Schtonk!

Fritz Knobel has been a swindler all his life. Already as a little boy in the bomb-wrecked Berlin of the second World War, he sold self-made Hitler souvenirs to the American soldiers. Now he is an adult, calls himself Professor Knobel and sells paintings, for example by Toulouse-Lautrec, which he also makes himself. When he meets the journalist Herrman Willie, he gets the idea to sell ''Hitler's diaries'' with his help. The diaries are obviously as false as the paintings he sells. Herrman's newspaper swallows the bluff, but not for long ..
Comment:
Schtank is not an imaginary word. Throughout his film The Great Dictator, Chaplin uses this word as the culminating point in the dictator's speeches.
The story of Schtank is the well-known affair of Hitler's false diaries. But here it is not told in a documentary fashion. I have fought against the naturalist way of looking at things for a long time. It is about some· thing completely different. It is about the way the Germans have dealt with the myth of Hitler since the war, how they have been and still are bargaining over it. The film is a portrait of Germany.
From the start the main characters in Schtonk were supposed to be mean people. But the real falsifier and journalist believed in what they were doing. In order to make this feeling come alive on the screen, the
two characters had to have all kinds of qualities - they could not just be mean. I thought a lot about whether they would emerge as too nice. But I cannot see things in black or white. I rather think that nothing is all evil or all good. I see the two figures as pawns in the game. In this way the big deal can be accomplished. Willie and Knobel are two fools, one a somewhat greater one than the other.
There were large numbers of elegant swine with charm and charisma that gained advantages under Nazism. It does not interest me to just condemn these people in an unsophisticated manner or to portray them in simplistic terms. No truths are communicated like that, just new lies.
My films live on their actors and the dialogue, regardless of whether it is a TV film or a film for the big screen. This is why I work on the script for such a long time and invest a lot of energy in casting. The casting has in fact been very successful so far.
Many people probably think I am portraying reality in my films. I never have. I have portrayed states of being, I have said something about our society. In the broadest sense I have told political tales, in the
hope of a better world to come.
Helmut Dietl