Gundolf S. Freyermuth moderating the workshop discussion with director Johannes F. Sievert after the screening of the documentary “Open Wounds – A Journey through German Genre Films” (directed by Dominik Graf and Johannes F. Sievert, Germany, 2017). From left to right: Roger Fritz, Lisa Gotto, Johannes F. Sievert, and Gundolf S. Freyermuth. April 13, 2017, Lecture Hall/Cinema, Cologne Game Lab, 5:30–8:00 pm. Credits: https://en.freyermuth.com/2017/04/16/april-2017-open-wounds-a-journey-through-german-genre-films/
The following post is offered by Prof. Johannes F. Sievert who had the pleasure of learning from Prof. Em. Dr. Gundolf S. Freyermuth during his film education at the ifs. Gundolf S. Freyermuth has remained an important influence on his work as a filmmaker. After university, Gundolf S. Freyermuth generously gave a remarkable interview for the documentary OFFENE WUNDE DEUTSCHER Film (Open Wound), lending the project a perspective of lasting value.
Check out his contribution below:
Interview from Offene Wunde deutscher Film — “Open Wounds: A Journey through German Genre Films”
Gundolf S. Freyermuth = gsf
Johannes F. Sievert = jfs
jfs: Let’s get started. My first question: do you have memories of German films from your youth, and what did German cinema mean to you back then?
gsf: My experience of German films in childhood was defined above all by watching the local movie theaters disappear. There were three or four cinemas within walking distance of where I grew up, and within the space of two or three years, every single one of them had been converted into a supermarket. That’s really the formative experience of my cinematic youth. In a broader sense, I belong to the first television generation. I was born in 1955, and around 1960, when I was five or six, my grandparents and then my parents got a TV set. All my early encounters with film happened entirely on television — mostly American TV series. Cinema didn’t re-enter my life until puberty, when going to the movies meant something quite different.
jfs: Do you remember the first things on TV or in the cinema that really made an impression on you — something you’d spontaneously associate with the medium?
gsf: Those are really two separate questions. On television, the defining experiences were American series — things like Perry Mason or Mr. Terrific, which made a huge impression on me as a kid. As for cinema, that chapter didn’t open until I was about sixteen, seventeen, eighteen — so in the early seventies, which was precisely when art house cinemas began appearing in mid-sized and larger German cities, especially university towns. That’s when my real film education started. It was also a turning point: television belonged to my childhood, and cinema became central in my later school years and early years at university. Everyone I knew was going to the movies two or three times a week, and we all pretty much stopped watching TV.
jfs: Was the New German Cinema important to you, or were you drawn more to international films?
gsf: Both, in the early seventies. On one hand, there were the new German films — Fassbinder above all, if I have to single someone out. Fassbinder, but also more accessible fare like Zur Sache, Schätzchen. But the more exciting discovery was something else entirely: American cinema from the thirties and forties. These were films that, for obvious reasons, had never reached Germany during those decades. They hadn’t been dubbed yet, so they were screened in the original or with subtitles — and that was an enormously formative experience. I was captivated by films like Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity. I watched them with a kind of hunger, as though I were discovering a world I hadn’t known existed. It then took me another three or four years to realize that many of those American films had actually been made by Germans or German-speaking émigré filmmakers. That was the moment when directors like Billy Wilder and Michael Curtiz were being rediscovered, and it suddenly became clear that these quintessentially American films had largely been created by people who had started their careers in German-speaking cinema.
jfs: Can you describe what it was about those films that excited you — what set them apart from everything else?
gsf: Looking back, I’d call it a feeling of unfamiliar familiarity. They were foreign — faster, somehow better — even though I had no formal film education at the time to articulate why. But they were of a completely different quality from anything I knew from German television or what remained of German cinema. By the sixties, German film had been largely reduced to Karl May adaptations, Edgar Wallace thrillers, and sex comedies — those were the last big hits before the cinemas turned into supermarkets. The New German Cinema didn’t really get going until the late sixties, and for a while it didn’t even reach theaters in Hanover, where I grew up; it arrived with a delay of three or four years, once art house cinemas began to open. So those American films were unlike anything I knew — and yet they had a strange familiarity about them. I think that came from my childhood exposure to American TV series like Perry Mason, which were essentially diluted versions of film noir. In a way, I’d started with the watered-down imitations on television and worked my way back to the originals — which is probably why they felt oddly familiar when I finally encountered them.
