Unity (19 page)

His intentions were initially obscure. It was not so much that he imposed himself on us as that he made himself the only means whereby we could achieve our goals. He persuaded us to present
The Ratcatcher
, only now there would be no lip-service paid to democracy. Not only did he write and direct it himself but he supervised every aspect of the production. He took particular care over the posters, which read ‘Wolfram Meier and his
Bettlertheater
present …' We were horrified. Since when had the theatre become his? And yet we said nothing, not from cowardice but from embarrassment. We were unwilling to draw attention to such overweening ego.

He played on that embarrassment along with the faint unease that each of us felt in his presence since, while we were expressing solidarity with the proletariat, he was the real thing. He had grown up among prostitutes, pimps and pushers. The experience had marked him – literally, in the livid scar on his frequently exposed chest. He was the representative of the class that our parents had oppressed. Our sense that they had exploited him left him free to exploit us. It was time to make amends.

His cause was aided by his intense physical allure. Everyone fell for him. The author just fell the furthest. He exuded sex with his shock of white hair and his rake-thinness, his appealingly
pockmarked
face and his feral smile. He used to say that hack actors had to be beautiful to be loved, but that he could make audiences love him in spite of his looks. He wore the same ragged clothes every day and rarely bathed: a practice he maintained throughout his life and one that became progressively less acceptable. At first, however, it seemed like a return to the natural man: an authentic whiff of the streets: two fingers raised to the deodorised
department
-store world. Besides, it was 1967: the theatre was thick with incense.

He consolidated his position by seducing Liesl Martins, the third member of the company's original triumvirate and the
source of much of its finance. Their subsequent affair, played out largely in public, placed her boyfriend, Manfred, in an acute dilemma. According to his own code – not to mention his
agreement
with Liesl – he had no right to be proprietorial. And yet his amour propre had been pierced. When the relationship became too heated for him to ignore, he engineered a showdown with Wolfram, who responded by seducing him too. For one who was by nature a cynic, he held an incongruously romantic view that sex would secure a person's loyalty. Which, by and large, it did. When it became clear that he had both of them hooked, he ditched them unceremoniously while continuing to live in their house, conducting his tortuous liaisons under their very noses.

With Wolfram at the helm, the
Bettlertheater
became Munich's most fashionable venue. The cream of the city's radical youth flocked to our exposés of the older generation's sins. As has been well-documented, among their number was Andreas Baader. He regularly attended performances with members of his set – I
hesitate
to call it a group since I doubt that, at that stage, it had become so organised. It was, rather, a crowd of like-minded friends who gathered around a mesmeric figure the way that we gravitated towards Wolfram. They made an enthusiastic but critical audience who would jump to their feet and harangue the actors when they judged our analysis to be wrong. Sometimes they provoked
stand-up
fights in the auditorium as the worlds of art and activism clashed. Soon, more conservative theatregoers were booking seats in the hope of witnessing a confrontation. They felt cheated if a play proceeded uninterrupted to its close. Some of the company were outraged, but not Wolfram, who recognised the value of a scandal. At the time I accused him of opportunism, but I realise now that his commitment ran deeper. He and Baader shared an agenda, embracing disruption both on and off the stage.

The Baader connection dogs the surviving members of the company to this day (the author of this memoir can never embark
on any project without the Red Army Faction being invoked). It proved to be most damaging during the abortive film
Unity
, when the young English actress in the title role attempted to blow up the Munich Olympic Stadium. Many explanations have been put forward for her action but, in the view of the author, who was present throughout the shooting, Felicity Benthall had become infatuated with Wolfram. She appeared convinced both that he was being unjustly vilified for his tenuous link with Baader and that, by planting her bomb, she would be acting as his surrogate, helping to realise his political dreams. In this, she not only totally misread the director, but caused him to forfeit his most ambitious and deeply felt film.

A catch-phrase of the Sixties held that the personal was
political
. For Wolfram, the political was personal. He used public life as a subject for melodrama. Once, on location in London at a time of industrial strife, he likened the rubbish piled in the streets to the parcels of excrement that the young Salvador Dali had secreted in drawers to shock the maids. Far from endorsing the dustmen's struggle, he compared it to the prank of a precocious Surrealist. Even more indicative of his lack of political acumen is the fact that, when dealing with the most notorious leader of modern times, he should have conceived of him exclusively in terms of his sexuality: Hitler's impotence; his coprophilia; his homosexuality; even his lack of a second testicle. While the Führer saw himself as a Wagnerian hero: Rienzi, Siegfried or Lohengrin, Wolfram saw him as the cursed Klingsor in
Parsifal
, suffering from a genital wound.

In the spring of 1968, the theatre burnt down. The cause was never officially established although, unofficially, few of us harboured any doubt. Baader and his friends had grown
disenchanted
. They had become part of the very performance they had wanted to disrupt. It was Feydeau-Baader that audiences were queuing to see. He felt emasculated so he destroyed the theatre,
thereby creating the pattern for the rest of his life. The group was devastated, with the exception of Wolfram. It was as if he knew that it was time to move on. His last big success had been Schiller's
Don Carlos
, with the Spanish court transposed to
Hollywood
(I would use that as a symbol, but I hear him quacking even as I write). Baader also moved on. A few weeks later, he burnt down Schneider's department store in Frankfurt. Suddenly, subtly, Germany was at war. It was the most devastating fire since that of the Reichstag. It seemed that no one had learnt anything in the intervening forty years. People simply stood and watched as history went up in flames.

