In Love, Engaged, Moved to West Berlin

Chapter 15 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

8 min readJul 21, 2024

This fake photo — created with ChatGPT — shows WM’s first encounter with the then-unknown Eartha Kitt during her nightclub performance on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn in 1953.

Premature Obituary for Two Weird Men

“On one of the last evenings on NWDR, we heard a necrology: a show was laid to rest. It was really a bit sad because Adrian and Alexander had given us a lot of fun. This very unconventional, even a little bizarre, show was a gem in the otherwise rather plain NWDR program. People chatted, made jokes, and knocked others down in a very personal, relaxed, private way.”

The obituary, published by the Neue Ruhr-Zeitung on September 16, 1953, continued:

“The reason for the show’s cancellation remained unclear. At least it didn’t seem to be due to the author’s lacking imagination. Did too many people resent Adrian’s charmingly mean-spirited attitude? Or could this statement in the farewell broadcast point to the underlying reason: With Alexander gone, the NWDR lost its last personality, which dared to speak freely. (And this Alexander was just a funny, incomprehensibly chattering creature anyway.) In any case, with the end of Adrian and Alexander, a lovely playground for feuilletonistic freedom has been closed. And that’s a shame.”

WM certainly doesn’t lack ideas. He lacks time — because he has accepted Heinz Ullstein’s offer. However, the necrology proves to be a little premature.

“After a two-year run, Wolfgang Menge’s recurring characters Adrian and Alexander were set to bid farewell for good,” reported Die Zeit on October 10, 1953. “But the protest of some listeners compelled them to continue. Now Adrian will once again regularly recite his more or less curious reports on Saturday evenings, and the bubbling Alexander will spin records.”

For a few more months, anyway.

The Coming and Going of a Great Love

As he prepares to move to Berlin, WM not only has to re-evaluate his professional commitments, but also his personal relationships. He is engaged and should decide on a marriage proposal.

But then an American actress and singer passes through Hamburg on her European tour. She is twenty-six years old, has big green eyes framed by long black hair, and a voice that stands out among thousands. The father is unknown, and her mother is a Black and Native American woman who worked on a farm and gave her up for adoption immediately after birth. From the age of nine, the foster child grew up in Harlem. Orson Welles discovered her for Broadway in 1951. In his production of Faust, he cast the young black woman in the role of the Trojan Helen. Welles told the press that his discovery was “the most exciting woman in the world.”

As a singer, however, Eartha Kitt is still working on her breakthrough success. In 1953, she got a recording contract and cut several singles, including “C’est si bon.” To make ends meet, she accepted engagements overseas. A signature of her European shows is that she sings in multiple languages: French, Spanish, German, and, of course, English. On the stages of the smoky nightclubs where she performs, she already exudes the glamor of the Hollywood star she will become within a year: exotic, tight-fitting dresses, eye-catching jewelry, and smooth movements. Her voice, alternating between rough and soft, captivates the audience in Paris, Zurich, Berlin, and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn.

WM falls in love, as does Eartha.

After a few days, Eartha Kitt has to move on to her tour’s next stop before returning to the US. Soon thereafter, during the holiday season, her career skyrockets with the worldwide smash hit “Santa Baby.” Meanwhile, WM has broken off the engagement with his Hamburg girlfriend. He begins working in West Berlin as he writes to Eartha Kitt. He officially registers in the Cold War frontline city on December 29, 1953, and Eartha replies from San Francisco on February 15:

“Dear Wolfgang: Thanks so much for your letter. I enjoyed hearing from you. Then, too, it started me thinking back on what we had done when we were together. It was fun, wasn’t it? … Write me again soon, Wolfgang.“

Life and Work in a Frontline City

WM does not go to West Berlin alone. He brings his unemployed parents and his younger sister with him. Marianne is eighteen years old and lives with severe disabilities resulting from a botched tonsillectomy. For some time now, WM has been supporting the family with 250 marks a month. That’s about half of the average German income. The desk where WM has to earn his high salary — as head of the series department at B.Z. — is located in the Ullsteinhaus.

The colossal clinker-clad structure is at Tempelhof Harbor. Heinz Ullstein’s father, Louis, commissioned it in the brick expressionist style to house Germany’s most efficient printing plant. When it opened in 1927, the Ullsteinhaus was twice as large as the Reichstag — at 80,000 square meters — and at 77 meters, it was also the tallest building in the Weimar Republic. Its façade is decorated with intricate ornamentation made of corbels and travertine blocks. A triptych relief frames the main entrance. It symbolizes the three divisions: newspapers, magazines, and books.

Upon assuming control of the publishing company, the National Socialists renamed the Ullsteinhaus “Deutsches Haus” — “German House” — and produced propaganda magazines such as Das Reich and Der Angriff. During the war, the Gestapo and SS also used the premises — for interrogations and torture. Only in 1952, seven years after the end of the Nazi regime, did the Ullstein family regain the building.

Two years later, when WM drives towards the red brick building in his equally red MG, he can see its tall clock tower with narrow windows from a distance. The windows shine like the eyes of an owl. The comparison is unmistakable. The gleaming copper roof is adorned with a veritable owl, almost three meters tall, made of bronze and weighing one and a half tons, the heraldic animal of the Ullsteins.

