TV
Poor in a Rich Country: The Film “A Man of His Class”

Christian (Camille Loup Moltzen, left) and his brother Benny (Len Blankenberg, middle) are, just like the rest of the family, ardent admirers of 1. FC Kaiserslautern. photo
© Daniel Dornhöfer/Saxonia Media/SWR/dpa
Out of hunger, he even ate the mold from the wall: Christian Baron’s autobiographical novel about his childhood in the 1990s touched many readers. Now the film adaptation is coming to television.
There is a huge hole in the apartment door. It has taken a toll since her father’s violent outburst. The hole remains in the door for many weeks and months. A symbol that family is not a protected space for ten-year-old Christian (Camille Loup Moltzen), who lives here in deep poverty with his two siblings and parents.
The money is never enough
Christian grew up in Rhineland-Palatinate in the 1990s Kaiserslautern. Violence, hunger and exclusion isolate the group of five from the outside world. Later he will be the first person in his family to graduate from high school, become a writer and write everything down.
But in 1994 he is far from that. When the family refuses to donate food out of pride, he eats the mold from the wall. The bestselling novel adaptation “A Man of His Class” (October 2, 8:15 p.m., Das Erste) shows what it’s like to live in the shadows.
The authorities? No help
Family man Ottes (Leonard Kunz) works as a mover and barely brings home enough money to survive and has an alcohol problem. He regularly beats his mother Mira (Mercedes Müller) – once so badly that she loses an unborn child. The housewife keeps threatening him that she will leave him – and then she doesn’t manage to do it. Eventually she loses the battle against cancer, in which her husband was obviously never supportive.
One day Christian gets a recommendation from his elementary school to go to high school. The father, himself from a working-class family, is strictly against it. Christian also fears the foreign environment. He is attached to his father, who likes to act as a model dad on better days. He accompanies him to the pub, despite all the bad things that have happened and continue to happen.
Happiness in a devastated family landscape
The city authorities also put obstacles in Christian’s way. Only when the mother’s sister, Juli (Svenja Jung), becomes guardian for the children do things start to move. The aunt doesn’t allow herself to be fobbed off by arrogant school principals; she fights for her bright nephew, who has actually long since resigned himself to secondary school.
Christian Baron, who now lives as an author in Berlin, speaks in an ARD interview of a “human-all-too-human ambivalence” that he wanted to show in the autobiographical novel.
“My childhood was marked by poverty and violence, but it was not an unhappy childhood. There were oases of happiness in this devastated family landscape.” The father is neither a villain nor a hero, but something in between. Maybe that’s what makes his literary story interesting for filming. He emphasizes: “This is not a material that I just came up with.”