Der Neger Erwin (1981) User Reviews

"Do you want the total drunkenness?"

[hasosch · 10/10 · 18 August 2008]

This is Achternbusch's reaction to Dr. Goebbels' original question. Herbert Achternbusch (*1938), Bavarian writer, painter, sculptor, filmmaker, actor and producer tells in "Der Neger Erwin" ("The Negro Erwin") the story of a man who has just been released from prison and wants to turn the hostess of his regular beer-pub "The Negro Erwin" into a film-star. Naturally for Achternbusch, her name is Susn, like in the novel and film "Das letzte Loch" ("The Last Whole"), and Susn is again played by Achternbusch's marvelous late actress Annamirl Bierbichler. The ex-convict enters the pub and asserts that he is the famous filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch: "I vote that drinkers make movies, since a drinker knows his homeland". Also the pub is a peculiar one: "Since centuries, the pub keeps Negroes as dogs, since the end of World War II only white Negroes" (Der Neger Erwin, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 75). Three Bavarian men are pressing their arms against one another in order to become the next Negro, because they want to repeat another feast of drunkenness after the last one lasted for 14 days. The filmmaker says: "I am the writer Do-not-read-me. Erwin Donotreadme. I need a sheet of paper and a few beers. Originally, I have been an airplane-bricklayer. For 25 marks per hour I have pulled up walls in airplanes with trowel and spirit level. When gasoline was out, I have made sight-seeings in nuclear power plants for Thalidomide children. When I asked them something, they lifted their fingers on their shoulders. I explained them that with nuclear power people do not need arms anymore" (loc. cit., pp. 68-69). The hostess Susn shows Erwin the past of the pub: stuffed animals in a barn where the former Negroes were living in a doghouse. Erwin says that his grandfather was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who did not drown in the Lake of Starnberg, but escaped on the opposite shore, where he was picked up by his girlfriend, the empress Sissi, and they went to Paris, where they lived in anonymity until the end of their days. Although Erwin's film is endangered by some misunderstandings caused by the Bavarian language, at the end, everything's okay: Mamba Anita and the other hippopotami are swimming in the river Isar, Munich is in the desert, the river Isar becomes the Nile, and the filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch becomes the new Negro Erwin, "since only the most depraved of all arts, the film, is allowed to try to say to our descendants that we, too, have been human beings" (loc. cit., pp. 92-93).