Frank Noack reviews Margare the Von Trotta’s Rosentrasse
Date: July 26, 2004
Language: English
Film review
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Frank Noack reviews audience’s enthusiasm for Margarethe Von Trotta’s Rosentrasse, alongside other pop-culture movies
I
Near the end of 2003, several German newspaper and magazine editors
asked their film reviewers to name what they considered to be the best
and the worst achievements of the year. With the polls of the
Berlin-based magazines _TIP_ and _Zitty_ (appearing every two weeks) and
_Der Tagesspiegel_ (the only daily newspaper in Germany to conduct such
a poll) combined, the winners in the "worst" category were _Matrix
Reloaded_ and _Matrix Revolutions_, followed by _Kill Bill Vol. 1_, _Das
Wunder von Bern_, _Irreversible_, and--if only with three
votes--_Rosenstrasse_.
_Kill Bill Vol. 1_ and _Irreversible_ were also among the year's
favorite films; a few critics even championed _Das Wunder von Bern_, but
nobody showed real enthusiasm for _Rosenstrasse_. Even its defenders
were defensive, asking readers to ignore the film's flaws because of its
honorable content. Director Margarethe von Trotta wasn't slaughtered
but, even worse, she was treated patronizingly as someone who means well
and isn't much of an artist. When the nominations for the German Film
Awards were announced in mid-April 2004, _Rosenstrasse_ was completely
overlooked--just a few days after winning Italy's David di Donatello
Award as Best Foreign Picture.
Audiences were kinder. According to the magazine _Filmecho/Filmwoche_
(No. 7 / February 14, 2004), more than 600,000 people have paid to see
_Rosenstrasse_ after its nationwide release on September 18, 2003. Half
a year later, it was still shown in a few cinemas across Germany, and
its recent DVD premiere was well-promoted. Von Trotta has scored an
average, solid success. Among German films released during 2003, only
_Good Bye, Lenin!_, _Das Wunder von Bern_, _Luther_, _Das fliegende
Klassenzimmer_, _Werner--gekotzt wird später_, _Die wilden Kerle_, _Till
Eulenspiegel_ and _Anatomie 2_ had attracted more cinemagoers. If one
adds all international films released in Germany during 2003,
_Rosenstrasse_ was at number 57--not too bad a place, considering that
Ang Lee's _The Hulk_ occupied number 58.
Promotion for _Rosenstrasse_ had visibly been inspired by Max
Färberböck's similarly-themed 1999 hit _Aimee and Jaguar_ in which
'Aryan' housewife Juliane Köhler falls in love with Jewish resistance
fighter Maria Schrader. Blond Köhler and dark-haired Schrader had
dominated the ads for _Aimee and Jaguar_ just as blond Katja Riemann and
Schrader were to dominate those for _Rosenstrasse_.
Before the film's nationwide release, leading lady Katja Riemann had won
a Best Actress award at Venice, the first given to an actress in a
German film since 1942, when Kristina Söderbaum won for _Die goldene
Stadt_. During the 1950s, two of West Germany's biggest stars won, but
Lilli Palmer did so for the US film _The Four Poster_ and Maria Schell
for the French drama _Gervaise_. Apart from some flattering press
reports, Katja Riemann's award did nothing for her.
Riemann also got a Best Actress nomination at the European Film Awards.
Born in 1963, she hadn't achieved stardom until she reached the age of
thirty, when she became a national box office draw via several
"Beziehungskomödien" ("relationship comedies"). For about five years she
was Germany's Meg Ryan, but overexposure hurt her career, as did some
unpleasant public appearances. She insulted journalists (not all of them
with justification) and on several occasions imitated the worst
eccentricities of Madonna and Jennifer Lopez.
In Egon Günther's well-meant but painfully uninspired TV movie
_Elsa--Geschichte einer leidenschaftlichen Frau_ (1999)--von Trotta is a
genius compared with Günther--Riemann was supposed to play a Jewish
mother who leaves Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s, sending her children
into exile first and following them later. Riemann, mother of a daughter
born in 1993, protested that she would never travel without her children
and insisted on a script change that had nothing to do with historical
facts but satisfied her ego. Whatever one may say against her, she has a
strong presence and remains a national celebrity. Her portrayal of Lena
Fischer certainly contributed to the minor success of _Rosenstrasse_.