Ullstein’s Illustrious Editors

In the editorial offices of Morgenpost and B.Z., WM rubs shoulders with seasoned journalists like his mentor Wilhelm “Tokyo” Schulze, but also fresh faces as young as he is or even younger. Some of them will go on to become big names in German media.

Henry Kolarz, for example, born in 1927, will gain fame in the mid-sixties with a stern series about the British mail train robbery and the script for the TV three-parter Die Gentlemen bitten zur Kasse (The Gentlemen Ask to Pay Up), which was based on the magazine series.

Or Oswalt Kolle, born in 1928. He is still a film editor but will rise to become West Germany’s most famous “sex educator” during the “sex wave” of the sixties and seventies.

Or Will Tremper, also born in 1928, a slender, not very tall man with black-rimmed glasses. He is assigned as WM’s closest colleague and is immediately impressed.

“You wouldn’t recognize him from the old photos because Wolfgang had really a lot of hair on his head,” Will Tremper recalls in his memoirs. WM “was a handsome guy, comparable in style to a young Robert Redford — who’s laughing? For me, someone who smoked a pipe, drove a roaring English MG, could cook fabulously even back then, had an affair with Eartha Kitt, and was currently chasing Miss Germany, represented a novel experience. We hit it off right away and whipped up a number of B.Z. series together.”

WM Meets His Alter Ego

As they collaborate, the two discover what they have in common: similar experiences of war, similar ambitions, similar longings for the future — and similar fears.

In 1944, when WM was stationed in Poland, Will Tremper, just sixteen years old and a “photojournalist in training,” received instructions from the “Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda”:

“Make a report: ‘Ukrainian Youth Helping to Rebuild Europe.’”

The order was signed “on behalf of” by a ministerial director, with a stamp of the national eagle below it.

That’s how Will Tremper describes the mission that took him to the Minsk encirclement. He managed to escape the Red Army by plane at the last minute. Eventually, he ended up back in Berlin but couldn’t stay in the capital for long. He fled “on foot from Berlin to Munich, where the surviving members of the Berliner Illustrierte editorial staff had sought refuge. But instead of an editorial office, I found myself in a film lab of the first American newsreel, World in Film, which had started operations in the Geiselgasteig studios.”

In the years after the war, Tremper worked as a photojournalist and writer. For a time, he ghostwrote for Curt Riess.

In the 1920s, Riess had been a drama and film critic for the Neue Berliner Zeitung: Das 12 Uhr Blatt (The New Berlin Newspaper: 12 O’Clock Edition), the only competition to the B.Z. am Mittag (B.Z. At Noon). When the Nazis came to power, he emigrated to the U.S. He reported from Hollywood for two dozen European newspapers and wrote several anti-Nazi nonfiction bestsellers. After the United States entered the war, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a military correspondent. In the early postwar years, Riess covered the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals and wrote a biography of Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels that was published in New York in 1948.

Tremper’s experience with Riess was similar to WM’s experience during his training years in London. Both young journalists developed their love for factual reporting by working with older writers who had been or still were in Anglo-Saxon exile — learning from them how to present their research narratively.

“He was interested in everyday adventures, briefly sketched but visually grippingly staged: raw stories from the street,” is how Norbert Grob characterizes the “penchant for headline stories, for concise facts and powerful punchlines” that characterizes Will Tremper’s journalistic and cinematic work. Almost all of this applies to WM as well. The paths that led both young war veterans to journalism overlap to a great extent. Will Tremper likes to quote Billy Wilder, who also began his career as a reporter, as a way of explaining this:

“If you don’t know what you want to be, become a journalist — journalism takes you everywhere!”

The Fascination of Ordinary Crime

One of the first big wins for the B.Z. team, Menge and Tremper, was the series “Courbierestraße Nr. 6.” Tremper describes it as “the story of an average Berlin apartment building from the turn of the century to the 1950s. ‘We simply put our finger on the map,’ Wolfgang assured readers in the announcement, ‘and looked under the roof …’ It was purely coincidental that Berlin’s most famous fortune-teller, Ursula Kardos, lived in this house, that puzzling murders cast their shadows over the tenants, that mysterious body parts were found in the neighboring Landwehr Canal, and that the hairdresser on the first floor had been killed right after the house was built. When readers complained that this wasn’t just an ordinary apartment building, we convinced them otherwise and, with the help of our excellent police reporter Ewe Wildberger, found a creepy thing or two in the other houses they asked us about.”

In this respect, the B.Z. series is a counterpart to WM’s reportage four years earlier for the Hamburger Abendblatt on “A Perfectly Normal New House.” The perspective has shifted characteristically. The restoration of normality after the destruction and turmoil of war has been replaced by the search for the secrets hidden beneath the surface of everyday life, the uncovering of its “uncanniness.” The approach is more sensationalist than factual, suggesting Will Tremper’s influence. But the shift in focus also foreshadows what will become the signature style of WM’s early successes in film and television: semi-documentary portrayals of ordinary crimes and their investigation.