Obituary – Walter Heynowski: Enlightenment and evening light

Truth makes grotesque inventions. There’s a German named Siegfried Müller. A scrap of heroic myth sewn together with a scrap of average: This results in the uniform that is not simply worn, that carries – through time and geography. It is the dress of an all-time butcher under changing commanders. Always Nibelungen, always Müller – in most cases barbarism waits for its moment. That was Kongo-Müller. Cynical, snarling horror hero of the documentary “The Laughing Man”. An international sensation back in 1966.

The questioning of this permanent mercenary, with the help of a lot of alcohol in front of the camera and keeping the fact that the interrogators came from the GDR a secret: The film established the world fame of Walter Heynowski, Gerhard Scheumann and cameraman Peter Hellmich. And dramaturg Robert Michel. Everything that was unmistakable from the now legendary studio H & S was condensed in this work: the peculiarity of a type or a fact, combined with historical in-depth drilling and current political polemics. Sensitive, fiercely fierce. Enlightenment: a means of combat copied from spies and scouts and poets and thinkers. The journalistic aspect: an excellent craft where it also becomes amazingly journalistic.

After the war, at the age of 22, Heynowski, who was born in Ingolstadt, was editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine “Frischer Wind”, later “Eulenspiegel”; a witty founder type. He became program director at German television and invented the Sandman. H & S: around a hundred films. Brilliant reveal art. And disclosure – if it is successfully aimed at the core – is an intelligence service in its own right. Heynowski and Scheumann specifically investigated three areas: there was the war in Vietnam (“Pilots in Pajamas”), there were old and new Nazis stirring and lounging about in the Federal Republic (“Comrade Krüger”), and in Chile imperialism staged a coup against Allende (“War of the Mummies,” “I was, I am, I will be”). In 1982 the independence of the studio, to which the world and currencies were open at the time, was abolished. Too much stubbornness, beyond Defa and GDR television? Definitely envy, resentment, accusations.

Heynowski, born in 1927, was one of those who, in a sense, became guilty through no fault of their own. Like Günter Grass, Dieter Hildebrandt, Martin Walser. A whole generation, fascism and war, and the ancient lesson: people only gradually become knowledgeable – often through the path of early error; One slides into misfortune through naive faith, through inhaling propaganda, through general helplessness and also through numerous blind coincidences. Time throws a person into a life that often leaves him no choice, and then the person stumbles around, and only much later does he rub his eyes.

Heynowski called his first volume of memories, published after the end of the GDR by the Eulenspiegel publishing group, “The Film of My Life,” with the subtitle: “Torn Youth.” Bitterest excellence. A book against a disastrous way of dealing with things: If a catastrophe could be prevented, the person running in the middle shouts: Why me? When catastrophe hits him, he cries: Why me?

In this sense, Heynowski was one of those who never gave in to repression, to a desire for a “normal” way of dealing with the German past. He was someone who repeatedly reminded himself that he was only allowed to be young under extremely stressful circumstances – and in a silent request for understanding, the honorable, obligatory thought of how little those few are still considered in West Germany who once died in camps or under guillotines, young resistance fighters, communists first, opponents of Hitler from the beginning. A seemingly carefree majority that was allowed to equate prosperity with democracy – it has always concerned the public more intensely than the suffering and fate of tormented political minorities who once sacrificed their own for the decent lives of the many. This is also why H & S made their films. And Heynowski will say sarcastically about his brother, who remained in the West: “We thought we were the winners of history, but he was the real winner.”

From his youth, Walter Heynowski knew the appeal of being wrong; he even dreamed of becoming a war correspondent. Luckily, he wasn’t considered purebred and therefore worthy of support. He then knowingly went to the communists, but after their demise he did not change his conscience. Having once come to the East out of spiritual need and barely saved his skin, he was not someone who now, in the new old West, shed his skin without need. Even if after the end of state socialism the stamp came crashing down on H & S: agitation, propaganda!

Yes, of course: clarity was part of the arsenal of diversity. Black and white images are a highly refined aesthetic, assuming the appropriate skills and the courageous will not to be misunderstood. “Every order looks for its elite.” A sentence from Heynowski. A true sentence, it refers to the opportunities that an order grants to those artists who show themselves ready to work.

Günter Gaus once wrote. »Among old communists in the GDR, I always found the need to protect from critical inquiries what they had gained political control of after so many sacrifices and what they had made of it. This attitude contained an element of self-deception. Above all, it was a form of self-protection from those who owed their good, peaceful life to foreign heroism.” The years after German unification were years of rise and reckoning. It’s understandable that sweeping took place primarily in the east. Because with its end, the GDR could (had to!) finally be called by the correct name of the things that had brought about this end. For many, the question “Have we lived for nothing?” came onto the agenda. Heynowski also wrote about this.

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Honest concerns, however, had to deal with blanket sovereign behavior, with a Western self-assurance that seemed almost prosecutorial. The biographies of Christa Wolf and Bernhard Heisig and Stefan Heym were picked through with moral unquestioning. As if everything that was part of West German life from early on was human and acceptable. Be in the GDR? Stay in the GDR? Presumptuous style cut off paths to self-criticism and often only provoked the understandable defense against hostile devaluations, i.e. justifications.

H&S? Cold warriors! That’s the verdict. After 1990, this basic mood transformed the communist Walter Heynowski into a dignified silent man. He became silent, defiant, head held high. Silence conquered bitterness. There are postures in which you run the risk of overexerting yourself and you need help with balance. This is how literature is always created. This is how authors and readers emerge again and again. Writing and reading is about making unbearable things bearable. The reader always encounters himself in literature that truly captures him. In the autobiographical books that Heynowski wrote, one encounters a simple truth: nothing is deeper than one’s own biography. You stand in front of yourself and meet an unknown person. You suspect that from where you would like to remain silent, some important truths are constantly staring at you. This is how the simple truth becomes a labyrinth. Warming against the cold outside.

Gerhard Scheumann died in 1998. At a congress of film and television professionals towards the end of the GDR, he called out media whitewashing and ideological colorlessness and was outrageously insulted. Walter Heynowski has now died at the age of 96. His publisher reports that he was able to hold a copy of his second autobiographical book in his hands: “Generation in the Evening Light.” H&S was a legend who threw himself into fights for the sake of the truth. A work has been created whose didactic character seems to be from yesterday, but it can wait, in the certainty of a future that will ask for political truths behind the facades in a completely different way. I hear the word whistleblower and think of H&S too.

The second volume of Walter Heynowski’s memories, “Meander of Memory” (Das Neue Berlin, 352 pp., hard copy, €28) will be published on November 11th.