Outside of Germany, the film will get some attention because of its
subject matter, even if it isn't really that new: Meryl Streep had
already played a blond, non-Jewish woman fighting for her Jewish husband
in the TV series _Holocaust_ back in 1977.
II
For nearly ten years, _Rosenstrasse_ had a reputation as the picture
that never got made, like Jodie Foster's _Flora Plum_. Once production
started, there were no serious conflicts. After 54 days of shooting,
filming was completed on December 18, 2002. The first Berlin press
screening was held on July 16, 2003.
One minor pre-shooting conflict involved 1943-born Jutta Lampe, one of
Germany's two or three greatest living stage actresses, who had
hesitated to play Maria Schrader's orthodox Jewish mother Ruth
Weinstein. Her hesitation was justified. Lampe gives an unhappy, even
campy performance, having to play a character completely alien to her
and, one may assume, to von Trotta as well. To anyone who has seen
Lampe's Phaedra, Andromache, Masha (_The Three Sisters_), Ranevskaya
(_The Cherry Orchard_), or Arkadina (_The Seagull_) on-stage, she's ill
at ease and most reviewers were kind enough not to mention her at all.
Like the similarly protestant Meryl Streep, she is unable to wear a
black wig without audiences being aware of it being a wig.
Within Germany Lampe contributed to the film's prestige. The cast of
_Rosenstrasse_ includes two relatively bankable stars (Riemann,
Schrader) as well as superior stage actresses such as Lampe, Doris
Schade (enjoyably sarcastic as 90-year-old Lena Fischer) and Jutta
Wachowiak, a Brecht performer from East Berlin's Deutsches Theater to
whom film historian Annette Insdorf had paid tribute in her book
_Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust_, in connection with the 1980
concentration camp drama _Die Verlobte_. Wachowiak and Belgian actor Jan
Decleir play an elderly couple and although they act in different scenes
until he is released, you know they belong to one another, with their
combination of larger than life dignity and earthiness.
Schrader (playing Hannah, the protagonist of the present day plot),
though not Jewish herself, was associated with filmmaker/actor Dani Levy
for many years (in 1998 they co-wrote _Meschugge_). There is an
undertone of bitchiness in Schrader's and Riemann's star personae that
gives von Trotta's film a much needed energy. Too often, the good
characters bore audiences to death. Schrader and Riemann are
refreshingly different from the noble heroines of von Trotta's earlier
pictures. It is an intriguing anecdote, mentioned by Riemann in an
interview, that one American company had developed a _Rosenstrasse_
project starring Sharon Stone, and seeking German money for it. For the
record, the cast of _Rosenstrasse_ also includes a veteran bit player,
76-year-old Johanna Penski, who had debuted as an extra in Veit Harlan's
_Durchhalte_ spectacle, _Kolberg_ (whose production had begun in 1943;
it was released on January 30, 1945).
Among the male cast, the dashing presence of Martin Feifel (as Lena
Fischer's Jewish musician husband Fabian) and Fedja van Huet (as Luis
Marquez, Hannah's South American fiancee) stand out. Fedja van Huet had
starred, alongside Jan Decleir, in the Academy Award winning Dutch film
_Karakter_. Considering his talent, he is scandalously wasted by von
Trotta. The Nazis could easily have become stock villains, but von
Trotta knows there was a gray zone, and in this respect the insecure
guard of Rainer Strecker deserves praise. On the debit side, Martin
Wuttke (a fine stage actor who had his breakthrough as Brecht's
Hitlerian Arturo Ui, but who is generally unremarkable on-screen)
struggles hopelessly with the admittedly difficult part of Joseph
Goebbels. He is leagues below Martin Kosleck, who so brilliantly
impersonated the minister of propaganda in John Farrow's _The Hitler
Gang_ (1944) and Stuart Heisler's _Hitler_ (1962), or Cliff Gorman, who
portrayed Goebbels to Anthony Hopkins's Hitler in George Schaefer's TV
movie _The Bunker_ (1981).
