"Im Schatten der Macht" opens this year’s International Film and Television Festival Cologne Conference 2003. The parable of contemporary history concerns the Günter Guillaume espionage affair which led to the resignation of Chancellor Willy Brandt. This screening provides a fitting occasion to dedicate this year’s retrospective to the work of screenplay author and director Oliver Storz. Winner of numerous awards, Storz is rightly regarded as one of the great creative forces in German television history.
"Im Schatten der Macht" is, in many respects, a classic Oliver Storz film. The recent past provides him with the subject matter and the social climate. On this foundation he constructs a film narrative exploring human conflicts with universal relevance. An excellent acting ensemble is guided to outstanding performances under his direction. In the past decade, Storz has delivered several successful productions in this vain: "Drei Tage im April"- commissioned in 1994 by the SDR to commemorate 8 May 1945 and winner of the Bayerischer Filmpreis (Bavarian Film Award) - tells the story of ordinary townspeople caught between paralysis and showing moral courage during the last days of the Second World War. "Gegen Ende der Nacht", set in the immediate post-war era, portrays the disturbing love story between an American secret service agent (Stefan Kurt) and a young German woman (Karoline Eichhorn), suspected of having been a concentration camp warden. The film won the 1999 Grimme-Preis (Grimme Award).
Oliver Storz was born in 1929 in Mannheim and grew up in Swabia in southern Germany. For all his later film success, Storz began his working life in other métiers: After completing studies in German, English and Romance Literature at Tübingen University, he worked for two years as a school teacher, before moving on to work as a critic and features editor for the Stuttgarter Zeitung. In 1960 he joined Bavaria Film’s newly formed television department. Here the leading creative lights and television pioneers of the era such as Franz Peter Wirth ("Tatort", "Die Buddenbrooks", 1979) and Rainer Erler ("Das blaue Palais", 1974-76) came together. And Oliver Storz was there as well, remaining with Bavaria as a writer, story editor and producer until 1974.
During this time he wrote the scripts for numerous television dramas, while at the same time revealing a completely different aspect of his capability: As producer and part of a writing collective with a one-man pseudonym, Oliver Storz was on board for the development of the only genuinely German cult series "Raumpatrouille Orion". He left a distinguishing mark on the seven sci-fi episodes that emerged from Bavaria’s format laboratory, then still in relative infancy. The ARD series first aired in 1966, just about simultaneously with the start of the US space adventure, "Star Trek".
Storz showed he had a knack for maneuvering genres and an instinct for innovative entertainment in the following productions as well: He wrote three episodes of "Alexander Zwo" (1972/73) directed for WDR by Franz Peter Wirth; a "Tatort" episode featuring commissioner Haferkamp ("Der Mann aus Zimmer 22") followed in 1974. After his time at Bavaria, Storz remained true to the crime genre, writing the screenplays for several episodes of "Der Alte".
Today, Oliver Storz, who bears the Federal Cross of Merit, and is also the author of novels and several volumes of short stories, distances himself a little from part of his early work in referring to it as "utility television". Closer to his heart are the highly ambitious television dramas that he began directing himself in 1980. These productions take up the thread of his adaptations of stage classics and literature - including Schiller’s "Wallenstein" and Hans Fallada’s "Der Trinker" (1967, dir: Dietrich Haugk) - done in an era of television defined by the genre. As early on as 1962, his adaptation of Albrecht Goes’ "Der Schlaf der Gerechten", (dir: Rolf Hädrich) was acknowledged with the International Berlin Film Festival’s Special Award for Freedom and Justice. With "Hildes Endspiel" (1984, dir: Franz Peter Wirth) and the erotic comedy "Das Viereck" (1988), Storz again wrote lighter domestic comedies, about which the Frankfurter Rundschau said: "Clever how he grabs hold of the Zeitgeist surrounding his subject, and picks it apart with fine-tuned parody".
His screenplays provided the blueprint for the work of some of the greatest directors in television history: Eberhard Itzenplitz ("Prüfung eines Lehrers", 1968, "Die Beichte", 1970), Fritz Umgelter ("Wie eine Träne im Ozean", 1970, adapted from a Manès Sperber trilogy). At the same time, Storz worked on domestic comedies and folk chronicles in the popular German ‘Heimat’ tradition ("Sachrang", 1978). In "Das 1001. Jahr" he shows us the year 1945 from the perspective of two teenagers. This was followed in 1980 by "Musik auf dem Lande", which also marks Storz’s directorial debut; the farce "Stadtbrand" followed in 1985, concluding the "Swabian Trilogy".'
In these films, as in many of his screenplays, Oliver Storz persistently breaks with convention, following the course of collective repression of the past as it mutates to collective neurosis behind the façade of affluence. Oliver Storz’s narratives are rooted in and driven by the omnipresence of the national socialist dictatorship in contemporary German life; observed, not with bitter accusation, but with melancholic-ironic ambivalence. Likewise, "Im Schatten der Macht" gives us not chronicle of a scandal-ridden 1970’s Federal Republic of Germany, but a tense chamber piece about the fall of a great man.
With a small sample from the oeuvre of Oliver Storz – chosen in consultation with Mr. Storz himself – the Cologne Conference pays homage to a pioneering television screenwriter and director, and offers a look at a genre arc spanning everything from science fiction and detective stories to bourgeois comedy and on to the great dramatizations of contemporary history that continue to influence the evolution of German television to the present day.