Biopic about Walter Kaufmann

Walter Kaufmann is one of the best-known Dunera Boys in Germany; he was a popular and respected writer in the GDR, well known in Australia, too.

His adoptive parents brought the Jewish boy, born in 1924, to safety in England on a Kindertransport. There he was taken from school in mid-1940, interned and deported to Australia. After internment and army service, he worked in various jobs and wrote his first novel ‘Voices in the Storm’. After his return from Australia, he lived as a writer and journalist in the GDR. Because he had kept his Australian passport, he was able to travel to many countries. He reported on political and social issues and always had an eye for experiences on the margins. He did this ‘always on the side of the victims, the disenfranchised’, as the Berlin film journalist Knut Elstermann sayd in his review for public TV RBB. These journeys characterise Kaufmann’s extensive literary work as well as persecution and exile, with his own experiences forming a cornerstone. ‘He was able to experience the world in his life. But not a day went by without him thinking of his parents, who were murdered in Auschwitz,’ the Berlin weekly newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine recalled in its obituary.

The film ‘Walter Kaufmann – What a Life!’, which premiered on 15 April 2021 shortly after Kaufmann’s death, ends with his warning on the occasion of right-wing extremist acts of violence: ‘This shift to the right has mobilised me, inwardly, in the sense that I now want to go to the barricades and tell everyone: Never again – never again!’

The ‘incredible life story’ of a man who was ‘as combative as he was full of life’ (Elstermann) is now being shown again in several cinemas in Hesse and Lower Saxony to mark the 100th anniversary of the writer’s birth.

The following screenings have been announced:
22 May in Büdingen, Novum Kino
23 May in Butzbach, Filmtheater
27 May in Grünberg, cinema
28 May in Korbach, Cine K
10 June in Hanover, Kino am Raschplatz

Director Karin Kaper accompanies all screenings, which are organised in cooperation with local organisations and initiatives. In addition to the evening programme, school screenings are planned at all locations on the following day, in which the director will also take part.

Ms Kaper has also announced that the film has been invited to Sydney and Melbourne in September. This period also has a background: On 6 September 1940, Walter Kaufmann reached Sydney on the ship Dunera together with more than 2,000 fellow sufferers who had fled to England to escape Nazi persecution. After internment and military service, Kaufmann lived in Melbourne until 1957 before moving to the GDR.