When The Sinking of the Laconia was broadcast earlier this year, it marked a near decade-long absence of Alan Bleasdale’s work from our TV screens. But the celebrated writer of Boys from the Blackstuff, The Monocled Mutineer and GBH, hadn’t been idle. For six years he had been researching and writing the script for Laconia, which was based around a little-known event during the Second World War in which a German U-boat commander named Werner Hartenstein rescued the survivors of the liner he had sunk. He’d been given a book about the incident by the producer Peter Fincham in 2004. “I read it on the train going home,” Bleasdale recalls, “and I remember ringing him up and saying ‘I’d do anything to do this’.”
What in particular was it that drew him to the story? On the face of it, a TV film about a German U-boat commander seems like an unlikely Bleasdale project. “Considering I come from Liverpool, where the vast majority of the merchant seamen who were on the Laconia came from, it was one of those great mysteries that I’d never heard of it: everybody’d heard, for example, of the sinking of Hood, which happened about the same time. That became part of Liverpool folklore but the Laconia never had.”
“But it wasn’t just that there was a link to Liverpool,” Bleasdale goes on. “I wouldn’t have done it just for that. I did it because I completely fell in love with the character of Hartenstein [brilliantly played by the German actor Ken Duken, above]. He is very different from many of the antiheroes that I’ve created in that he was a blissfully good man, and he was part of Nazi Germany. I was one of the many people born nine months to the day after the end of the war, so you’re brought up with these stories you hear of the Nazis, and suddenly here was this almost knight in shining armour.”
Was the Laconia incident under-reported because the Allies didn’t want the Germans to be seen as human beings during the war? “I don’t think the Germans wanted to be seen as human beings,” says Bleasdale. “I think also it was covered up by true Nazis because they didn’t want anyone to think there was a knight in shining armour wandering around the South Atlantic being nice to people he’d sunk.”
It’s a strange contradiction isn’t it – that Hartenstein rescues the people he’s just tried to kill? “There’s a line from one of the seaman who says, ‘He’s a really good bloke, what a pity the bastard sank us in the first place.’”
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Bleasdale was so taken with his subject that he wrote the script with a blown-up photo of Hartenstein looking down on him. “He thought he was doing right for his country and not for the Nazi party. I stayed with it through the six years because I couldn’t let go of him. I was entranced by the moral decency of the man. I wanted people to know about him.”
But for some, Hartenstein was too good to be true. “The hardest thing of all was to convince our German co-producers, who were articulate, intelligent, pleasant people, that actually Hartenstein was as good as he seemed,” Bleasdale says. Fearing Hartenstein was being romanticised, the producers even showed Bleasdale’s script to a history professor, expecting him to rubbish it. But he told them it was “on the money”. “I spent an awful lot of time researching this, and this really happened,” Bleasdale insists.
The film, a riveting and moving three hours, hasn’t been shown in Germany yet, and apparently they’ll see a different version, something Bleasdale is wary about. “I hope they’re not going to alter history,” he says. “Inevitably with something on this scale it can be interpreted by editors and producers in a different way.”
The journey of the script to the screen has not been an easy one for Bleasdale. “There were times when I never thought it would see the light of day,” he says. “I initially wrote six hours because there was so bloody much that I wanted to say. And then I was told that it was three hours. I was at a loss at what to do. The production company brought in a woman called Hilary Norrish [the script editor and producer of Laconia], who was armed with several knives but she doesn’t stab you in the back. She’s brilliant at bringing things down and keeping the heart of it. Without her I don’t think I could have survived it.” But cutting three hours out of a project that had become dear to his heart – that must have hurt, surely? “Put it this way,” Bleasdale says. “There was blood on the floor but none of my vital organs were ever damaged.”
The Sinking of the Laconia (15) is out on DVD on March 14