Let's Hope For The Best (DVD)

Paul Dessau - Let's Hope For The Best, a film by Anne-Kathrin Peitz

Paul Dessau (1894-1979) is a violin wonderchild, becomes assistant to Otto Klemperer and eventually accomplished conductor. He writes operetta and film music - both to mountain films with Leni Riefenstahl by director Arnold Fanck and animated films Walt Disney.
As a convinced communist, Paul Dessau goes to the GDR in 1948. He works with Bertolt Brecht as well as his fourth wife, the director icon Ruth Berghaus, and significantly shapes the socialist music scene and stage art. He becomes an outwardly celebrated, inwardly hostile GDR state composer.

"Paul Dessau: Let's hope for the best" by Anne-Kathrin Peitz sketches an artist's life between adaptation and repulsion, political idealism and musical individuality, in which, like under a burning glass, the changeable German-German history of the 20th century markedly condenses.

The film portrait consciously senses the contradictions in Dessau's character, life and work and embeds people and his music in the historical context. The cinematic approach to the protagonist and his sound cosmos becomes quite literally but also in a figurative sense a puzzle, whose individual - often also disparate parts - slowly assemble into an overall picture. In addition, interview partners - from politician Gregor Gysi to former Konzerthaus director Frank Schneider or the American jazz composer Jack Cooper as well as composer and pianist Steffen Schleiermacher - are looking to create the portrait Paul Dessaus not only with words, but actually puzzling.

Bonus: "Five animal verses" written by Paul Dessau and Bertolt Brecht

Author & Director: Anne-Kathrin Peitz; Editing: Claudia Cellarius
Camera: Björn Kowalewsky; Audio: Jakob Schneider

Paul Dessau - Let's Hope For The Best