jfs: What were the films and TV series on German television that shaped you most?
gsf: From early childhood, I remember things like Augsburger Puppenkiste. But as I got older and was allowed to watch TV in the evenings, it was mostly American and British series — Perry Mason, The Avengers, that sort of thing. And those series had been dubbed by people like Vincent Lüdeke, who did such extraordinary work that when you later heard the American originals, you realized the German versions were essentially new creations rather than translations. I loved them. So yes — I was very much a TV kid in the sixties, part of the first generation to grow up with television. Born in ’55, German TV launched in ’53, and by the time I was five or six we had a set in the house. I watched constantly, right up until puberty, when cinema took over.
jfs: So cinema was a kind of rediscovery for you — one that coincided with puberty.
gsf: Exactly, though the sequence was the reverse of what you might expect. My formative early experiences were with television, and then I transitioned to cinema. Partly it was simply about getting older — you went to the movies, especially if you wanted to take someone on a date. But it also coincided with the emergence of the art house cinema movement in university towns and mid-sized cities. I remember exactly when the Apollo Cinema opened in Hanover. It completely transformed the experience of going to the movies, because it wasn’t just about the films — it was about the places themselves. These weren’t mass-market venues; they were gathering spots, often with a bar attached. You didn’t just show up for the screening — you came early, stayed late, and talked about what you’d seen. And naturally, they screened very different things from the mainstream cinemas. One of the most formative experiences for me was encountering those American films from the thirties and forties, which I initially assumed were purely American productions. They were shown in the original or with subtitles. It wasn’t until the seventies that I discovered many had been directed by filmmakers who had begun their careers in the German film industry before emigrating.
jfs: Could you say more about what fascinated you most about those films — what made them so different from German cinema?
gsf: At that point, my knowledge of German film was genuinely limited. I knew a little of the New German Cinema and some American series in dubbing. But my real film education began with those thirties and forties American films. They were fast-paced, hard-edged, funny — they opened up a world I simply hadn’t known. Very quickly, I started reading the source novels, Chandler and Hammett. Those films, shown in German art house cinemas in the early seventies, opened up both cinema and America for me. And then, gradually, it dawned on me that many of them had been made by German émigrés.
jfs: For me it was a generation later — I encountered all of them on television. So for me it was a TV experience: Siodmak, Casablanca, and so on.
gsf: And if you were unlucky, they were dubbed.
jfs: Always dubbed on TV, yes.
gsf: The regional third channels — NDR 3 in Hanover, for instance, where I saw a lot of these films — often broadcast them with subtitles. I suspect they simply couldn’t afford dubbing, so they went with subtitles instead. I saw many of those films on NDR 3, and then later I’d want to see them on the big screen and go to the cinema. In that sense, the third channels were poor enough to be spared that awful mutilation of dubbing.
jfs: I watched Casablanca in German for so long, and loved it so deeply, that I recorded the audio on a tape recorder and played it back over and over. I think I could recite every role in the German dubbing from memory. The film fascinated me so much because it draws together so many worlds — and of course its central theme connects to the whole phenomenon of émigré cinema.
gsf: What struck me, too — I was still learning English at the time — was the sheer variety of accents in Casablanca: French, Italian, a whole range of languages and voices woven throughout. Nothing like that existed in German cinema. German films were in German, and every foreign film was dubbed. Everything you heard on TV or in the theater had been standardized into High German. And then along came a film like Casablanca with all these different languages and accents. At eighteen or nineteen, I found that electrifying.
jfs: Should we move on to the émigrés? Would you prefer I ask a question, or would you rather just talk?
