Laughter, laugh, silence: Daliah Lavi and Robert Lembke
Photo: SWR/MGGGERZ/Bavaria Media
In a “What am I?” Show from 1971 there is a memorable scene: Prominent guest of the show is the Israeli singer and actress Daliah Lavi. With her, Robert Lembke leads the small talk typical of the cheerful brave entertainment show and asks the Haifa-born artist about her Russian father and her German mother: “Has there been any family problems?” Lavi replied that the only problem was that the mother had to learn to cook Russian, and the father had to learn German. This is followed by a happy laughter of everyone involved, also in the studio audience. “Otherwise there were no problems? So you have arranged yourself, ”summarizes Lembke in a friendly manner, and Lavi confirms it with a smile. Today we know that the innocence of these television pictures corresponds to the need for Germans, which is deeply sitting at the time of their first broadcast, not wanting to know anything about their guilt.
To do this, you have to know that a large part of the Jewish family Daliah Lavis was murdered in the Holocaust. Robert Lembke, who became popular as a quiz master for decades on German television, has only luckily survived the persecution by the Nazis as the son of a Jewish father. At times, from 1937 to 1944, he was halfway protected by a so -called “mixed marriage” with an “Aryan” woman.
The scene from the ARD archive described at the beginning can be seen in the documentary drama “Robert Lembke-who I am?” The film, which illuminates the life of Lembke (1913–1989) and also asks the question of why the popular TV “Rateonkel” did not want to talk about the Nazi past, is a form of history work, as one would like: not history revisionist, not boulevard journalist-sensationalist, not one-dimensional and one-dimensional and Simplifying. Strictly along Lembke’s biography as a journalist and TV manager, the documentation of decades of silence tells about the Nazi era and the consequences that this type of repression not only had for himself, but also for his family. Because not only the perpetrators were silent about their crimes after 1945, the surviving victims also remained silent for a long time, be it out of fear of being stigmatized and excluded in the German post -war society, be it out of shame to be among the few survivors.
“Nobody is concerned,” the Quizmaster replied once in the 1980s in a talk show when he was asked as a private person after his life. The questioner was his ARD colleague Joachim Fuchsberger, who in turn was used as a 17-year-old on the Eastern Front. Just as little spoken of the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust was talked about the German Wehrmacht and its crimes.
The documentation shows that the career and quiet workaholic Lembke, which the audience perceived primarily as a modest-human television, “a strictly kept secret broke around with him”, as the documentary of the documentary formulates it. His “secret” was that he was someone else in a previous life: the “Robert Weichselbaum” persecuted by the Nazis as “Halbjude”. He was 19 when Hitler’s NSDAP came to power. When he was able to leave his hiding place in May 1945, a farm in Fürholzen, Bavaria, he had reached the age of 31.
When the US soldiers arrived in the area, the local population, under which there were of course many convinced National Socialists, was very afraid. A contemporary witness, who knew about Lembke’s hiding place, remembers: “Mr. Lembke has said: I can speak English, it stays calm, the war ‘ He then went towards the American with a white sheet and told them he knows his people. And he guarantees that there is no shot. ”When Lembke made contact with the liberators, a gi had held a pistol on his temple.
Immediately after the end of the war, Lembke made a career as a journalist in Munich – only as a department head of domestic politics/sport in the »Neue Zeitung«, where he worked with Stefan Heym and Erich Kästner, later as editor -in -chief of the Bavarian Radio and deputy program director of ARD. He had a lot because of the Nazi dictatorship to “bring humanity back”, as the film states in one place.
One of Lembke’s journalist colleague in the immediate post -war period was the writer and documentary filmmaker Georg Stefan Troller, who is 103 years old today. When asked whether the Germans were unable to mourn at the time, he replies in the documentary: “They have been very mourned.” But Lembke took the order of the new democratic media seriously: Enlightenment and contributions to democratic will formation, presented in an entertaining form. Lembke, the nice, balancing, mediating harmony manufacturer, knew “how to bring people together”, so confirm some of his companions in the film. That was one of his most outstanding qualities. He once described his role as a moderator of a popular quiz show: “I consider myself part of the studio facility.” What was also known about him: that he loved animals “because they don’t lie”.
When he was involved in the broadcast of the World Cup in 1954 as a television man, he asked the reporters to avoid triumphals in German victories. There should be better talk of “sporty competition” instead of “winners and defeated”. Lembke, the modest, the entertainer, the contact knot, the communicator, the voluntary confidence officer from the service.
“I believe in the good in humans. It still has to be in it. It comes out so little. ”That is one of Lembke’s aphorisms. Another of his sayings goes as follows: “The removal of conscience is one of the small operations.” Lembke, the “representative of a cheerful pessimism”, as the documentary calls him, has brought a whole series of books with such wisdom and short and shortest prose on the market, while he has not accessed the letters and documents from the time of his persecution in the basement of his house.
Have the grandparents ever told something about their persecution history? Robert Lembkes grandson, Florian Benedikt, also a journalist at a Bayerische Zeitung, replies: »Never. Not a single word. ”Like many others, the television man Lembke did not want to be reminded of the Nazi era. In the documentary commentary, it sounds like this: »After 1945, he saw no advantage in talking about his Jewish origin. Robert Lembke wanted to belong again. ”So he arranged himself. In fact, one learns from the film that Lembke himself either refused to talk to his daughter about his Jewish father and the Nazi era or only with reluctance and passive-aggressively.
The documentary, which is mainly assembled from archive pictures, old TV sections and interview passages, may have been conventionally advised in its form. Above all, the bad cuts of notifying documents that are only available in writing (i.e. diaries, letters, texts of all kinds) of actors in front of questionable backdrops in short game scenes is now standard. Nevertheless, the film is very worth seeing due to the carefully collected information.
“Robert Lembke-who am I?” Is available in the ARD media library until September 6th.