Happy Is the One Who Forgets

Memories of Nazi Germany. Chapter 1 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

6 min readApr 14, 2024

This surreal image–created with ChatGPT—features a man on an island’s beach. His transparent, glass-like head reveals a sky with clouds where his memories should be. The man is smoking a pipe, from which smoke curls and blends into his head’s cloudiness.

1 Happy Is the One Who Forgets

The sun has pierced a blue hole in the dense gray clouds through which our plane has just descended. The sky’s edges are lost on the horizon in the waves of the North Sea — a summer’s day on the island of Sylt, a good two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. From the airport, my rental car rolls through narrow, clean streets. Houses are lined up close together, more cute than posh, framed by low walls and flat garages. The rolling hills become more undeveloped and barren. The green and white spotted dunes crumble away towards the coast. Not far from them, at the end of a private path overgrown with hedges, is the red brick building Üp de Hiir 33.

The driveway reveals another, messier world. Plastic bags with empty bottles pile up at the front entrance. The door leading into the house from the stone terrace is ajar. Chaos reigns in front: red and blue slippers, half a dozen open newspapers and magazines, and two mail-order catalogs strewn randomly over equally randomly placed loungers and chairs. The sounds of jazz, rummaging, and rattling from inside the house indicate that someone is searching for something.

I look around. A hammock is bobbing in the wind. On the stone slabs under it are a red coffee mug and a metal roaster with the remains of a mussel feast. Next to it is a plastic bucket full of empty shells, and further along is an overturned spray paint can, a toy doll with twisted limbs, and a broken fly swatter.

“Sylt is peculiar.”

“Well,” says a scratchy voice behind me. And as meaningless as this statement is, it sounds ironic.

Wolfgang is standing in the patio doorway. He is a shade over six feet tall, thin to scrawny, and clad in an outfit reminiscent of a partisan: a washed-out green denim shirt and pants that are far too wide and of a colorless hue. The crimson suspenders dangle functionless to the left and right down to his knees. He turned 63 three months ago. His smooth skull, however, looks as hairless and bald as a newborn. The eyes underneath lie behind the thin lenses of nickel glasses, almost unprotected by brows. A Dunhill pipe hangs in the center of his lips, bent like a lifeless branch. The corners of his mouth are curled into a mocking smile. His eyes seem to have followed my gaze across the middle-class garbage dump.

“I got dressed especially for you,” he says, pointing to the bell box of a laser light barrier at the entrance — a device that warns him of visitors in his seclusion. “Because I was lying here naked, it’s warm today — ”

“Yes,” I agree, “the air carries a hint of the south — ”

“I have no fondness for the South,” he interrupts me. “I’ve never even been to Sylt’s southern parts. I have the feeling that the people there are already black.”

He casts a suspicious glance at my face, dark-skinned and now even darker after a vacation in Greece.

“Sylt is peculiar. At no other fashionable seaside resort in the world, you find only nationals. Here, you’ll encounter maybe two Italians and a Swiss — at most. Otherwise, it’s all Germans.”

However, his tone of voice and expression sow a seed of doubt about how much he cherishes this homogeneity.

“I’ll make some tea,” he says, vanishing into the house.

“I don’t remember anything!”

We have an appointment for an in-depth biographical interview. The magazine stern demands a portrait, as drastic a depiction as possible, of the “Menge saga” — that concoction of intellect and passion, stinginess and integrity for which the TV author and talk show host is both famous and infamous. I am also researching a multi-part report on the German exodus to Hollywood after the Nazis took power and the consequences for film and television in the post-war Federal Republic. This series is, of course, part of stern’s ongoing journalistic amends for the damage done by the publication of the fabricated Hitler diaries four years earlier.

Wolfgang returns with two cups, the tea bags inside steeping, and the strings and labels hanging over the rim. He sets them down on the table with an air of impatience.

“So!”

He is not only nearly twice my age, but he also has decades of interview experience ahead of me. I bypass probing preliminaries.

“You were born in 1924 and lived through the Third Reich as a teenager. What was it like when — ”

“I don’t remember anything!” He jumps up, strangely agitated. “I’m not saying this to be a jerk — ”

Still barefoot, he paces over the flagstones.

We fall silent, and the silence doesn’t sound very convincing.

“Look,” he says, finally standing before me: “I think people who claim they can remember their childhood and youth are disingenuous. I’ve often contemplated this. For instance, I once tried to recall what a newspaper kiosk looked like back then. I can’t even remember where one used to be. I also have no idea whether our house even had a newspaper. That’s gone, it’s all gone.”

He begins to climb awkwardly into his hammock, which swings beneath him with unruliness.

“Peruvian,” he says as if to account for his difficulties. His long, thin body finally settles into the proper position and relaxes.

Memories must be worked out

“I often attempt to recollect what I was truly like back then. What did I do? What did I do in the evenings, for heaven’s sake?” Wolfgang sighs: “I once discussed this with Manès Sperber …”

The Austrian French writer, who was two decades older than Wolfgang and died in 1984, worked in Berlin during the 1920s. As a Jew and communist, he had to flee Germany in 1933, surviving in Austria and Yugoslavia, then France. When the German Wehrmacht invaded there, too, he sought refuge in Switzerland. After the war, he reflected on the political catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century in a series of autobiographical writings.

His main work, the trilogy of novels Like a Tear in the Ocean (1949–1955), describes the fate of a group of Jewish artists and intellectuals between betrayal by the Communist Party and the rise of German anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust. Later, in his autobiography All Our Yesterdays (1974–1977), Sperber recounted his childhood and youth in Galicia and Vienna, his political awakening, zeal for Zionism and communism, and ultimately, his confrontation with the crimes of Stalinism in the 1930s. Wolfgang once interviewed Sperber on his talk show.

“I told him, ‘I don’t believe your memories!’ Sperber replied that he indeed didn’t have any memories, at least not until a photograph sparked a recollection. Only when he began writing down what little he knew everything else ensued.”

“So, memories must be worked out?”

“Indeed, but I haven’t tried my hand at an autobiography yet. Nor do I intend to.”

The sun is gradually setting. In the evening light, the circular beginnings of a three-day beard that has slipped upwards and backward can be seen on Wolfgang’s bald scalp.

“Anyway, I don’t want to rummage around in there. There’s a barrier …”

He falls silent.

After a while, the phone rings in the house.

Wolfgang inhales deeply. He swings out of the hammock. Relieved.