If you enter the word "sawal" in a search engine, you will get your own name and company name, but you will not get the meaning it has in a story by Wolfgang Kohlhaase.

It says “life” there, and only two people understand it: a Dutch physics student named Straat in a German camp in 1944 and a kapo, who is being taught Persian by this young man.

An invented Persian, because Straat has no idea about the language, he just intuitively seized an opportunity to offer himself to someone who has power over him, he invented a chance of survival that is actually completely unthinkable.

Unless someone comes up with it, as was the case with the story The Invention of a Language.

It was published in 1977 in the GDR in a volume entitled "Silvester mit Balzac".

In 2019 a film was made out of it: “Persian Lessons” by Vladimir Perelman.

Wolfgang Kohlhaase knew a lot about life because he was young at a time when everything was new.

He was born in Berlin in 1931, so in 1945 he was just about to stand on his own two feet, and many years later he marveled at this coincidence of "puberty and world history".

"Everything that came after that, up to the present day, I can't separate from that spring of '45." Generational experiences then also played a major role in his work.

He became perhaps the most important screenwriter for DEFA, the state film company in the GDR.

Together with the director Gerhard Klein, Kohlhaase was responsible for some of the most important titles from the early phase of the workers' and farmers' state: "A Berlin Romance" (1956) and "Berlin - corner Schönhauser" (1957).

One could find an attitude to life there that had nothing to do with the ideological rhetoric of the regime and the increasing restrictions on freedoms.

Kohlhaase's characters would also have had a place in the Italian cinema of the time, apart perhaps from an idealism that seemed like a bright shadow of the official slogans for the future.

"Berlin around the corner" (1965) then fell victim to the 11th plenary session of the Central Committee of the SED and could not be performed until 1990.

Kohlhaase remained a key figure in GDR cinema even during the Honecker years, now with Konrad Wolf as the new artistic partner.

In "I Was Nineteen" (1968) it was about the key moment of 1945 again. And in "The Naked Man on the Sports Field" (1974) you can see the fundamental difference between a socialist cinema and commercial entertainment in the West as well as maybe nowhere else in a GDR film.

In "Solo Sunny" the tension between the individual and the general public shifted even more clearly into conflict.

With “Der Bruch” (1990) by Frank Beyer, the experiences of 1945 and 1989 merged.

Always worked "without a trick".

Wolfgang Kohlhaase once said of himself as a narrator that he always worked “without tricks”.

He didn't need dramaturgical formulas or psychologically manipulative logic to build up tension.

With his relaxed self-evidence and his pragmatism, he found excellent opportunities to continue working in reunified Germany.

He now had an important collaboration with Andreas Dresen, which also led to an ambitious project such as a film adaptation of Clemens Meyer’s great Wende novel “Als wir traumten” or to the hit “Sommer vorm Balkon” (2004), in which one could see something like a search for traces of the experiences of "Berlin - corner Schönhauser".

In the 30 years after 1989, Wolfgang Kohlhaase was more in demand than ever.

Unfortunately, Wolfgang Kohlhaase did not write an autobiography.

The book "Around the corner into the world" is more of a hodgepodge, it has to be enough - alongside all the films and texts - to remember him.

Wolfgang Kohlhaase died in Berlin on Wednesday at the age of 91.