Quadflieg. Strack. Frank. Solbach. Weiss. Baumann. Caninenberg. Uhlig. Frank. Heesters. Schöne. Fitzek. Braun. Dumont. Damals waren sie die Könige des Fernsehens (mit Solbach als Kronprinzen). Und das Fernsehen war die Königin der audiovisuellen Medien. Es gab drei Programme, kein Internet, keinen PC, kein Smartphone, und wenn das Erste vor Weihnachten oder zu Ostern einen Mehrteiler zur besten Sendezeit ausstrahlte, lag der Marktanteil bei fünfzig, sechzig Prozent. Und der König der Mehrteiler hieß Fritz Umgelter.
Umgelter hatte als Schauspieler und Theaterregisseur angefangen, 1953 ging er zum Hessischen Rundfunk, und eine Zeit lang drehte er auch Kinofilme („Wenn die Conny mit dem Peter“). Aber sein Durchbruch war der Fernseh-Sechsteiler „So weit die Füße tragen“, die Geschichte eines deutschen Kriegsgefangenen, der sich quer durch Sibirien bis in den Iran durchschlägt. Der Straßenfeger des Jahres 1959, Einschaltquoten wie beim WM-Endspiel. Und Umgelters Schlüsselerlebnis.
Maßlose Unterhaltung, hätte Kafka gesagt
Es folgten „Am grünen Strand der Spree“, „Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frisst“ und „Rebellion der Verlorenen“, Panoramen der deutschen Vorkriegs- und Nachkriegsseele, und die große, zu Unrecht vergessene Manès-Sperber-Verfilmung „Wie eine Träne im Ozean“. Dann kamen die Siebzigerjahre, und die Stimmung in den Sendern und bei den Zuschauern drehte sich. Neben dem Sozialkritischen wollte man Historisches sehen, Abenteuer in Uniform, Menuette und Pulverdampf. Sein Meisterstück in diesem Genre drehte Umgelter schon 1973: die „Merkwürdige Lebensgeschichte des Friedrich Freiherrn von der Trenck“ mit Matthias Habich als Trenck. Eine Liebesgeschichte im Siebenjährigen Krieg, Musketen und Perücken, Preußen gegen Österreicher, der Alte Fritz, seine Schwester und der junge Friedrich. Maßlose Unterhaltung, hätte Kafka gesagt.
Der Zwölfjährige aber las keine Abspänne, und so fiel ihm der Name Umgelter erst auf, als er ihn später immer wieder las, bei den „Unfreiwilligen Reisen des Moritz August Benjowski“ ebenso wie bei der Adaption von Christoph von Grimmelshausens „Simplizissimus“, wieder mit Habich in der Titelrolle. Hier achtzehntes, dort siebzehntes Jahrhundert, aber allemal Barock: Umgelters Berichtsgebiet. Zuletzt, als Schlussakkord, „Der Winter, der ein Sommer war“ nach dem Roman von Sandra Paretti: knapp sechs Stunden Fernsehen, ausgestrahlt in drei Teilen zu Weihnachten 1976.
The first thing you see is a stage set, a painted canvas. An orchestra plays, a soprano with white make-up sings, and Günter Strack, as the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, curses like a trooper. The singer is second-class, but the count’s coffers cannot afford a better one from Paris – at least that is what Minister Schlieffen (played by Pinkas Braun, another forgotten TV star) thinks. In Paretti’s novel and in the film adaptation, the story is about the sale of Hessian soldiers to the British for use in the American War of Independence, but it is also about the costs of the absolutist state, both moral and social.
An officer has deserted from the Landgrave’s army and is being hunted by mounted peasant corps. A large landowner is ennobled and pays for it in hard currency. A noble daughter has aroused the Landgrave’s lust; in order to legitimize her mistress status, Claus von Haynau (Christian Quadflieg) is to enter into a “marriage of convenience” with her. His half-brother Robert (Sigmar Solbach) wants to go to America to look for his real father, but it takes a chain of mix-ups, swindles and betrayal to get him the opportunity to board a ship in Bad Karlshafen as a simple mercenary. At the court festival in front of Wilhelmshöhe Palace, the peasants turn the Landgrave’s carousel in the cellar while the nobility enjoy themselves upstairs. The machinery of the corporate state still works, but it is creaking at every point. The filmed splendor of the palaces serves the purpose of exhibiting the superfluity of excess. “The Winter That Was a Summer” was HR’s contribution to the bicentennial of the American Revolution.
The carousel of Umgelter’s TV epic is also turning like clockwork. The three-part series was shot in eight weeks in Upper Hesse and in a nature reserve on the Austrian Danube. The castles in Kassel and Weilburg, the old town of Melsungen and the banks of the Weser in Karlshafen served as backdrops, and the German army even provided extras in the form of a Jäger battalion. Nevertheless, the reunion with “The Winter That Was a Summer” is painful.
The same old pattern of close-ups, medium shots and close-ups seems too worn out, especially in comparison with Umgelter’s “Trenck”. The imperfections in sound and lighting, the recited dialogues, the wild acting in fight and love scenes, the album-like, repetitive narrative style are all too obvious. Only the magnificently suffering Anneliese Uhlig, whose biography deserves its own film, and Hans Caninenberg, who acts with Buddhist equanimity, are a laudable exception as the Haynau couple.
Umgelter had no chance against Kubrick
The fifteen-year-old hardly noticed any of this, or rather, he didn’t want to notice. Because then (as now), prime time was not about art (Fassbinder, Kluge & Co. were responsible for that), but about ratings. Only Umgelter, as can be seen from his battle scenes and rococo festivals, was constantly aiming for something higher, and it must have been a constant annoyance to him that he could only offer the production values of the Hessischer Rundfunk to compete with Kubrick – whose “Barry Lyndon” is now a classic, but was a flop at the time.
It doesn’t help: the nostalgia that the first images from the baroque theater trigger turns to disillusionment over the course of the six hours. The brave Sigmar Solbach, who was to become the TV gynecologist on duty as “Dr. Stefan Frank”, was remembered as smarter and less wooden, and Christian Quadflieg’s evil brother Klaus doesn’t seem half as demonic as he once did on second glance. The old guard, on the other hand, is a spectacle, feeding the monkey uninhibitedly: Günther Strack as the bloated Landgrave (“You don’t know what it’s like to gorge yourself until you can’t eat anymore!”), Heinz Baumann as the fame-hungry regimental commander Rall, Werner Kreindl as the American small-town doctor who cares for the wounded on both sides and plays chess with friends and foes alike.
Almost all of them are dead. Umgelter died in May 1981 at the age of just fifty-nine, after launching the first season of “Traumschiff”; Anneliese Uhlig died in 2017 at the age of almost a hundred in Santa Cruz, California; Christian Quadflieg died last summer in Hamburg. In “The Winter That Was a Summer,” their paths crossed in front of half-timbered houses in Hesse, and like the viewers in front of the screen, they probably thought it would go on like that forever. But the time of pre-Christmas miniseries, sailing ships and tricorn hats was over. Television in the 1980s became faster, shriller and kitschier; crime dramas and family series spread. Private broadcasters were just around the corner. Umgelter’s Paretti film adaptation was an epilogue. The fifteen-year-old had no idea about it. Today he knows.
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