A.When department store heir Harry Jandorf (Joel Basman) returned to Berlin from prisoner of war at the beginning of 1919, traumatized and with the baggage of a dead comrade (Martin Bruchmann) in his mental baggage, women took over the city. They are chauffeurs – “Have you ever seen a dead man drive a car or one with no legs?” – They make up the lion’s share of the employees in the “Kaufhaus des Westens”, design clothes, publish magazines and begin to celebrate lesbian subculture in nightclubs . Almost without exception, superiors are men, although the proportion of women in Berlin’s population is 78 percent. There are 600,000 war widows between the ages of twenty and thirty-five alone; there is one man for every four women. Revolution seems possible not only politically.
In the first episode of the series “Eldorado KaDeWe – Now is our time” and also later, many signs point to a new departure. At the same time, the restorative and anti-democratic, anti-Semitic and misogynist forces are growing in strength. Not only Vienna, but also Berlin becomes an “experimental station for the end of the world” (Karl Kraus). This series by Julia von Heinz, which is staged in a new anti-nostalgic way, not only historical, but also the historical-critical potential, aesthetically uncovering the scope of possibilities of the time (overall concept, direction, screenplay), is also temporarily the Berlin of the Roaring Twenties Experimental station for utopia, equality and creative change.
The guest performance of the feverish hunger for life
At the end of the sixth and last episode, Harry Jandorf will travel to America with his mother Cordula (Victoria Trauttmansdorff). The guest performance of his feverish and ingenious, initially drug-drugged hunger for life, which was expressed in economic optimism, in the orientation of the KaDeWe company towards luxury, modern advertising and shopping as an increase in emotions, is over. He had to hand over the department store to his co-managing director, the staid numbers person Georg Karg (Damian Thüne). The German banking association, from which the Jewish members are gradually being removed, no longer grants its loans to Jews.
Adolf Jandorf (Jörg Pose), who founded the department store in 1907, a figure in the merchant’s habitus as drawn by Thomas Mann, has already died. Department store owner Tietz (Oliver Polak), who took over the KaDeWe as a jewel in his department store chain, is also being pushed out. Suddenly Jews are no longer Germans, but “pests of the people”. Like Mücke Kron (Neele Buchholz), a young woman with Down syndrome who will later be murdered as a victim of euthanasia. Like the openly lesbian women, including artists, photographers, editors, designers, singers and vaudeville performers, whose anarchist, fun-loving club “Eldorado” is first picked up by brown thugs and then turned into the NSDAP party headquarters.
“Eldorado KaDeWe” tells the story of the department store with precise localization of the currents of the twenties as a convincing mixture of reality and possibility, of past, present and future – not only in the scripts (in addition to Julia von Heinz also John Quester, Sabine Steyer-Violet and Oskar Sulowski), but in many trades. The gaze soon sticks to posters that seem to have fallen out of time – like a film advertisement for Rosa von Praunheim’s “It is not the homosexual that is perverse, but the situation in which he lives” (1971). Behind the department store facade of the KaDeWe there is a crane, in front of which there are modern taxis (image design Daniela Knapp). Fritzi Jandorf (Lia von Blarer) travels in today’s S-Bahn. The tenement building in which the saleswoman Hedi Kron (Valerie Stoll) lives with her war-disabled father Rudolf (Martin Ontrop) and sister Mücke, in which she later tried desperately with her husband, the NSDAP functionary Rüdiger Hartmann (Tonio Schneider), none To become a “German mother” in the sense of Nazi ideology, on the other hand, is consistently designed with contemporary historical artefacts.
The effect of the seamlessly merging time levels is terrific and vivid. “Eldorado KaDeWe” is, elegantly and effortlessly interwoven like the “old Tibetan carpet”, which Else Lasker-Schüler speaks of in one of her poems, a “mesh of a thousand and thousand wide” connection of the “far fetched” historical with the nearby, still abandoned of the present. This series has just as much to do with questions of unfinished equality and democracy, with current anti-Semitism and discrimination. It recognizes the now in what has become. This is also called the historical sense.
Love as a critical power
Julia von Heinz focuses on a very specific utopia: love as a critical power. To be more precise, lesbian love. Fritzi and Hedi, in contrast to Harry Jandorf and Georg Karg, not historical but fictional characters, experience sensually staged moments. They read to each other poems about the dissolution of boundaries and overcoming through love.
For them, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler (to whom the series is dedicated) is their torch. The fact that the two of you, who are not lucky enough to be lucky in time, are given a certain degree of happiness towards the end, which makes this series, which is absolutely worth seeing, even more extraordinary. History, perhaps on television or in “moving images”, is not only what was, but also what could or should have been. “Eldorado KaDeWe” also sets new standards in this regard.
Eldorado KaDeWe, 8.15 p.m. in the Erste and in the ARD media library
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