Munich (dpa) – A documentary drama portraying a distinguished family of German writers and authors, whose story parallels the radical social and political changes in 20th Century Germany, is in the final stages of shooting at the WDR Studios in Cologne.
The mammoth, 21-million mark (9.5 million dollars) project with the working title “The Manns” – A Centenary Novel” focusses on the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann and their children, wives and friends, starting in 1923 during the Weimar Republic prior to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis a decade later.
Taking a cue from Thomas Mann’s Nobel Prize winning first novel “Buddenbrooks”, which was based on the author’s own family history, the authors of the project, Heinrich Breloer and Horst Koenigstein, spent more than three years researching the project before filming began last May in Almeria, southern Spain, which served as the location for Mann’s time of exile in Pacific Palisades, California.
The partners succeeded in lining up a cast that almost reads like a “Who’s Who” of the nation’s finest acting talent.
Former East German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, who returns to filming in Germany after appearing in leading roles in films in the U.S., plays Thomas Mann. Juergen Hentsch is cast in the role of Heinrich Mann, Monica Bleibtreu plays Thomas’s wife Katia Mann, and Veronica Ferres is Heinrich Mann’s second wife Nelly Kroeger.
Thomas Mann’s children, Erika Mann and Klaus Mann, are played by Sophia Rois and Sebastian Koch. Other roles in the gigantic cast include Philipp Hochmaier as the noted historian Golo Mann and Katharina Eckerfeld as Elisbeth Mann, Thomas Mann’s last, and still living child.
Likewise on the technical side, Breloer and producer Katharina Esterer have lined up top talent, including Gernot Roll, photography (credits include “Rossini” and “The Great Bagarozy”), Waldemar Pokromski, make up, (an Oscar for “Schindler’s List”), costumes, Barbara Baum (“Aimee and Jaguar”, “The House of Spirits”) and Properties, Goetz Weidner (“Schtonk”).
Breloer and Koenigstein spent over three years researching the project, interviewing 60 people once associated with the Mann family in Europe and the United States.
They put together some 150 hours of documentary material, including 20 hours with the octogenarian Elisabeth Mann-Borgese, Thomas Mann’s youngest daughter, who lives in Canada.
“Without Elisabeth Mann-Borgese,” Konigstein said, “the project would not have been realizable.” And as producer Esterer explained, “She functioned as the main source of the trilogy and for the first time made public her recollections.”
Following her advice, a villa where Thomas Mann and his family lived in Munich was constructed on the Bavaria Film lot, which formed the setting for the first episode covering the years 1923 to 1933, when the family was forced to leave Germany.
The second part deals with Thomas Mann in exile in southern France and Switzerland before he obtained a teaching position in Princeton, New Jersey.
The third part covers the writer’s postwar life until his death in 1955 and the deaths of his son Klaus and brother Heinrich. Besides the trilogy, a three-part documentary is also being filmed, drawing on 245 hours of archive material and interviews on the Mann family.
Before moving to Cologne for the wrap-up of the tight, 83-day schedule, filming took place in Spain, France, Zurich, Luebeck, and Munich.
The mini-series unfolds against a background of the rise of the Nazis, the rescue of various family members during the war against Hitler, and their return from exile to Germany after the war.
“The story of this representative writer family is, at the same time, a panorama of the social and cultural upheavals in Germany during the 20th Century,” Breloer said.
Bavaria Film, which is handling foreign sales, sees good chances of selling the series abroad.
“We are already in negotiations with representatives in Spain, Italy and the BBC and we see good chances of selling the project to the United States,” Esterer said. The three 90-minute episodes will probably be screened on Germany’s public network ARD and the Franco- German cultural channel Arte in the autumn of 2001.
