Janni Schenck

Putting-up

I spent fifteen years telling myself I couldn’t do something. Which was stupid, because that always turns out to be true. To be accurate I spent thirteen years doing that and another two years thinking I had to do it but I didn’t know how. Then a year seriously thinking about how I was going to do it.

It was a story. The problem was it was true. The bigger problem was it happened in a Germany that has thankfully disappeared, which I knew next to nothing about. Not least as I didn’t speak German.
https://youtu.be/E7IVGBWV8cc

I didn’t want to be the sad bloke with shelves full of books with swastikas on the spine. Even after I learned they’re called hakencruzen. I read everything I could, buying books from boot-sales, second-hand shops, anywhere. What I didn’t want was military history. I needed to know how a village worked. What people had for breakfast in 1945. What the newspaper was called.

I had the story: I’d heard it first-hand. I needed the framework it happened in. And the reality of that wasn’t anything you’ve ever seen on TV. You think you know about it from the graphic violence of Saving Private Ryan or the extended buddy movie treatment of Band of Brothers. You don’t. Even Der Untergang doesn’t touch on what happened to ordinary people, the millions of people who just happened to be born at a place, at a time. Who could have been anybody. Who could have been you.

I hadn’t the first clue before I started this what had happened to ordinary people. I got my first clue talking to a German woman about her town. I’d asked her what’s it like?

Oh, quite new houses, like any other town in the north of Germany, she’d said. And the old town? Well, the RAF took care of the old town one night in late March 1945. Chiefly because they could. It shocked me. It still does. And before anyone jumps up and down screaming about the Blitz, yes. Awful. About 40,000 British people died from German bombing in the war. About 40,000 people died in three nights of bombing by the RAF in Hamburg. Something else they forgot to mention at my school, along with the whole idea of German resistance to Nazism which by its nature, was quite secretive and predictably and inevitably short-lived. It must have been exactly the same as in places like Syria now. “Why didn’t you fight it?” always comes up against “How?”

It must have been exactly the same as in places like Syria now. “Why didn’t you fight it?” always comes up against “How?” When the police take away everyone in the house next door, what are you going to do? Call the police? Maybe write to your MP? Fight them, the same way refugees are told they should, with sticks against rifles? And there’s always plenty more room on the truck. But some people stood up.

I turned it into a screenplay, Janni Schenk. One person refused to read it twice because it upset her so much the first time. It’s not graphic violence. The body count is very low and almost all of it happens out of shot. It’s a very simple story. Almost all of it is true.

An orphaned boy is betrayed by his country, his youth-group and his school-teacher before he saves his village from total destruction.

Except his youth-group was the Hitler Jugend. And the people about to destroy his village were the US Army. And for that reason alone I don’t think any film-maker outside Germany is going to touch it with gloves on. Certainly not an American film-maker. But let’s see. Maybe I’ll be wrong.

A Working Synopsis

Janni Schenk

Janni Schenk is a German boy of about 14 whose family are dead. Displaced to a rural village he brings with him his injured cat, his hobby repairing radios and his love of both the Hitler Youth movement he was conscripted into and Swing music introduced to him by his aunt Hannah, who adopts him. His story moves between Hamburg, the last day of his war in the mountain village of Fall and the present day in England, where he lives as an old man. Every incident in this screenplay happened. Otto Horst was a real person who saved the lives of the Hitler Youth Boys. Janni Schenck told me his story first hand, although I never knew his real name. Every time I thought of him Janni’s name came to me. Recently I found that Christa Schroeder, one of Hitler’s secretaries, was employed after the war by a Herr Schenk, in pretty much the same area where this story is set, southwest Germany, in April 1945. Otto Bachler was also a real person, although a surgeon, not an accountant. He made a joke about Hitler and was to be executed when partisans attacked. He walked from Romania to Bremen and saw the destruction of Dresden on the way. He lived to a ripe old age as a doctor in West Germany. His grand-daughter showed me his surgical needles and told me his story.

Every musical detail is accurate, including the edict about the rules for Swing tunes. This is not a normal war story. Some people may find Janni not very likeable. I think he is a normal boy of his age and background. Above all else, he was a victim. He was fooled into thinking the drums and flags and songs and guns were a noble cause. He was fooled by the SS into trying to save his village, which would have cost him his life while they got away to live in comfort. Finally Janni was betrayed by the man who saved his life, necessarily, the schoolteacher and head of the Hitler Youth troop who he had trusted implicitly.

Janni’s aunt is reunited with her husband who she thought was dead. Janni and the schoolmaster survive. The fervent Nazi dies, along with Otto who was only trying to get home. Swing music makes the Americans pause long enough to decide not to destroy the village. And Janni’s music, the Swing music that got him through, that survived too, as the soundtrack for both sides. But the songs of the Hitler Youth, their pledge of loyalty to the father of their new nation were all a lie. Their fatherland was abusive. The dream was sour. But even from the hatefulness of that premise, life went on. Janni and Germany made things better, for everyone. Things can change. Good will come. It’s just that sometimes you can’t see when or how.

It was a summer afternoon about 16 years ago and I had nothing much to do that wouldn’t wait. I walked across the fields, down the hill and over the canal and the little river, then up the hill the other side of the valley, to a pub nearly at the top, near the Rudolf Steiner school. An old man was in there, having a loud argument with a fat Enlighs skinhead.

I’d seen the old man before. The first time I noticed his white flowing hair and aquiline nose and said to my partner ‘Look, that’s Rudolf Steiner,” but she unsportingly didn’t laugh. He was getting louder this time. Then I heard the words “Hitler Youth,” which are not words you often hear in Home Counties pubs, even if there are fat skinheads there. I’d assumed it was the large, bald bloke. And I was wrong.

It was the old man who’d spoken about the Hitler Youth. They were great, he said. And he should know, because he was one. Or had been then. What had made him incandescent with anger was being called a Nazi. You had to join the Nazi Party, he shouted at the other man, who was probably not a skinhead really, just fat and bald with a London-diaspora voice. And sixteen million people had. But you didn’t get the choice about joining the Hitler Youth. You go a card on your thirteenth birthday, telling you that you were a member. Your choice what happened next.

I’ve always thought of him as Janni Schenck. I wrote his story.