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Exactly 75 years ago today, Götz George saw his father for the last time.
The seven-year-old drove with his mother, the actress Berta Drews, from the south-west of Berlin, where the Georges lived in Wannsee, to the north-east, to Hohenschönhausen.
The Soviet secret police maintained a special camp there for “hostile elements”, and Heinrich George had been interned there since the end of the war, under the charge of being one of the “most respected fascist artists”.
Berta Drews drove to Hohenschönhausen once a week in the hope of being able to see her husband.
If a meeting came about, it was at the camp entrance and only a few precious minutes.
December 6, 1945 was a cold, foggy day, and luck was with the Georges: “He comes towards us with sweeping strides,” Drews recalled in her memoir.
“The little one flies on his neck.” There are only memories of the mother, none of the son.
“All of that has been suppressed by me,” Götz said much later.
What he remembered very well was his first beating.
He was four or five years old, he said much later, and probably cheeky to his mother.
The father laid him on a bench in the bathroom and spanked his bum with a riding crop.
In the mirror he then looked at the red and yellow stripes, the sight "impressed itself like a brand".
Heinrich with the three-year-old Götz, 1942
Source: picture alliance
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Then there is another memory, again from the mother.
The Hebbel Theater in Berlin was looking for a twelve-year-old for a key role, and the director - an ex-colleague of Heinrich - fell for his son.
Götz went to work with enthusiasm and stayed next to the big O.E.
Hate brave.
No sooner had the curtain fallen than he stormed towards his mother: “Was I as good as Heinrich?” Less than a year later the boy was standing on the boards of the Schiller Theater (which his father had directed) and played the son in “Götz von Berlichingen ”(the parade role of the father).
“Götz”, that was - according to statements from camp inmates - the last word Heinrich George had spoken on earth.
Fear and affection.
Role model and demarcation.
Continuation of the family tradition and competition within the family.
There was a lot of talk at Götz George about his father, against whose larger size he alluded, but that was always an obvious claim.
There was no serious investigation of the thesis, not even coherent statements by Götz about it, just snippets scattered over decades.
Thomas Medicus has finally got down to it in his double biography "Heinrich and Götz George - two lives" (Rowohlt, Berlin, 26 euros).
There are actually two separate biographies because the two lives practically do not overlap.
On their own, neither is spectacular; there have been enough separate books.
The interesting thing is the attempt at a psychogram of the son in the mirror of the father.
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Why, asks Medicus rightly, was Horst Buchholz occupied as a gang leader in the legendary “youngsters” and not Götz George?
At 18, he was closer to the Filmalter des Oberrowdies (19) than 23-year-old Buchholz;
both had played in theaters in Berlin and had some film experience.
The answer is likely to lie in the image: Buchholz was the brash working-class boy from Neukölln, George was still the son from a good family.
In Göttingen, where he was studying drama, he is said to have walked around with a bag that contained records made by his father, and he is said to have viewed his films with a projector.
The father as an object of study.
George 1964 in "Herrenpartie", on the left behind him Hans Nielsen and Rudolf Platte
Source: ullstein bild / Getty Images
A cord cut had to be twofold, from the father and his prominent role in National Socialism.
"Hitlerjunge Quex", Jud Suss "," The Degenhardts "," Kolberg "- no other star had been so hired for propaganda, no other had thanked God in his theater for the salvation of Hitler on July 20th, no other a month Signed an appeal to hold out before the end of the war.
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Götz George distanced himself with film roles.
In “Kirmes” (1960) he plays a young deserter who shoots himself because none of the adults has the courage to protect him from the armed forces' henchmen.
In “Mensch und Bestie” (1963) he is locked in a concentration camp by the Gestapo;
the security guard who shot him trying to escape is his brother.
And in “Herrenpartie” (1964) he and a choir found themselves on vacation on the Adriatic in a strange village that only consists of women - all men, it turns out, were murdered as partisans by the Wehrmacht during the war.
