2023-04-30 12:20:24
DThe one who took cameraman Michael Ballhaus under his wing when he got his first permanent job at the SWF in Baden-Baden in the late 1950s was the station’s in-house director, a man named Peter Lilienthal. You have to say it like that today, because posthumous fame was distributed extremely unfairly: Ballhaus, the famous cameraman for Fassbinder and Scorsese – but who was Peter Lilienthal?
He appears extensively in Ballhaus’ autobiography. “Lilienthal had a completely different style than the people I usually met at work,” writes Ballhaus. “He was a few years older than me and he had experienced a lot more. When the family had to flee because she was Jewish, his mother hid her jewelry in a laundry bag; as the Lilienthals were a wealthy family, these were diamonds. The inspector did not discover them when they left the country. They took a ship to Uruguay and, thanks to the jewelry, their mother opened a small hotel in Montevideo.” In which little Peter never had his own room, but always lived in whatever was free at the time.
Lilienthal returned to Europe in his mid-twenties, studied in Paris (where he could mostly be found in the Cinemathèque) and in Berlin at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, and spent the first half of the sixties at Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden, almost one at the time ex-territorial, quota-free oasis where he learned the directing trade (and met Ballhaus, who photographed six of his films).
In 1971, Peter Lilienthal – a descendant of the aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal – founded the “Filmverlag der Autor” together with Wim Wenders, Hark Bohm and ten other directors. The contract they signed in the third year of the social-liberal coalition opposed the old industry with an anti-model; it was no longer the case that individual private entrepreneurs were to produce films; instead, all members of the publishing house would become “entrepreneurs”.
Each member – whether director, writer, cinematographer or composer – was entitled to author’s royalties, but undertook to invest the 45 percent of the profits they would receive in new films. Another 45 percent of the profit would be collected by the publisher and – by majority decision of the delegates – made available to other authors for their projects.
Counterpoint to Volker Schlöndorff
It was the cinematic equivalent of student rebellion against their fathers. But Lilienthal was actually a foreign body in film publishing. He had no reason to rebel against his father. On the contrary, he had liquidated the villa in Berlin’s Grunewald forest in 1939 and fled with his family just in time. In this way, Peter Lilienthal became the least native of all the members of the “New German Film”, the antithesis to Volker Schlöndorff, who meanwhile accepted his “Germanness” in all shades.
But when the “young filmmaker” Lilienthal switched to the cinema at 40, he was shooting in London with a Franco-American (Eddie Constantine), and his hero was an Italian anarchist in exile: “Malatesta”. And in the 1970s, when more democracy dared in Germany and this democracy was attacked with bombs, Lilienthal was far away in his films. “La Victoria” portrayed Chile shortly before the Pinochet coup (which killed Lilienthal’s leading lady, Paula Moya).
In Portugal, “It reigns calm in the country” was written about the oppression of the population in a country ruled by the military – barely veiled: Chile. And “The Uprising” traced the Sandinista uprising against the dictator Somoza. Yes, these films were set far away, but there was also a “home front” where the right government committed to the wrong regime and vice versa: Franz-Josef Strauss courted Pinochet, and Erich Honecker offered asylum to those persecuted by Pinochet.
Lilienthal’s “heroes” come from the poorer middle class and want a quiet life. But times won’t let her. In “David” (Golden Bear winner 1979), the 18-year-old title character is desperately looking for a way to escape from Germany after the pogrom night. In “Dear Mr. Wonderful”, a bar owner in New York is robbed of his life’s work by real estate speculators. And Lilienthal’s last film “Camilo – The Long Road to Disobedience” documents the life of the US Army’s first deserter from the Iraq War.
In 1995 Edgar Reitz shot “The Night of the Directors”, in which he told the history of German film to mark the 100th anniversary of cinema. He conducted many individual interviews, including with Kluge, Herzog, Wenders, Schlöndorff and, of course, with Lilienthal. Since of course he never got them all together in one place, he put them together digitally – and reaped an enormous scandal. “Peter Lilienthal,” Reitz recalls in his memoirs, “who would have refused to appear in the same room as Riefenstahl in the analogue world, found the coincidental proximity to the Nazi director intolerable, even in the virtual world.”
Lilienthal’s grandfather, whom nine-year-old Peter saw for the last time on the morning of farewell in Grunewald, bore the first name Siegfried Israel, an expression of the Jewish attempt at assimilation into Wilhelm’s Reich. His grandson learned the following lesson from this: “No false assimilation, stay on the move, reject any kind of belonging to a nation, flee rather than attack.” Lilienthal had lived in Munich for many years and felt comfortable there. But not native. He died there at the age of 95.
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