Germany, Austria 2025 / Directed by Klaus Fried, realized by Julia Albrecht / Original version: German, English / Subtitles: German / Length: 109 min.

"The film by Klaus Fried and Julia Albrecht is a gift at the right time, highly topical, full of ambivalence and a multi-layered family saga. Erich Fried united the fiercest contradictions as an artist and as a person: As a Jewish émigré expelled from Nazi Germany, he became a harsh critic of Israeli policy. As a left-wing pacifist, he sought dialogue with the avowed neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen. His love life only partially followed his sensitive poetry on the subject. As a father, he remained a mystery to his son Klaus: larger than life and yet deeply human."
Daniel Sponsel, Festival Director of DOK.fest München

Synopsis

The Austrian Erich Fried is still the most widely read German-language poet, even if we sometimes can't bear to hear his love poems anymore. His life circumstances are those of a traumatized, highly educated and empathetic troublemaker with an almost pathological urge to reconcile the extremes of political convictions, from the RAF to neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen. A man who himself fled the Nazis from Vienna in 1938, a Sisyphus who tirelessly worked for understanding. His son Klaus Fried, who lives in England and bears an uncanny resemblance to his father, laments that he had to share him with a generation of young Germans who could not trust their own fathers. The house in London was a bursting German Embassy of the left. Idealists, terrorists planning a kidnapping in the kitchen, and hordes of pot-smoking hippies came and went. A guru to his visitors, Papa was hard to reach for his own children. A toymaker and insect rescuer who could fix anything. A collector who never passed a dumpster without fishing out objects whose lives, in his view, were not yet over. Klaus Fried sets out and, in conversations with siblings, friends and contemporaries, tries to get closer to his father. Fried senior, with his messy love life of three marriages and at least six children, offers a wide field. The film is a firework of recent European history: from the annexation of Austria, the Nazi crimes, the division of Germany with Fried as a knowledgeable wanderer between worlds, the wild sixties and the unrest of '68, Vietnam, the terrorism of the RAF and the cobbled-together theories of later exegetes. Fried senior occasionally steps in from the sidelines with impressive poetry that few have known from him so far.

Director´s Statement by Klaus Fried

It’s a strange thing to share your parents with a whole generation of young Germans, who couldn’t trust their own. Some slotted into the family, like student leader Rudi Dutschke, who knew how to play with a 5 year-old, or clown-bomber Fritz Teufel, who baked a wonderful strudel. But most had eyes only for Erich. It was infuriating. Our house was full to bursting - idealists talking politics in his study, terrorists planning kidnap in the kitchen and a permanent encampment of hippies getting stoned in the garden. To us he was ‘Dad’- a maker of toys and a rescuer of insects. A round-bellied bread-stuffer, whose fat-fingers could fix anything. A hoarder who couldn’t pass a skip without plundering it for some discarded bit of tat which, to my mother’s great indignation, he’d drag home like some fellow refugee that needed rescuing. But the ceaseless flow of ‘visitors’ flocked to him like some kind of political guru.

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From the outside, this father of mine that looked like a toad and grinned like a monkey was a bag of contradictions. A refugee who pined for his homeland but treasured the outsider status his exile bequeathed. A literary giant, who divided his time between rescuing the German language from the brutality of National Socialism and resuscitating the fleas, which he sieved tenderly from the bath after we’d wash the cats. Reviled by many and idolized by so many more, he was a devoted opponent of fascism wherever he found it and a fierce advocate of free speech, who defended the right of neo-Nazi demagogues to preach their own vile hatred. I was still a teenager when he died, but I’ve been picking at the fragments of his identity ever since, piecing them together to see what sort of a portrait they might make. It’s a fascinating puzzle of outlandish stories and humorous anecdotes - an absurd life but a surprisingly coherent one. He may not have lived long enough to answer the myriad questions that I never got to ask, but he left plenty of clues in his poetry and the friends and devotees he left behind.

I’m like him so I’m told, when I meet his old comrades – the heavy-set features, the walking-stick-waddle and the progressive neurological disease, which he bequeathed me. And I share that sense of being cut adrift by a country that doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. In the centenary of his birth, when the UK tears itself away from the continent that does, I’m discovered that I too feel exiled. Erich fled Austria in 1938 for London, to shelter from the political madness that had gripped his birthplace. 80 years later, I’m making the reverse journey, with my newly granted Austrian passport, I’m leaving behind a small island in the grip of an identity crisis and embarking on a quest to discover my own. I’ll travel across borders and back and forth through time, revisiting key events that shaped my father’s life and try to exorcise the horrible feeling that history is stuck on the repeat cycle.

The film playfully combines historical archive with contemporary footage, informal interviews with commentary and poetry. But the spine of the film is the road movie through his life, that transforms this personal portrait into something more dynamic and offers an outsiders perspective on the landscape and heritage that shaped my father’s life. Audiences can expect lyrical visual sequences of a continent haunted by the past as a backdrop to his poetry, which remains centre-stage and forms the philosophical heart of the narrative. And while my own narration, will guide the audience through his story, we will draw heavily on the wealth of recordings he made, so that much of the film will actually be in his own voice.

Several films about him and the many TV appearances, prize-givings and readings he recorded, offer a wealth of material. And there’s our family archive in London and the State archive in Vienna, which offer a variety of fascinating source material. As legal heir to his legacy, I have access to all his poetry and prose and to my mother’s intimate memoirs, published in German, about their peculiar life together. I also have established relationships with the contributors, transforming informal interviews into something far more intimate. FRIENDLY FIRE is first a portrait of a great Austrian poet, second a tribute to a flawed but dearly loved father and finally a whirlwind tour through a century of history that has brought us to the critical moment we all share.

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Credits

FRIENDLY FIRE a production by HANFGARN & UFER and MISCHIEF FILMS a film by KLAUS FRIED realized by JULIA ALBRECHT in cooperation with NATIONAL FUND OF THE REPUBLIC OF AUSTRIA FOR VICTIMS OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM and CULTURAL DEPARTMENT OF THE CITY OF VIENNA and FUTURE FUND OF THE REPUBLIC OF AUSTRIA on behalf of RUNDFUNK BERLIN BRANDENBURG and WESTDEUTSCHER RUNDFUNK

Editing and sound design JULIA ALBRECHT Cinematography RALF ILGENFRITZ Additional camera and sound MATTHIAS KREITSCHMANN Camera USA RENÉ JUNG Consulting and research JUDITH WIESER-HUBER Sound editing and mixing ADRIAN LO Colorist RALF ILGENFRITZ Production management rbb DENNIS MÜNCH Production management CORINNA VOLKMANN and PHILIPP MAYER and CHIARA STRAKA and MARION SCHIRRMACHER and SARAH VIANNEY Film accounting HEIKO HOBOHM Post-production WERNER BEDNARZ Editorial JENS STUBENRAUCH and ROLF BERGMANN Producers GUNTER HANFGARN and RALPH WIESER and ANDREA UFER