Pierre Wander (1929-1995)
Pierre Wander was born on March 5, 1929 in Strasbourg. He was the third child in a family living on ‘Rue de Lausanne’, in the Krutenau district, on the outskirts of the city centre. Coming from a middle-class family who spoke the local dialect, he was just eleven years old when Alsace was annexed by force by Nazi Germany. In the spring of 1942, at the age of thirteen, he began keeping a diary, written in German. The first mention of a trip to the movie theater dated May 4, 1942.
Pierre then went to the Scala movie theater, in the ‘neighbouring’ district of Neudorf. There he watched Ihr Privatsekretär (1940, Charles Klein), a comedy starring the likes of Theo Lingen, a brilliant comic actor whose name he jotted down next to the film’s title in his notebook. Then, between that date and the final screening on Tuesday 29 December – when he went to see the comedy Einmal der liebe Herrgott sein (1942, Hans Zerlett), starring the Austrian actor Hans Moser, at the Rheingold – Pierre went to see twenty-eight films at the cinema. Excluding the month of June, for which there were no entries in his notebook, this works out at roughly one screening per week.
At the age of thirteen, Pierre was therefore a rather keen film buff. According to his notebook, Pierre preferred comedies and popular comedians such as Theo Lingen, Hans Moser and Heinz Rühmann – the only three actors whose names appeared repeatedly in his notebook. Indeed, twelve of the twenty-eight films he watched can be classified in this category. Among the remaining sixteen films, the genres were very varied: adventure films, circus films and crime thrillers, as well as romantic films and musicals. This may come as a surprise, as some were rated 18 and over, often due to the presence of dance scenes of varying degrees of suggestiveness. Surprisingly, of the twenty-eight films Pierre watched, twelve were restricted to adults only. Another young man from Strasbourg also claimed that he had been able to watch films starring Marika Rökk, an actress whose films were almost all restricted to adults because she was often naked, and because the ushers at certain cinemas were less strict about checking the age of the audience.
Photo 82 : Coll. part.Marcel Wander – Pierre Wander (on the left) during the communion of his elder brother, André, circa 1941-1942.
Photo 83 : Coll. part. Marcel Wander – A page from Pierre Wander’s diary. On July 20, Pierre went to the Eden movie theater to see Paradies der Junggesellen (1939, Kurt Hoffmann) and noted down the name of the lead actor: Heinz Rühmann.
Photo 84 : Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum – Marika Rökk in the film Kora Terry (194, Georg Jacoby).