General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Schtonk

Schtonk! is a 1992 German satirical comedy film directed by Helmut Dietl that farcizes the 1983 Hitler diaries hoax, in which the Hamburg magazine Stern published 60 volumes of diaries supposedly written by Adolf Hitler that turned out to be entirely fake two weeks later.¹ The title is the original German one, Schtonk!; the film was chosen as the best German film of the year by German critics and was Germany's entry for the Academy Awards.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Schtonk! (also listed as Schtonk)³
Director and screenwriters	Helmut Dietl; screenplay by Dietl and Ulrich Limmer³^•⁴
Lead cast	Götz George, Uwe Ochsenknecht, and Christiane Hörbiger⁴
Runtime and format	115 minutes, 35mm, color, Dolby Stereo; German age rating FSK ab 6 Jahren³
Production	Bavaria Filmproduktion GmbH (München-Geiselgasteig) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR); producers Günter Rohrbach and Helmut Dietl³
Principal awards	Deutscher Filmpreis 1992 Filmband in Gold for Best Film, Acting, and Directing; Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film 1993; Golden Globe nomination 1993³
Subject	The 1983 Stern Hitler diaries hoax, with characters thinly disguised from the real participants¹

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The film follows two men whose fortunes rise together on a forgery. Fritz Knobel, played by Uwe Ochsenknecht, supports himself by faking and selling Nazi memorabilia, including a nude portrait of Eva Braun signed "A Hitler" and an urn purportedly containing the ashes of Hitler and Braun. When Knobel writes and sells a volume of Hitler's nonexistent diaries, he treats it as just another job. The journalist Hermann Willié, played by Götz George, learns of the diaries and realizes their potential value; a newspaper, the film's stand-in for Stern, is willing to pay any price to rewrite history. As pressure builds, Knobel is forced to deliver more and more volumes of the fake diaries, and he finds himself acting increasingly like the man whose life he is rewriting.¹

The supporting cast includes Christiane Hörbiger as Freya von Hepp, Harald Juhnke as Pit Kummer, Ulrich Mühe as Dr. Wieland, Rolf Hoppe as Karl Lentz, Veronica Ferres as Martha, and Dagmar Manzel as Biggi.¹

The real events behind the film

The film's characters are only thinly disguised versions of the people involved in the actual 1983 scandal. Knobel is based on the real-life forger Konrad Kujau, and Willié on the Stern journalist who published the scoop.¹ The British television serial Selling Hitler later covered some of the same terrain, but from a distinctively Germanic point of view, as The Independent put it at the time of the film's UK release.²

The satire works on two levels. It mocks the events and characters of the hoax itself, and it also targets the discomfort Germany has with its difficult past. The film portrays a country teeming with unreconstructed old Nazis grown sleek on the Economic Miracle, still so steeped in the Hitler myth that the dictator's meandering confessions about his flatulence and bad breath, passages taken verbatim from the forgeries, are seized upon as if they were high philosophy.²

Production

The film was shot between 24 April 1991 and 24 July 1991 in Hamburg, Gotha, the Bergisches Land, Drachenburg near Bonn, Odenthal, and Frönden.³ The original negative runs 3,137 meters, corresponding to the 115-minute running time, and the film was passed by the FSK, the German voluntary self-regulation body, for audiences aged 6 and up on 27 February 1992.³ Xaver Schwarzenberger was the cinematographer, Konstantin Wecker wrote the music, and Tanja Schmidbauer edited.⁴ Neue Constantin Film GmbH & Co. Verleih KG of Munich was the original theatrical distributor; Croco Filmverleih & Vertrieb GmbH of Berlin handled later distribution.³ The film was shot in widescreen.⁵

Reception and awards

Schtonk! was a success both at the box office and with German critics, a rarity for a German comedy, and it was chosen as the best German film of the year and as Germany's entry for the Academy Awards.² At the 1992 Deutscher Filmpreis it won Filmband in Gold awards for Best Film, for acting, and for directing.³ It was nominated for the 1993 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and for the 1993 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and it received the Ernst-Lubitsch-Preis from the Club of Berlin Film Journalists, the Gilde-Filmpreis in Gold from the German art-house cinema association, and the Best Screenplay award at the Tokyo International Film Festival 1992.³

Critical opinion abroad was more mixed. The critic Kim Newman, writing in Empire, found the farce rambling and its characters hideous, while acknowledging the film's skits on the Hitler cult.⁵ On IMDb the film holds a rating of about 7.1 from roughly 4,500 votes.¹

Availability

The film received its first German television broadcast on ARD on 29 May 1994, and a digitized version was re-released theatrically in Germany on 16 February 2023.³ Streaming availability changes frequently: in August 2025 JustWatch listed the film as free to stream on myfilmfriend in the United States,¹ while the German portal Kino.de listed rental and purchase options on services including Magenta TV, Alleskino, Prime Video, iTunes, Microsoft, Rakuten TV, and YouTube.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 1990 to 1994 › Titles K to W

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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