Even the best performances cannot compensate for the dull sets and
cinematography. _Rosenstrasse_ is neither a historical pageant nor an
intense chamber piece. It has flaws that are typical for a medium-budget
film. Von Trotta lacked the money and, it must be admitted, the
imagination to recreate 1943's Berlin. The scenes set in the present are
damaging not for dramaturgical reasons, but, since they include
spectacular shots from present-day New York and Berlin, you realize all
the more that the old Berlin consists of only one street corner and
various interiors. You never have a sense of 1943's everyday life. You
are never really there.
III
Most historical films contain inaccuracies. Who decides which
inaccuracies matter and which don't? It depends on each filmgoer's
special knowledge, which he all too often considers to be an absolute. I
initially laughed when I read the following letter to the editors of the
British film magazine _Sight & Sound_ (March 1999): "For all the talk of
the 'realism' of 'Saving Private Ryan' (...), the film contains many
gaffes. In Iowa in mid-June fields of ripe grain are nonsensical, as are
the fields of ripe grass in France shortly after D-Day. The mother in
Iowa is shown looking out of a window over her sink, but in those days
(...) farm sinks had high backs – don't sinks by windows belong to the
50s or later? And the old gramophone is remarkably 'high-fidelity' for
its time". As said, I did laugh initially at this letter, but if I were
an expert in horticulture, sink architecture, or gramophones, I would
also have complained of the several gaffes.
Several German reviewers of _Rosenstrasse_ have complained of historical
inaccuracies. I want to single out Iris Noah's article "Willkommen seid
ihr, Klischees" which appeared in the weekly _Jungle World_ (September
17, 2003) because it managed to attack the film for alleged inaccuracies
while adding inaccuracies of its own. Noah's tone is unusually
aggressive, full of resentments that have nothing to do with von
Trotta's film itself; she seems to be unfamiliar with Nazi culture and
subculture, and she seems not to have talked to or read books by
participants of the _Rosenstrasse_ events.
She accuses Margarethe von Trotta of anti-Semitism, even if it is not a
malicious one. Indeed, the casting company who chose the extras seems to
have used such dubious expressions as "Jewish types" or "Aryan types",
but these faux pas have nothing to do with what happens on-screen and
don't justify Noah's beginning her article with the following sentence:
"In Margarethe von Trottas Film 'Rosenstrasse' soll man die Juden schon
an der Nasenspitze erkennen und Deutsche haben unbedingt blond zu sein".
Even after a second viewing, I have not detected a single nose that
called attention to itself. Katja Riemann's blond hair is covered most
of the time. The Nazi star Litzy (Nina Kunzendorf) looks like a Latin
import and Hannah's non-Jewish fiancée has dark curls. In order to
create a somber mood, von Trotta even let several blond actors (Jürgen
Vogel, Frank Behnke, Rainer Strecker) dye their hair.
Had von Trotta used some racial stereotypes, they still would have been
justified because it was easier for blond, Nordic-looking Jews to remain
unharassed in Nazi Germany, as Herbert A. Strauss has described in his
autobiography _In the Eye of the Storm_ (1997), and a blond 'Aryan'
woman possessed more authority when confronting Gestapo men. While hair
color doesn't reveal anything about a person's character, religion or
ethnic identity, it does contribute to his or her appeal to others.
Anyway, von Trotta makes no use of such stereotypes.
One attack that seriously backfires is the one on the admittedly dubious
Goebbels episode. In front of Joseph Goebbels and other high-ranking
Nazis, Lena Fischer plays the piano while her friend Litzy sings "Ich
weiss nicht, zu wem ich gehöre". Such an event, Noah argues, would never
have been possible in 1943 because the song had been written by the
exiled Jew Friedrich Hollaender, and it was associated with Marlene
Dietrich, whom Germans despised as a traitor for her entertaining U.S.
troops. With this argument, Noah reveals herself as someone who, instead
of doing research of her own, merely reproduces the usual Dietrich
clichés from the yellow press. It is true that Friedrich Hollaender had
written the song, but it was first sung by Anna Sten in the 1932 UFA
melodrama "Stürme der Leidenschaft" ("Storms of Passion").
