Kulenkampffs Schuhe (2018)

Regina Schilling recounts the postwar history of West Germany—the era of the economic miracle—through the lives of four people, which she tells in alternation. They are the biographies of her father, a Cologne druggist (1925–1973), and three television entertainers: Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff (1921–1998), Hans Rosenthal (1925–1987), and Peter Alexander (1926–2011). The youth of the four men, all born in the 1920s, coincided with the Nazi era, and their early adult lives were shaped by the war. Schilling’s father, Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff, and Peter Alexander served as soldiers; Hans Rosenthal was persecuted by the Nazi regime as a Jew and survived in hiding in a Berlin allotment-garden colony. A central point in the film is Adolf Hitler’s speech to district leaders in Reichenberg, in the Sudetenland, in December 1938, in which he describes the systematic incorporation of German youth into Nazi organizations from an early age: the German Young People, the Hitler Youth, the Labor Front, the SA, the SS, the NSKK, the Reich Labor Service, and the Wehrmacht. The Hitler quotation ends with the words: “... and they will not be free for the rest of their lives.” The documentary ends by repeating this sentence, which serves as a kind of motto. Kulenkampff’s Shoes consists entirely of archival footage. Using photographs, private Super 8 films made by her father, and excerpts from variety shows—above all Einer wird gewinnen (1964–1969 and 1979–1987) and Dalli Dalli (1971–1986)—the director first portrays the young Federal Republic from her own perspective, since watching television together was one of the cherished rituals of her childhood: “But on Saturday evenings, everything was all right: peacefully united in front of the television, we children freshly bathed and in our pajamas, our father behind us, smoking, with a beer, our mother with a sweet Moselle wine.” From the variety shows, Regina Schilling has selected sequences in which the three TV stars reveal something about their past, often so unexpectedly that viewers are taken aback. Kulenkampff, for instance, repeatedly slips brief comments about his wartime experiences into his hosting. Kulenkampff’s shoes, which give the film its title, come into focus in a shot where he is limping slightly. The reason was that during the Demyansk Pocket battle, Kulenkampff had amputated four frostbitten toes himself. For the director, the leather shoes he wore on the show “are a metaphor for this economic-miracle era, when the injuries of war were concealed behind a gleaming façade.” The film repeatedly interweaves these newly revealed traumatic experiences with images from everyday entertainment in West Germany. The difficulties of running his parents’ drugstores in Cologne are evoked through excerpts from the 1970 film Industrielandschaft mit Einzelhändlern, about the decline of a Hamburg druggist, played by Horst Tappert, who also belonged to the protagonists’ generation. Tappert’s and Martin Jente’s lives serve as further examples of the postwar era’s silences and repression. Jente had appeared as “Mr. Martin,” the television butler on Kulenkampff’s show Einer wird gewinnen. Tappert had been a member of the Waffen-SS, while Jente had been a member of the SS since 1933 and an adjutant at the Führer’s headquarters. Both facts became known only after the two TV stars had died. Robert Lembke, the host of the quiz show Was bin ich? (1955–1958 and 1961–1989), had a father of Jewish heritage and “hid on a farm in Bavaria during the last year of the war” (quote from the film). The comment on these facts, long kept secret, is: “No wonder nobody wanted to talk about the Nazi era and the war. Could people have worked together if they had known everything about one another?”