If I’m unlucky on my way to work, I sometimes end up stranded at the central train station in Wanne-Eickel, a small town in the Rhineland. There’s not much to do there. There’s a DM, a Lidl, a Hornbach. So you can shop, at least there’s that. The only thing I know about Wanne-Eickel is that Heinz Rühmann’s parents once ran a pub in the train station, most likely serving hearty broths behind heavy curtains. Heinz Rühmann – the so-called actor of the twentieth century, Germany’s cinematic everyman (starring in ninety films) – died in 1994 at the age of ninety-two. He was a little too old to be Elena Helfrecht’s grandfather. Great-grandfather, that would be about right. The people’s actor. Our grandpa, Germany’s grandpa.

In the film Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944), Rühmann plays the mildly insolent middle-aged writer Johannes Pfeiffer. Sometime around 1900 (we never learn when, exactly), his friends convince him to pass himself off as a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium. Among the weird old hacks teaching alcoholic fermentation and other arts, the young and pithy Dr Brett stands out. A perfect nationalist pedagogue, he compares his students to saplings: young trees need to be bound to stakes in the ground so that they don’t sprout in every direction. Discipline is the tie that binds them.

Despite the film’s celebration of discipline, it wasn’t enough for Nazi censors in 1944. The teachers in the film – apart from Dr Brett – were a bit too easily lampoonable as figures of authority. The film was not permitted to be shown publicly. Teachers couldn’t be disparaged when they were in such short supply. On a January night in 1944, Heinz Rühmann boarded a south-bound sleeper train out of Berlin with a copy of the film. When he arrived at the Führerhauptquartier near Görlitz (present-day Gierłoż) in East Prussia, Rühmann hoped to convince Hermann Göring to allow the film’s release. Göring’s officers were given a private screening, which they greeted with cheerful enthusiasm. Cheerful enthusiasm being at least as rare as teachers at the time, Hitler green-lighted the film, which he had not seen; it opened in theatres the next day.

Some of the film’s actors never lived to enjoy its lasting success. They were conscripted as soldiers in the Wehrmacht as soon as they finished their gigs as pupils in the fictitious Babenberg Gymnasium. Dr Brett’s rendition of the film’s core symbol for German discipline didn’t include the purpose for which the young saplings were raised: to be cut down as needed. Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960) refers to the forest as a potent symbol of the Germans: