Genres and Film Topics in Germany

The Third Reich, the Red Army Faction, the GRD and the Re-Unification of Germany – contemporary historical themes furnish material for sometimes spectacular films. Yet the viewer should not invariably expect more background on motives and the actual issues.

When the Hollywood director Bryan Singer re-filmed the story of the failed assassination attempt against Hitler of July 20, 1944, feature page journalists and historians of the German Federal Republic looked upon the enterprise with extreme scepticism. Would a director who had made his name with action films be able to treat adequately the story of the military resistance in the Third Reich? Could a leading man like the avowed scientologist Tom Cruise harm the memory of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg? Should Bendler Block, the most important memorial site of the 20th of July, be used for shooting a film? All these questions were discussed.

When the film was released, journalists began making lists of its historical errors. The daily newspaper Die Welt opined that the story was “invented, and badly invented”. The news magazine Der Spiegel saw in Cruise “all in all a believable Stauffenberg”, but also a smooth film hero “without a dark side and a past”. The film, it maintained, was naive because it was Hollywood catching up on the historical reception of the German resistance after 1945. But the use of public funds to subsidise the film, so declared the magazine, had certainly paid off “if a few million historically less informed Germans, Americans and Europeans learned from it that there had been a serious military opposition to Hitler”.

Valkyrie, countered the historian Christine Hikel in her essay “To Whom Does the 20th of July, 1944 Belong”, published at the Internet portal zeitgeschichte-online, is “a feature film, not a historical documentary”. After some longeurs, Singer “succeeded in making an exciting and sophisticated film based on the historical facts”, though he does not attempt to provide background to the latter. She admitted that “the picture of the resistance, the participants, the motives and the goals is not presented with sufficient discrimination”. Yet to demand “that the film should present the results of historical research in all its details” would be to ask too much of the medium.

What can a feature film do?

What can a feature film about historical events actually do? At least, it can draw historical figures with sufficient accuracy and nuance that in this way contexts, processes and actions become clearer and more intelligible. That cannot work with flawless heroes, but only with human beings whose strengths and weaknesses we can understand. This approach succeeds, for instance, in Sophie Scholl – the Final Days(2004).

It was not the first time that film has treated the story of the Munich student and founder of the resistance group “The White Rose”. New was that director Marc Rothemund and scriptwriter Fred Breinersdorfer told the story totally from Sophie Scholl’s own perspective. This was made possible by access to hitherto unknown protocols of Scholl’s interrogation by the Gestapo, which were stored in the East German Ministry for State Security. From this emerged a film that made more visible a person, her posture and the circumstances in which she developed than had been possible before, in whatever form. The result was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize and nominated for the European Film Prize and an Oscar.

The more complex the circumstances, the more it helps the public to have a character through whose eyes it can follow the narrated events. The attempt of director Uli Edel and scriptwriter Bernd Eichinger to film the Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008) was therefore doomed to failure.

The film is a tour de force through the history of the German terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF). One event chases the next, without cause and effect ever becoming clear; main characters emerge and vanish again without being identified. The person of Gudrun Ensslin becomes visible, but that of Ulrike Meinhof remains vague, while that of Andreas Baader becomes bogged down in blatant gestures.

More informative, on the other hand, were films on the same subject that confined themselves to individual aspects and facets, such as Margarete von Trotta’s German Sisters (1981), whose storyline concentrates on the Ensslin sisters, or Andreas Veiel’s Black Box BRD (2000), which focuses on both the culprit (the terrorist Wolfgang Grams) and the victim (Alfred Herrhausen). Several directors have attempted to treat the subject of the RAF, and attempts still continue, as the 2009 Munich Film Festival showed, where four new films on the theme were presented: Dutschke, The Lawyers, The Day Will Come and Shadow World.

Films about the RAF have been given very different receptions by critics and the public, but they have never been met with indifference. Reinhard Hauff’s Stammheim (1986) was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale under protest of the jury chairwoman, Gina Lollobrigida. The film could be shown at the festival only with police protection.

In 2000 Volker Schlöndorff turned to the subject of the RAF in his Legend of Rita. The film, which portrays the everyday life of an ex-terrorist in exile in the GDR, succeeds in giving a sensitive picture of several prickly themes of the time. It follows the adaptation of a radical to the quiet, bourgeois life under “real socialism” and shows both the dissatisfaction and the naive expectations with which people in the ex-terrorist’s surroundings experienced the re-unification of Germany. It is a film that provides authenticity in each of its facets because, in the collaboration between the director from the West and the scriptwriter from the East, two views and evaluations converge.

A nuanced view is no obstacle to commercial success

In the meantime, films have carried images of the events of November ’89 and of the situation in the GDR far beyond the borders of Germany. This has been done especially by Wolfgang Becker’s prize-winning classic comic Wende film Good Bye Lenin! (2003) and by the Stasi drama The Lives of Others (2006), for which director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was awarded an Oscar in 2007.

Both prove that nothing stands in the way of commercial success for such nuanced and sensitively told stories. In the first months after its start up to April 2009, Good Bye Lenin! has had 6.5 million viewers and The Lives of Others 2.4 million. “Perhaps the GDR will now come more than ever in the cinema”, wrote Thomas Brussig, author of the script for the comedy Sun Avenue and who grew up in the East Germany, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. But, he warned, that will now be both easier and more difficult: “Easier because we can now imagine voluntarily viewing a realistic film about the GDR, and more difficult because The Lives of Others set standards that will be hard to live up to”.