In the spring of 1972, the German-French spy series "The Red Chapel" ran on the ARD evening program.
Veteran director Franz Peter Wirth ("Operation Walküre") took care of the staging of the seven-part series, to which Westdeutscher Rundfunk alone, as the main producer, contributed three million Deutschmarks. The leading role was played by the aspiring television actor Werner Kreindl.
The plot focused on the activities of the Soviet spy Leopold Trepper (Kreindl), who headed an anti-Nazi agent network from Brussels and Paris from 1938 before falling into the hands of the German Abwehr in November 1942.
The series was, as they said at the time, a street sweeper, it achieved top ratings and was resold to Italy, Spain and England.
Then it was forgotten.
Andreas Kilb
Feuilleton correspondent in Berlin.
Follow I follow
Carl-Ludwig Rettinger's documentary “Die Rote Kapelle” has unearthed Franz Peter Wirth's directorial work from 1972.
It serves as illustrative material for the western half of the network that is still known today by the name given to it by the German secret service because it never found its own name for itself.
The eastern half of the “Red Chapel” was in Berlin;
It consisted of several loosely organized groups of friends around the couple Harnack, Schulze-Boysen, Kuckhoff and Coppi, whose members were arrested and mostly executed after the Brussels agent group and their radio code were exposed in autumn 1942.
A major part of socialist history politics
For them, too, there is a visual testimony in Rettinger's documentation that is intended to authenticate historical reality through fiction: the feature film "KLK an PTX - The Red Orchestra", which Horst E. Brandt shot as a series in the GDR in 1970. Brandt's film, a major project with a production cost of six million marks (East), which came into the cinemas with an epic 178 minutes running time, was a central part of socialist history politics. The Defa wanted to use it to prove that the German resistance had been controlled by the communist party apparatus that had gone into hiding before July 20. That is why the role of the “Rote Fahne” editor John Sieg was systematically exaggerated and that of the bourgeois intellectuals Harnack and Schulze-Boysen downplayed. The Marxist textbook jargon of the dialogues did the rest.
The transfiguration of the Soviet influence in "KLK an PTX" corresponded in the West German series to the belittling of the crimes of the Gestapo and the Abwehr. In Wirth, Trepper's opponents were portrayed as patriotic professionals, not as torturers and murderers. The Berlin resistanceists only appeared on the fringes as amateurs. Rettinger's film therefore continuously criticizes its fictional predecessors with a narrator's voice, while at the same time using it as an illustration. In order to create a counterbalance to the historical-political images from the past, he mixes them with historical film documents, interviews with descendants of those involved and today's recordings of the scenes of the event. Nevertheless, he does not escape the logic of the cinematic medium. A picture is only refuted by another picture,and such images are missing from Rettinger.