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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
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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)