Next to Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, F.J. Strauss, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, Herbert Wehner was one of the major political architects of the German Federal Republic. Of course, Wehner knew that he could never become the chancellor. A part of his own personal history is still in the dark: his years as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and his participation in Stalin’s purges will all remain shrouded until the Moscow files have been thoroughly appraised. Author and director Heinrich Breloer was the first person permitted to have a look at the cadre files in Moscow and at the central archives of the Party in East Berlin. He discussed this files with contemporaries of Wehner, who had experienced and suffered through many years of Stalin’s reign of terror together with Wehner, with both of his female companions, Lotte Loebinger and Lotte Treuber, and with Ruth von Mayenburg, who accompained the film’s author through the labyrinth of Moscow’s Hotel Lux and Lubyanka. This TV production received the “Prix Europa 93” for the category “Series and Multiparts” by a unanimous vote of the jury. The series was repeated on the 14th and 17th November 1993 on the cultural channel ONE PLUS
- Tags
-