George is the youngest in "Herrenpartie", any of the others could be his father.
Here he is the link between the war-terrified, good youth of the fifties and the sixty-eighties.
He is distant from the World War II generation and criticizes.
But nothing more.
He does not take part in the patricide of the New German Cinema.
Instead, he starts a gallery of monsters.
The first is Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commandant, in 1977 in “From a German Life”.
George plays him rigid as if in a corset, a body armor.
The term comes from Klaus Theweleit's “male fantasies” and explains the behavior of German soldiers in World War II, this encirclement of all feelings in their uniform, their tank.
Höß belongs to the "generation of the unconditional" who grew up fatherless during the First World War and who distinguished themselves under National Socialism through a particularly cold feeling.
Götz George as a concentration camp commandant in "From a German Life"
Source: picture alliance / United Archive
Götz George also grew up without a father.
He too cannot be explained without his body, just as his father could not be separated from his body.
And yet, as much as they used it as an instrument of representation, the body was one of their most important differences.
It was not for nothing that the Berlichingen was Heinrich's star role: The “then epitome of the German man”, is how medicus characterizes him, “physically and well mannered coarse, but true to the heart;
uncouth and quick-tempered;
hand amputated, but invincible. "
Götz George has hardened his body all his life, you just have to see him in some "Schimanski" episodes in his slip.
He could have given German cinema the physical masculinity of Steve McQueen or Jean-Paul Belmondo if German cinema had not despised physical masculinity.
Götz wasn't a "Götz", his body was athletic, agile, light-footed.
Not a body of persistence, but one of change;
that of a society ready to change, not an authoritarian one.
This is Schimanski's body, but also that of Uhu Zigeuner in “Rossini” and Hermann Willié in “Schtonk!”.
But it is expressly not the body of his monsters, of Rudolf Höß, of Fritz Haarmann (in "Totmacher") and of Josef Mengele (in "Nothing but Truth").
Götz George evidently felt the need to play these perpetrators, and he even invested a million marks from his private fortune in the Mengele film.
In a WELT AM SONNTAG interview afterwards, George spoke of the fact that there was only one last monster missing, Adolf Hitler "in the last phase of his life, in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery".
One can now compare Götz George and Bruno Ganz in spirit.
One can also compare Günter Lamprecht and Götz George in spirit, because Fassbinder would have preferred to see George in the role of Biberkopf for his "Berlin Alexanderplatz" film adaptation;
that failed for unexplored reasons.
Above all, one could have compared father and son directly, Heinrich in the version from 1931 and Götz in the version from 1980. Perhaps the son was still pinching back then.
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Götz had to turn 75 before he faced the direct comparison.
In the docudrama "George" he played his father, with black and white scenes (with Heinrich) being faded into color sequences (with Götz as Heinrich).
It is these transitions that suggest a continuity - and as far as Götz is concerned, they are not so wrong.
Family peace restored: the parents Berta Drews and Heinrich George
Source: picture alliance / dpa
Three quarters of a century after his death, "George" is a posthumous acquittal for Heinrich, both in front of history and in front of his son.
Heinrich George, an apolitical artist who got innocently under the wheels of history.
Götz George, who harmonizes family historiography into one image, somewhere between the mother's transfiguring memoirs, the painful scraps of his own memories and the endless public debates that had led to an official Russian rehabilitation.
It was an arrangement in the self-awareness of stepping out of the shadows;
After the actor's award for “Totmacher” in Venice, George attested that he was now “out of the district class”.
At the end of a long journey, Götz George answered the subliminally decisive question of the young Federal Republic of how the sons feel about their fathers with exculpation and the restoration of family peace - very different from Thomas Harlan, Veit's son.
Thomas finishes his last book by assuming his father's guilt: “Father, you lover, obdurate, listen!
I made your film.
I made a terrible movie.
I made 'Jud Suss'. "