Anna Sten's singing of "Ich weiss nicht ..." did have a political
meaning when it was first heard. Sten, star of several Soviet and
leftist German films, had been bought by the nationalist UFA. Thereafter
the communist newspaper _Die Rote Fahne_ denounced her as a traitor who
tries to lure proletarian audiences into bourgeois cinemas. Noah has
never heard of Anna Sten, but she has heard somewhere that Germans used
to attack Marlene Dietrich as a traitor. This, however, was in 1960,
when Dietrich gave her first (and only) live concerts in Germany. The
motivation behind the protests against her is too complex to be
discussed in the _Rosenstrasse_ context, having to do with the tickets
being too expensive for the average German Dietrich fan, and with
Dietrich visiting them so late.
_Rosenstrasse_ is set in 1943, not 1960. In 1943, Marlene Dietrich was
not viewed as a traitor but as a German-born actress who made it in
Hollywood. There is no factual evidence for Germans having felt hatred
for Dietrich during the Nazi era. On the contrary, it was Germans who
turned "The Scarlet Empress" (1934), a box office disaster in the United
States and elsewhere, into a huge financial success. Dietrich was on the
covers of Nazi film magazines. During the 1937 Venice Film Festival--a
fascist event that was boycotted by leftist and liberal artists--she
personally appeared after having appeared in the anti-Communist
melodrama _Knight without Armour_ in which she, as a Russian aristocrat,
was assaulted and raped by greasy, subhuman Bolsheviks. At the same
time, Luise Rainer participated in a demonstration against Vittorio
Mussolini's visit to Hollywood, which severely damaged her reputation. A
few ugly Nazi articles of that time depicted Dietrich as a victim of
"Hollywood Jews", but these articles were anti-Semitic, not anti-Dietrich.
Dietrich had helped émigrés financially, yet she never publicly attacked
Nazi Germany until it was safe to do so; had she done that before 1945,
her mother, sister and cousin (a Wehrmacht soldier) who had remained in
Germany might have suffered. Dietrich began entertaining U.S. troops in
the summer of 1944, a year after the _Rosenstrasse_ episode. The people
of the liberated town of Aachen greeted her enthusiastically in 1944,
and her films were successfully shown in German cinemas during the
1950s. If she felt uneasy towards her homeland, it was chiefly because
she had not left it as a star who knows and trusts her audience. Nobody
in 1943 associated the song "Ich weiss nicht, zu wem ich gehöre" with
Dietrich, since it hadn't been recorded by her at that time, and even
afterwards nobody considered Dietrich to be a traitor for entertaining
U.S. troops because these were the days before CNN. Germans didn't even
care when their biggest star, Zarah Leander, left for Sweden in 1943.
And Germans loved stage actress Tilla Durieux who spent World War II
among partisans in Yugoslavia (who haven't been particularly nice to
German soldiers), resuming her German career in the 1950s.
The song "Ich weiss nicht ..." didn't make much of an impact for decades
since the film _Stürme der Leidenschaft_ (directed by Robert Siodmak)
was not too successful. In 1975, Israeli singer Daliah Lavi (a big star
in West Germany since the 1960s) added the song to her repertory and
made it famous. Dietrich's interpretation never achieved the popularity
of Lavi's. Lena Fischer's interpretation of Friedrich Hollaender's "Ich
weiss nicht ..." is certainly meant by von Trotta to be an act of subtle
resistance, but its presentation is hardly comparable to the rousing
"Allons enfants de la patrie" episode from _Casablanca_. Even if all the
people present at the occasion had known the song had been written by an
exiled Jew--and it is well-documented that due to uncertain authorship,
much forbidden music was played during the Nazi era--the fact remains
that the Nazi élite privately enjoyed forbidden fruits.
IV
Iris Noah considers the conditions under which the men live in their
Rosenstrasse prison to be too comfortable. Although she doesn't express
it that directly, she misses the smell of sweat and urine. Obviously,
she confuses the Rosenstrasse building with a train leading to
Auschwitz. In his autobiography _Und Gad ging zu David_ (Berlin 1995),
Gad Beck (b. 1923) described his stay in that environment as not
particularly nightmarish; he felt nervous but he also got warm food, and
he spent most of the time cruising and having sex (p. 112 ff.). A more
audacious, provocative filmmaker than von Trotta might have worked Gad
Beck's experiences into her and Pamela Katz's pious screenplay. Also,
according to Beck, many more men had been involved in the protests than
is officially recognized.
