Ruins of the Third Reich at the Berlinale

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 28 February 2010 16:29

Written by David D’Arcy

A trip to the Berlinale always involves something more than cinema. Most years it’s also a journey into archaeology. And what better place for it than this tomb for Nazis and so much that they represented? It used to be easier to see the ruins of the Third Reich in Berlin.

They were inescapable, if not too distinguished. Now, with the rebuilding of the center of the city that’s been a work in progress since reunification, there are construction sites where there were once the shells of buildings. Still, every year, films at the Berlinale take you back to the darkest days under Hitler.

Not Just Riefenstahl

This time in the Berlin competition that journey into the past came in a new German-Austrian epic melodrama about a film, Jud Suess: Filme Ohne Gewissen / The Jew Suess: Film Without a Conscience, a feature about a movie that was made by the director Veit Harlan under the Nazis. It is banned today in Austria and Germany, except for "scientific" purposes.

20 million Germans saw Jud Suess after its release in 1940, and 20 million more elsewhere in Europe watched the film. The numbers reflect director Harlan’s feel for popular entertainment. He was not the filmmaker that Leni Riefenstahl was, but he did better at the box office.

The Nazi Jud Suess project was executive-produced by Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda (overplayed with disturbing gusto in the new feature by the German star Moritz Bleibtreu). Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, ordered his troops to watch it.

The 1940 Jud Suess was sentimental Nazi anti-Jewish melodrama, yet It was far from the most venal of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda films. You need only look at newsreel from the time to see far worse. But Jud Suess may have been among the most effective.

It'’s the story of a 18th-century Jewish financier, who gains the confidence of the king of Baden-Wurttemburg, and is later tried and executed to the delight of a frenzied crowd after he's been intimate with a Christian girl. In the original film, she submits to him in order to end the torture of an opponent of the financier, who is screaming in a cell nearby. In his defense, Judd Suess tells the court that he was only acting on orders from a ruler whom he served. Sound familiar? Just add some flourishes of unintentional humor that would make Mel Brooks wince.

The melodrama worked then, provided it was shown to a willing audience. It doesn't work now, unless Nazi-stalgia kitsch is your thing, even though director Oskar Roehler has ramped up the sex and taken us through the defeat of the Nazis and the judgment of history on those who served them, like the actor Ferdinand Marian, who played Jew Suess. 

A screen Casanova before Goebbel's reinvented him as  screen Jew, Marian was married to a Jewish actress (played by Martina Gedeck, from The Lives of Others) whom he abandoned. I won't give away details of their absurdly improbable encounter once the war begins, but she ends up dying in the camps.

The new feature shows you how hard it is to return to that spirit of melodrama. It also makes you wonder what the point would be to try.

It's all the more preposterous that the filmmakers seem to have meant well. Try to see this disaster to watch how the actor Tobias Moretti plays the Nazi Era actor Ferdinand Marian to the letter, and beyond. Marian was so persuasive as Jew Suess in the 1940 film, we're led to believe, that he was sought out by women who wanted the adventure of sex with "a Jew." See it also for Moretti as Goebbels, just as over the top as Christoph Waltz’s performance in Inglorious Basterds. Does gestural sadism make screen Nazis fun to watch, and therefore OK?

Yet seeing Jud Suess anywhere will be a problem. Although the press packed into the Berlinale Palast for a screening, later crowding the press conference and forcing a crowd to watch it on a huge screen outside, the Germans who saw it weren’t seduced by the heavy breathing, heavy soundtrack and heavy guilt. Watch for it late at night on the History Channel, it at all.
 
For the making of he original Jud Suess, Jews were brought in from the ghettoes of Poland to give the film authenticity. They were sent back after shooting, and most perished in the death camps.

Ghetto as Potemkin Village

The Warsaw Ghetto, and its cinematic exploitation by the Nazis, is the subject of A Film Unfinished, by Yael Hersonski, which was also at Berlin.

A film about the ghetto was commissioned by the Nazis – since it was never finished and never made public, we don't know what the Nazis wanted to do with it. One soldier-cameraman, Willi Wist, was found by the filmmakers. Wist talks about filming in the streets and staging most of what was shot. We do see is the ghetto from more than one viewpoint, a Jewish village of rich, poor and all between. The Nazis were apprehensive allowing the outside world to see their treatment of Jews and East Europeans. This might have been a version of the Red Cross tours to the camps.

If there are images of starving Jews, some of them children, which seem intended to make the captives look inhuman, we also see footage of Jews in the ghetto living what appear to be bourgeois lives of comfort. The goal here seems to ne to convince viewers that this life of contentment was a reflection of the richness of a diverse community.

Narration from survivors, witnesses (read by actors) and the cameraman himself take us behind the lens, to the organization of scenes that were commanded and acted out on German orders, and repeated if necessary.

