Walter Kaufmann: From sailor to seer

Adventure? Nowadays? How do we still perceive the world? By plane we hurriedly and listlessly cross war fields, disaster areas and famine savannas. The passenger flying far above is only concerned about the level of service and is worried about the connecting flight. The dwarfing of travel into transport – it has brought all shores and distances closer together. More and more people are falling into the fatal obsession that adventure art can be imitated as Sunday tourism.

Life and work of reporter Walter Kaufmann, born on January 19, 1924, died in 2021: On the road became his fate – and his profession. Ruhrpott, London, Australia (“the shock of these great, great distances went through me there”), and finally the GDR. But his true home was the world. And writing about it. From Japan to New York, from Rio to Calcutta. At the outbreak of war in 1939 he was an adolescent emigrant, then an enemy alien, then an Australian labor soldier; He became a laundry driver, dock worker, wedding photographer and 1956 Olympic attaché for the joint German team in Melbourne.

Every good report warns: Always staying within your own walls – that would be paranoia. And it’s true, at home I’m too close to myself, and being bossy and narrow-minded can add up to a depressing burden. After reading Kaufmann, you will know a little more about the benefit of traveling to places where you don’t belong. And to stay there until you become a little strange to yourself. There is no existence without distance.

Kaufmann’s Jewish father was a proud German, well-off lawyer in Duisburg, whom the Nazis suddenly refused to allow him to attend the inauguration of a war memorial. Shock, disbelief, slowly percolating realization: bad times. When the synagogues burn and his parents’ house is devastated, Walter climbs out of the cellar and sees a lonely, beautiful painting on the wall of the room: “Two Women in the Rain.” Smashes it onto the floor: “Beauty, I thought, she has no place here anymore!” For a long time, it remains inexplicable to him why the – wealthy! – Parents did not emigrate in time.

When Kaufmann returned to Duisburg in the mid-1950s, he was struck by anti-Semitism that spiraled: Yes, we knew that his parents were “away” at the time. That’s right, they traveled – to Auschwitz. Kaufmann’s decision: Just get away from this still deep brown West Germany!

What attracts him is the desire to develop in the East. When he said goodbye, his father’s former secretary, “a woman with a stiff look,” gave him a file he had left behind, which contained an adoption notice: the parents were not his biological parents at all. Shock. Frozen, confusion. Then the inner composure – from then on he stubbornly searches for his mother, a Polish Jew; he follows the path meticulously to Berlin’s gray, low Mulackstrasse. The reporter conducts research on his own behalf – but he never learns the fate of the woman who brought him into this world.

When I think of the writer’s life story, I think of Volker Braun’s thoughts about the 20th century: “If its realizations did not amount to devastation, it did not consume the ideas like the bodies or, worse said, realize the ideas by consuming the bodies “Despite or because of his experiences, Kaufmann remained a hopeful, an upright person, a person of solidarity. The strong guy must have always been a power charmer at all times; and his travel literature was an opportunity for readers in the cramped GDR to empathically exalt their own contemporaries.

As a reporter, he was an artist of combining cosmopolitanism in travel destinations and cosmopolitanism in the image of people. The books “In the Flow of Time. On three continents”, “My longing is still on the way. A life on the road” proves this. His working principle? Approach the “heart of things” carefully. Where the spiritually and socially lofty and profound can be found. Trust was probably the key word between this reporter and his interlocutors. In political hotspots such as Northern Ireland. At the trial of US civil rights activist Angela Davis; In 1972 he was there as a reporter and witnessed their acquittal. The moving story of the Israeli tank officer who witnesses a Palestinian suicide attack degrades himself in this shock and from then on, disturbed, goes in search of the thoughts and feelings of his (supposed) enemies.

After the collapse of the SED state, he wanted to return to Australia as his first frightened reaction to the new political order. On a Berlin house wall he saw a gallows made of chalk and a sign with the name Gregor Gysi on a rope. Therefore: away! No, that’s why: “I’m staying!” Kaufmann stayed in Germany, remained true to his family and his way: this defiance, this steeled attitude, to look the accursed things in the face.

A novel invents life. The report finds it. Why do we care about found life? Because we search ourselves – and without success? You don’t see it, the river of history that carries you along, whirls you around, washes you somewhere – but every good report conveys this dilemma to us as a tickling experience. Seume, Bechstein, Dumas, Kisch, Troller, Granin, Hemingway, Chatwin, Kapuściński, Nooteboom, Gauß, Stasiuk, Koeppen, Büscher, Villain, Scherzer. Also a merchant.

At the English boarding school, the 15-year-old fantasist once raved to all his classmates about his trips to India, Africa and other exotic countries. Until someone says: lie! A “student court” meets and pronounces the punishment: a fight with someone stronger in the group. Merchant, defeated, bleeding, but stubborn: “… and one day I’ll see them, the whole world!”

And he saw her! In his life he had his hands in machine oil, he slept with the homeless, he knew the dirt of various circumstances. During his time as a sailor, his favorite thing was to paint the outside of the ship. In seafaring this is called “pönen”. He liked to paint the chimneys. He pissed and they called him Picasso. Picasso, the sailor. Walter Kaufmann, the clear-sighted narrator: a seer.

“Walter Kaufmann” is showing in the Berlin cinema “Toni” this Friday, January 19th, at 6 p.m. What a life!”, a documentary (2021) by Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies.