The sixth feature film in which Hildegard Knef starred shows the destroyed Munich of 1947. After the Second World War, draughtsman Michael Roth returns from exile in Switzerland to his hometown of Munich and stays in the half-destroyed Regina Palace Hotel, where he had often stayed in the past. He finds that his former friends receive him with hostility, as his hasty escape has been linked to the theft of jewelry from the Jewish woman Nelly Dreifuss, who took her own life at the time. Roth knows that he is innocent, but rehabilitating himself is not so easy.

In order to make the hotel business as realistic as possible, the employees who had lost their jobs due to the destruction of the real hotel were hired as extras for their actual roles.

D 1947, 109 min., FSK: unrated

Young reporter Niko Jost is working on a series of articles entitled "Black Market and White West", which he sees as a springboard for his career. Ambitious and ambitious, he is prepared to do anything. On behalf of an even more unscrupulous editor, Jost pokes around in the past of a nouveau riche hotelier and makes some interesting discoveries.

"DER MANN, DER SICH VERKAUFTE shows Hansjörg Felmy in the atypical role of the unsympathetic egocentric, Hildegard Knef plays a mysterious life-lady. Director Josef von Báky's film caricatures the press of 1959 with skillful exaggerations." filmportal.de

FRG 1959, 103 min., FSK: from 6

Kai Wessel's film largely follows the artist's autobiography entitled "Der geschenkte Gaul". Heike Makatsch is stunning in the leading role. One can hardly speak of a role anymore, she embodies Knef, a contradictory woman with rough edges, so intensely and sensitively.

The icon of film and song was loved and hated by her audience in Germany. Her love for Nazi supporter Ewald von Demandowsky remained with her even years after the war, despite her marriage to Kurt Hirsch, an American lieutenant of Jewish origin. She goes to America, but Hollywood is not ready for a German actress so soon after the war. So she returns to Germany, but even here she is soon no longer wanted because of a small nude scene in DIE SÜNDERIN. Back in America, she was finally able to do what she loved best: performing on stage. Hildegard Knef becomes a star on Broadway. Her stellar career did not go unnoticed in Germany either. The time finally came in 1966. She gives her biggest concert to date in front of a German audience in the Berlin Philharmonie.

D 2009, 137 min., FSK: 12+

Curd Jürgens is Mackie, June Ritchie is Polly, Hildegard Knef is Jenny and Lino Ventura is Tiger Brown: this is what producer Kurt Ulrich (with French money) managed to achieve when, after three years of preparation, the 1963 film version of the legendary work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill was finally shot. All film markets were to be served, and so the film begins with Sammy Davis turning the legendary Mackiemesser song into a swing with a big band. Wolfgang Staudte, the renowned, experienced director, cleverly left the film in a stage setting, thus achieving an effective cohesiveness. Certainly one of the most unusual adaptations of the "Threepenny Opera".

F/BRD 1963, 124 min., FSK: 16+

Shortly before our summer break, we honor Hildegard Knef once again at the end of our series on her 100th birthday. We are particularly looking forward to the live concert by Nicole Metzger and her jazz trio, who will be our guests with their homage to the artist "So oder so ist das Leben":
Nicole Metzger, jazz singer, Jean-Yves Jung, piano, Jens Loh, double bass, Jean-Marc Robin, drums

Afterwards we will once again show the film portrait by Luzia Schmid: Hildegard Knef was a diva, opinionated, controversial, mirror and antithesis of her time. As an actress, singer and author, she celebrated international successes, experienced crushing defeats and was creatively active for more than five decades. She became part of the German public at the age of 20 and was to remain so for the rest of her life. Her favorite theme, being successful, failing, reinventing herself again and again and - against all odds - getting up again and again, makes her an expert on survival.