Claus Mueller

This superbly crafted biographical documentary by Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszien premiered in North America in a May 2023 screening arranged in New York by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and the Leo Baeck Institute. The focus of the film, writer Walter Kaufmann, passed away at the age of 97 in 2021. Every stage of his life is chronicled and accompanied by his visual participation and recorded commentaries from his texts including childhood and youth; passage as a Jewish child refugee from Germany to Britain; life in an Australian internment camp; employment as a soldier; holding blue collar jobs; and work for long periods as a sailor on Australian and GDR (German Democratic Republic) ships. He joined the Australian communist party and trade unions and was naturalized in 1944 and never gave up his Australian passport. Work on ships and lengthy stays in countries like Cuba, Japan, the USA and Israel provided the backbone for his numerous novels and investigative reports published in different countries but mostly in the GDR.

Kaufmann never compromised his views. The film uses as primary sources open extensive records of his personal files which covered exchanges with many well-known writers and letters written to him by his adoptive parents who perished in a concentration camp. Throughout the documentary, Kaufmann accompanies viewers in person with reflections about places he is visiting or quotes from his letters, such as those from his parents about their passage to the camps, which never reached him. Kaufmann did not learn about their fate until he returned to Duisburg in the fifties when he saw a listing of lawyers from Duisburg who perished in the camps.

Kaufmann was born in Berlin on January 19, 1924, as Jizdak Schmelzer to a young Polish woman who lived in the basement of a building in a part of Berlin where impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe lived. At the age of three he was adopted by Dr. Sally Kaufmann, a well-off Duisburg Jewish lawyer, and his wife Johanna an aspiring artist, and his name was changed to Walter Kauffmann. After the war, when he returned to Berlin, Walter could not find his birth mother. Walter, as he stated, had shifted his life from a poor Jewish ghetto kid to that of a bourgeois youngster. He went to German schools but decades later he still vividly recollects the demonstrations of the nazi party in Duisburg, the condemnation of Jews by teachers, the disappearance of Jewish students from his classes, and the destruction of his parents’ home by a mob. He liked his schoolmates, but they told him that his only fault was being Jewish. In 1939, when he turned 15, his parents decided he should live in Britain to join a distant uncle and he left in a Kinder transport. Feeling isolated, he attended a German school there but was forced to leave Britain as a German enemy alien who according to Churchill, if 16 and older, should be all collared. In 1941 He arrived in Sidney, Australia with more than 2,000 others who had been forced to leave Britain.

After living in Australia his work focused more on writing novels about his travel experiences and on completing issue-oriented investigations. During a conference in Poland, he was invited to go to the GDR where it was suggested to him that he return to his original home om Duisburg. He encountered widespread amnesia about the Third Reich in West Germany, distrust about his motivation for being there, and in Kaufmann’s words, people related to him as “a dead person on vacation”. The new owner of his old home barely recognized him but, she recalled giving his mother a pair of shoes just before she was deported. Kaufmann returned to Berlin and decided to live in the GDR where he was appointed representative of the Ministry of Culture, travelling and writing critical reports for the GDR and other media. As a GDR attaché he represented East Germany at the 1956 Olympics.  Given his leftwing background, coming from the GDR, as a citizen of Australia with numerous books and awards, and recognized for his critical convictions, Kaufmann easily accessed new sources of information and shared their views. After the Olympics in Japan, he met Katahara, the leader of a radical student movement organizing with peasants in opposition to expanding US military bases. In the US, he spent many months in the 60s covering the trial of Angela Davis, becoming her principal supporter in the GDR and helping create broad support for her. He also covered the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and investigated the trial of the murderers of three civil rights activists which received, reflecting justice in the US South, light sentence and the dismissal of charges against their leader, a Ku Klux Can chief. In his articles he analyzed the pervasive discrepancy of wealth in the USA and its persistent poverty.  Kaufmann described homeless people he encountered in New York City at night.  As a deckhand, Kaufmann travels alone to Havana because the captain refused to permit his pregnant wife Angela Brunnner, a prominent GDR actress to join him. He is hosted in Havana by the Cuban Writers Union. For him, Cuba represents socialism as he wanted it to emerge in the GDR. Before leaving Cuba, Kaufmann points out that beyond the fading fervor for the revolution, Cuba was facing hard times, similar to the issues faced in the GDR, of scarcity, not having enough food. His superiors at home refused to publish his book “Voices in the Storm” first printed in Australia in 1953 unless he changed some sections. Kaufmann refused and there was a five-year delay before his version was printed in the GDR.

Travelling to Israel several times, Kaufmann is not well received even by his distant relatives because he comes from socialist Germany and is outspoken about the dispossession of Palestinians. He openly shares the perspective of individuals like Shlomo Smelzman whose son was killed in the war and others including concentration camp survivors whose children face death in the Israeli wars. Kaufmann was not a religious Jew in the traditional sense. But there are no doubts about his beliefs, being a socialist, opponent of the oppressive settlement policies of Israel, and supporter of the two-state solution. He had serious reservations about living in the GDR given the crimes Stalin committed but made sure that his two daughters Rebecca and Deborah had Jewish names living in Germany. As the longtime head of the PEN association through 1993, he supported open discussion and expressed his desire for a free socialist East Germany, and thus objected to the dissolution of the GDR. Massive peaceful demonstrations in East Germany had articulated “We Are a People”, the Western version changed it to “We Are one People”, stripping from the GDR whatever had a socialist taint. The unification euphoria rapidly disappeared in East Germany with many living there expressing that the GDR had been annexed and transformed into an underfunded miniature version of capitalist West Germany. Sensing an emerging chasm in former GDR regions Kaufmann realized that “we were entering a grim period”.

Thirty years after unification, East Germany is still trailing behind.  Contemporary surveys show  that those living in the West have a more positive view of their states (Laender) and a more optimistic perspective about the future than those living in the East. Unemployment is higher in the former GDR than in West Germany and productivity as well as average income lower than in the West. Many regions in the East have experienced departure of young people to the West and antagonism towards immigrants in the former GDR is still high. More importantly, some of the arrogance and feeling of superiority of Westerners towards the East has remained. The socialism of the GDR has been eradicated and replaced by a consumer culture. The appeal and voting record of the rightwing populist party AfD (Alternative for Germany) reached 27% in March 2023 in the former GDR, far below the AfD votes scored in West Germany, reflecting the disjuncture between both parts of Germany which Walter Kaufmann anticipated.

“Walter Kaufmann: What A Life” is an extraordinary distillation of his political reflections about different countries and specifically Germany. The documentary, including its subtitled version, is not yet available outside Germany. For more information contact the directors through www.walterkaufmannfilm.de

Claus Mueller, New York  1 347 210 6759

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