GERMAN INTERMARRIAGE 
TESTIMONIALS

Date: July 26, 2004 

Language: English

Film review 

 

1. 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.