Thomas Claus used to climb the Goethe Tower in the city forest a few times with his now grown-up son.

After the fire in this Frankfurt landmark in October 2017, Rosemarie Heilig (Die Grünen), head of the environmental department (Die Grünen), commissioned the filmmaker to document the construction of the new Goetheturm on film, Claus enthusiastically threw himself into the project.

The result is more than the 25-minute film "The Goethe Tower - a new landmark in Frankfurt".

In the course of his research, Claus also reconstructed the until then completely forgotten story of the Jewish department store entrepreneur Gustav Gerst, who donated the money for the Goethe Tower in 1931.

Claus will soon be flying to New York to interview one of Gerst's great-nephews, who knew the department store operator.

Claus wants to use this and other material to create a documentary film about the Frankfurt benefactor.

"Learning by doing" was the motto

Filming was not actually part of the life of Claus, who was born in Dresden in 1963.

At a socialist elite school with a focus on mathematics and physics, he was to be trained to become a computer science hero.

But the rebellious youngster was more interested in the music of Frank Zappa or "Ton Steine ​​Scherben" and rejected the GDR system, which is why there were unpleasant encounters with Stasi representatives.

Claus refused military service, instead he had to serve as a "construction soldier" for the socialist fatherland.

After all, he was able to do an apprenticeship as a sheet metal worker and then ended up as a technician at the Dresden theater, where critical theater was cultivated.

There he made his first experiences with Super 8 film in an independent film group.

In 1988 he got a job as a lighting technician at the Dresden Defa studio for animated films and worked his way up to become a screenwriter and director.

He shot his first own film in the period from reunification to German reunification.

On the night of October 3, 1990, when the end of the GDR was sealed, he sent a camera team to a workers' pub in Dresden, where the guests sat spellbound in front of the television.

Back then, the determined anti-fascist Claus saw people for the first time raise their right arm in a Nazi salute.

In 1991 he founded a film production company with two friends.

"Learning by doing" was the motto.

In fact, orders kept coming in until one of the partners shot a feature film against Claus' will in 2001, which failed with the audience and cost the company a lot of money.

At that time, Claus said goodbye to the company, moved to Berlin because of his future wife and started his own production.

Since then he has made numerous films, mainly on archaeological themes, mostly commissioned by museums.

Although Claus never studied archeology, he is now well versed in many eras of human history.

Carl maintains a particularly close connection with the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle, for which he has made numerous films about the Nebra Sky Disc exhibited there.

The filmmaker, who has lived in Frankfurt since 2012, sees himself as an archeology mediator, but also deals with other topics.

For example, he created a film with Bayerischer Rundfunk entitled "He called himself Y - the unknown AR Penck" about the painter Penck, who came from the GDR.

Another project is also pending in Frankfurt: a film about the city forest, which came into the city's possession 750 years ago.