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  1. Evelyn Wilcock summarizes the relevant literature in relation to the cinematic effects of the Rosentrassee film. 

Date: July 28, 2004

Language: English 

Historical Media Review 

 

  1. Evelyn Wilcock summarizes the relevant literature in relation to the cinematic effects of the Rosentrassee film. 

 

Rosenstrasse - a response

 

When Margarethe von Trotta decided to make a film about the Rosenstrasse

demonstration, one wonders whether she anticipated the critical

barracking. Those of us who live in Jewish intermarried families or

research their treatment in the Third Reich could have predicted that,

no matter how faultless her work, any film about the heroism of

non-Jewish women married to Jews would arouse dissent and resentment.

Half a century after the end of Nazism, disparagement of the

intermarried is not just history but unfinished business. This essay

will consider the responses to von Trotta's _Rosenstrasse_, and argue

that her handling of the topic merits some respect for its tact and

even-handedness.

 

If von Trotta had chosen to make a historical film about the

Rosenstrasse demonstration set safely in the past, the result might well

have been the documentary imagined by historian Wolfgang Benz.[1]

Bigger budget films like _The Pianist_ or _Schindler's List_ have

certainly done better at re-creating the mistrust and panic of wartime

life on the margins of a Nazi dictatorship. But these were films about

Nazi persecution of Jews, a well defined victim group whose destruction

has been extensively documented. Not so the persecution of mixed

families; academic attention has been sparse and the Rosenstrasse

demonstration, if it has been known at all, has survived as a folk

memory rather than as a fully documented event.

 

Critics of the oral history have focussed on recent research which

effectively destroys the belief inspiring von Trotta's film, that a

week's protest by non-Jewish German wives played any part in securing

the release of their Jewish husbands. Wolf Gruner claims on the basis of

Gestapo documents that the Jews from mixed families who were taken from

their places of forced labor and incarcerated in the Rosenstrasse

building in February 1943 were not held as a prelude to deportation but

only in order to select individuals with Jewish connections to replace

deported Jews in positions of communal administration. Antonia Leugers

questions this re-interpretation, reminding historians that twenty five

Jews were initially sent from the Rosenstrasse to Auschwitz Monowitz,

the labor camp later chronicled by Primo Levi who was a prisoner there.

She cites in particular contemporary evidence from Margarete Sommer of

the Catholic Hilfswerk organization who was closely involved in the

support of  mixed couples in the Berlin diocese and was in no doubt that

deportation was only averted by the protest.[2] It seems difficult to

believe that there was no intention to deport the Jews held in the

Rosenstrasse in February 1943, or at least to hold them. But "difficult"

and "belief" are significant words. In academic terms the question must

remain open, since the documentation is inconclusive.

 

Historian Beate Meyer, author of an authoritative work on the

persecution of children of Jewish mixed marriage in Hamburg,[3] probably

knows more than anyone about the Byzantine application of Nazi law to

intermarried Jewish/non-Jewish families in Germany. Her analysis of the

film Rosenstrasse in the light of her own meticulous research cannot be

faulted. Not only does she pin point its historical oddities and explain

where its examples are atypical, but she correctly identifies the

post-war intellectual developments--civil disobedience, feminism and

idealization of German aristocracy--which shaped von Trotta and

retrospectively flavor her Rosenstrasse script. This is not the film a

historian of the subject might chose to make but one must concede that

von Trotta has done well enough with the scant information available to

her and has falsified nothing.

 

But von Trotta is in deeper water; in spite of its title, _Rosenstrasse_

is not a holocaust history so much as a film about the far more

problematic aftermath. On the Jewish side, women writers have already

produced notable books; one thinks of _Weiter Leben_ by the Austrian

Ruth Klüger[4] or Eva Hoffman's recent essay on Poland, _After Such

Knowledge; Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust_.[5]  But for

many Germans this ground remains taboo.  It is too difficult and the gap

between German and Jewish understanding simply too wide.  Lifelong

campaigners against German anti-Semitism may well be concerned that, in

a situation where German self-respect is daily sustained by the

satisfying television coverage of Israeli (that is Jewish) misdoings in

the Middle East, by raising the question of Jewish hostility to

intermarriage, Von Trotta has trespassed on issues too delicate to be

left to the mass media or trusted in German hands.

