Culture : Sitcom Pokes Fun (Ouch!) at German Bigotry : Loudmouthed ‘Motzki’ star attacks easterners. Critics return fire, demanding show be banned.

Cultural events rarely stop a nation in its tracks. But then, serving up a volatile brew of humor, bigotry and reality on prime-time television to a nation totally unprepared for such stuff doesn’t happen all that often, either.

Since the first of 13 planned episodes of the new sitcom “Motzki” exploded onto German television screens last month, the country has not been quite the same.

Some believe it never will.

The show’s main character, a crusty, intolerant, foul-mouthed, retired driving instructor named Friedhelm Motzki, is Germany’s nightmare. He is a loudmouth bigot who, for half an hour each Tuesday night, voices the very prejudices that politicians here have tried so hard to pretend don’t exist--prejudices that are unspoken in polite company but that nevertheless dominate the arduous process of German unification.

Motzki is a western German who hates ossies --slang for those who lived in the former Communist east. And he isn’t afraid to say it--at 140 decibels.

He dispenses his derision--usually brief, withering verbal attacks--on his long-suffering ossie cousin, Edith, whom he employs after his wife’s death to clean his shabby western Berlin apartment. Some examples:

* On East Germany: “Your entire country wasn’t worth a damn. You were broke and never knew what real work was. Without us (westerners), you’d have starved to death decades ago.”

* On eastern Germans: “That pack is only after our money. . . . They don’t even say thank you. Just the opposite; they only complain and always want more. . . .”

“You ossies have been German now for nearly three years; when are you finally going to catch on. . . ?”

“There’re a lot of reasons why you’ll come to nothing. That’s the way the Communists raised you--as spendthrifts and sponges.”

* On his brief euphoria over the collapse of the Berlin Wall: “Who was to know that behind it was one huge wreck, sitting on polluted land and inhabited by a bunch of uncivilized ingrates, every single one of them greedy, envious and lazy. The only thing you ossies know how to do is bitch. It was a black day in our history when they pulled down that goddamn wall.”

* On German Unification Day: “Oct. 3rd is a day of catastrophe.”

Motzki (a play on the German verb motzen, meaning to grouse) dismisses ossie fashion as “dyed sugar sacks from Cuba” and says he can spot every ossie member of Parliament--”They’ve all got beards.”

Motzki’s creator and principal writer Wolfgang Menge--a westerner--carefully avoids Germany’s other volatile social crisis of hatred toward foreigners. Indeed, Motzki’s lone friend in the world is the neighborhood Turkish vegetable dealer.

The show’s two main characters are both played by eastern Germans who moved west in the early 1980s--Juergen Holtz, 61, former East Berlin stage actor now with the Frankfurt am Main Schauspielhaus, and Jutta Hoffmann, a highly respected actress expelled by the Communists in 1983 for engaging in political opposition and now a professor of drama in Hamburg.

After three episodes, Edith has yet to return fire, but Menge says she has her day. “Just wait,” he said in an interview. “She, not Motzki, is the real key to this production.”

Meanwhile, Germans, both east and west, are still in shock.

Rarely, if ever in a Western country, has there been such a powerful reaction to a TV sitcom. Newspaper stories about the show catapulted out of the culture section onto the front pages and stayed there for days. Reviews landed on the editorial page.

“Horrible, filthy, awful, obscene, purely destructive, repulsive. . . ,” sputtered the country’s largest circulation daily, Bild Zeitung, a western paper.

” . . . Definitely shocking for all of those who saw German unity as a dream-wish fulfilled,” declared the eastern Saechsische Zeitung.

One opinion poll published three days after the first episode found 60% of those questioned in the west and more than 67% of those in the east agreed that “Motzki” should be stopped immediately. Only 10% said it was genuinely funny.

Some have called for candlelight protest marches against the show, such as those mounted in recent months against right-wing extremism.

A lawyer who represented a Berlin Wall victim at the trial of former East German leader Erich Honecker filed suit last week against the heads of North and West German Television, the two main TV backers of “Motzki.”

“That’s not satire, that’s the way you stoke hate,” said the Berlin attorney, Ekkehard Ploeger.

Meanwhile, an eastern Berlin newspaper has urged its mainly ossie readers to write in with their own retorts to Motzki’s ravings and offered dinner with a mystery guest to the winner.

Western political figures, especially those from Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats, have led the chorus of outrage.

“What we need now between east and west is something that eases our contacts with a bit of humor--not something that drives us apart,” said Bundestag President Rita Suessmuth.

Friedhelm Ost, once Kohl’s spokesman and now a Parliament member, was harder. “Motzki is divisive, an attack against the solidarity of the Germans,” he said. “It should be taken off the air.”

The show’s co-producer at North German Television in Hamburg, Horst Koenigstein, described political pressure as intense. “They couldn’t do anything, but they sure tried,” he said.

In part, the intensity of the show’s impact is understandable. It has scored a direct hit on one of the nation’s most sensitive sore spots, merely emphasizing the dictum that the truth sometimes hurts. Indeed, for all the public outcry, not one serious voice so far has challenged the bitter reality that Motzki’s rantings reflect an important body of western German opinion.

Anyone who has whiled away an hour in a western German tavern or watched westerners in action in the east can attest to that. Eastern Parliament member Konrad Weiss commented after watching the first episode: “He’s the nicest obnoxious westerner I know. Compared to the real Motzkis, he’s a teddy bear.”

Aside from the power of hard truth, “Motzki” has descended on a people with little tradition of laughing at themselves. What little political humor that does exist in Germany tends to be trite, slapstick and benign--far removed from the hard, biting Anglo-Saxon variety of satire served up by Motzki.

It is two decades since something similar hit west German TV screens in the form of “Ekel-Alfred” (Obnoxious Alfred), a conservative, disgruntled government bureaucrat convinced that West Germany’s first post-World War II Socialist-led government was driving the country to ruin.

That character was also a Menge creation. “There was an outcry then too, but it didn’t match this,” said Menge.

The origins of both Motzki and Alfred, Menge said, came from the British Broadcasting Corp. series, “Till Death Do Us Part,” featuring the gutter commentary of an earthy London longshoreman named Alf Garnett.

America’s counterpart, Archie Bunker, while in a similar vein, is a little too friendly, Menge said.

Menge says he is surprised but not worried about the avalanche of protest that “Motzki” has generated in its initial weeks. In the end, he believes it will have a positive effect by exposing the western mood for what it is.

“It’s crazy to pretend you can solve problems by not bringing them out in the open,” he said.

Some reviewers agree.

” . . . It’s psychotherapy for the divided German soul,” wrote Jutta Voigt in one of eastern Germany’s most respected weeklies, the Wochenpost. “Finally, all this frustration is being released. Sure, it’s one-sided, but what does that matter, really, if it’s funny? Laughter is healthy.”

AMERICAN ANGLE

Germany’s’ “Motzki” show has a lot in common with the 1970s CBS-TV sitcom “All in the Family,” which revolved around the intolerant dock foreman Archie Bunker and his long-suffering wife, Edith (in photo, left). It took several months for U.S. audiences to adjust to the blunt humor of Archie’s denunciations of African-Americans, Puerto Ricans and other minorities. Critics debated whether the program promoted prejudice or countered it by making fun of it. After concern that “All in the Family” might be canceled, the groundbreaking show, produced by Norman Lear, instead rocketed to top ratings and stayed there for five years. It is widely credited with changing the course of television comedy in America.

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“All in the Family” was based on the British series, “Till Death Us Do Part,” (the correct name) not on a series called “Till Death Do Us Part.”

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