Why did we choose Horst?

                Horst Buchholz isn’t the kind of person you would normally do research on for a history class, and that’s exactly why we chose him to be our topic. We wanted someone a little outside of the norm. Someone who wasn’t a famous politician or a poet. I had taken a film course during spring semester and recalled Buchholz’s name coming up in one of our class discussions. When I saw his name on our list, I was hopeful that my partner would agree that he would be a good option. I only recognized a few of the other names on the list, and was hoping to do research on something I truly enjoyed. Luckily, Alexa wants to go into the entertainment industry and we quickly agreed that he would be our topic. Our interest in the film industry made doing research a lot more fun, partly because we weren’t looking up political speeches or long essays – we were looking up movie clips and interviews. Originally, the only thing we knew about him was that he had been nicknamed “The James Dean of German Cinema”, which seemed impressive. In order to learn more, we dug deep into the internet and visited different places around the city to find out more. We read commentary by his son about his life, ventured to the film museum to find out more about the cinema of the time, and even ended up being able to visit his grave. All of this gave us some interesting insights into his life that we never would have gotten otherwise. Through some interviews we were able to find, we learned a little about Horst and his private life and even found ourselves sifting through old tabloids that were printed about his presumed affairs.

               Through our research on his life, we learned a lot about the German film industry in general and how it is a reflection of Germany history. Because he was active in the film industry after the end of World War II, he had to deal with the dramatically altered industry. In fact, I would venture to say that he helped to heal the industry by devoting himself to it for many years. We learned about Billy Wilder, who directed one of the more famous films Buchholz appeared in. Wilder emigrated from Berlin to Hollywood after Hitler took power in 1933, even though he didn’t speak any English. He won more than 50 awards during his career and is world-renowned as one of the best directors of all time. Both of these men demonstrate the tumultuous history of German cinema through their careers, and the film they did together, “One, Two, Three” demonstrates their abilities. The film is a comedy that is set in West Berlin and provides a humorous take on the climate that ended up changing both of their lives forever.

               Learning about the German cinema through this project has been extremely interesting. We never knew how much the divide between East and West impacted the country as a whole. For some reason, this divide wasn’t really focused on in my past history classes, but this project really opened my eyes to all the implications it had for the people of Germany. We hear about what Hitler did, but never really focused on the negative impact the division of the country had on the people and the culture. By doing research about Horst Buchholz, we learned more about how the nation was affected by its history.