 

Jewish religious law traditionally abhors mixing of any kind. The Nazi

propagandists in _Der Stürmer_ knew that, if the Nazis opposed

intermarriage, equally so did the orthodox Jews. The Nazis are gone, but

Jewish opposition to intermarriage remains right across the religious

spectrum.  Since 1945, Judaism in Germany has been dominated by the

orthodox. Jewish identity has been formulated only in terms of orthodox

matrilineal descent and the majority of Germans of mixed Jewish descent

have been rigorously excluded. Non-orthodox and secular Jewish

identities are dismissed as "imaginary" or insultingly regarded as a

psychological aberration. On the rare occasions where German writers

protest at Jewish rejection, their work may lack balance and portray

Judaism as inferior to Christianity. One might compare the _Jewish

Burial_[6] with the British treatment in Maggie O'Farrell's tragic

_After you'd gone_.[7] I am relieved that von Trotta has not dodged the

issue.

 

Perhaps feeling that attack is the best form of defense, Jewish

commentator Iris Noah accuses the film of anti-Semitism.[8]  Although as

a Jew I share some of her doubts about its portrayal of Judaism, I am

inclined to agree with Frank Noack that she is seeing prejudice where

none exists. Denouncing the film as racist may be a means of

discrediting von Trotta and avoiding her argument.

 

Iris Noah opens her discussion by ridiculing the film-makers' lack of

respect for Orthodox Judaism when the makers apparently approached the

Berlin Community at short notice for help with the film. It is a

familiar story and the breakdown in communication can never be blamed

entirely on one side. Most Germans know no Jews; their tentative

approaches to the Community--a community sadly too small to handle the

interest it arouses--are too often met with equal lack of understanding

and a brusqueness bordering on rejection. Noah assumes (and she may be

right) that it is through lack of Jewish knowledge that some details of

the mourning rituals which open the film  are  (apparently) as

unfamiliar to her in Berlin as they are to me in London. But Noah

remains silent on a more contentious matter, why von Trotta has chosen

to open her film about intermarried couples in the Third Reich with a

present day New York Jewish family sitting Shiva. To those familiar with

Jewish customs there is an immediate connection. Traditionally any child

of an orthodox Jew who married a non-Jew was treated as a child who had

died and the cutting of all contact was symbolized by their parents

sitting Shiva. Von Trotta could have given a more graphic portrayal of

Jewish rejection. Instead the Shiva for Ruth's husband serves as a

sub-text and the only words spoken are Ruth's to her horrified son, that

if Hannah marries her non-Jewish partner, she will no longer be Ruth's

daughter. The audience is assured from the start that this film about

Nazi objections to intermarriage will not exclude the Jewish.

 

Iris Noah claims that Rosenstrasse was cast in physical stereotypes. The

opposite is the case:  in both time frames, the 1940s and the present

day, von Trotta is at particular pains to not to differentiate between

Non-Jew and Jew. Ruth's Jewish New York cousin is blond and so is her

daughter in law, whereas Luis, Hannah's non-Jewish fiancé, is dark as is

Arthur von Eschenbach's "Aryan" wife.

 

Von Trotta also takes trouble to remove the distinction between German

and Jew.  Iris Noah asks how the "half-Jewish" child Ruth could identify

as German after seeing the difference between the way she was treated

during the Third Reich and the lives of her non-Jewish classmates who

suffered no such daily deprivations. The emigration and destruction of

the home-born German Jewish population has unfortunately perpetuated the

Nazi separation of Jew from German. Iris Noah appears unaware that,

notwithstanding Nazi legislation to the contrary, many German Jews,

including refugees rightly regarded themselves as fully German.  Adorno

like Ruth defined being German in terms of the language. The current

Jewish Community in Germany includes many foreign-born Jews, many

originating in the Soviet Union where Jews were allocated a separate

nationality. But Iris Noah is wrong to suggest that this is or ought to

be the case.  In Western Europe and the USA,   Jews identify their

nationality as that of the countries where they live, and this would

apply particularly to Jews in mixed families many of whom lack orthodox

descent credentials and are not acceptable as Jews in Israel.

 

I shared Noah's irritation at the weird portrayal of mourning rituals.

An orthodox friend confirmed that he had never once been asked to remove

his shoes at a Shiva (it is a mourning ritual usually performed only by

the most immediate relatives of the deceased), but he pointed out that

Jewish practice is determined not only by religious law but by the folk

customs of each community. Although I have never removed my shoes at a

Shiva, I was asked to remove my shoes at the door as a house-guest in

Germany last Spring.  Many non-Jewish Germans do ask guests to remove

their shoes before entering their home.  Who knows what is Jewish and

what is German in this survivor's family? Ruth has somewhat improbably

brought her children up speaking German.

