With a name like Rosenthal it is strange that so few people in 1970s Germany had cottoned on to the fact that the country’s most popular TV game show host was a Jew.
Hans Rosenthal, played here by an understated Florian Lukas, was feted by an adoring public and lavishly paid and praised by his TV network for hosting German TV’s best loved light (very light) entertainment show. Called Dalli Dalli it was a bit like our own The Generation Game. Contestants had to complete daft tasks against the clock. Its title was German slang for hurry up. Remember that.
There will be much to celebrate on November 9, 1978 the date of the show’s 75th episode says the TV star’s boss. However Rosenthal wants the day off. For him the date has a darker significance. It is the 40th anniversary of Kristallnacht, an event that foreshadowed the murder of his little brother. But the answer is no. Everyone knows that Thursday night is Dalli Dalli night, protests the boss.
Director Oliver Haffner’s quietly gripping real life story is set in a Germany that had yet to grapple with its past. The period is beautifully observed with Rosenthal’s successful post-war life lived among the vivid history-erasing colours and styles of the 1970s.
True, his son is part of a younger generation who want to rid the country of its “old Nazis”. But Rosenthal and the remnants of the Jewish community who he makes time in his busy showbiz schedule to support have always had to do their commemorating without official recognition. That is until now. For the next Kristallnacht anniversary will be led by none other than chancellor Helmut Schmidt himself.
Rosenthal’s dilemma therefore is whether to fulfil the expectations of his bosses or deliver the fathom deep obligation he feels to be at the ceremony. As the pressure builds and the date nears the film toggles between Rosenthal’s brightly lit work and home life and his dark past that was necessarily lived in shadow. Each flashback explains the introspection that fleetingly plays across Rosenthal’s professionally happy face. One memory is of the final conversation with his little brother. Others are of his life as a teen (played by Claude Heinrich) hidden by a brave woman in her chicken coop.
Back in the contemporary scenes the excellent Lukas conveys Rosenthal’s past with a frozen smile or stare. Imagine the exhaustingly upbeat Paul Daniels, only with a hole the size of the Holocaust in his heart. Only his wife (a watchful Silke Bodenbender) sees how her husbands smiles are failing to reach his eyes.
Breaking point happens during a press scrum on the day of the a highly anticipated broadcast. As Rosenthal effortlessly fields questions from the admiring gaggle, one from the Jewish Chronicle no less, brings him up short. Shouldn’t he be at the Kristallnacht ceremony and did he know that Dalli Dalli was the phrase the SS barked at Jews in Poland?
Haffner cleverly uses footage of the real Rosenthal hosting the actual TV show to reveal what happened next.
Rosenthal – The Great Showman is on at the Everyman, Belsize Park on November 9 at part of the UK Jewish Film Festival
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