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Trystan Pütter and Sonja Gerhardt in »Ku'damm 63«: Mersey Beat and swastika scribbles
Photo: Boris Laewen / ZDF
Rock'n'Roll in a self-experiment: The dance school owner and strict mother of three daughters Caterina Schöllack (Claudia Michelsen) freaks out to the Beatles.
After she had been hit by a bus, the doctors had patched her up and prescribed a brace, but whipped up by a herbal juice called "Frauengeist" and "Twist & Shout" she leaps and sprints through her apartment.
Shake it up, Ms. Schöllack.
In the end, the rock'n'roll beginner collapses and has to be taken back to the hospital.
Departure, breakdown, departure, breakdown - this is the rhythm of the ZDF post-war epic »Ku'damm« into its third season.
"Every period of mourning has to come to an end," says the dance school general Schöllack once with her Teflon smile, after a person from the close family has died very shortly before.
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Schöllack daughter Eva (Emilia Schüle): First a victim of yesterday's men, then a gallery owner for modern art
Photo: Frederic Batier / ZDF
Displacement is the noblest task in »Ku'damm«, but the next collapse lurks behind every party.
The series works like the colorful, crowded shop window of an era, but hidden ambivalences, abysses and historical deposits emerge.
It doesn't matter if it's 1956, 1959 or 1963.
The fashions are cleared away, the forces of repression remain intact.
Marlene Dietrich wants to go to the Grand Prix
One of the Schöllack daughters (Emilia Schüle) runs a gallery;
Beatniks argue here about Fluxus, Cage and Beuys.
However, the money for the free-spirited avant-garde banter comes from the young woman's husband, who previously abused her as a husband and psychiatrist.
First a victim of a repressive society, then a pioneer of modern art - it goes that fast in »Ku'damm«.
Another Schöllack daughter (Sonja Gerhardt) tries her hand at songwriting and writes an old diva who has re-migrated from the USA a contribution to the Eurovision Grand Prix in Copenhagen, which actually took place there in 1964.
The diva is based on Marlene Dietrich, who came back to West Germany at the beginning of the sixties and with her film "The Judgment of Nuremberg" confronted the then historically forgotten Germans with their own past.
But Dietrich never took part in the Grand Prix.
In the beat club run by the Jewish friend of a Schöllack sister (Trystan Pütter), people rave about Mersey Beat and Swinging London and play the twist with an appropriately tasty tremolo.
A few Nazis also dance and drink with us, but later they come back to smear their swastikas on the dance floor.
Beatlemania and anti-Semitism are cruelly juxtaposed here.
What was and what could have been: The team behind the »Ku'damm« trilogy operated a kind of extraction of contemporary history in the style of the series that run on US streaming services such as Netflix, such as the counterfactual film company fantasy »Hollywood«.
The time of that time is reproduced in detail - but based on today's awareness.
In »Ku'damm«, for example, the historical setting is used for topics such as blended families, female self-empowerment or gay self-discovery.
Repressions of an affluent society
A risky balancing act: How far can the historical setting be charged with the current attitude towards life?
The fact that this works well over long periods at “Ku'damm 63” also has to do with the fact that the pop-cultural time context is so concretely and concretely spread out.
The scene in which Mrs. Schöllack is surprised by her children with a television set against loneliness is strong.
A reference to Douglas Sirk's widow melodrama "What heaven allows" - which also told in rich colors of the perfidious repression of an affluent society.
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Scene from »Ku'damm« with a new television set: What Heaven allows
Photo: Boris Laewen / ZDF
After the inventor of »Ku'damm«, Annette Hess, the head author is now Marc Terjung, who recently wrote a beautiful road movie with Ska music for ZDF with »The summer after graduation«.
In the historical three-part series he brings together the real and the secret hits of the early sixties, from Henri Mancini's “Moon River” to Nat King Cole's “That Sunday, That Summer”, and integrates them into the plot as a narrative.
In November, »Ku'damm« will also appear on the theater stage as a musical;
Behind the project is the production company Ufa, from which the TV saga was developed, as well as the powerful Content Alliance of Ufa mother Bertelsmann.
It remains to be seen whether the often abrupt plot twists of the original in the themes of homophobia and depression, Holocaust denial and rearmament in singing and dancing will work.
In some scenes of the new »Ku'damm« season, you can see that musical versions have already been considered, for example when Mother Schöllack was ecstatic about »Twist & Shout«.
But the exploitation chain should be fine with us: We have never seen such a graceful self-dissolving ballet on ZDF.
»Ku'damm 63«,
from now in the ZDF media library, from Sunday at 8:15 pm, in the linear ZDF program
Icon: The mirror
