His work was a provocation, his very existence a scandal, Klaus Lemke has remained a show-off and a loudmouth even in his old age - even if he put all his audacity into his voice and into every microphone that was held out to him, every camera that was on he was judged, said again that German film, indeed the whole German subsidy culture, was “good, banal, soothing, civil servants, frigid, for sale, museum-like and your own fault”: Then he didn’t necessarily give the impression of a nice and friendly man .

But he had to be that harsh and unforgiving.

After all, he was embraced more and more tenderly by this well-behaved and bureaucratic culture in his last years.

Which he couldn't allow himself to be corrupted by.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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But the people who worked with him, the actresses, musicians and cameramen, loved him – which, for everyone to see, also applied vice versa.

Ever since he was young, Klaus Lemke has always made films with young people.

And the more he distanced himself from his youth, purely in terms of age, the more the eyes of his films felt drawn to this youth;

sometimes it seemed like he didn't need much more plot for his films than just the will to watch boys be young.

Klaus Lemke died on Thursday – and of course those who survive him have the consolation that if the creator dies, the works will remain.

Except that with Lemke the person, the director and author of these films, was always an integral part of the works.

His last film had just premiered at the Munich Film Festival.

"Champagne for the eyes - poison for the rest" is his name;

it's a kind of retrospective look at the films and the circumstances from which they were made.

And the stories that Lemke tells about filmmaking as the art of bluffing, stacking up and gambling not only have depth and great coherence.

They also justify all of Lemke's tantrums against the subsidy culture that is obedient to the authorities.

Life as raw material

Anyone who is old enough and was lucky enough to study in Munich in the early 1980s could observe the permeable borders between Lemke's life and the cinema very directly in the "Capri" café on Leopoldstrasse, where Lemke, when he wasn't turned around, hanging out with his people and collecting life like a resource.

His friend Richard L. Wagner wrote poems that were about regular customers.

Lemke discovered his future cinema heroes.

And vice versa, the films that he formed from the raw material aimed at the effect that viewers wanted to transform their own lives into a Lemke film.

Hardly any other filmmaker of his generation has remained as true to himself as Klaus Lemke.

Even his first film, called Little Front, was about a couple of boys coming out of the theater where Howard Hawks' big game hunter film Hatari! was running;

then they drive out into the countryside and because there are no big game to hunt in Upper Bavaria, they catch trout and try to talk as cool and sophisticated as John Wayne and Hardy Krüger at Howard Hawks.

American films, body cinema, action and dialogue with double bottom: That was what he aligned his ambitions with.

The Manifesto of Oberhausen, the so-called Young German Film, which referred to it: Lemke rejected all of that even then, as the art of the teachers, with whom he wanted nothing to do.

Even if he shared a longing for America with the young Wenders and a dislike for the stuffy narrative norms of German cinema with the young Kluge.

Except that he drew different conclusions from it.

His thriller "48 Hours to Acapulco" from 1967 "came from the envious admiration for a cinema that is free of all deposits from other arts and art ideas", wrote Frieda Grafe at the time.

However, Peter Berling, then a producer, pointed out that it was just as important to shoot in fancy locations and meet beautiful and famous women along the way.

However, nothing came of Brigitte Bardot, whom he would have liked to have cast.

His thriller "48 Hours to Acapulco" from 1967 "came from the envious admiration for a cinema that is free of all deposits from other arts and art ideas", wrote Frieda Grafe at the time.

However, Peter Berling, then a producer, pointed out that it was just as important to shoot in fancy locations and meet beautiful and famous women along the way.

However, with Brigitte Bardot, whom he would have liked to have cast, nothing came of it.

His thriller "48 Hours to Acapulco" from 1967 "came from the envious admiration for a cinema that is free of all deposits from other arts and art ideas", wrote Frieda Grafe at the time.

However, Peter Berling, then a producer, pointed out that it was just as important to shoot in fancy locations and meet beautiful and famous women along the way.

However, with Brigitte Bardot, whom he would have liked to have cast, nothing came of it.

Klaus Lemke, born in 1940 in Landsberg an der Warthe, which was still Prussia at the time, grew up in Düsseldorf and was a very Munich director – even if the 1972 Hamburg film “Rocker” is considered by many admirers to be his best.

Amateurs play the leading roles;

they know what to say themselves, they don't need a script for that: Lemke later said he wasn't the author of the film, but Hamburg held the copyright.

But it was his Munich films, it was "Idole", "Sweethearts", "Amore", for which he was famous and loved by a young audience.

They were the very simple stories he had borrowed from westerns on the one hand and The Lost Illusions on the other: A stranger comes to town.

And challenges them.

Which was very Munich and at the same time of universal validity.

The sense of beautiful bodies

He was never a great stylist.

He didn't have the time or the budget for an elaborate mise en scène, if only because he despised film funding.

What was available to him instead was a sense of body, a flair for voices, a strong awareness that beauty is both: a grace.

And a product whose manufacturing conditions he knew very well.

So he made Cleo Kretschmer, a not particularly elegant girl from Lower Bavaria, a star.

Malakoff Kowalski, who wrote the music for Lemke's later films, says that the best thing was when a film was finished and Lemke sent the DVDs with a typewritten letter and colorful felt-tip pen drawings;

and all lightly sprayed with Lemke's perfume.

Marked with "Kisses, K." Without him, what will become of the German film?