Return trip to Hollywood
By Marie Louise Kjølbye
Thorstein Thomsen’s Rock Hudson skal ikke dø i Ukraine (‘Rock Hudson will not die in the Ukraine’) is a biographical novel of international calibre about the Danish-German Detlef Sierck who under the name Douglas Sirk became one of Hollywood’s greatest golden age film directors. It is also a fascinating story of an immigrant: Sierck (1897-1987) grew up in Hamburg, the son of Danish parents, where he soon became hugely successful as a theatre and film director before fleeing to the US when the Nazis came to power. In 1938 Sierck and his Jewish wife, Hilde, caught the very last steamer from Rotterdam to the US. Between 1942 and 1958 Sierck directed twenty-nine movies in the US, averaging almost two a year, from war films to sensitive melodramas.
Based on the sparse - and often contradictory – information Sierck provided about his life, Thomsen tells the story of a man who through his art miraculously recreated the mood of the old Europe he had left behind. The book’s emotional turning point is Sierck’s loss of his son, Klaus, who died on the Eastern front at the age of nineteen. Sierck found a kind of substitute in his friendship with his son’s American look-alike - the young Rock Hudson. Sierck made Hudson a star and cast him as the lead in many of his films, but not in the war movie, ‘A Time To Love And A Time To Die’ (1958) written by the Western front author Remarque. Sierck could not bear for Rock Hudson to die in the Ukraine as his son had done.
In his introduction to the book Thomsen explains how he became obsessed with Sierck after watching ‘All That Heaven Allows’ (1955) one Easter in 2008, a film where Sierck in particular cultivates the expressionist style which became his trademark and which was the inspiration for Fassbender’s ‘Fear Eats The Soul’ (1974): ‘I think the story is too big and that I’m too small.’ This has proved not to be the case. Thorstein Thomsen’s biographical novel moves and impresses the reader, especially because the author respects that the truth about a human being can only be sought and never found.
Translated by Charlotte Barslund