But then, who cares for authentic witnesses anyway? One of the women who
had helped to free her beloved during the Rosenstrasse protests, Gisela
Miessner, defended the film to little avail in the daily newspaper
_Junge Welt_ (September 26, 2003). It seems that actual experience is
not in demand these days. It is second-hand experience that counts. A
few years ago, I had to endure a whining girl accusing a real Auschwitz
survivor--who told audiences how much she enjoyed visiting today's
Germany--of being naive and inappropriately optimistic. Today's Germany
is so horrible! the girl (or girlish woman) screamed, trying to upstage
the woman who really had been in hell.
V
Margarethe von Trotta's worst decision was to suggest a sexual encounter
between Lena Fischer and Joseph Goebbels. Too many people have left the
cinemas asking themselves: Did they or didn't they? As if that mattered
in the context. As someone who pays particular attention to sexual
improbabilities (as opposed to other cinemagoers who detect
horticultural improbabilities), I would say they didn't, and couldn't
have done. For her meeting with the Propaganda minister, Lena wears a
tight red dress that she's incapable of putting on without help from
others. After Goebbels has left, she is still wearing her dress, with no
button unbuttoned. Friends have to help her out of it. Of course, there
may have been sexual practices that didn't require undressing, but I
won't go further into that. It is a well-documented fact that Goebbels
wasn't attracted to blondes, and unlike Hermann Göring (whose WW I
sweetheart, actress Käthe Dorsch, repeatedly persuaded him to release
prisoners), Goebbels rigidly separated sex from politics.
VI
The chief reason why _Rosenstrasse_ was attacked despite its good
intentions is, to me, an ideological one. I dare say that _Rosenstrasse_
was attacked for its humanism, its homage to non-political antifascism.
If you study the lives of people who saved Jews during the Third Reich,
you'll discover that they usually were apolitical. Those who do the
right thing are not identical with those who write the right thing.
Self-righteous journalists and historians who promote civil courage are
almost never identical with those anonymous people who risk their lives
by intervening when neo-Nazis attack blacks or Arabs in the subway.
Needless to say, these real heroes don't get any awards for their
courage, and usually they don't want them. Such humanitarian awards go
to talk show humanists – glamorous people who say on TV that they hate
Nazism and violence. A notable exception is politician and marijuana
activist Christian Ströbele ("Die Grünen") who, after being attacked
with an iron rod by a neo-Nazi, fought back despite being unarmed and
bleeding.
The Rosenstrasse women demonstrated courage because they loved their
husbands, sons, or cousins. Their attitude is still not taken seriously
even if it has saved more lives than the writings of more politically
motivated people.
Another taboo subject which von Trotta has touched is the gray zone. In
his review of Fred Zinnemann's 1944 antifascist drama _The Seventh
Cross_, the _New York Times_ critic Bosley Crowther felt it necessary to
remind his readers that the film based on Anna Seghers's novel was set
in 1936 and that in the meantime, all good Germans as depicted must have
emigrated or been killed. In view of the bombs dropped on Germany, this
position was understandable.
Less understandable is the fact that German émigrés who spent World War
II in Hollywood (not the worst place, if I had to choose) and came back
to Germany after 1945 miraculously didn't meet any good German or
concentration camp survivor, only Nazis and opportunists. Never mind
that leading West German film producers Gyula Trebitsch, Arthur Brauner
and Walter Koppel had survived the holocaust, that our most popular
literature critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and his wife had witnessed the
Warsaw ghetto uprising; popular talk host Hans Rosenthal had survived in
hiding, and theater and TV director Imo Moszkowicz had been an Auschwitz
inmate. Somehow, no Hollywood émigré (as opposed to Moscow émigrés,
whose views are far more differentiated) wanted to know about these
people's fates. A notable exception is actor Fritz Kortner who spent
World War II in Hollywood: Kortner, one of the most viciously attacked
Jewish stars of the Weimar years, never forgot the cowardly and
reactionary behavior of many of his fellow émigrés who would have become
Nazis had they been allowed.
