Thomas Brasch: Angels of Iron

Filmed in expressive black-and-white images, Thomas Brasch’s gripping directorial debut about a criminal gang operating between East and West during the Berlin Airlift, shows the city between World War II and the Cold War, but from a perspective informed by the spirit of disillusion and resistance that emerged in the 1960s on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Berlin, summer of 1948. Three years after the end of World War II, the city remains divided into four sectors. The Soviet Union has cut off land access to the French, British, and US sectors. The air is filled with the constant noise of American planes, the so-called "raisin bombers," bringing supplies into the city. Taking advantage of the situation, young Werner Gladow and his gang carry out armed robberies, escaping from West to East and vice versa, knowing that the respective police forces cannot follow them beyond sector lines. They receive tips on where to strike from former state executioner Gustav Völpel, in exchange for a percentage of their loot. Inspired by Al Capone, their lives are thrilling, but as people get killed, the police become determined to put an end to their crimes.

Thomas Brasch, who was expelled from the East German film academy in 1968 for political activities after just one year, made Angel of Iron four years after emigrating to the West in 1976. The film immediately earned him a place in the First Feature Competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981. However, what attracted more attention in Germany was Brasch being awarded and accepting the Bavarian Film Prize, presented to him by the arch-conservative Bavarian minister-president Franz Josef Strauss. For some, it was seen as a sellout; for others, hypocrisy; and yet others were scandalised because Brasch, West Germany’s favourite East German dissident, thanked the East German Film School for training him.

In his acceptance speech, Brasch attacked a society in which the arts were forced but also best suited to bear and reveal its contradictions. Accepting the prize was his way of bearing these contradictions, while his film depicted resistance to the system, not deliberately but intuitively, through criminal acts. Brasch used real historical figures—Werner Gladow, his girlfriend Lisa Gabler, and Gustav Völpel—to illustrate different forms of resistance: “Firstly, the kind that Gladow pursues, who has this organisational obsession with forming and organising a group and making things plannable. Secondly, the very individualised idea of happiness that Völpel has: crime as a means of achieving a happy life on some islands or somewhere else. Thirdly, the criminality or anarchism of the woman, for me the most far-reaching or interesting.” (translated from an interview with Thomas Brasch, published in the literary journal Exit 2, 1982)

West Germany 1981, b/w, 105 mins. With English subtitles.
Written and directed by Thomas Brasch. With Hilmar Thate, Katharina Thalbach, Ulrich Wesselmann, Karin Baal, Ilse Pagé, Klaus Pohl, Hanns Zischler, Kurt Raab.