Cold war TV drama gets premiere 37 years on
Director unearths not only missing episode of East German police show but the story behind why politburo seized tapes


Helen Pidd in Berlin
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 June 2011 17.11 BST


An episode of an East German police TV drama banned by the politburo during the cold war is to get its premiere 37 years on.

The storyline in Polizeiruf 110 about a murderous paedophile was censored in 1974 because the GDR government feared it would lead to an uncomfortable debate about the death penalty, which was then still in force in East Germany. Progress, eh?

The tapes were confiscated shortly before broadcast and assumed lost, until they were found in the German Broadcasting Archive in Babelsberg, near Berlin, in 2009. The recovered footage had no sound, but, after the accompanying script also came to light, one determined German director resolved to recreate the dialogue with the help of actors from the long-running series, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

Stefan Urlass has spent much of the past two years working on the reconstruction of the episode, which will be broadcast on German television on Thursday night.

He has managed to piece together the extraordinary story of how the episode incurred the wrath of the GDR state censors.

Polizeiruf 110 (Dial 110 for Police) was conceived in 1971 as a direct competitor to the West German police series, Tatort (Crime Scene), which had become a big hit over the border. Keen that East German citizens did not tilt their TV antennas towards the west, the GDR government asked state broadcasters to come up with their own version.

From the start, an "adviser" from the ministry of the interior was on hand at all script meetings to oversee proceedings.

On 24 November 1972, the creative team from Polizeiruf 110 were invited to a meeting at the ministry to watch a police training video.

The film was concerned with a notorious murderer called Erwin Hagedorn, who between May 1969 and October 1971 had sexually abused and then killed at least three young boys in the East German town of Eberswalde. He was sentenced to death and was shot in the head by firing squad in Leipzig on 15 September 1972 – a fact which was withheld from the Polizeiruf team as well as the general population.

"The interior ministry just told Polizeiruf that they thought it would be a good idea, in the light of the Hagedorn case, to do something about sex crimes," Urlass told the Guardian on Thursday. "They were aware it was a problem."

The Polizeiruf producers were then tasked with producing an episode loosely based on the Hagedorn case. The director Heinz Seibert then worked on a script with the working title "One fine day". The shoot started well, but just before filming was over, the government put on the brakes and confiscated all the material without giving a reason.

"Seibert had already finished a rough cut, but then the head of television in the GDR ordered that the scripts, the footage and related paperwork had to be surrendered to the authorities – Seibert was never told why," said Urlass.

It was only after reunification that Seibert discovered the reason for the confiscation, when he issued a request for information from a commission set up to investigate banned films in 1990.

He discovered that in 1974 the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, had learned that a West German journalist was investigating Hagedorn's case. At that time, it was not public knowledge in either Germanies that he had been given the death penalty.

"The top brass in the SED [ruling party] thought that this news could cause a scandal – they had a guilty conscience for what they had done to Hagedorn and they were afraid it would come out," said Urlass.

Capital punishment was already a matter of intense controversy in Europe at that time, plus the question of Hagedorn's criminal culpability had been raised during the trial, as well as the fact that Hagedorn was under the age of criminal responsibility at the time of the first two murders.

Talking about his prosecution publicly became taboo, and the Polizeiruf episode was scrapped, less it remind viewers of the case.

Never given a satisfactory explanation, the director, Seibert, was furious. He started to fight for the film to be shown and was sent out into the cold as a result, according to Urlass: "It was a tragedy for him. Though he didn't lose his job, he was no longer allowed to work on decent projects and was only ever given trivial bits and bobs to do."

MDR, a German regional state broadcaster, said it decided to commission the reconstruction as a history project.

"The footage and script convinced us that this programme will still captivate viewers today, 37 years on. With this project we have brought a piece of history to life," said Jana Brandt, head of television drama.

Cold war TV drama gets premiere 37 years on | World news | The Guardian

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Interesting partly because of current perspectives. It seems that back in the 70's, even the STASI were embarrassed about the death penalty, whereas today there'd be plenty on the right cheering them on.