2024-10-05 09:29:14
“Herrhausen – Lord of Money” tells the story of the legendary CEO of Deutsche Bank, who was assassinated by the RAF in 1989. Like a spectacular ghost train ride through all the topics that still worry us today. Four hours worth every euro of contribution.
There are moments when he is completely with himself and visible to everyone, where he wants to be, needs to be, where he really is, not just in his eyes. Right in front. On the bicycle. Here it is, far behind him, the group of bodyguards. It’s always sunny there too. It looks like it’s flying. Carefree.
Until one day a delivery truck appeared next to him and men tried to pull him off his bicycle while he was driving until someone from Lebanon ordered them to stop. Alfred Herrhausen, CEO of Deutsche Bank, the “money lord”, as the “Spiegel” headlined, the “good person in the banking tower”, according to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, should not be kidnapped by the RAF.
Not long after he was murdered. On November 30, 1989, a seven-kilo bomb exploded on a street in Bad Homburg. The armored car flies through the air and stops on the other side of the road. Herrhausen dies after shrapnel cuts his femoral artery.
Every boomer from the West still has images of the Mercedes disaster in their heads, as well as wanted posters with faded black-and-white photos of the latest generation of terrorists. Who was really there that Thursday, just three weeks after the fall of the Wall, has not yet been clarified. Daniela Klette, arrested in February, is a suspect as is Burkhard Garweg, who is still wanted.
“Herrhausen – The Lord of Money” tells the story of the last two years of the life of the man whose shadow still falls on everyone at the top of Germany’s most important financial institution. Thomas Wendrich transcribed them, Pia Strietmann represented them in images. Wendrich received the screenplay award for multi-part series at the SeriesMania festival in Lille. With some justification.
His biopic, which rather spectacularly combines the portrait of a hunted man with spy thrillers, rumors, contemporary history and political, economic and terrorist, reflects in its structure perfectly the figure around which it revolves. And “Herrhausen” not only deceives through the nature of a dazzling numbers man, who was a philosopher, a visionary, who perceived changes with a very fine sense before others even suspected them, who overwhelmed himself like everyone else around him, obsessed with nightmares, traumas and fears.
Standing still is death
It’s a ghost train ride through an axial age and its phenomena that are more like our present than she thinks, and perhaps have more influence on her than she realizes or would like. “Standstill is death” was one of the central mottos of the life of the banker born in Essen in 1930 (along with “You must want power”). There is no stopping in Wendrich’s series either. This is their quality and perhaps their only problem.
We begin with the nightmare of the conservative anarchist (or the conservative anarchist). Herrhausen dreams of a Christmas party where he will be Santa Claus and the terrorists will turn it into a massacre. And with a real vision. In 1987, Herrhausen declared in New York that the countries now called the “Global South” should have their debts canceled for the benefit of all.
This makes it quite famous worldwide outside Frankfurt. But that doesn’t even get him many friends in Frankfurt or on the board of directors of his bank. He doesn’t have it anyway. The conferences in the semi-dark, windowless oak coffin of the meeting room, where this is revealed, where Oliver Masucci as Herrhausen plays with his colleagues, of whom he was by no means the boss, are already highlights in the history of television.
For all those born after and for what they take for granted, “Herrhausen” is – even aesthetically among other things – almost a training course for adults on contemporary history. They learn where they (or their parents) come from in an elegant way, never moralizing, never pedagogical. In the late 1980s only people with the imagination and mental agility of Alfred Herrhausen were aware of digitalisation, globalisation, sustainability, investment banking, politicisation, the moralisation of money and the need for women in management levels .
Herrhausen obtains a loan from Helmut Kohl for Gorbachev’s dissolution of the Soviet Union. Herrhausen’s Kafkaesque story at the center of the evil of the past is also a great television moment.
The fact that East and West, capitalism and communism are clearly separated is actually only discovered by the secret services, the CIA and the Stasi, who listen in real time to every word that Herrhausen exchanges with Kohl and the others. And that they want to prevent what Herrhausen is planning. And – here “Herrhausen” dances on the thin line of speculation – both make use of naive left-wing German terrorists who, in their delusion, do not even notice how they are being exploited in the dilapidated training camp in Lebanon.
“Herrhausen” takes part in a contemporary, biographical and dramaturgical war on multiple fronts. Losses must be suffered. As always, the first victims are the secondary characters.
They are – from Thomas Loibl as Herrhausen’s main opponent on the board of directors of Deutsche Bank, to Sascha Nathan’s wonderfully palatine Helmut Kohl, Ursula Strauss as Herrhausen’s secretary, Julia Koschitz as Herrhausen’s Frau Traudl and the particularly nice Franz Hartwig in the role of Herrhausen’s Stasi comrade, who likes the new system with the documents on the CDU party donations affair, so dense that they remain imprinted in the memory even with half a minute of television. Yet, curiously, precisely because they are so well chosen, if one wants to know more about them, they hardly go beyond the function they are supposed to fulfill in Herrhausen’s epic.
Now we have to say a few words about Oliver Masucci. He was once the returning leader in “He’s Back” and the administrator of the Jewish accounts driven mad by the Nazis in Philipp Stölzl’s “Schachnovelle.” As a hotel manager he failed to save Roman Polanski’s “The Palace”. Masucci looks nothing like Herrhausen, this rather thin and straight man in the eternal double-breasted suit with the always sharp side parting. It’s more physical, more virile.
But the way he manages to make it so that you, even as a boomer, can just imagine Herrhausen in Masucci’s physiognomy, in his way of articulating himself, in his way of opening his eyes, of entering a room explosively – which is worth already a television award. Like the rest of “Herrhausen”.
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