Unity (21 page)

L.M. Yes, some people remember the Nazis as heroes and others as monsters. Does that mean that both views have equal worth? Renate is a sad woman. She is a sick woman. She is a successless woman. She has nothing in her life but the past. So she – how do you say in English? – colours it in. She makes all these reports about Wolfram as another Hitler. But look at us. Look at Manfred. Look at me. Do we look so weak?

L.M. Renate believes that, because she was Wolfram's wife, she should also be his widow. Wolfram married her in 1978. It
was his worst time.
Unity
was in boxes instead of on the screens. Mahmoud, his boyfriend, went back to his home in Beirut. Right now after he returned, he was killed by a bomb. And Wolfram married Renate. It was a joke. One evening, we were all together – no, sorry, Manfred and I were not with them but Dieter and Kurt explained about it to us. Wolfram wanted to go out and Renate started to fight with him. He lost his patience and told to her, ‘Why don't you shut your mouth and open your legs?' So she stood up like clockwork and pulled down her skirt. Wolfram, to save her the shame, took her upstairs to bed. Still I am furious that I was not there. Two weeks later, he married her.

M.S. He was always a masochist and to marry Renate was the most masochist thing that he could do.
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L.M. Poor Renate thought that she now had rights over Wolfram and over all of us. But he made fun of her when he lived and, again, when he died. He left to his mother all his money and all his films. He left to Renate some rubbish.

M.S. Excuse me?

M.S. You English and your Shakespeare – excuse me, your Royal Shakespeare! Do you ever speak about anyone else?

L.M. Wolfram's mother set up the Meier Foundation. For the first five years, she was the leader. Then, when she grew tired, she asked me to take her place. Me, the friend, and not the widow. Renate wrote a book – a book that is full of lies – about Wolfram. She is bitter at me and the board because we did not give her the rights to use the letters or the scripts or the pictures. I am sorry, but when we work very hard to keep the films healthy, we do not allow Renate to pour acid on the prints.

M.S. Of course Wolfram had his failures. He could be rude. He could be cruel. He could make you pull out your hairs.
(With a laugh.)
When I had my hairs. But he could also be the most exciting, the most fascinating man who ever lived (and, yes, I include your Shakespeare). Sometimes, still, I dream about him. I never tell this even to Liesl. I am in hospital. I have pains. I look across the room and all my dearest friends are lying there. Some have no arms and no legs. Some have terrible cancer. Then, right now, Wolfram comes through the door followed by a camera. And, after a few moments, we are well: we are whole; and we dance. He turns the ward – he turns the world – into a Hollywood musical and we are all the stars.

L.M. When Geraldine Mortimer spoke about growing up in Hollywood, Wolfram said ‘I too.'

M.S. He was a boy when the safest thing for a German was to be an American. Later, he started to hate America but he never lost his love for Hollywood. He said always that Hollywood wasn't America. Hollywood was the world.

L.M. He had the most extraordinary fantasy. All those stories, all those people coming from the head of one man. There was no surprise that he was so thin. He was like a mother who hungers to feed the childrens.

M.S. He gave us such chances. He made us known world-wide. When we went to New York or Tokyo or Australia, they asked how is Dieter or Luise or Dorit. No need for family names.

L.M. We were a family. We were Wolfram's family.

M.S. Some persons said that he put us in chains. He did not allow us to work for another director. But what did that matter when we made such a good work for him? He gave us one, two, sometimes three films a year. And he found a role for everyone.

L.M. We were so excited when he told us of a new project. If it came from a book, we all ran to buy it. Who was the heroine? Was it Luise or Irma or me? And sometimes there was pain. But, for every Mayor's wife or schoolmistress, next time it was Rosa or Margarite.

M.S. We never complained when he cast someone else from the group. It is true there was sometimes silence – and
sometimes
worse. But not for long. It was when he looked outside, there were the problems. There were the problems for him and there were the problems for us. The new persons, they did not understand how he worked. Naturally, they wanted to be in a Wolfram Meier film but they did not see that it meant more than just learning a Wolfram Meier script.

L.M. What he could never win was the market. It is a cruel joke – no? – that, in his films, he shows so strongly how the market eats up people. And, in the end, the market eats up him. He becomes successful, so people want more of him. They want him in bigger cinemas on bigger screens so he has to make bigger films with bigger stars.

M.S. In a bigger language.

L.M. And then the film is never finished. And people, they say, oh yes, we knew all the time that he was a maker of small films for small audiences. So give him small money.

M.S. But his fantasy is big.

L.M. But his money is small. So, in the studio, they no longer try to sell him.

M.S. And that, my friend, is what happened after
Unity
. It was not just one film that was lost. He was broken. He could no longer go back to where he was before. Where he was before is no longer there.

L.M. If you cut off an artist's fantasy, you cut off his arm … his leg.

L.M. No, for a little while, we were strangers. We had – how do you say in English? – a lover's quarrelling.

M.S. But between friends.

L.M. We looked after our childrens. Wolfram was not happy. He said that childrens were the enemies of art.

M.S. He was so much a child himself.

L.M. Then, one day, the telephone rang. It was Wolfram. There was no voice which meant it was only Wolfram.

