"We knew long before Lewinsky, Clinton was like".

More culture is hardly glamorous: they German million-heiress and filmmaker, he renowned photographer. Now, Pia Frankenberg a commemorative book about the film world is written. An anecdote from her biography, unfortunately, is missing: How Bill Clinton of the Germans in the Po summarized.

 

When Maria goes to the Berlinale, it is still young, naive and even already damned rich. Her parents are in a car accident, died, she has inherited, it is their money in the young German cinema. Capital destruction is their goal, but Maria's first film is successful, it makes more. And then she meets Johan, this little greasy, but hard charismatic Belgians, a godfather in the world of distributors and producers, a speaker, a maker and is a loser.

As Pia Frankenberg still went to school, it was November 1974 in the Rhineland, her father died in a plane crash. It could be the father, "Mr. JOHNSON" call, he had heard the cream, the factories, many millions of German marks. Pia Frankenberg inherited, they sat on the board of the group, not yet 20 years old. The money, she wanted to offer, she says in New York this evening, "but then a friend convinced me to incorporate it into film projects to be stuck." She turned shorts ( "longing for the totally Other," 1981), movies ( "Burning Bed", 1988) and many documentaries, and now she says: "I have my money for what Ordinary hewn on the head, it was a good time. money is the responsibility that we have. In the case of films, festivities and good food, it was in good hands. "

Of course, based her book "The last rotation" so to Frankenberg biography, but it is a novel and less witty than true poetry. There are and were all the directors of this book is really at the Berlinale the early eighties, including Johan lived then or at any rate a kind of Johan, who wants, can do all of the models therefore seek and find.

But "The last rotation plays only Frankenberg biography, even with the movie world of that time, an eclectic world of auteur films, mainly about their own importance and the attention of the audience for serious wrestled before with Doris Dörries" men "of the comedy boom began.

All of this is the backdrop, "The last rotation" is a love story, the story of Maria and Johan, a story of failure, the unequal spätpubertierenden and the couple's son at the beginning and end of the book leads to Patagonia, to a penguin colony.

Pia Frankenberg is blond, she wears a black T-shirt and a hooded sweatshirt ( "57th Berlin International Film Festival"), a rather clever and funny as woman, a writer for many years already. She lives in Manhattan, Central Park West, along with her husband, the photographer Elliott Erwitt, one of the biggest of the big agency Magnum.

The Po-incident

Frankenberg is sitting in her kitchen, is on the table wine, ravioli, Erwitt is told about this and how difficult it was to Barack Obama to take pictures on 20 January in Washington. Hours in the cold to stand. Do not stir them. "Very many Nerzmäntel in Washington," he says and chuckles, he says the proud blacks who have made smart for their president.

It was easier. With Kennedy. When Clinton anyway. Clinton saw that the photo session Pia Frankenberg in the Oval Office, by Elliott Erwitt as assistant smuggled into the White House, and then presented to the President snapshot beside the beautiful German and took her to the Po.

"We knew long before Monica Lewinsky, Clinton was like," says Erwitt. "Monica Lewinsky was then but an insult," says Frankenberg. Erwitt, and then goes back down, the dog walk in the park lead. Or grind, because the dog is old. And Frankenberg says: "I was without words. What do you say when the hand of the chairman at the Po senses?"

The two, Erwitt and Frankenberg, met in 1988 when she artifacts for a theme night a movie about dogs turned on him and he had just finished a photo book about dogs published. It has "geschnackelt," says Frankenberg, she was a little surprised, because Elliott was 29 years older, had six children, three marriages were behind him.

Thick grass, and showy in the U.S.

She moved to New York anyway, 1996, and marveled over the city. Moreover, in buses that do not pay with coins. That on rainy days, weak strong New York New Yorkerinnen about puddles, and not a word to say. About the speed, the hands, "New York has taught me," she says, she says, "educated". And she probably thinks that the city they like so many immigrants to the displeasure, the bad mood of the old home had forgotten.

Your last two novels ( "Klara and love to the zoo", 2001, and "Nora", 2006) played a large extent here in New York, with the latest filming "travels Frankenberg now literarily back to Germany. They had long since arrived in America, she says, she is a citizen of both states and Obama was allowed to choose, "my first president and then as an equal," says Frankenberg.

But she still misses Germany, of course. The Friends. The Sunday breakfast, all the cafes where you sit for hours and may be read without immediately to get the bill.

And the grass, the German turf miss it, says Pia Frankenberg, Germany was in the grass "delicate and wild" and not as "thick and ostentatious as in America. Here it looks as if the grass is itself a beauty operation behind" .

Pia Frankenberg, "The last rotation," Rowohlt, 256 p., Euro 18.90