gsf: I can just talk, if you like.
jfs: Sure.
gsf: We can give it a try, and if I start rambling, feel free to jump in.
jfs: Alright. You’ve already set up the transition: you became fascinated with these films, and then you realized they were made by people who had begun their careers in the German film industry.
gsf: Right. First there was the fascination with American cinema from the thirties and forties. Then came the realization that many of these films had been made by people who had started out in Germany. At the same time, I was a student, and at university the Frankfurt School loomed large — its critique of the culture industry, the Enlightenment as mass deception. So during the day I was absorbing criticism of the culture industry, while at night, in darkened cinemas, I was enthralled by these supposedly malign products of that very industry. It took me a while to reconcile the two — not as a contradiction to simply live with, but to understand that many of these films weren’t only made by German filmmakers, but that even the critique of Hollywood and the culture industry had come from German intellectuals: Adorno, Horkheimer, and to some extent Kracauer.
That was the key insight: the critique was not an external one but had been formulated by people who were right in the thick of it in Hollywood. Adorno and Horkheimer were dictating Dialectic of Enlightenment in a sunny garden in Santa Monica in 1944, while just around the corner the very films I found so compelling were being made. That realization launched a fifteen-year deep dive into the subject of the film émigrés. It began as academic research, and I discovered that people like Adorno and Horkheimer were rubbing shoulders at parties with filmmakers like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder. They moved in the same salons and the same social circles — so the supposed contradiction between critiquing the culture industry and producing its most successful works was really part of a single cultural and social continuum, unfolding in the same place at the same time.
That’s what made me want to go to Los Angeles — to see what was left of that culture and to meet the people who were still alive. It took a few years to find anyone willing to fund the trip, but when I was working as an editor at Transatlantik magazine, I began developing a semi-fictional piece called “Investigations into the German Soul” — a kind of fake diary kept by an American FBI agent investigating the émigrés. Through that literary device I could tell the story of what the agent discovered, linking the famous directors and actors to figures from critical theory and other exiles like Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Heinrich Mann. Many of these artists were not only in exile in the U.S. but were actively working in the film industry — because film, in a sense, was the sun around which all the other arts orbited. Writers, architects, musicians all found work in Hollywood, which is why so many of them ended up there, even those who had had nothing to do with film before fleeing Germany.
This was a lost culture I was determined to explore. Finally, in 1985, through a lucky sequence of circumstances, I was able to travel to Los Angeles and interview two or three dozen survivors. A few of them became close friends, and remained so until they died.
jfs: Do you think there’s a common thread running through the lives of these artists in exile, or were their experiences too individual to generalize?
gsf: No, there were definitely recurring themes. One of them — and this may sound a little cynical, though I don’t mean it that way — was that looking back, many of the people I interviewed, then in their mid-seventies to mid-eighties, had come to see what happened to them as a peculiar kind of formative journey. Many of the German-speaking filmmakers who were driven into exile weren’t necessarily “German” in any narrow sense. A significant number came from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was multinational, with German as its shared language. When they looked back on their lives, many of them recognized that they had brought a great deal of “Germany” with them when they were forced to leave. They were profoundly shaped by German culture, and their immersion in American life not only transformed them but, in a positive sense, modernized them.
They had to shed a great deal of cultural baggage — and in hindsight, they recognized that much of it had been dead weight. To make it in the U.S., they had to let go of things that Germans back home would only relinquish fifteen or twenty years later, through the postwar processes of democratization and re-education. In a sense, the émigrés were ahead of the curve: they underwent a cultural modernization in the thirties and forties that West Germans wouldn’t catch up to until after the war. It was as though they had traveled into the future. Nearly everyone I interviewed came to see that cultural shock — that forced modernization — as a form of liberation.
