Clemens Wilmenrod

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clemens Wilmenrod's "Invention"
Toast Hawaii

Clemens Wilmenrod (actually Carl Clemens Hahn ; * July 24, 1906 in Oberzeuzheim in the Westerwald ; † April 12, 1967 in Munich ) was a German actor and from 1953 the first German television chef . Wilmenrod is considered to be the inventor of Hawaii Toast , Arabian Horsemeat and Stuffed Strawberries . He is also said to have made the rum pot popular in southern and western Germany. He allegedly also made sure to popularize the turkey in Germany as a Christmas roast. Wilmenrod had no training as a cook , but was a trained actor.

Life

Carl Clemens Hahn first received piano lessons at the Conservatory in Limburg an der Lahn . He then took acting lessons from Louise Dumont in Düsseldorf. As an actor, he initially had little success. After his first engagements in Stendal , he worked at the Residenztheater Wiesbaden from 1935 and at the Komödienhaus Dresden from 1939.

In 1945 he was drafted into the tank grenadier and was shot in the ear. He could not find a publisher for the experiences of his 111 days with the Wehrmacht (title "Without me"), which were written down on 400 manuscript pages .

1950 followed an engagement at the Hessian State Theater in Wiesbaden. In the same year he met the daughter Erika of the master butcher Klink and married her; together they moved to Lübeck in 1951. After a dispute with the Lübeck artistic director, he switched to the “Kleine Komödie” theater in Hamburg. He also dubbed films and played small film roles on Wedding Night in Paradise and When a Woman Loves .

February 20, 1953 to May 16, 1964, he entered the NWDR- or WDR telecast Please, in ten minutes at the table, assisted by his wife Erika and the Quick jockey in "Heinzel Koch" brand, in 185 programs as a television chef on.

Wilmenrod committed suicide in a Munich hospital at the age of 60 without leaving a suicide note. He probably suffered from stomach cancer . Carl Clemens Hahn was buried in his home town of Willmenrod . The grave site was closed after the rest period had expired, but the tombstone was retained and was later set up again at another point in the cemetery, supplemented by a small memorial.

Acting career

In addition to his career at the Stendaler Theater der Altmark and other German theaters, he made his film debut as an actor alongside Hilde Krahl and Johannes Heesters in Wolfgang Liebeneiner's When a Woman Loves in the role of President. Heesters was also his film partner in Géza from Bolváry's Wedding Night in Paradise (1950) with Claude Farell . This was followed by a supporting role in The Women of Mr. S. The director Anatole Litvak engaged Clemens Wilmenrod in 1951 for the Hollywood production Decision Before Dawn , in which he shared his place in the trenches with stars like Richard Basehart and Oskar Werner . Despite these merits, his film career stagnated after the role of Montomura in the television film The Geishas of Captain Fisby (1953). In the mid-1960s he had a movie success as Willi Wimmer alongside Vivi Bach in the comedy Ein Ferienbett mit 100 HP (1965). His television career ended with two guest roles in the television series Die Fifth Kolonne and Das Kriminalmuseum .

TV chef career

Wilmenrod's television career began rather by accident. The actor, who was only sporadically employed after the Second World War (as in 1951 in the feature film Die Frauen des Herr S. ), was looking for a job at the newly established NWDR television in Hamburg in the early 1950s . Together with his wife he waited in the bunker converted into a television studio on Hamburg's Heiligengeistfeld shortly before the scheduled job interview in a room in which a natural history program was shown on a monitor. Wilmenrod himself tells the story of his calling as follows:

“My wife and I saw a poison researcher in Berlin handling a snake - in close-up. You could only see the hands of the researcher, who placed the animal in the right position for the camera and extracted the glittering poison from the dripping pine trees. It was extremely exciting! After the show was over, I dragged my wife into the next pub. 'Imagine', I whispered, 'this beast would have been an omelette'. "

- From a radio feature by Herbert Hoven

The idea of ​​the “TV kitchen” was born. The director of the NWDR immediately engaged the unsuccessful actor in the role thought up by Mrs. Erika. Clemens Wilmenrod borrowed his stage name from the Westerwald community of Willmenrod , from which he came. According to reports, he only learned some basic skills in 1955, including how to properly cut an onion , from his later competitor and "intimate enemy" Hans Karl Adam , from whom he is said to have bought some recipes, the two of whom quarreled about how to honor.

The show Clemens Wilmenrod invites you to table

The NWDR broadcast the fifteen-minute program every two weeks from February 20, 1953 (monthly from 1957) on Friday evening at 9:30 p.m., i.e. at prime time. 185 episodes had been produced by the time it was discontinued in May 1964. At first, Clemens Wilmenrod greeted his audience with the sentence “You dear, cute people”, later it became “Dear friends in Lucullus” and finally “Dear connoisseur community”.

In the first broadcast there was a fruit juice in a glass, an Italian omelette , fried veal kidney with mixed canned vegetables, followed by a Turkish mocha. All dishes were prepared live during the short broadcasting time and consumed by the participants after the broadcast. An important utensil in the TV kitchen, which was tiled to the ceiling, was the “Heinzelkoch” infrared grill, which was also mentioned in the credits. The trademark of "Don Clemente" - his nickname - was his portrait drawn by the caricaturist Mirko Szewczuk on his cooking apron.

