The discussion at the KELLERCLUB was evaluated by film director and producer Ilona Ziok for her film FRITZ BAUER – TOD AUD RATEN (CV FILMS, 2010). She used Bauer’s arguments in the panel discussion as a “common thread” for the plot of her documentary film, which is therefore particularly authentic. Ziok’s film is the first film to make a serious effort to portray and illuminate Bauer’s significance for democratic development after 1945, and HEUTE ABEND KELLERCLUB offers a successful introduction to this.

Daniel Kothenschulte wrote about Ilona Ziok’s film and the atmosphere of the time in the Frankfurter Rundschau under the apt title “Aufklärung im Kellerclub”: “Ilona Ziok’s documentary begins in a cosy talk show setting. When this form of broadcasting became established in German post-war television, for a long time there was only one setting for it: the cosy regulars’ table. Which must have been less commonplace: On this evening in 1964, people are talking about Auschwitz. In rich black and white, the tube cameras are pointed at a friendly older gentleman who appears completely unimpressed by the convivial atmosphere of beer and cider. It is Fritz Bauer, the most prominent public prosecutor of his time and initiator of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. His craggy face behind his massive horn-rimmed glasses makes him look older than his sixty-one years. Nevertheless, he appears young in his diction and positive energy. He answers students’ questions clearly and with a precision that is ready to print: ‘We did a lot when we created the Federal Republic. We have a democracy in the Basic Law (…). But what you need are the right people to live these things.”

The reviewer hits the sore spot, which is present in the KELLERCLUB discussion for just under an hour, but is only addressed at one point by Bauer himself. His political opponents would have preferred to shut him up and he felt the walls coming down on him from all sides.

Kothenschulte also addresses this: “‘I hope I have not said without logic what would have to happen to avoid atrocities such as those that are the subject of the trials and could happen again, not least in a nuclear age,’ Bauer concluded one of his essays on his legal memoirs. ‘Nothing belongs to the past. Everything is still the present and can become the future again.” The brochure in which this can be read was banned for school use in Rhineland-Palatinate in 1962 as “Vaterlandslosigkeit”: … “and the Ministry of Culture was not afraid to send a young CDU politician to a public debate with Bauer. The time was not yet ripe for a reappraisal, said the aspiring party functionary categorically, his name: Helmut Kohl.” (1)

Notes and literature

(1) Daniel Kothenschulte, “Aufklärung im Kellerclub”, in: Frankfurter Rundschau, 22 November 2010.