ARD documentary | TV quizmaster Robert Lembke: The cheerful pessimist

There is a memorable scene in a 1971 broadcast of "What am I?": The prominent guest on the show is the Israeli singer and actress Daliah Lavi. Robert Lembke engages in small talk typical of the cheerful, demure entertainment show and asks the Haifa-born artist about her Russian father and German mother: "Were there any family problems?" Lavi replies that the only problem was that her mother had to learn to cook Russian, and her father had to learn German. This is met with joyful laughter from everyone involved, including the studio audience. "Otherwise, there were no problems? So, they made do," Lembke summarizes kindly, and Lavi confirms it with a smile. Today we know: The innocence of these television images corresponds to the deep-seated need of Germans at the time of their first broadcast not to want to know about their guilt.

In this context, it's important to note that a large part of Daliah Lavis's Jewish family was murdered in the Holocaust. Robert Lembke, who became popular as the quizmaster of the show that ran on German television for decades, survived Nazi persecution only by sheer luck as the son of a Jewish father. For a time, from 1937 to 1944, he was somewhat protected by a so-called "mixed marriage" with an "Aryan" woman.

The scene from the ARD archive described at the beginning can be seen in the docudrama "Robert Lembke – Who am I?" The film, which explores the life of Lembke (1913–1989) and also asks why the popular TV "guessing uncle" didn't want to talk about his Nazi past and his youth, is a form of historical reappraisal that we often wish we had: not revisionist, not sensationalist, not one-dimensional and simplistic like Guido Knopp. Following Lembke's biography as a journalist and TV executive, the documentary tells of the decades-long silence about the Nazi era and the consequences this form of repression had not only for him but also for his family. Not only did the perpetrators remain silent about their crimes after 1945, but the surviving victims also remained silent for a long time, either out of fear of being stigmatized and excluded in post-war German society or out of shame at being among the few survivors.

"That's nobody's business," the quizmaster once replied on a talk show in the 1980s when asked about his private life. The questioner was his ARD colleague Joachim Fuchsberger, who, in turn, had served on the Eastern Front at the age of 17. Just as the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust were rarely discussed, so too were the German Wehrmacht and its crimes.

The documentary shows that Lembke, a careerist and quiet workaholic, whom viewers perceived primarily as a modest, philanthropic TV uncle, "carried a closely guarded secret with him" for a long time, as the documentary's voiceover puts it. His "secret" was that in a previous life he was someone else: "Robert Weichselbaum," persecuted by the Nazis as a "half-Jew." He was 19 years old when Hitler's NSDAP came to power. When he was able to leave his hiding place, a farm in Fürholzen, Bavaria, in May 1945, he was 31.

When the US soldiers arrived in the area, the local population, among whom were, of course, many staunch National Socialists, was terrified. A contemporary witness from Fürholzen who knew about Lembke's hiding place recalls: "Mr. Lembke said: I can speak English, just stay calm, we'll manage. He then approached the Americans with a white sheet and told them he knew his men. And he guaranteed that not a shot would be fired." When Lembke made contact with the liberators, a GI allegedly held a gun to his temple.

Immediately after the end of the war, Lembke began his career as a journalist in Munich – first as head of the domestic politics/sports department at the "Neue Zeitung," where he worked with Stefan Heym and Erich Kästner, among others, and later as editor-in-chief of Bayerischer Rundfunk and deputy program director of ARD. He was deeply committed to "bringing back humanity" after the Nazi dictatorship, as the film states at one point.

One of Lembke's journalist colleagues in the immediate postwar period was the writer and documentary filmmaker Georg Stefan Troller, now 103 years old. Asked whether the Germans at the time were incapable of mourning, he replies in the documentary: "They mourned themselves deeply." Yet Lembke took the mission of the new democratic media seriously: to educate and contribute to democratic decision-making, presented in an entertaining format. Lembke, the kind, conciliatory, mediating harmony-maker, knew "how to bring people back together," as some of his companions in the film confirm. This was one of his most outstanding qualities. He once described his role as host of a popular quiz show as follows: "I consider myself part of the studio equipment." Another thing that was known about him: that he loved animals "because they don't lie."

When he was involved in the 1954 FIFA World Cup broadcast as a television operator, he asked reporters to avoid shouting triumphantly at German victories. It would be better to talk about "sporting competition" rather than "victors and vanquished." Lembke, the modest entertainer, the networker, the communicator, the volunteer confidence-booster on duty.

"I believe in the good in people. It must still be within them. So little comes out." This is one of Lembke's aphorisms. Another of his maxims goes like this: "The removal of conscience is one of the minor operations." Lembke, the "representative of a cheerful pessimism," as the documentary calls him, published a whole series of books with such wisdom and other short and very short prose, while keeping the letters and documents from the time of his persecution in the basement of his house, inaccessible to anyone.

Did the grandparents ever talk about their story of persecution? Robert Lembke's grandson, Florian Benedikt, now also a journalist for a Bavarian newspaper, answers: "Never. Not a single word." Like many others, the television personality Lembke didn't want to be reminded of the Nazi era. The documentary's commentary puts it this way: "After 1945, he saw no advantage in talking about his Jewish heritage. Robert Lembke wanted to belong again." So he made peace with it. In fact, the film reveals that Lembke himself either refused to discuss his Jewish father and the Nazi era with his daughter, or responded only with reluctance and passive-aggression.

The documentary, which is primarily composed of archive footage, old TV clips, and interview excerpts, may be conventional in its format. In particular, the bad practice of having actors recite or repeat documents that only exist in written form (i.e., diaries, letters, texts of all kinds) in short scenes in front of questionable backdrops has unfortunately become standard practice. Nevertheless, the film is well worth watching due to the carefully compiled information.

“Robert Lembke – Who am I?” is available in the ARD media library until September 6.