Unity by Michael Arditti Page A

contentious than when he voiced it in the presence of the Hollywood actress, Geraldine Mortimer, who physicallyattacked him. 89 His mother’s and stepfather’s baby was stillborn.
    After his wife’s empty-handed return from hospital, Wolfram’s stepfather treated him even more perversely, alternating brutal beltings with lachrymose pleas for love (Wolfram relished both as proof of his dominance). To preserve the peace, Kristel connived to keep the pair as far apart as possible. The simplest means was to send Wolfram to the cinema. He went every day after school and, increasingly, instead of it. So began the great love affair of his life. He himself takes up the tale, courtesy of Andy Warhol’s Interview : ‘I was Christopher Columbus: I discovered America. Smokey bars. Sunlit prairies. Rita Hayworth. Spencer Tracey. The Manhattan skyline. The mob. Teenagers … A world of vast landscapes and minuscule gestures. A world where everything was fluid yet everyone had a place. And for that I have to thank my mother. If she hadn’t married again, I might never have known.’
    Cinema was Wolfram’s life and it therefore stands at the heart of this memoir in the form of a detailed interpretation of each of his films by the author, the person best qualified to bring Wolfram’s work to a wider audience. I was not merely his closest professional associate – the only actor to have appeared in every single one of his films – but his wife. One might suppose, given Wolfram’s very public proclivities, that our marriage was a mockery but, on the contrary, it attests to the deep devotion he felt for me that, despite the absence of desire, he wanted the union. Nevertheless – and unlike some of my less privileged former colleagues – I retain the right to exercise my critical faculties. I am under no illusions about his failings – at least not now, a decade after his death. 90 While he lived, I was in total thrall tohim. It was a madness that I never understood until we worked together on the unfinished Unity and I learnt about loyalty to a dictator. 91
    I first met Wolfram Meier at the Bettlertheater in Munich in the mid 1960s (dates from that period are particularly hazy). His cousin, a stagehand, had sneaked him into a performance which impressed him so much that he returned again and again. He never applied formally to join us (he would never have revealed such vulnerability), but he used to sit and drink with the actors late into the night, becoming one of the group by stealth. He did not hold back on his criticism of performances that he considered inadequate. Some of those under attack were incensed that this upstart – this yob – should give them notes, but it was an article of our faith that everyone be allowed his say. Goethe’s view of Faust was of no more consequence than that of the woman who sold the ice-cream in the foyer.
    At first Wolfram was employed backstage but, when an actor in Buchner’s Leonce and Lena fell ill in mid-rehearsal, he offered to take over the role. His ambitions did not stop there, but stretched to taking over the company. Conditions worked in his favour. Although Klaus Bernheim and Manfred Stückl were nominally in charge, we were a collective. We decided to put our principles into practice by doing away with a director and taking all decisions (artistic as well as administrative) by vote. The democratic ideal soon proved to be unworkable. Anarchy prevailed until Wolfram, trading on the fact that as the most recent recruit he was the one least subject to personal allegiances, took control. He brought in some friends to build the set. He worked with his cousin on the lighting. He instructed the actors on the staging. The play opened on time.
    His intentions were initially obscure. It was not so much that he imposed himself on us as that he made himself the only means whereby we could achieve our goals. He persuaded us to