The well-known DDR filmmaker Walter Heynowski died in November 2024 at the age of 96. John Green, an English filmmaker who studied in the DDR and worked as a foreign correspondent for DDR television, wrote the following eulogy for Heynowski’s funeral.
Walter Heynowski and his long-time collaborator Gerhard Scheumann were legendary in the GDR as documentary filmmakers of a special calibre. I was lucky to get to make his acquaintance in 1964 when I began working as an intern at the DEFA documentary studios in Berlin. Later, after graduating from the Film Hochschule, I was lucky to be asked to work on two documentaries made by the Heynowski-Scheumann Studio.
The H&S Studio, as the independent studio they founded became known, enjoyed an exalted status and acclaim in the GDR but also won renown for its films internationally. In their films, both showed a determination to expose fascism wherever it reared its ugly head, made no secret of their support for the socialist goals of the GDR.
Walter had no ambition to make films of outstanding aesthetic kudos or to be hailed as a great documentary ‘auteur’. He unabashedly viewed film primarily as a weapon in the struggle for justice and socialism. He was at heart a journalist who realised that documentary films could reach people in ways that the printed medium could not. He embraced the new medium with commitment and passion and soon revealed his talent for telling a story in an uncompromisingly combative way and with revelatory impact. His films were characterised by a pared-down to the bare bones approach, no didactic narration was used; he let his human subjects condemn themselves out of their own mouths.
His teenage years coincided with Hitler’s all-out war and he, like most of his peers, had been indoctrinated with Nazi ideology. With the liberation of Germany from fascism and the establishment of the GDR, he took up print journalism to begin with as an editor on the Berliner Zeitung, then became editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine, Frischer Wind, forerunner of Eulenspiegel, before going on to work for the Deutsche Fernsehfunk (forerunner of GDR Television). A short time later, he and Gerhard Scheumann set up their own independent studio.
Throughout its life, the Heynowski-Scheumann Studio went on to make over 100 films, 67 of them with Heynowski as the director. Among the most memorable were “Der lachende Mann – Bekenntnisse eines Mörders” (The Laughing Man – the confessions of a murderer) — an exposure of the German mercenary and Nazi Siegfried Müller, widely known as ‘Congo Müller’, and the atrocities he and his gang committed in the Congo. Later they made several documentaries in Vietnam, based on interviews with captured US military personnel, notably ‘Pilots in Pyjamas’. There were also many other notable films, from Chile under dictator Pinochet, in Lybia and several about the roles played by former Nazi officials in the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany.
Although the H&S Studio was often accused by its enemies of merely churning out propaganda for the GDR, the mud never really stuck because no one could deny the accuracy of the stories they told and the veracity of the reality they revealed. He pared down his subject matters to their bare bones, using rarely a superfluous shot and no over-long, explanatory narrations. He let his protagonists condemn themselves out of their own mouths.
Walter Heynowski will be remembered largely for his uncompromising style of exposure and the revelatory nature of his films. He took up subjects that were invariably ignored or avoided by Western film makers as either too difficult to realise or too dangerous to attempt. His legacy lives on in the archives of his work.