M.S. He always smoked on his cigarette before he spoke.

L.M. He wanted us to play Joseph and Magda Goebbels. For the first time we were husband and wife.

M.S. Perhaps it is not the husband and wife we chose. Goebbels is not at the tip of an actor's list. A dwarf. A cripple. But he is also the intellectual among the Nazis. An artist who wrote a novel and a drama. Evidently, Wolfram saw those qualities in me. Anyway, the Joseph of your friend's script was the private man, the bon vivant, interesting for every woman. If he planned to show the cruel demagogue, I do not believe that Wolfram would ask me.

L.M. Wolfram told me directly. Magda is a surface woman: an elegant, pleasure-loving woman. But she is also a mother who, later, killed six of her childrens in Hitler's bunker. Wolfram saw her as the model for the Greek tragedies that he wanted me to play.

M.S.
Medea
would have become Wolfram's masterwork. And yours.

L.S. Only a person who does not know Germany has done what she has done. It was the action of someone who laughs at a joke that she does not understand.

M.S. There speaks a man! And a young man. I admit that there was a time many, many years ago, when I thought that there were attractions between Liesl and Wolfram. But there was nothing.

L.M. He had so much spirit. Everyone fell in love with Wolfram. Women. Men. Everyone.

M.S. Naturally, I also fell in love with his spirit. But not his person. Our friend here speaks about his person.

L.M. It was a long time ago.

L.M. He was very young.

M.S. We were very young.

L.M. Yes, but he was still younger.

L.M He was very British: very good-mannered; very ‘fair play'.

M.S. I think most of all he was sad.

M.S. Maybe both. He had Wolfram always hanging on his shoulder. He had Felicity who was not the right lover for him.

M.S. They were night and day. He wanted one Felicity. She wanted many Lukes. That is all I must tell you. He was interesting for Wolfram – too interesting. He was not
interesting
for me.

M.S. This makes no sense. Did you ever take part in making a film?

M.S. It is so exhausting. Some days not a thing happens. You sit in the van and, at the end, you feel like you walked up the Alps. You have no energy to read and certainly not to study politics.

M.S. Then you must look for your solutions in England. Think for a moment. You – you, Michael – you go on holiday with your friend. You have a happy time: beautiful girls, or, if you prefer it, beautiful boys. But he lies in bed all week with a bad stomach. Why? You eat the same food: you drink the same water; but you are strong in the stomach and he is weak. And why are you strong? It is because of how you lived before, in England.

L.M. Manfred speaks correctly. If you want to find the truth about Felicity, you have to go to England. We went. We were surprised by what we saw.

L.M. With Wolfram. For the film. Naturally, we did not play. It was the past – the childhood. But Wolfram asked for us … he needed us and Dieter and even Renate. He never made a shooting outside Germany and he was nervous. He was nervous because of the English and their contempt: their contempt against foreigners and their contempt against cinema. In all other European countries, he was Wolfram
Meier. But, in England, the only Germans you knew were Franz Beckenbauer and Gert Mueller.
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M.S. He was never sure if your contempt against cinema was because it was popular or because it was new. It was so … how do you say when you must have spectacles?

M.S. That is true. You are full of pride that you win the War, he said, but then you throw away the victory. You despise the Americans but you must bend the knees to them. They were once your colony; now, you are theirs.

L.M. Everything in England begins with language. What about pictures? They are the world's language. But no, you give your money to Sir Bamforth and the classics, as if perfect vowels bring with them perfect morals.

M.S. My friend, you speak as if the past is the only measure of judgement. But what about excitement? What about experiment? Where was the English
nouvelle vague
? Where was the English
nouveau roman
?

M.S. I feel sure that you admire other nineteenth-century things like ‘Britannia rules the waves', but you can no longer have them. So Britannia tries to push back the waves. ‘We are an island,' she says. ‘Keep out your filthy foreign ideas along with your filthy foreign dogs.'

L.M. I never felt so hated for being a German as in England. In France and in Belgium, there is more reason and less reminder. In England, I felt as if I was all the time wearing a sign. It was not even as if you hated us for what we did in the War. It was for what we did afterwards. You wanted usto stay the same so that you too could stay the same. Like small childrens, you demand applause not once, not twice, but again and again for the same trick.

L.M. Wolfram said that British virtue was an illusion. Like a girl who is locked in a convent all her life who is proud that she is a virgin. It is an accident of geography.

L.M. Excuse me? I think that is why you are here. I think that is why you wrote me a letter and asked – begged – me to discuss what happened with your friend. I think that is why you send me your books: your books that have not even been made into films.

L.M. But it is just this sort of – how do you say in English? – superiorness that made Wolfram (I suppose you will not object if I name him again) so angry. One evening in the country, Luke made arrangements for us all to see a play that came from London. It was about one of the Channel Islands in the War, where an old duchess stood up against the German invaders. It was a demonstration of your British belief that, deep inside, all foreigners want to be treated like servants. I think it was written by one of your prime ministers.
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But my question to you is: what happened on the other islands? What happened in Guernsey where the British made collaborations with as much freedom as in any French village? I have not seen any plays about that.
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M.S. Felicity was not fighting against politics in Germany but in Great Britain. You say that there was still fascism in Germany.