Presented in Association with the Goethe Institute, San Francisco
Eberhard Fechner, hailed by critics as the foremost author/director of German television, began his career as an actor and went on to produce the first of his many TV features in 1967. In the last decade, Fechner has developed a “panorama of German society from 1900-1975” through a series of six documentaries, each dealing with a different aspect of German society. Five of the six films are developed through lengthy interviews taped without prior research in order to preserve spontaneity; a sixth uses actors and is based on the autobiography of Walter Kempowski. We will be showing the first four films in the series: Testimonials for Klara Heydebreck (1969), a portrait of a woman and an era, initiated by police reports of her suicide and developed through interviews with those who knew her; Class Picture (1970), revealing interviews with members of a 1937 graduating class; Under Landmark Protection (1973), inspired by a key left in the front door of an elegant apartment building which proved to be a clue to a family history from the turn of the century through the Second World War to the present; and Tadelloeser & Wolff (Right Or Wrong: My Country) (1974), based on the autobiography of the son of a small businessman in the port city of Rostock. Not being shown are Life's Key Dates (1975), an attempt to chronicle the everyday lives of Berliners by focusing on important moments: birth, marriage, retirement, death; and The Comedian Harmonists (1976), which studies the lives of a world famous singing troupe which flourished between 1927 and 1935 but was forced to disband because three of its members were Jewish. Ronald Holloway writes, “The Fechner cycle of documentaries and semi-documentaries opens up perspectives on a people and a nation.... Information of enormous range and depth is placed before the viewer to reflect on. Patterns of thinking become apparent, life-styles visibly emerge, and, on occasion, truths are certified in candid, revealing terms. And through it all runs an introspection, a private and public calling-to-account for the past....”