 

When I watch the film, this is what I see. A Jewish German girl from New

York begins to ask questions about her mother's history which has

previously been suppressed.  She comes back to Germany to find the woman

who rescued her mother and this is what the film is about, to the

exclusion of all else. Because it is a fiction there are many

improbabilities both visual and linguistic. It is unlikely that the

American heroine Hannah speaks fluent German and that for much of her

visit she wears a spotless white coat, but even more unlikely is it that

a German film director might decide to take this for her topic.

 

During this visit the survivor's child meets (it seems) only one German,

the Good German, Lena Fischer, who rescued her mother. Lena Fischer is

the "good" German in every sense. She is of noble birth, and is a woman

artist (as is von Trotta), Lena is anti-racist: we see her and her

brother dance in a nightclub entertained by an Afro-American singer

reminding us that Josephine Baker toured in Weimar Germany and Germans

relished black jazz. Lena marries a Jew, a fellow musician. His

profession, though irritating, is significant. Modern opponents of

intermarriage emphasize the importance of preserving cultures, culture

standing in as a synonym for race. Lena and Fabian, non- Jew and Jew,

have classical music as their common heritage. The folkloric celebration

at Hannah's wedding celebration demonstrates that the recently

popularized East European version of Jewish culture is not exclusively

for Jews.

 

I would suggest that the film's departures from historical reality arise

from the need to present its argument. Beate Meyer and Nathan Stoltzfus

have both rightly pointed out that non-Jewish women who married Jews

were often from modest backgrounds: trades people and shopkeepers.

Moreover, professional musicians such as Lena and her husband, being

barred from work in Germany, were likely to have emigrated. But the film

requires a Baron's family with its weight of German historical

significance to serve as the equivalent of the Jewish family whose

responsibility it is to transmit to its children an inheritance reaching

back for thousands of years. The (half) Jewish mother Ruth who opposes

her daughter's marriage to a non-Jew is neither better nor worse than

the Baron who cast off his daughter Lena on her marriage to a Jew. Von

Trotta grasps this nettle and makes it her subject. The New York Jewish

heroine is in love with a non Jewish South American and she must decide

whether or not to marry the non-Jewish fiancé rejected by her Jewish

mother.

 

The happiness of Lena and her husband must be balanced by the mixed

marriage of Ruth's mother who was divorced by her non-Jewish husband.

Statistics seem to show that intermarriage presents a higher risk of

divorce. But 1930s Germany mixed couples where the wife was the Jewish

partner were a minority, and only a minority of the non-Jewish men

divorced their Jewish wives. Beate Meyer questions whether that divorce

would have left Ruth's mother and possibly Ruth herself liable for

deportation. Their identification with the Jewish community is not in

question; some children of mixed marriage were enrolled in Jewish

schools and Ruth's mother might have needed to take Jewish employment..

Von Trotta provides no details but individual stories suggest that the

scenario is a reasonable one, though less common within Germany than for

mixed families who were trapped as refugees in some occupied countries.

The Nazis were not punctilious when it came to applying the fine letter

of the law and Jews of mixed descent do not feature as a separate

category in statistical analysis of victims. Ruth's mother must die so

that von Trotta can make it clear that the Rosenstrasse demonstration

saved at best only a few Jews, while the majority perished.

 

Since 1994 German holocaust literature has notably portrayed the German

people themselves as the victims of Hitler.  During the visit to Berlin

the Jewish American Hannah discovers that her maternal grandfather was a

non-Jewish German not a Good German but an ordinary German who abandoned

his Jewish wife by divorcing her. She does not go off in search of him.

By divorcing his Jewish wife, Ruth's father would have qualified himself

to remain in the army and might well have died among the thousands on

the Eastern Front. Trotta excises any historical detail which might

shift the attention from the persecution of the Jews.

 

Even the persecution of intermarried couples and of Lena herself is

understated.  But it is not fair to accuse von Trotta of idealizing the

German resistance. When Lena rescued a Jewish child "just like that" she

behaved true to type; a significant number of people who helped

persecuted Jews in the Second World War had family ties to Jews or were

themselves of distant part-Jewish descent. Ruth's own rescue and

survival usefully demonstrate the extent to which Jewish survival relied

on non-Jewish contacts.

 

Von Trotta's film wavers. Many writers on race, and one might include

Gilroy and Edward Said, as well as Salman Rushdie, rightly claim that

hybridity is a reality of modern life, elevating it to the keystone of

modernity. But in relishing and asserting the value of multiple

heritage, there is an equal danger that anti-racists with von Trotta

among them might suggest that hybridity is superior to what one may

loosely call an "unmixed" descent. The supporters of mixed marriage in

this film represent the good, the motivation of those who oppose it

remains in doubt.

