Konrad Wolf: Stars

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1959, Stars — the first German film to directly confront the persecution of Jews — finds poetic imagery to explore inaction and complicity, hope and resistance through the fragile love between a German corporal and an imprisoned Jewish woman in Bulgaria in 1943.

October 1943. After a harsh period on the WW2’s Eastern front, German corporal Walter is now stationed in a quiet Bulgarian town. His new assignment—supervising local mechanics at a garage—is a welcome reprieve, one he approaches with little zeal, preferring to spend his time sketching. Walter’s routine is disturbed when a group of Sephardic Jews from Greece is temporarily housed in the town, awaiting deportation to Auschwitz. Among them is Ruth, a young woman whose defiant spirit unsettles him. When she pleads for help for a sick, pregnant woman and Walter dismisses her, Ruth accuses him of callousness and indifference. Stung, Walter helps after all. As he falls in love with Ruth and becomes fully aware of the fate awaiting the Jewish prisoners, Walter decides to save her.

The script for Stars was written by Bulgarian author and screenwriter Angel Wagenstein (1922–2023), whom Wolf had met in Moscow and who later also scripted Goya. A Sephardic Jew and former Bulgarian antifascist partisan, Wagenstein drew on his own experiences—the partisan boy Blashe in the film is based on him. 

Film historian Thomas Elsaesser notes that the iconography of Stars—trains, barbed wire, and faces, especially Ruth looking out from the train—was influenced by Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), which had deeply impressed Wolf. Stylistically, Wolf added long tracking shots, unusual angles, repeated facial close-ups, bird’s-eye views, as well as image superimpositions to heighten the poetic tone of Ruth and Walter’s shared scenes. Narratively, Stars resembles Lissy in charting a protagonist’s shift from passivity to action—though Walter acts for love, while Lissy grows estranged from hers.

After Wolf’s previous film Sun Seekers was banned, Stars was a success for Wolf and his team. It competed at Cannes in 1959 and won the Special Jury Prize, though its inclusion in the festival had not been without complications: the East German–Bulgarian co-production was entered as Bulgarian because West Germany, invoking the Hallstein Doctrine, protested East German participation. Ironically, Bulgaria had initially banned the film. According to Wagenstein it was criticised for its “abstract humanism,” lack of fighting spirit, and even for failing to show class divisions among the Jews. Elsaesser adds that its depiction of Bulgarians as Nazi collaborators delivering Jews to the Germans remained sensitive in the late 1950s. In West Germany, Stars was released in 1960, but without its final scene suggesting an anti-fascist and ultimately communist trajectory for Walter.

GDR/Bulgaria, 1959, 88 min, b&w, German with English subtitles
Directed by Konrad Wolf, script: Angel Wagenstein, dramaturgy: Willi Brückner, editor: Christa Wernicke, camera: Werner Bergmann, set design: Jose Sancha, costume design: Albert Seidner, music (score): Simeon Pironkow.
With Elena Chranowa, Hans Fiebrandt, Jürgen Frohriep, Hannjo Hasse, Erik S. Klein, Ivan Kondow, Sascha Kruscharska, Georgi Naumow, Stefan Pejtschew, Naitscho Petrow, Milka Tujkowa.