One was a good movie star, the other had just received an Oscar as a director: in 1955, a piece of film history took place in a Höchberger inn.
Dark wooden furniture in a Höchberg dining room witnessed memorable conversations in the summer of 1955. “Elmar, do you have any more from your Krakow?” Asked a 52-year-old director who had just received an Oscar in Hollywood. Elmar had. “And what about your liver sausages?” Asked a 42-year-old film star who had recently made his international breakthrough alongside Yves Montand. Elmar could help here too. It was a fun evening.
Photo: Repro Roland Flade
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In the summer of 1955, these and similar scenes did not only take place once in the Gasthof Hofmann at Höchberger Hauptstrasse 56. Elmar, the man with the sausages, was the 30-year-old butcher and innkeeper Elmar Hofmann. The director was Walter Reisch, who received an Oscar for his script for “Titanic” with Barbara Stanwyck in 1954 and previously wrote scripts for films with Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman. The world-famous film star was Peter van Eyck, who, like Reisch, still valued the simple things in life despite his global success.
The shooting of the Cornet film was in progress in Würzburg
Photo: filmportal.de
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Reisch and van Eyck, both of whom came from Germany but had emigrated to the USA and had American citizenship, made the wide-screen color film “The Cornet. The Way of Love and Death” with hundreds of local extras in Würzburg and the surrounding area a novella by Rainer Maria Rilke. Both had stayed at Elmar Hofmann’s inn for a few weeks – and not primarily because of his sausages. Because: In the same property were the “Chamber Light Games”, a small cinema in which the director and his main actor watched what had been shot during the day at the fortress, in the Guttenberger Forest or in the Taubertal in the evening when there was no idea.
The restaurant and guest rooms have long been closed. In the cinema, too, no film has flickered on the screen since 1962. Here, where a photographer then offered his services for a long time, is now a funeral home. During an on-site visit, the now 85-year-old Elmar Hofmann led into the former cinema hall, which once could accommodate up to 250 spectators, but is now much smaller thanks to a partition. “Here they reviewed the work of the day,” recalls Hofmann of his famous guests.
The butcher and innkeeper did not run the cinema, which was opened in 1953. Josef Plöschek was responsible for this, who also owned the Karllich Chamber Light Games and the Rathaus-Lichtspiele in Kleinrinderfeld. In Höchberg he showed films four to five evenings a week that had previously been shown in Würzburg, but now cost 50 pfennigs or a mark less to enter than in the neighboring city. In the post-war period, when people had to turn every mark twice, this was a weighty argument that also attracted visitors from the nearby Würzburger Zellerau.
Photo: Roland Flade
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Westerns and German home films, for example with Marianne Koch or Dieter Borsche, or mountain films were particularly popular. “Who had seen mountains back then?” Asks Elmar Hofmann. On Sunday there was also a play in the afternoon, which mainly attracted young audiences. On Friday evening there was a night performance after 10:15 p.m., which was particularly popular with the Schafkopf players at the Gasthof Hofmann. After the end, business continued briskly – “sometimes until four or five in the morning,” recalls Hofmann.
Before the night performance on Friday there were Leberkäs rolls
The Höchberg chamber light games had a unique selling point that made them known in the wider area: before Friday night there was Leberkäs-Semmeln. “A baker from Waldbrunn brought 50 to 100 heads,” Elmar Hofmann remembers, “and I made the Leberkäs from 8 p.m.” In between, he kept peeping into the movie room.
Photo: Roland Flade
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The former Gasthof Hofmann has a long history that can be read on the Internet in the WürzburgWiki. Built as a half-timbered house in 1796, it was expanded in 1911 by a dance hall – later the cinema – to the left of the main building, in which chandeliers illuminated the guests on the herringbone parquet. After the end of the cinema era, dance events with live music took place here. In 1970, Elmar Hofmann built a hotel garni on the site of the former pig and cattle barn, which was operated until 2000.
Photo: Repro Roland Flade
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The last guests also saw the former guest rooms a long time ago. With Elmar Hofmann and his brother Gerhard, who is eight years younger, the famous visitors of the summer of 1955 are unforgettable. When the Cornet film with Anita Björk, Götz von Langheim and Benno Sterzenbach in other leading roles celebrated its world premiere on December 16, 1955, this naturally did not take place in the Höchberg Chamber Light Games, but in the splendid CC cinema in Würzburg’s Eichhornstrasse opened.
Walter Reisch, a cousin of the Austrian composer and cabaret artist Georg Kreisler, went back to Hollywood and continued to work as a producer (“Fräulein”, 1958) and screenwriter (“The Journey to the Center of the Earth”, 1959). He died in Los Angeles in 1983. Peter van Eyck continued his international career after the Höchberg episode, among others in Fritz Lang’s last film “The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse” (1960) and in the film “The Longest Day” (1962), “The Spy, who came from the cold “(1965) and” Die Brücke von Remagen “(1969). He died in 1969.
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