One day we heard in the Globetrotter that the Hessischer Rundfunk was planning to develop a television production unit and was looking for people. The Globetrotter was an old railroad lounge car standing on a bomb-site that had been turned into a café and hangout for performers. Of course we had all heard about television in the USA and assumed that this new medium would mean new work opportunities for actors. The people who were responsible for developing television in Germany immediately put a damper on our expectations. Stage actors weren't wanted for television. What they were looking for was fresh, natural types who didn't posture the way we did on stage. Talent scouts were already out looking for types like that on the streets. The “fresh, natural types” they collected were dragged into the studios and put in front of the cameras. At first they were all flops. The directors who took over the television productions had almost all started in theater, and when they were casting television plays they generally started by bringing in actors whom they knew from the theater.

One of the first television plays to be broadcast on German television was A Hero of Our Times by the American author D. Davidson. The Hessischer Rundfunk produced it 1955. It was about American soldiers returning to the USA at the end of the Korean War, after being POWs in China. The play just suited the Cold War mood. The director was Fritz Umgelter, a pioneer of German television drama. I played one of five American soldiers.

The Hessischer Rundfunk's first television studio was circular; it had originally been designed as the chamber for the Bundestag, the West German parliament, at the time when Walter Kolb, elected mayor of Frankfurt in 1946, was campaigning for Frankfurt to be the capital of the new Federal Republic. Rehearsals in those days were hardly any different from in the theater, except that they were considerably shorter and more intensive right from the start. The director rehearsed with us in the studio at the beginning, just as with a stage play. About a week before the broadcast the technical elements were added: the cameras were brought in and it was worked out precisely how the actors and the cameras would move.