Unity (40 page)

There is a prolonged silence. Bücher appears to be struggling with himself.

THOMAS BÜCHER
was born in Munich in 1928, the son of a barber, a profession which, as he describes in our interview, was to save his life during his internment in Auschwitz. After the war, he opened a chain of night-clubs which led, in the early 1950s, to his move into hard-core pornography. In the mid 1970s, he was perfectly placed to take advantage of the video revolution and, by the end of the decade, his company, Angel Films, had become established as one of Europe’s leading names in ‘adult
entertainment
’. In 1992, its survival was threatened by the death of
Charlotte
Haffmann during the making of
Virgin’s Island
. Although Bücher was cleared of any personal responsibility, his standing was severely impaired. The following year, he sold his controlling interest in the company, while remaining Chairman of its Board.

RENATE FISCHER
was born in Düsseldorf in 1948. She was a founding member of the
Bettlertheater
, remaining a close
associate
of Wolfram Meier throughout his career. She occupied an anomalous position in Meier’s stock company. While
unquestionably
a member of the inner circle, she was never given the opportunities on screen that such intimacy might have brought. As she herself states in her memoir, her most significant role was the Virgin Mary in Meier’s radically reordered
Faust
. Even so, she appeared in every one of Meier’s twenty-six films, generally in unflattering guise, an object of derision.

Notwithstanding her lack of romance in his films, Fischer came the closest of any woman to playing the love interest in Meier’s life when she married him in April 1978. The marriage was unconventional and Fischer has written vividly of the
humiliations
of the wedding-day. Nevertheless, they maintained their partnership both on and off screen. In the years since Meier’s death, Fischer has worked as a cabaret singer, night-club hostess and agony aunt. She is currently the presenter of the
ratings-topping
Cooking
For One
170
on German television.

LIESL MARTINS
was born in Bremen in 1939. Her father, Gottlieb Martins, was a writer of the
Blut und Boden
(Blood and Soil) school of mystical romances, which achieved great popularity after the First World War and were highly esteemed by the Nazis. She was orphaned by the Allied bombing and brought up by her grandmother in Oldenburg, a few streets away from Ulrike Meinhof, whom she never met. She studied in Frankfurt where she became active in Leftist politics. After a brief marriage to Konrad Schreider, owner of the Red Dawn publishing house, she met Manfred Stückl and Klaus Bernheim, with whom she founded the
Bettlertheater
, which rapidly became the most celebrated of the city’s alternative troupes. She first worked with Wolfram Meier in 1965 and, apart from three years in the mid 1970s when she adopted her children, continued to do so throughout his career, playing leading roles in several of his films, notably
Rosa Luxemburg
and
Margarite
. After Meier’s death, she worked sporadically for other directors and as a presenter for the State radio station,
Bayerischer Rundfunk
, before taking on the
directorship
 
of the Wolfram Meier Foundation. The Foundation is dedicated to the conservation and distribution of Meier’s films and to the management of the Meier archive. Liesl Martins
regularly
travels the world, lecturing on Meier’s work and introducing it to new audiences.

CAROLE MEDHURST
was born in Rochdale in 1950. On leaving drama school at the age of twenty, she worked at Stratford, with several small-scale touring companies and on the London Fringe. In 1972, she joined the International Workers Party, with whom she later had a very public breach. Although her allegations of brainwashing techniques and sexual harassment were never proved, they did permanent damage to the Party’s reputation.

Unity
was the occasion for Medhurst’s last appearance as an actress. As she has described elsewhere,
171
the experience so unnerved her that, when she returned to England, she quit the profession and worked in a series of menial jobs, among them the stint in the fish and chip shop that was to inspire her first success as a writer.
Assault and Batter
was the BBC’s sleeper hit in the winter of 1985, its blend of comedy and suspense proving to be even more popular when it was transposed from Burnley to
Baltimore
and from a fish and chip shop to a pizza parlour. Medhurst moved to Los Angeles in 1988, declaring later that year to
The Independent
that ‘I am now a corporation. I can buy shares in myself.’ Her company, Battery Productions, has been responsible for a succession of highly successful series on American TV. It is currently developing several projects for the cinema as well as
Circus on Ice
, billed as ‘a new concept in entertainment’,
scheduled
to open in Las Vegas in July 2005.

GERALDINE MORTIMER
was born in Berkshire in 1948. At the age of six months, she was taken by her mother to join her father in Hollywood, where she spent her childhood. She kept a diary throughout her life. The first, dating from 1956, came from Walt Disney, the studio for which, by a neat coincidence, she was to make her debut the following year. The entries, a mere two or three lines at first, stretch to several pages by the time that she reaches adolescence and give some hint of the painful experiences to which the adult Geraldine will later allude. After 1971, when she joined the International Workers Party, a long account of which is included in the entries for June of that year, the
autobiographical
material becomes increasingly mixed with politics – nowhere more so than in the two months printed above.

As the diligent reader will note, in the entry for 23 October 1977, Geraldine writes that she has instructed her executors to destroy all her diaries on her death. No such document has survived. Indeed, as was widely reported, she died intestate in Poland in 1986. Two years later, Sir Gerald Mortimer’s victory in his bitter legal battle with the IWP ensured that the journals (along with the rest of his daughter’s estate) passed to him. Given his own death later that year, it is unlikely that he read them. They remained in the possession of Lady Mortimer until her death, when they were bequeathed to the British Film Institute.

MANFRED STÜCKL
was born in Wiesbaden in 1941. His father was an SS officer who, after the war, successfully assumed the identity of his wife’s brother, until a casual remark about the couple’s sleeping arrangements by the eight-year-old Manfred prompted an investigation by a teacher who suspected incest. His father was tried and imprisoned, his mother committed suicide, and Manfred was placed in a series of children’s homes. At the age of eighteen, he won a prestigious scholarship from the Study
Foundation of the German People and entered Berlin University. On graduation, he worked as a teacher and took part in the early peace movement before leaving for Munich, where he co-founded the
Bettlertheater
with Liesl Martins and Klaus Bernheim and gave Wolfram Meier his chance to direct. He played the title role in Meier’s first film,
The Ratcatcher
, and Josef in his last,
The Holy Family.
In the intervening years, he acted in many of Meier’s most celebrated films, including
The Passion of Albrecht Dürer,
for which he received several international awards. After Meier’s death, he directed an autobiographical feature,
The Shuttlecock.
Having failed to secure the film’s distribution, he moved to
television
, where he now heads the development division of
West-deutscher
Rundfunk
in Cologne, which funds the new generation of German directors.