Wagner Brothers: A documentary that has never been seen in Germany

In a moment of exhaustion, Moritz Wagner says: “Animals would be the best athletes.” No doubts, no paralyzing thoughts, no plans for the future anyway, Wagner would like to have a head as tidy as an animal when he throws the ball to the basket in the North American professional league NBA.

But he didn’t. Neither does his younger brother Franz, who, like Moritz, plays for the Orlando Magic. Moritz has been living in the USA for nine years, Franz for five, but both are still amazed by their careers, which have taken them from Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg to Ann Arbour, Michigan, to Florida to the Magic.

The directors Thomas Pletzinger and Timon Modersohn were allowed to accompany the Wagner brothers for part of their journey. The camera ran along when Moritz, 27, and Franz, 23, talked over the past few months about the NBA entertainment machine, which sometimes throws them into such disarray that they lose all sense of time and space. “If you don’t know where you’re going to wake up in the morning, even a Ritz Carlton is of no use to you,” says Moritz, the spokesman in the documentary, which will be available in the ZDF media library from this Monday.

The series has the English title “The Wagner Brothers”, just as if the four-part series were aimed at the global market. But the story of the Wagners is still a rather German story. Moritz Wagner is considered a solid NBA professional, while Franz has what it takes to become one of the greats in his sport. At least that’s how the Orlando Magic see it, who have given Franz a five-year contract that will pay him at least $224 million – and in the best case even $269 million. That’s more than Dirk Nowitzki earned in total in his 21 years with the Dallas Mavericks.

This documentary is also about money, which – and this is what makes it so special – has no taboo topics. You can listen to Moritz Wagner on the phone with his agent Jason Glushon and sorting through offers. Six or seven million dollars per season is not enough for Moritz; he considers the sum a joke, a disregard for everything he believes he has achieved in the NBA. Moritz complains, he curses, he complains and in the end he collapses exhausted.

A scene like this would probably have been removed from many other sports documentaries. “Not released”, as it is called in such cases, because the protagonist feels that he is portrayed in an unfavorable light. In the case of the series “The Wagner Brothers”, however, the rule was: no censorship and the main actors had full trust in the filmmakers.

Timon Modersohn has earned this trust over the years. He met the Wagners while riding an elevator; he lived in the same house in Prenzlauer Berg as the two brothers. Thomas Pletzinger later joined the project. He is a writer and non-fiction author specializing in basketball. For his book “Gentleman, we live on the edge” (2011), he accompanied the Alba Berlin team for a season as a kind of participant observer. In 2019 he published “The Great Nowitzki,” a biography of Dirk Nowitzki, who had just resigned at the time. The enormous ambition was already revealed in the title, an allusion to Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. Anyone who read the book got to know an almost godlike Nowitzki, Pletzinger pumped him up to be larger than life.

Something similar was now to be feared with “The Wagner Brothers” (here apparently an allusion to “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoyevsky or to the “Blues Brothers” – or both, who knows). But Pletzinger has taken a back seat this time. He and Modersohn let the Wagner brothers tell their story themselves. There is no longer any sense of panic, as was the case with the Nowitzki book, of having to find a second level that would make the work “larger than life”.

However, the Wagner family also makes it easy for the authors. Not only Moritz and Franz are gifted interpreters of themselves. The parents, father Axel Schulz, a psychotherapist by profession, and mother Beate Wagner, a medical journalist, are also people of words. A stroke of luck for Pletzinger and Modersohn, who have used this strong material to create a sports documentary series that has never been seen before in Germany. So close, so clever, so visually powerful – the Amazon documentary about Jan Ullrich can only keep up.

And yet this series also has its weaknesses. The first two of the four episodes are mainly about winning the 2023 World Cup. Sure, Franz Wagner was the leader of this team alongside Dennis Schröder, and the title is the most sparkling that a German national basketball team has ever won. But putting the World Cup in the foreground leads to an imbalance. The special, the unheard of thing about the Wagner brothers is their journey through America together. In the USA, a World Cup title counts for little, the only thing that counts is the NBA championship ring.

Pletzinger and Modersohn were seduced by the powerful images they captured during the World Cup in Japan and the Philippines. And whenever they liked a scene, they gave it weight in the documentary, as if it were an oil painting of a roaring deer.

The images in “The Wagner Brothers” will stand on their own for quite a while. There won’t be any new, strong scenes from the duo in the next few weeks. Franz Wagner has sustained an abdominal muscle injury and will be out for a longer period of time. Lots of time to think about your own life again.

“The Wagner Brothers” is now available in the ZDF media library. The documentary can be seen on linear TV on December 14th (12:25 a.m.) and December 15th (11:45 p.m.), both on ZDF.