Unity (18 page)

Just as it would be futile to produce a portrait of Unity Mitford without including one of Hitler, so it is futile to attempt an analysis of Felicity Benthall without including one of Wolfram Meier. From a reading of Luke's letters, it appears that the key to Felicity's conduct and to the transformation she underwent in Munich lay in her relationship with Meier. My own deep hostility to Meier inclines me towards a similar conclusion. I find it hard to forgive a man who revealed his indifference to me on sight and who, while occupying my consciousness for years, instantly banished me from his. I find it hard to forgive a man who drove a wedge between my friends and myself. I find it hard to forgive a man whose manipulation of those friends left me with a profound mistrust of commitment, the effects of which lie outside the scope of this book.

On the other hand, it was Meier's intervention that saved me from life as a mediocre actor and led me to hone my talents as a writer. During the desiccated years, first as a teacher and then as a copy-writer, my need for a means of self-expression prompted me to transfer my allegiance from the stage to the study and embark on the arduous apprenticeship which, after a decade of false starts, discarded drafts and rejected typescripts, resulted in the
publication
of my first novel.

Of the various accounts of Wolfram Meier that I have read –
intimate
memoirs, critical studies and Joachim Bürger's full-scale biography – by far the most illuminating is that by Renate Fischer. Her book consists of a general introduction, followed by chapters devoted to each of Meier's stage and screen productions (the incomplete
Unity
is excluded). I am extremely grateful to Fischer for making the typescript available to me and for allowing me to
extract the introduction (I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Hilda Meister in preparing the translation). For many reasons, some of which will be evident from the text and others which will be touched upon later, it remains unpublished. Nevertheless, I trust that readers will share my estimate of its worth.

Earlier, I cast scorn on the notion that Unity's spirit was working through Felicity. It is, however, indisputable that Felicity's abject devotion to Meier resembled Unity's enslavement to Hitler.
Moreover
, the coincidence of Meier's playing Hitler is too convenient to ignore. Even before his assumption of the role, his treatment of his colleagues had been likened to Hitler's subjugation of his henchmen. In the final paragraph of this extract, Fischer draws a direct parallel between the ruthless exercise of their wills.

In the absence of Felicity's own testimony, I am left clutching at analogies. Fischer's memoir is particularly helpful for, although it mentions her only in passing, the intensity of the writer's
obsession
with Meier mirrors Felicity's. Both women effaced their own needs in order to pimp for him – although, if Liesl Martins is to be believed, Fischer went on to bed him herself. Her contention that Felicity took up arms on behalf of Meier receives little support elsewhere. Luke's description of the furore surrounding
The Judge
suggests that Meier's politics were, at best, ambiguous (critics, including Fischer herself, might prefer the word
opportunistic
). Felicity was surely sharp enough to recognise that his politics were subservient to his art – if not that his art was subservient to his egotism.

Parenthood apart, a degree of egotism is essential for all human achievement. An excess of it, however, is responsible for all human vice. Indeed, many of my objections to the concept of evil would be met by the simple substitution of
egotism.
Gone would be the associations of Hieronymus Bosch and the Spanish
Inquisition
: gone would be the shades of a humanity steeped in sin and doomed to hell; and in their place would stand the callous
disregard for the rights of others which, in my view, united Felicity and Meier. Meier was an artist: a licensed egotist. To adapt his own aphorism, if altruism is egotism in Lent, then art is egotism at Christmas. Felicity, however, lacked such an outlet. Her egotism left her permanently dissatisfied. She was one of life's
table-hoppers
, renouncing the chance of present happiness for the
illusion
of excitement elsewhere.

My mother, who never took to Felicity even as a prospective daughter-in-law (a role for which she was prepared to overlook any manner of fault) judged her to be flighty. It can be no accident that, in the Biblical myth of the Fall, what incites mankind to evil is curiosity. With Felicity in mind, I prefer to approach it from another angle and to identify Adam's sin less as the lust for
knowledge
than as the dread of being bored.

Wolfram Meier died on 17 June 1984. The doctor pronounced a verdict of natural causes. He had abused his body for so long that it collapsed. His chest was as thin as a communion wafer. His skin was as tacky as fly-paper. His heart was hugely enlarged. Some writers might mine that for a symbol, but Wolfram abhorred such sentimentality. Whenever he encountered it on stage or screen, he would flap his arms and quack in mockery of Ibsen's
Wild Duck
.

He left behind him an extraordinary body of work. Along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, he had laid the foundations of what became known as New German Cinema, of which he was, arguably, the brightest light. His twenty-six films, from
T
he Ratcatcher
in 1968 to
The Holy Family
released posthumously in 1984, constitute a unique testament, at once an extended cinematic autobiography and an exhaustive portrait of post-war German social and cultural life. His output was prodigious and, in retrospect, it is tempting to suggest that he had received a premonition of early death. Moreover, whatever the personal tragedy for his circle of friends, there is reason to believe that his best work already lay behind him. His last two films betray signs of negligence. The economic climate that had
facilitated
the funding of his films had turned cold. The sexual well from which he had drunk so deep was poisoned.

Wolfram was born on 16 October 1944 although, in interviews, he would always cite a date a year later. This was neither a conventional nor a commonplace vanity but, by ascribing his birth to 7 May 1945, the day of Germany's surrender to the Allies, he aimed to portray himself as a phoenix rising from the ashes of war (there were some who maintained that the ashes were those of Hitler's bunker). He was therefore able to forge a parallel between his own development and that of his country. The process of
self-definition
had begun.

