For the 100th birthday of the show master Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff.
He covered. He insisted on live shows, and there was hardly one that he didn’t go overboard and show off his pride with a grin. The small rule violation was his trademark. As early as 1959, when he greeted the audience with “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen in the Federal Republic of Germany, in the GDR …”, he caused a storm of indignation, because at least one “so-called” should have preceded the second.
He was one of Germany’s great showmasters and at least half the population of the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the GDR sat in front of the television sets when he led the quiz show “One will win” on Saturdays. Most of them were waiting for some kind of political statement, a little tip against the Adenauer government or something positive about social democracy or even Willy Brandt. He made these remarks that drove my one uncle to white heat and enthused the other. My parents acted as if they hadn’t noticed anything – as “spoken aside”, that was the name of the old stage directions that the actor Kulenkampff knew only too well. So he also knew that this would get him the increased attention in the hall and in the living rooms. Then he wiped the sentences away and said something like: That’s my opinion, you’ve got yours, and now to the candidates. He laughed at it.
As I was used to for a long time, I lay on the floor in front of the television and knew the answers to most questions by the age of twelve at the latest. Quiz was then educational television: It was about capitals, oceans, Goethe and Schiller, about Friedrich and Charlemagne. So school material. But I liked seeing Kulenkampff. He spoke freely and he seemed to be saying what he was thinking. Today I tend to believe that Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff contributed significantly to the civilization of the Federal Republic. This “GDR” was important, and so was the vote for Willy Brandt. But more important was how he put it: as a request to allow what the government was against.
A few years later we accused him of the fact that this was not linked to a declaration of war. But that was precisely the punch line. He demonstrated that a society must allow dissent if it does not want to ossify. He also showed that you could do it with a laugh and then continue talking to the others.
I lay on the floor and admired him for it and thought: That’s what you want to be! Last but not least, I was attracted by the idea of doing seven or eight programs a year, being able to make a living from it and being on a small sailing boat in the Mediterranean for the rest of the time. With a woman you loved. I was just a teenager.
I knew that my parents – we lived in Frankfurt most of the time – had seen him as an actor at a young age (my mother was born in 1920) in the “Kleiner Theater am Zoo”, now the Fritz-Rémond-Theater. Little did I know that in addition to the shows, he toured with a small troupe for decades in a bus. He wasn’t the charming Hallodri he claimed to be. Maybe he was. But he was also a workhorse.
Kulenkampff was perhaps the most successful show master in Germany for many years. But showmaster wasn’t a profession in his eyes. He was, he never tired of telling the incredulous audience, an actor. He made films and appeared on stage in cheerful and serious roles. But I only ever saw him as the coolie from the Saturday night shows who tried his hand at acting. Even the day before yesterday, for example, when I watched the dedicated (one-person) piece of time “In Doubt for the Defendant”, in a television adaptation from 1987, I never saw the American lawyer and civil rights activist Clarence Darrow, just a coolie who struggled finally not being an entertainment fanatic.
I think he had played that role too successfully today. There was no longer any movement, no more nuance of his voice that the audience could not recognize as a pen. Horst Tappert had a similar experience with Derrick. But at least that was a real role. The Kulenkampff of the Saturday evening shows, on the other hand, was a role that pretended to be reality.
Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff was born on April 27, 1921 in Bremen into a wealthy merchant family. He graduated from high school, then learned to act and became a soldier. He is said to have cut off several frozen toes by hand. Which was more traumatic, the fear of being killed or the fear of killing, I don’t know. Today we know that facing this dilemma alone hurts many people to the core. I suppose his audience recognized themselves in that, too, without it ever becoming an issue. At that time people talked a lot about his charm. I think it was essentially the fact that he sometimes radiated the irresistible happiness of living in a society in which one could be civil.
A friend of mine is more than 25 years younger. She also knows Kulenkampff from television. She remembers how he curled up around the candidates, bent over them, got very close to them, how he grabbed her arm. When she told me this, I thought I felt disgust. Everything has a story. Even the charming is not a constant. Kulenkampff would be impossible today. But even then there were outraged calls when he kept asking a very small candidate about it. The limits of what can be said have shifted. You do this all the time. Harald Schmidt, for example, would also be impossible today.
But still playing with the little border crossings is part of the charm. Taking something out of yourself that you are not allowed to take out of yourself. Rudi Carrell once described Kulenkampff’s impact as follows: “He said what television viewers did not dare to say. They loved him for that. “
From 1985 to 1990 he read “Night Thoughts” almost two thousand times. That was the last broadcast of the ARD every evening. After that there was only noise. In 1997 he was on stage for the last time. He died on August 14, 1998 in his house in the Seeham community in the Salzburg region.
