Manfred Stelzer: The grassroots should become active

Many colleagues say that Manfred Stelzer was always a team player as a director and script developer. He never appeared as an autocrat on set. The characters that he developed together with his friend, the screenwriter Gert C. Möbius for “Polizeiruf 110” were very popular: the two detective inspectors Uwe Groth and Jens Hinrichs, who investigated in Schwerin, embodied by the actors Kurt Böwe (Groth ) and Uwe Steimle (Hinrichs). Here the police officer armed with a GDR cloth bag as a loner with his quiet and almost anarchic skepticism towards the capitalist West that had been imposed on the GDR, there the overzealous criminal inspector and authority-obsessed adaptor who always suspects the really big crime and likes to be caught by the BKA and dragnet speaks. This unequal, even antagonistic pair represented in a very sympathetic way, on the one hand, the type of former GDR citizens who had not come to terms with the socialist idea, and, on the other hand, the overzealous capitalist assimilated people.

A loving monograph on his life’s work has now been published about Manfred Stelzer, who died in 2020 after a long illness: “… and always a pinch of anarchy.” This praiseworthy anthology was edited by Stelzer’s long-time partner, the curator Beatrice E. Stammer, and the film and television historian Jan Gympel.

“Only they make you crazy” – a documentary film about the partial occupation of the disused Bethanien Hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg in December 1971 is named after this song by Ton Steine ​​Scherben. It was directed by a “Georg von Rauch House collective” consisting of Susanne Beyeler, Rainer März and Manfred Stelzer. The occupiers had named Bethanien after Georg von Rauch, who had recently been shot in a police operation and was from the “Romantic Hash Rebels,” which then became the armed group “June 2nd Movement.” The Scherben, in turn, dedicated the “Smoke House Song” to the occupiers, which became one of their best-known songs.

Rainer März and Manfred Stelzer were in England in the early 1970s and were strongly influenced by the British film collective Cinema Action, which stood out in 1968 with films about the May riots in Paris, but also against pension cuts in Great Britain. Just like the British collective, Beyeler, März and Stelzer refrained from making comments in their Bethanien film and wanted to give the occupiers a combative expression with images and original sound. You could say they saw directing as a weapon.

In 1975, Manfred Stelzer and Susanne Beyeler had a conversation with Manfred Salzgeber, who had founded the first arthouse cinemas in West Berlin, about their collective work, in which Stelzer answered the question about the political line: “We already have a line, and that is in every film. We always want to try to get the base, whether it’s a union or young people, to become active. (…) One thing that we want to achieve and that we have achieved is that our colleagues also see the film as part of their fight.«

Manfred Stelzer was born in Bavaria in 1944 into humble circumstances. He trained as a chemical laboratory technician and decided early on to become a filmmaker. Without a high school diploma, he was accepted into the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), where he initially made documentaries about people and groups who would otherwise never be in the spotlight. He remained true to this approach until his death, as well as to the concept of seeing film as teamwork. In between lies an outstanding career with almost 100 films.

The 1979 documentary “Monarch,” which Stelzer produced in close cooperation with Johannes Flütsch on direction, book/concept, camera and sound, attracted great attention. After their joint documentaries about truck drivers and fairground workers, they turned their attention to the professional slot machine player Diethard Wendtland, who drove his car across the Federal Republic and successfully took out the “Monarch” slot machines and thus made a living.

After this tragicomic documentary, which was produced by Regina Ziegler and which also enjoyed success in the cinema before it was broadcast on TV, Stelzer switched to the feature film genre. Together with the writer Ulrich Enzensberger, he wrote the script for “The Chinese are Coming” (1986), produced by Klaus Volkenborn, with the wonderful Hans Brenner in the typical role of an industrial worker. The Bavarian Zündapp factory for two-stroke mopeds, which had to file for bankruptcy in 1984 and was relocated to China completely dismantled, served as a model for the story of the dismantling of an entire industrial plant that was relocated to China.

This was followed by “Superstau” (1991) with Ottfried Fischer: a feature film that, with some very thigh-slapping humor, tells the story of how East and West meet on a Bavarian highway section on the way to vacation because there is no progress. Afterwards, Manfred Stelzer devoted himself more and more to television, using anarchic humor to tell his stories of likeable losers, rascals and rebellious people, including such successful series as “Wolff’s Revier” and “Tatort” Münster.

»Manni’s films are honest. Like the blues. Manni loves his characters, with all their small and big weaknesses. (…) They always have something to do with him. With his experiences, dreams, but sometimes with his anger” – this is how Klaus Volkenborn congratulated his friend Manfred Stelzer on his 50th birthday. There are many such contributions and memories in the book, including from Kurt Böwe, Gerd Conradt, Doris Dörrie, Harun Farocki, Axel Prahl and Elke Sommer.

The editors have provided this work biography with a very good apparatus that lists all of Stelzer’s films with a synopsis, the complete production and acting staff, as well as the dates of the cinema premiere or first broadcast.

Beatrice E. Stammer/Jan Gympel (ed.): … and always a pinch of anarchy. Manfred Stelzer and his films. Büchner-Verlag, 336 pages, br., 35 €.