The inability to know the truth about a fellow human being was a recurring theme of Wolfram's work and one that he exemplified in his life. He lied not only about his age but about his
background
. When he arrived at the
Bettlertheater
, he claimed that he had been born in the GDR. He confided in each of us individually – and supposedly uniquely – that he was the illegitimate son of a top-ranking politician, even hinting that it was Ulbricht
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himself. He warned of the danger of our being seen in public with someone who was under constant surveillance by the
Stasi
. Such was the paranoia and, I am forced to admit, the chemical consumption of the day that we believed him.

Wolfram's alleged father had met his alleged mother while she was plying her trade on the
Linienstrasse
during the War. He was subsequently brought up in a brothel, the details of which brought tears to our eyes until we discovered that they had been taken straight from a biography of Edith Piaf (in whose life-story Wolfram long hoped to film the author of this memoir
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). The truth is at once more mundane and more moving. His father was killed on the Russian front. His widowed mother scavenged and scrounged to provide for her three-year-old daughter and
six-month
-old son. The ravages of peacetime took their toll and the little girl died – officially of typhus, in reality of malnutrition. For the rest of her life, Wolfram's mother blamed herself for neglecting her daughter in favour of her son. Wolfram, on the other hand, never uttered a word of regret for his dead sister. On the contrary, his solitary survival confirmed his sense of destiny.

That sense was reinforced by his guilt-ridden mother and the household of doting female relatives who lived with them. Kristel Meier spoke many times of how, from his earliest years, Wolfram's behaviour marked him out as exceptional. When asked by his teacher to name his favourite smell, in place of his
classmates
' hot chocolate or sizzling sausages, he answered ‘American soldiers'. When that same teacher found him digging assiduously in the school sandpit, she inquired if he were making a castle. ‘No,' the eight-year-old replied, ‘I'm digging your grave.' He was transferred to a new school shortly afterwards. When challenged about the incident years later on a chat-show, he declared that his strongest reason for wanting to kill his teacher had been the 365 Day calendar on her desk. Every morning she ripped off a page at Registration as if time were just so much waste paper.

Time for Wolfram was a precious resource. Childhood was fast disappearing. When he was ten, his mother married again. Her new husband was a butcher (a profession vilified throughout Wolfram's work). Stepfather and son made no secret of their mutual loathing. Wolfram also turned against his mother, pouring particular scorn on her explanation that she had only accepted the proposal in order to provide him with an adequate diet. A year into her marriage, she became pregnant. When she went into labour, she left Wolfram in the care of his stepfather. On the first night that they were alone, the two slept together. Wolfram told the story with glee, relishing the horror on our post-adolescent faces. He denied that he had been in any way harmed by the encounter, insisting that, on the contrary, he had been its
instigator
, feeling the simultaneous thrill of consummation and of power. He claimed that every boy of that age had sexual feelings and would welcome such an opportunity: a view that never proved to be more contentious than when he voiced it in the presence of the Hollywood actress, Geraldine Mortimer, who physically
attacked him.
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His mother's and stepfather's baby was stillborn.

After his wife's empty-handed return from hospital, Wolfram's stepfather treated him even more perversely, alternating brutal beltings with lachrymose pleas for love (Wolfram relished both as proof of his dominance). To preserve the peace, Kristel connived to keep the pair as far apart as possible. The simplest means was to send Wolfram to the cinema. He went every day after school and, increasingly, instead of it. So began the great love affair of his life. He himself takes up the tale, courtesy of Andy Warhol's
Interview
: ‘I was Christopher Columbus: I discovered America. Smokey bars. Sunlit prairies. Rita Hayworth. Spencer Tracey. The Manhattan skyline. The mob. Teenagers … A world of vast landscapes and minuscule gestures. A world where everything was fluid yet everyone had a place. And for that I have to thank my mother. If she hadn't married again, I might never have known.'

Cinema was Wolfram's life and it therefore stands at the heart of this memoir in the form of a detailed interpretation of each of his films by the author, the person best qualified to bring Wolfram's work to a wider audience. I was not merely his closest professional associate – the only actor to have appeared in every single one of his films – but his wife. One might suppose, given Wolfram's very public proclivities, that our marriage was a mockery but, on the contrary, it attests to the deep devotion he felt for me that, despite the absence of desire, he wanted the union. Nevertheless – and unlike some of my less privileged former colleagues – I retain the right to exercise my critical faculties. I am under no illusions about his failings – at least not now, a decade after his death.
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While he lived, I was in total thrall to
him. It was a madness that I never understood until we worked together on the unfinished
Unity
and I learnt about loyalty to a dictator.
91

I first met Wolfram Meier at the
Bettlertheater
in Munich in the mid 1960s (dates from that period are particularly hazy). His cousin, a stagehand, had sneaked him into a performance which impressed him so much that he returned again and again. He never applied formally to join us (he would never have revealed such vulnerability), but he used to sit and drink with the actors late into the night, becoming one of the group by stealth. He did not hold back on his criticism of performances that he considered inadequate. Some of those under attack were incensed that this upstart – this yob – should give them notes, but it was an article of our faith that everyone be allowed his say. Goethe's view of
Faust
was of no more consequence than that of the woman who sold the ice-cream in the foyer.

At first Wolfram was employed backstage but, when an actor in Buchner's
Leonce and Lena
fell ill in mid-rehearsal, he offered to take over the role. His ambitions did not stop there, but stretched to taking over the company. Conditions worked in his favour. Although Klaus Bernheim and Manfred Stückl were nominally in charge, we were a collective. We decided to put our principles into practice by doing away with a director and taking all decisions (artistic as well as administrative) by vote. The democratic ideal soon proved to be unworkable. Anarchy prevailed until Wolfram, trading on the fact that as the most recent recruit he was the one least subject to personal allegiances, took control. He brought in some friends to build the set. He worked with his cousin on the lighting. He instructed the actors on the staging. The play opened on time.