“I want everything. Hildegard Knef « – film about Hildegard Knef: You have to leave success behind you

A life is trapped in paradox. In 1944 the demise of the “Third Reich” built by the Nazis for a thousand years approached. But a young woman, acting student, has only one thing in mind: success. Absolutely and at all costs. There is a UFA documentary from this time about your acting class. Hildegard Knef stands out. Through talent? Many, she says, would have many. No, through will to success! Later she confesses: »I have ambition. He accompanies me like a love that has good and bad days. “

That is why this remarkable documentary by Luzia Schmid revolves over the actress, singer and author Hildegard Knef. But Hildegard Knef is too smart to believe in the success that she is drawn to for life. “I want the success and defend myself against it.” Because it is the defeats that make you see, success makes you blind.

Knef has the intellectual access of an existentialist beat with dialectic who lives in his questions and distrusts the answers. She is afraid of being recognized and afraid not to be recognized, she says. So many confessions of her, pronounced in different lifetime, right at the beginning of the film. They are all right because they always include the opposite of what has just been said.

It is an early shock -like crash that forces you to think about yourself and the questionability of every fame. As a drama student, she has a relationship with the “Reichsfilmtramaturge” Ewald von Demandowsky, a high Nazi official, head of film production Tobis and close employees of propaganda minister Goebbels. In her autobiography “The gift Gaul” (1970), an important book, it says about the man almost twice as old: “He is an ambitious, an capable, a movable, who needs roots. Ewald from Demandowsky believes. He believes in the men’s breed. “And this admission follows:” I have nothing to oppose him. “It is a drastic experience for her, where she will work out for life: evil can be convenient. The Nazi official should open the doors to the film world. In fact, the twenty -year -old has already made several films for the UFA, but – for luck – will only come to the cinema after the war.

Hildegard Knef had the great gift of being able to express inner contradiction.

After the liberation, her patron Demandowsky is no longer a patron, but a sought -after war criminal that the Russians shoot in 1946. Hildegard Knef has already met the Jewish US control officer Kurt Hirsch, whom she married in 1947. It is a blank leaf, appears in the cabaret and in the castle parking theater at Boleslaw Barlog. In the Babelsberg studios, which are now called Defa, Wolfgang Staudte is making his first post -war film “The murderers are among us” and is looking for a new film face. He finds Hildegard Knef. With this big film, which not only relates the question of guilt to Hitler and his generals, but asks every single German to ask himself what he did or fail to do – Hildegard Knef succeeds a success that she can never repeat.

With her husband, she goes to Hollywood, receives a seven -year contract with David O. Selznick – here she is now Hildegard Neff, but will not play in any film. She divorced from Hirsch in 1951. This will say in 2005: “Hilde was not a bad person, but very calculating.” In Hollywood you don’t like her, the contract becomes a bond.

All of this has long been known. But new in this film »I want everything. Hildegard Knef «by Luzia Schmid is the perspective of a woman who is as distant-reflecting with the defeats of her life as with her success. In Hollywood she fails, as well as her marriage to Hirsch. As then fails the second marriage to British actor David Cameron. The attempt to gain a foothold in the film in West Germany becomes a scandal. Willi Forsts “Die Sünder” from 1950, in which Hildegard Knef can be seen naked as a painter model for a few seconds, creates an enormous outrage in Bigotten Adenauer-Germany-she flees back to the USA.

In New York, the leading role in the musical »Silk Stockings« by Cole Porter is offered. You can’t sing, she fends off. But because she has no other chance, she accepts the role – it will be a great success. Ella Fitzgerald calls her “the best singer without voice”. And the Knef knows that that’s right. If you make good texts about your singing, preferably self -written? The audience is always moody, sometimes she will be successful in the coming years, sometimes not. The Knef does not complain, but stated that she worked with good directors who made bad films with it. Billy Wilder will shoot “Fedora” with her in 1978, and this will also be no success.

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At some point it is the question of whether you can hold out the marathon run that is in the best case. She always gets sick, seriously ill. Wrote a book about her cancer in 1975: “The judgment”. Her daughter says, even when she was no longer sick, she retained the gesture of the disease, which was exhausting for everyone. And she simply continued the painkillers after all the operations, became dependent on them.

Songs sound like “For me it should rain red roses” like self -defense against a brutal outside world that does not settle with flowers, but in numbers. Doesn’t she have the right to some beauty after all the struggle? No, she has to work hard until the end. It is always rich in between, then she has to work against the debts again: with concerts, with supporting roles on television and talk shows. She had her last television appearance two weeks before her death in 2002.

Everything just the consequence of the insatiable ambition-and only the role of the concentration camp survivors Susanne Wallner in Wolfgang Staudtes “The murderer are among us” will remain? That too would be a lot as a sum of a life. But there are also the books, the texts of their songs and their unusual interpretations. In the end, Hildegard Knef – and this is how we experience her in this film by Luzia Schmid, who works with archive material and speaks to life companions – has long since been saying goodbye to too high -flying plans.

This is precisely why as a viewer you can now participate in the wealth that life only gives those who are capable of experiencing experiences. Hildegard Knef was able to do so and also had the great gift of being able to express their inner contradiction.

She was undoubtedly a cool, calculating spacer. But in their always clever insights on errors, failures and rare success flickers flicker that has a strengthening force. The poetic form of life, the substance of which (the pain) must always be kept cool, requires self -discipline. Because the sentimental heated the petty bourgeois of feeling, Hildegard Knef hated. And the success with which she once had closely connected? In her eyes, this also turned out to be an illustrator. What remains of Hildegard Knef are also her philosophical insights into life, which is as hard developed as a rare gift.

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