Unknown to any of us, even Liesl, Wolfram had insured the building only weeks before the attack. Some praised his prescience; others took a more sceptical view. But even the most painstaking investigation by the Insurers failed to uncover a link. With the proceeds, Wolfram bought a camera and equipment and made his first film. The fact that the money belonged to the collective never appeared to cross his mind. He laid claim to it on the grounds that he would put it to the best use. Which was, of course, true. Those who took issue with him were ruthlessly purged: an event that the survivors subsequently dubbed the Night of the Long Knives. The failure of the rebels in their future careers was to be a lesson to us all.

Even shoe-string films are costly. When the insurance money ran out, Wolfram shaved his head and, making the most of his Albino looks, appealed to various foundations to fund the film, on the grounds that he was dying from cancer. When their contributions left a shortfall, he exhorted some of the actresses to walk the streets. His success bore witness not only to his powers of
persuasion
but to the spirit of the age. It was typical of Wolfram that he should have drafted feminist ideology into the service of his masculine ego, claiming that all women prostituted themselves:
most did so to their husbands, trading sex for security; we, at least, enjoyed the distinction of doing it for art.

Wolfram entertained few scruples about the source of his funding. The majority of his films were financed through
co-production
deals with television. At times, however, the
controversial
subject matter caused the money-men to shy away. A case in point was
Unity
, where they were worried by the emphasis on the Führer's private life (no doubt they would have been mollified by a few establishing shots of Dachau). So Werner Kempe, the producer of all Wolfram's films from
Rosa Luxemburg
until their rupture on
The Holy Family
, approached Thomas Bücher, Germany's most successful pornographer, who was later to gain notoriety when a model died during the making of one of his films.

Bücher saw the film as a solid investment, but he also secured Wolfram's promise to direct a feature for his own studio. He had been courting him for years, no doubt to provide some private measure of respectability. All Wolfram's friends advised against his making any such commitment. Pornography had not then penetrated the mainstream to the extent that it has done today, when its former stars can be found in Hollywood films, on Paris cat-walks and in the Italian Senate. Reputation and reality were united in confining it to the back streets. Wolfram, however, saw it differently, passing off his private addiction as an artistic credo. The actors in pornography espoused the rawness that constituted his ideal. They did not hide behind bourgeois notions of character: they did not hide behind anything at all. They were themselves, naked and unashamed. As he declared to a stunned Berlin Festival: ‘Just as all art is said to aspire to the condition of music, so all film should aspire to the condition of pornography.'

The Ratcatcher
was acclaimed at festivals throughout Europe. At home, it won a state prize. Wolfram's career was launched and,
from then on, it rarely faltered. Although lazy critics questioned his work-rate, the quality of the work never suffered (which is more than can be said for that of his private life). He showed extraordinary loyalty to his original
Bettlertheater
actors, tailoring parts to our particular talents with the result that we became known far beyond Munich. Fame, however, came at a price. ‘Caligula made his horse a consul,' he said to Dieter. ‘I can make you a star.' Every time that he claimed that anyone could act, the public presumed that we couldn't. He was the alpha and omega of his films. We were as much a part of the aesthetic as the lighting and costumes. We had no reputation outside his: no roles apart from his. You could no more cast us in another director's film than you could recycle one of his sets.

We were stars for an age without illusions and a public that knew how films were made. This was a public that watched sex scenes not to derive vicarious pleasure, but to enjoy the
humiliation
. They knew that, however lavish the setting, we were performing in front of indifferent cameramen and prurient
makeup
artists on a set cold enough to make the biggest stud shrink and give the greatest goddess goose-flesh.

Wolfram made no attempt to temper his ruthlessness. The fascist streak inherent in all directors was especially pronounced in him. He pressed his natural tendency to sado-masochism into service, alternately coaxing and bullying the cast and crew. I was never able to work out whether he tortured us so that he could make a better film, or made the film in order to torture us better. He claimed that he was fulfilling our secret desires. In his view, the greatest pleasure in most peoples' lives was subordination. It was, therefore, understandable that we harboured ambivalent
feelings
towards him. We wanted to hate him because we were subservient to him, but we couldn't because our subservience brought us satisfaction – which, in turn, confirmed our hatred of ourselves.

Like every dictator throughout history, he both demanded our dependence and despised us for it. Even at his most autocratic, however, he retained a degree of insight. I myself was present during the filming of
Unity
, when he explained to the actor playing Hitler how easy it was to become a megalomaniac when surrounded by sycophants. Then he laughed, as though he realised the significance of what he had said. In the early days of the
Bettlertheater
, we lived as a commune – as much for
pragmatic
as for idealistic reasons, given the tangle of relationships involved. Later, we became his vassals. He was determined to be the principal lover in all our lives. So, when Liesl Martins announced that she was pregnant, he immediately offered her the title role in
Margarite
(a part that had been originally earmarked for the author). The shooting schedule, however, would require her to have an abortion. One evening, at his regular weekend party, he put her publicly on the spot in a truth game designed to winkle out which she wanted most: a baby or the mammoth leading role. Two days later, she entered a clinic. In spite of her decision, Wolfram never allowed either Liesl or her husband Manfred to come as close to him again.
92

Wolfram was drawn to violence. He delighted in provoking his partners. Like the heroine of a cheap thriller, he believed that the intensity of the blows attested to the strength of the love. He adopted similar tactics with his colleagues, deliberately riling them in the hope that they would lash out with either fists or words. Like Hitler, he believed in the principles of divide and rule and survival of the fittest. The one watched Himmler, Göring and Goebbels jockeying for power, the other Manfred, Dieter and Kurt. The author was not the only person to whom the Nazi analogy had occurred. On one occasion when we were all gathered in a
café, someone read out a newspaper article about life at Hitler's Berchtesgaden retreat. Erich Leitner, who had listened to the behaviour but not to the names, exclaimed in fury that it was libellous of
Bild
to print such a story about Wolfram and the Serpent's Nest. The error caused deep embarrassment to all but one of those present. He merely flashed an inscrutable smile.