The actor Thomas Thieme has often shown in his long career that he knows how to rule in very different ways. Sometimes rumbling, sometimes quietly, with cunning and deceit, with nobility and meanness. At the Salzburg Festival in 1999 he gave Shakespeare’s Richard III. as dirty old king, in “The Lives of Others” he played a self-intoxicated GDR culture minister, then the unity chancellor Helmut Kohl, the Bavarian patriarch Uli Hoeneß, and finally the secret ruler of the village of Unterleuten based on the novel by Juli Zeh. With him, a single grim sentence, which he makes like a sword stroke, is often enough – and then there is peace.
The 73-year-old Thieme also shines as a power man and manipulator in the ZDF docudrama “Kaiserspiel”. What would this film, which the otherwise rather media-critical House of Hohenzollern would like, be without this leading actor? As Otto von Bismarck, Thieme plays everyone on the wall, the Prussian King Wilhelm (Peter Meinhardt), who has been relegated to a secondary character, the weak French Emperor Napoleon III. (Hubertus Hartmann), the unworldly but very receptive to cash, King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Matthias Eberle).
The brutality of the Franco-German war is not ignored
The screenwriters Dirk Kämper and Lothar Machtan concentrate on the epoch year 1870/71 in their story. With targeted provocations, Bismarck drove France to declare war on Prussia. On the way to German unification, after the abdication of Napoleon III. only two obstacles: Prussia and her German allies must defeat France, which will only be the case when the fortress of Paris falls. And Bismarck has to convince the latently stubborn, in the film penetrating grandfather Wilhelm, to accept the German imperial crown.
This docudrama, which is largely based on historical facts, has to be credited with the fact that it in no way ignores the brutality of the Franco-German war, such as the terrible bombing of French cities. The encircled Paris is in turmoil, the uprising of the Commune in spring 1871 is in preparation: The film shows how the teacher Louise Michel (Oona von Maydell) becomes an extremely determined resistance fighter against her own government. In a second subplot, the former Empress Eugénie is allowed to review the historical events half a century later in conversation with the German Emperor’s daughter Luise. This part of the film, which takes place at Arenenberg Castle on Lake Constance, is the least convincing because the two old ladies are only giving the cues.
Basically, it all boils down to this one day that was supposed to be a triumph for Prussia, but actually anticipated its end: the imperial proclamation in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Thieme shows Bismarck as an unscrupulous Machiavellian who reports indiscriminately for days until his “most gracious master” finally gives in and lets the German princes proclaim him emperor. Of course, the famous sentence of Wilhelm I should not be missing: “Tomorrow is the most unhappy day of my life! We will bury the Prussian monarchy.” Thomas Thieme doesn’t have to make any major contortions in his portrayal of Bismarck, he has persistently approached the historical figure. Sometimes a smile seems to flicker across his face when he knows that he is a boot length closer to his goal.
Kaiserspiel – Bismarck’s founding of an empire in Versailles, ZDF, 8:15 p.m.