Is it still allowed to name a prize after Hans Abich?

The German Academy for Performing Arts and the 3sat broadcaster donated an award in the name of the festival co-founder at the Baden-Baden TV Film Festival in 2004.

Since then, the directors Edgar Reitz and Dominik Graf, the producer Nico Hofmann, the actress Senta Berger and the actor Matthias Brandt have won the award - all of them the top guards of the German film industry.

As director of Radio Bremen and program director of ARD, Abich himself shaped the local television history.

Before that, between 1948 and 1964, he was an important figure in West German post-war film: Film construction GmbH Göttingen, which he founded together with director Rolf Thiele, produced Wolfgang Liebeneiner's “Liebe 47”, one of the most important debris films, and Kurt Hoffmann's “Wir Wunderkinder “one of the few critical debates on the economic miracle mentality of those years.

Liebeneiner, however, had been production manager at Ufa and professor by Goebbels' grace under the Nazis, and Abich and Thiele had belonged to the NSDAP.

A judgment without weighing up

The film historian Armin Jäger takes this as an opportunity to demand that Abich be excluded from public memory in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. The namesake of the television game award, Jäger researched, was not only a party member, but at times also a research assistant in the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and editor of two National Socialist propaganda magazines. According to Jäger, Abich concealed this “fall into sin” as well as other earlier “little posts” in his questionnaire on denazification, and he had no fear of contact with Liebeneiner because he was “artistically impressed” by it.

For the film historian, the clues are sufficient to make a judgment: Abich's "unquestioned career" as the figurehead of television must "posthumously come to an end" - along with the award named after him. One can, however, interpret the facts differently. In contrast to Alfred Bauer, the founding director of the Berlinale, whose posthumous fall of the monument last year, Jäger's article measured up, Abich did not lie about his past. Radio Bremen was at the forefront of television progress when he was director, and by founding the Baden-Baden Festival, Abich gave television play that forum that German cinema lacks to this day.

The career of an ideological opportunist is different.

Reversing the award in his memory would therefore not be self-cleaning for the industry.

It would be an act of forgetting.