Younger German journalists of today have chosen what I call the
Hollywood perspective. It is easier, more comfortable to divide Germans
into killers, victims, and émigrés. And the Rosenstrasse women didn't
fit into any of these categories. They could save lives because they
were part of the system. At least one of the Rosenstrasse women is
depicted by von Trotta as a Nazi, wearing her swastika on her chest, but
she is still fighting for a Jewish relative. (German actor Michael Degen
recently revealed that those Gentiles who saved his and his mother's
lives had been anti-Semites, but they were horrified by Nazi violence
against Jews.)
All films that have dealt with German resistance made it clear that
these courageous people had been a minority. Yet even these few decent
people seem to offend the average young German of today. It was
different in the early 1980s. In those days when thousands of young
Germans (as well as older people like Heinrich Böll who had remained
young at heart) protested against nuclear weapons, the heroes of German
resistance were appreciated. After reunification, if you asked people in
the streets to name antifascists, they would certainly have mentioned
Oskar Schindler and Marlene Dietrich. Both have done good, particularly
Schindler, but both are impossible to imitate. The average German could
not go to the Gestapo and say: "Heil Hitler, please give me a thousand
Jews to help me repair my roof". As much as I usually disagree with
Claude Lanzman, I think he was right in accusing _Schindler's List_ of
telling a story that was too atypical to be of educational value. As for
Dietrich, she is too Apollonian a figure to invite identification. By
focusing on extraordinary situations (Schindler) or personalities
(Dietrich), the German media intimidate ordinary people instead of
encouraging them to become politically active. Having to look up to Gods
makes you passive.
Like such emigrants as Klaus and Erika Mann (two of my favorite
enemies), most journalists today say that the average German couldn't
have fought Hitler anyway, so it was better to leave Germany in the
first place. Fortunately, another 2003 poll asking who were the greatest
Germans of all time had the following antifascists among the top ten:
Hans and Sophie Scholl (resistance fighters who were executed), Willy
Brandt (a resistance fighter who emigrated to Norway and Sweden and
later became German Chancellor), and Albert Einstein, one of the few
pacifists during WW I. All of them had either been Nazi victims (the
Scholls) or émigrés, though Brandt did visit Nazi Germany illegally
until the outbreak of World War II. There remains a distrust of all
Germans who survived within Nazi Germany. This distrust is hardly
reduced to non-Jewish Germans. I vividly recall a scene from Otto
Preminger's Leon Uris adaptation _Exodus_ (1960) in which concentration
camp survivor Sal Mineo is brutally interrogated after the liberation,
having to explain why he had managed to survive the death camps.
VI
Discussing _Rosenstrasse_ is much more engrossing than watching the film
itself. In view of the subject, this is not too bad an effect. There are
great films which leave audiences paralyzed, unable to talk for days.
_Rosenstrasse_ has flaws and could easily be improved upon by a more
virtuoso filmmaker. But it raises questions that its makers may never
have thought about.
Frank Noack reviews the Cinematography of Rosenstrasse
Frank Noack critiques the cinematography of the film, Rosentrassee.
<<Even the best performances cannot compensate for the dull sets and
cinematography. _Rosenstrasse_ is neither a historical pageant nor an
intense chamber piece. >>
I totally agree.
Initially, I had planned to make my students at American Military University
watch this movie--even though I consider it and the story on which it is
based to be VERY flawed.
<<...The Rosenstrasse women demonstrated courage because they loved their
husbands, sons, or cousins. Their attitude is still not taken
seriously...>>
There were political/racially motivated murders in my hometown Wiesbaden
(other people's Jewish husbands, sons, cousins) within three weeks of
Hitler's assumption of power in 1933. Where were the brave Berlin
Rosenstrasse women then? They did not muster their courage until ten years
later, by which time most German Jews had been killed.
Instead, I shall refer my students to the heroic action of the 'Aryan' wife
of a Jewish man in Wiesbaden who risked death in order to prove her love
http://www.charlotte-opfermann.com/eujhallheimer.htm The Rosenstrasse story
is just so much fluff.