You feel as if you're inside a Nazi propaganda film, watching religious Jews pray, or groups of men and women remove their clothes and walk into what is meant to be a ritual bath. There is even a circumcision performed under orders on a new-born baby. Death was also part of the charade, as elaborate Jewish funerals were organized to show that the captive race had its own dignified death.
 
Seeing Hersonski's documentary now, there’s an eeriness to the rehearsed ceremonies, especially in the disrobing under duress before entering the bath. The same people would be going into showers a few months later. Mass graves were filmed as workers filled with them with bodies of those who starved to death in the ghetto. The graves look so much like those shown in films about Auschwitz and the other death camps that the footage seems generic.

"These impression in Warsaw had a profound impact on me," said the cameraman Willi Wist, echoing what that silent footage of mass graves is telling us, "although later I got to see quite a lot." You can only guess what he meant.

The Nuremberg Trial: Banned in Boston

Then there were the other films that weren’t seen. Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, was commissioned by the US government after World War II. Director Stuart Schulberg mixed trial footage with a chronicle of the war and the Holocaust. Schulberg rescued Nazi footage from burning.

The Nazis were eager to cover or destroy their tracks. The job of identifying Nazi leaders on that footage was aided by none other than Leni Riefenstahl, after Bud Schulberg (Stuart's brother) brought her to Germany from hiding in Austria as a material witness.

There was more than enough material for the Schulbergs to turn out two other documentaries  for the courtroom – The Nazi Plan, four hours on Hitler’s rise and reign; and Nazi Concentration Camps, a gruesome hour-long compilation of scenes from the liberation of the camps by Allied troops.

The documentaries were shown to the judges and defendants at Nuremberg. After the verdicts, in April 1947, Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen eyed a larger audience for the film about the trial itself: "The very way in which the Trial was set up and conducted and the evidence which it produced constitute an historical document that should be of use, not only in motion picture theaters, but in schools and universities for many years to come."

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today was released in Germany in 1948. Yet the film was never shown in the United States. By that time, America’s enemy was the Soviet Union, whose officers are shown cooperating in the trial of Nazi leaders. Fearful that a film exposing German crimes would imperil the Marshall Plan, the government decided not to distribute Schulberg's film in the US, and refused to sell it to Pare Lorentz, who was preparing the English-language version for an American release. 

While US officials fretted about fueling anti-German feelings (an odd concern, given than veterans had plenty of their own firsthand reasons to hold such sentiments), a Soviet film about Nuremberg, Sud Narodov (Judgment of the People) , played Times Square. It wasn't until 1961 that the American  melodrama, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg, opened in the US, but that was a commercial project that needed no government approval.

Also Censored: The Good German

The Nuremberg Trial: Its Lesson for Today played for a largely American audience in a section called Berlinale Spezial. In the same section, a once-censored film played for a largely German audience in the International cinema, the official jewel of East German movie theaters.

The film was Der Aufenthalt, The Turning Point, a postwar story written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase and directed by Frank Beyer about a young German soldier who’s imprisoned by the Polish military after a woman wrongly accuses him of murdering her daughter.

East German authorities pulled the film from the 1983 Berlinale, because East German authorities thought their Polish neighbors in the military might find it offensive. Bear in mind that in 1983, when martial law was in effect in Warsaw, most Poles were more offended by the prospect of German and Russian troops coming across the border to impose order.)

The Turning Point was shown at the festival for the first time since then this year. Beyer, who died in 2006, didn't live to see it at the festival, but Kohlhaase was there, introduced with respect by Andreas Dresen, the gifted director from the former East Germany.

It’s the classic tale of a wrongly jailed innocent man. The context is what’s unusual here – a Nazis soldier presented as a victim in German film. The soldier, played by Sylvester Groth, is an end-of-war conscript isn’t old enough to have done much damage, but let’s not forget that the Germans slaughtered about 20% of the Polish population, the highest of all the countries the Nazis invaded. Given the circumstances, you would have had trouble finding anyone in Poland who thought there was such a thing as an innocent German.

Most of The Turning Point, adapted from a novel by Hermann Kant, takes place in prison. The scenes in the cells with ensembles of Polish and German prisoners play like theater. You get the claustrophobia of enclosed prison spaces, but also the vicious battles among Poles and Germans after a war has been won and lost. It's a film that any respectable country would be proud of, yet respectable isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think of East Germany in the 1980s.

There's a self-pity here for a persecuted German that will be as unusual for Americans as it will be hard to stomach, but it's no less self-pitying than Das Boot, Wolfgang Peterson's 1981 nationalistic hit about the sailors in a U-Boat under depth-charge attack from a British ship.  The Turning Point won’t be coming the US anytime soon, unless it plays as a restored classic in a museum. See it if you can.

For other Berlin stories go to: http://filmfestivaltraveler.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=533:what-to-do-in-berlin&catid=105:travel-feature&Itemid=107

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