WEST GERMANY: Rosie & the New Rich

They are seen everywhere in West Germany these days: plump, well-barbered, aggressive men, their eyes alert for opportunity or slightly lidded after a heavy meal. They travel from factory to bank to hotel in chauffeur-driven Mercedes 3005’s; their women are gowned by Dior, Heim, Balenciaga. Liveried servants attend them at banquets in redecorated medieval castles. They are the new German millionaires, whose energy, efficiency and shrewdness have contrived, organized and engineered the astonishing miracle of West Germany’s economic rise from the ashes of war.

Military Objective. Some of Germany’s new rich have cultivated their indulgences along with their undoubted abilities. In the vicinity of industrial Frankfurt, the most popular indulgence was Rosemarie Nitribitt, a big-eyed and notably globoid blonde. Rosie’s nest was feathered with Persian rugs, green velvet chairs, thick draperies, a multitude of mirrors, and a French double bed. Her closets were jammed with Paris-label dresses and 40 pairs of Italian shoes; and she always kept handy at least 150,000 marks (about $35,000) in cash.

Rosie’s amorous career began at 14 in tiny Niedermending, where she instantly became a military objective of the French troops who then occupied the airport. A few years later, Rosie moved on to Frankfurt and became a bar girl. Soon she had enough money to buy a modest Ford Taunus, then graduated to a red-upholstered Mercedes 190 SL. She would cruise up and down the Kaiserstrasse or park in front of the Frankfurter Hof, the city’s swankest hotel. As a plump, well-tailored captain of industry approached, Rosie would appear to be having trouble with her engine, and appeal prettily for help. Her tab was high—anywhere up to 1,000 marks in a city where 20 is the average. Explained a Frankfurt businessman: “To understand those sums you had to know Rosemarie.”

Medicine for Business. Last October Rosie entertained her last guest. When police broke into her apartment they found her strangled with her own stockings. The police moved gingerly in the case, gently questioned a number of big industrialists, finally arrested an unemployed salesman named Pohlmann, who insisted loudly that he was not the murderer. Most tabloid-reading Germans believe him.

One of those interested in Rosie’s rise and fall was Writer Erich Kuby, 48. He was interested not so much in Rosie the prostitute, he explained, as in “Rosie, medicine for our big businessmen, who didn’t visit her because she was so good in bed or so beautiful, but because they could unload their troubles, because she fed their ego, because she gave content to their empty lives.”

His story of Rosemarie Nitribitt was snapped up by Moviemaker Rolf Thiele. Even before shooting began, protests poured in. Soon it seemed as if every capitalist and manager in Germany took the film as an intended insult, collectively and individually. Associations of theater owners in the Rhineland and Bavaria pledged they would not show the picture. The Daimler-Benz Co. refused to lend any of its cars to Thiele; Opel turned him down when he asked permission to shoot a sequence on an assembly line. A gasoline company indignantly demanded the withdrawal of still pictures showing Rosemarie (played by Actress Nadja Tiller) leaning against one of their gas pumps. The equally indignant owner of the Frankfurter Hof, some of whose guests had been Rosie’s clients, forced the filmmakers to use another name on their cinema hotel. When the Venice Film Festival asked to show the picture last month, the German Foreign Ministry protested that Das Mädchen Rosemarie did not correctly reflect conditions in West Germany, and should be banned. In Venice the film was awarded the “Italian Critics’ Prize.”

Growl & Belch. Fewer than ten people went to the funeral of the real Rosie Nitribitt last year. But last week Nitribitt had become a part of the national vocabulary, and Das Mädchen Rosemarie was playing to capacity in 100 theaters —a postwar record. Hundreds of puns have grown up about her name, helped by the fact that in German it rhymes with “dynamite.”

Film critics divided on political and chauvinistic lines. Some bemoan the movie as giving a one-sided and unfair picture of today’s Germany; others hail it as a stinging satire in the direct line of George Grosz’s savage post-World War I cartoons and Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Director Rolf Thiele has only one minor reservation. Says he: “If The Threepenny Opera was the growl of an empty stomach, this film is the belch of a full one.”