Stuffed strawberry

Wilmenrod's kitchen work was shaped by the consumer-oriented curiosity of the post-war period - he used canned vegetables, ready-made sauces and ketchup in the preparation of his creations without hesitation . But he also set the culinary course for the Germans' longing for travel during those years: olive oil , garlic and Italian pasta - and pizza dishes had their place in Wilmenrod's kitchen. His witty Münchhausiaden , presented in mock cosmopolitanism and announcing all sorts of alleged trips, did the rest to help him achieve great fame in the newly emerging West German "television republic".

His exaggerated name creations for simple dishes are also unforgettable, such as Arab rider meat for a simple minced meat dish, Venetian Christmas feast for a breaded schnitzel, but also Papal chicken, René onion soup, flambéed black banana, sausages with oysters and many more.

When, according to Wilmenrod, a viewer accused him of not having invented the strawberry filled with a plain almond himself, he put a long kitchen knife on his chest during the program and vowed to ram the steel into his heart if any viewer "on the Crust of this planet ”who had eaten a stuffed strawberry before.

Wilmenrod was also successful with his columnist cookbooks . They appeared with a total circulation of over 250,000 copies by Hoffmann and Campe , Vollmer and later also as paperbacks by Rowohlt Verlag .

effect

Although Wilmenrod's cuisine can hardly stand up to the comparison with modern standards of culinary art , its effect in the 1950s was enormous; his broadcasts were always street sweeps . When Wilmenrod presented a cod recipe, cod was sold out in all fish shops for the next few days.

Wilmenrod was one of the first whose unmistakable television presence and popularity in Germany also began to interest the advertising industry, which signed him for various kitchen appliances and foods. The business relationship with a spirits manufacturer allowed Wilmenrod to promote the rum pot. It caused a scandal at the end of the 1950s when the well-known portrait of the TV chef was depicted on a fish tin, for which he received a fee (and a sharp reprimand from WDR ). This was followed by a fundamental dispute over the question of surreptitious advertising: whether it should be allowed for well-known television professionals to charge extra fees for advertising appearances? For the news magazine Der Spiegel , this debate was even worth a cover story about Wilmenrod. The sharp objection of a blasphemy- scented Catholic theologian against Wilmenrod's capricious welcome from the audience, "Dear Brothers and Sisters in Lucullus", inspired by the letters of the Apostle Paul , also damaged the television chef's reputation. In 1964 the program was finally stopped.

In the spring of 2008, NDR filmed Wilmenrod's life under the title It lies on my tongue, based on a script by Lothar Kurzawa with Jan Josef Liefers and Anna Loos in the leading roles (first broadcast on November 25, 2009 in Das Erste ).

Filmography (selection)

Works

  • It's on my tongue . Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1954
  • Clemens Wilmenrod invites you to table . Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1956
  • As in Abraham's bosom. Breviary for globetrotters and gourmets . Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1958
  • French cuisine . Vollmer publishing house, Wiesbaden 1963
  • Cooked on TV. One hundred and one recipe from Clemens Wilmenrod . Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1963

literature

  • Franz Josef Görtz : The national gourmet. Clemens Wilmenrod was Germany's first TV chef - the trained actor, inventor of the "Toast Hawaii" and founder of surreptitious advertising would have turned 100 by now . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 23, 2006, p. 50
  • Gerd Hallenberger: Clemens Wilmenrod. Signs of food culture . In: montage / av. Journal of Theory and History of Audiovisual Communication . Volume 10, 2001, No. 2: Eat! Drink! To celebrate! , Pp. 123–129, here p. 127 (PDF; 1.1 MB)
  • The double head . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1959, pp. 47-57 ( online ).
  • Silvia Becker: Cooking programs in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR - Clemens Wilmenrod's “Please have a table in ten minutes” and Kurt Drummer's “The TV cook recommends” in comparison . North German booklet on radio history 8, published by Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Hans-Bredow-Institut , Hamburg October 2010

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g The double head . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1959, pp. 47-57 ( online ).
  2. ↑ The 100 largest Rhineland-Palatinate: Wilmenrod, Clemens. In: SWR.de . August 14, 2007, accessed June 29, 2020 .
  3. ^ Manfred Schaaf: Willmenrod. In: lima-city.de. February 2, 2015, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  4. ↑ The fifth column (1963–1968): Full Cast & Crew in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  5. ^ Herbert Hoven: The elector in the television kitchen. In: Deutschlandfunk - Radio Feature , July 25, 1995.
  6. ↑ Petra Foede: Battle of the Cooks: There is no toast in Hawaii. In: fr.de . February 4, 2011, accessed June 29, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Clemens Wilmenrod and the stuffed strawberry. (Video; 2:35 minutes) In: Youtube . Retrieved June 29, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Lutz Neitzert: Clemens Wilmenrod - The Schürzenjäger and the Papal Chicken. In: SWR2 . March 28, 2009, archived from the original on December 11, 2012 ; Retrieved June 29, 2020 (radio feature manuscript).
personal data
SURNAME Wilmenrod, Clemens
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hahn, Karl Clemens (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor and first German television chef
DATE OF BIRTH July 24, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Oberzeuzheim
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 1967
Place of death Munich