 

This film therefore needs to be compared with other films about mixed

marriage including _My Big Fat Greek Wedding_,[9] or from a Jewish

perspective the tragic _Solomon and Gaenor_,[10] and films opposing

Jewish mixed marriage such as _Crossing Delancey_.[11]  It has to stand

comparison with that controversial masterpiece of Holocaust film, the

Italian _Life is Beautiful_,[12] which also focuses on a mixed

Jewish/non-Jewish couple. One regrets that _Rosenstrasse_ lacks depth of

characterization and is so low-brow in its aspirations but the film was

worth making.  It is an honorable attempt to communicate to a wider

audience that, as Stoltzfus concluded in his academic study of the

Rosenstrasse Demonstration,[13] even under Nazism, intimate family

relationships proved stronger than social coercion.

 

There are not many films dealing so sympathetically with couples in a

mixed relationship, nor having the courage to take Nazi racist attitudes

out of their time frame and question their persistence in the here and

now. The lesson of the Rosenstrasse demonstration, as relayed to Hannah

in the film is that personal loyalties and relationships between

ordinary people can be stronger and confer more worth on individuals

than loyalty to a people or a family, even a family with a proud and

long history. Hannah returns from her exploration of the Holocaust to

marry Luis her fiancé.

 

Hannah also brings back from Berlin her grandmother's ring, a ring which

she says can make wishes come true. Are we to understand that the ending

itself is wishful thinking? The Jewish style wedding with which

_Rosenstrasse_ concludes would probably not be likely in Britain or

would not be easy. Hannah's tram ride does not expose her to racist

remarks about Turks, Russian Jews or other immigrants to Berlin.

Rosenstrasse ignores the nationalism and fundamentalism in modern

Europe. Those of us who are Jews in mixed families are an insignificant

number and hardly representative.  But the women who demonstrated in

Rosenstrasse were similarly few in number and representative of nothing

but themselves. If this is von Trotta's message, she may rest her case.


 

Evelyn Wilcock, Institute of Germanic Studies, London


 

Notes

 

[1].  Wolfgang Benz, 'Kitsch as Kitsch can', Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18

Sept. 2003 on website http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/artikel/167/18149.

 

[2]  Antonia Leugers, 'Die "laut erhobene Proteste" in der Rosenstraße

1943', h-German website response and providing full references for

research by Wolf Gruner and the ensuing discussion.

 

[3].  Beate Meyer, 'Geschichte im Film - Judenverfolgung, Mischehen und

der Protest in der Rosenstraße 1943', h-German website response.

 

[4].  Ruth Klüger, Weiter leben; eine Jugend, Göttingen: Wallenstein

Verlag, (1992). English language edition  (addressed to an American

rather than a German speaking audience and thus omitting some pertinent

observations) Ruth Kluger [sic], Landscapes of memory, a Holocaust

Girlhood remembered, New York: The Feminist Press (2001) London

Bloomsbury publishers, (2003)

 

[5].  Eva Hoffman. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy

of the Holocaust, London: Secker and Warburg, USA: Public Affairs (2004)

 

[6].  Lothar Schöne,  Das jüdische Begräbnis, Köln: Kiepenhauer & Witsch

(1996)

 

[7].  O'Farrell, Maggie. After you'd gone, London: Review (Hodder

Headline Publishing) (2000)

 

[8].  Iris Noah, 'What do they tell about us -Was sagen die über uns?'

Teil 5:' Im Kino- Rosenstrasse' [Web Page]. Available at:

http://hagalil.org/s1/judentum-net/what-do-they-tell/rosenstrasse.htm.

 

[9].  My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Nia Vardalos, script, Joel Zwick,

director (2002)

 

[10].  Solomon and Gaenor, S4C and Filmfour Arts Council of England and

Arts Council of Wales, Sheryl Crown producer; Paul Morrison, director

(1998)

 

[11].  Crossing Delancey, Dan Leigh, producer; Michael Nozik, director

(1988)

 

[12].  La Vita è Bella, Roberto Benigni, director (1997). Script

published in Roberto Benigni and Vincenzo Cerami, La Vita è Bella,

Turin:Giulio Einaudi editore (1998) and in German as Das Leben ist

Schön, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp (1998)

 

[13].  Nathan  Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the

Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany. London and New York: W.W. Norton &

Co (1996)

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