
[x] See for example Igra’s Den tunna hinnan mellan omsorg och grymhet (Natur & Kultur, 2011); translated into German by Peter Nestler as Die dünne Haut zwischen Fürsorge und Grausamkeit (Iatros-Verlag, 2004)
[xi] «Just once for all time, it never comes back, perhaps it’s nothing but a dream. That merely happens once in a lifetime, perhaps it's over by tomorrow.»