The other recurring theme was a feeling of having landed between two cultures. Even as they shed old habits, much of their original culture stayed with them. Almost none of them claimed to have become fully American. And what’s striking is that the U.S., as a country of immigrants, allowed them not to fully assimilate — to hold onto parts of their old identity, which was often experienced as a kind of enrichment rather than a deficit. Certain filmmakers, for instance, became specialists in particular genres — horror, most notably — that had clear European roots, and which, through the process of Americanization, became global success stories.
jfs: For directors like Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak, was returning to Germany — making films there again — like revisiting a past that no longer existed?
gsf: Yes, that’s exactly what it was. When the war ended, the émigré community split into two camps. Some said, “We’re never going back,” and remained in the U.S., becoming ever more American — Billy Wilder being the obvious example. Others said, “We’re going home; we can’t cope with the language and the conditions here.” But it’s crucial to understand that there was no real return. As Gottfried Reinhardt — Max Reinhardt’s son — once put it: “There was no going back, because the country we had fled no longer existed.” What he meant was that the Federal Republic of Germany, whatever it had become, was an entirely different country from the Weimar Republic they had left behind. Grete Mosheim, another émigré who did go back, said something very similar. She became a celebrated stage actress in Berlin again in the fifties, but she noted that there was no longer an audience for the kind of theater she had made in the twenties. The audiences had changed so profoundly that the old plays simply couldn’t be performed — no one would have understood them anymore.
That experience of returning to a country that was politically, socially, and culturally unrecognizable made the idea of homecoming deeply complicated. Some tried; most didn’t stay long or didn’t find much happiness there.
jfs: I’ve always wondered whether the disappearance of certain genres from postwar German cinema was connected to that loss — whether the exile of both filmmakers and audiences had contributed to the erosion of certain film traditions.
gsf: That’s a compelling argument, though it may not map perfectly onto this particular interview and your film. One could make the case that a distinctly “German cinema” never really existed in the first place. Arnold Hauser, in his Social History of Art, argued that large-scale theatrical productions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depended on a national audience to recoup their costs — which is why productions in cities like Bayreuth or Berlin had to draw audiences from across the entire country. But cinema, from its very beginnings, required an international market, because the cost of producing feature films was simply too high for any single national audience to support.
Silent films traveled internationally with ease, since they needed no dubbing. And even in the early thirties, when sound film first arrived, the technical demands of dubbing were so formidable that many films were shot in multiple languages simultaneously. Robert Siodmak’s last major Berlin production, Brennendes Geheimnis, was filmed in three languages with different lead actors in each version. The Blue Angel was shot twice. The filmmakers of that era knew their productions had to appeal to international audiences to pay for themselves.
Hollywood perfected that system — partly because American films were never strictly American in any national sense. They were multinational productions. After the war, German films, for a range of reasons, lost that international dimension. Who wanted to see German films in 1945? The dominant genres of postwar German cinema — the Heimatfilm above all — were so rooted in a specifically German psychology that they couldn’t travel. Erich Pommer, a returning émigré who helped restart German film production after the war, faced enormous obstacles, and the scale of what he could achieve was far smaller and far more nationally circumscribed.
Meanwhile, television was emerging as a competitor, and the film industry couldn’t sustain itself. The result was a downward spiral: fewer cinemas, fewer films, smaller ambitions. German film eventually found a kind of lifeline through television, funded largely by the license fee system. But that shift came at a price: it meant abandoning precisely the genres that require an international audience to survive. Genre films are, by their nature, international — they speak a universal cinematic language.
Postwar German films, by contrast, were too locked inside a national frame of reference, and without any ambition to reach international markets, genre filmmaking simply stopped being economically viable. When you make Edgar Wallace films that are nominally set in England but have German street signs, and where all the English characters are played by German actors in exaggerated British costumes, you shouldn’t be surprised when you can’t sell them in England. The essence of genre is that it operates in a non-national register — a cinematic language that is, at minimum, internationally legible. The moment you abandon the ambition to make films that can travel, genre cinema stops working. It’s not economically sustainable, and there’s no compelling reason to pursue it. There are a few national genres, of course — the Heimatfilm being the obvious case — but those are precisely the films that hold no interest whatsoever for anyone outside Germany.