Dialog International

From an American Classroom to the German Screen

One of the hits of this year's Sundance Film Festival was Dennis Gansel's movie Die Welle (The Wave).  Angelika Nguyen has a positive review on Ost:Blog and explains the origin of the film:

"Seit über 20 Jahren ist “Die Welle”, der Kurzroman um ein reales Faschismusexperiment an einer USA-Highschool, ein Klassiker, der auch bei uns an Schulen gelesen wird.
Regisseur Dennis Gansel nahm sich den modellhaften Stoff vor und griff, statt den Roman zu verfilmen, zu den Originalprotokollen. Außerdem verlegte er die Ereignisse von den USA 1967 ins heutige Deutschland."

The "Fascism Experiment" she refers to was a project by a young social studies teacher Ron Jones at the Cubberly High School in Palo Alto.

"What came to be known as the "Third Wave" began at       Cubberly High School in Palo Alto as a game without any direct reference       to Nazi Germany, says Ron Jones, who had just begun his first teaching job       in the 1966-67 academic year.  When a social studies student asked       about the German public's responsibility for the rise of the Third Reich,       Jones decided to try and simulate what happened in Germany by having his       students "basically follow instructions" for a day.

      

But one day turned into five, and what happened by the end of the       school week spawned several documentaries, studies and related social       experiments illuminating a dark side of human nature - and a major       weakness in public education."

What began as a class lesson on Strength through Discipline rapidly grew into a movement that engulfed the whole school, with a salute (the wave) and secret police.  Dissenters were ostracized and even beaten up. The students came to believe that they were part of a national movement of select youth that would rise up and create a new community based on order, national pride and action.

Ron Jones soon realized his "experiment" had gotten out of hand and he called a school assembly to put an end to it:

"There is no Third Wave movement, no leader," he told the       stunned audience.  "You and I are no better or worse than the       citizens of the Third Reich.  We would have worked in the defense       plants.  We will watch our neighbors be taken away, and do       nothing," Jones said, referring to the three skeptics exiled to the       library for the crime of disbelief.  "We're just like those       Germans.  We would give our freedom up for the chance of being       special."

After watching Die Welle Angelika Nguyen is moved to ask:

"Stell dir vor, es ist Faschismus: wie würdest du dich selbst verhalten? Welche Rolle würdest du einnehmen? Wärst du Mitläufer wie Dennis oder Fanatiker wie Tim oder würdest du Widerstand leisten wie Karo oder würde dir die Erkenntnis erst allmählich dämmern wie Marco? Oder hättest du das Zeug zu einer Leitfigur wie Lehrer Wenger?
Dem Film gelingt es, unter konkret zeitlichen Umständen universelle Fragen zu stellen. Das befreit sich vom Provinziellen, das deutsche Filmstoffe manchmal an sich haben und macht sich in aller Welt verständlich." (Just imagine that it is fascism: how would you act?  Which role would you take on? Would you be a fellow traveler like Dennis or a fanatic like Tim; or would you be part of the resistance like Karo, or would the truth only slowly sink in like with Marco?  Or do you have the right stuff to be a leader like the teacher Wenger? The film is successful in posing universal questions in the context of a real situation. So the film is able to move beyond the provincialism of so much German cinema and assert itself in the world.)

I have not had the chance to see Die Welle yet, but I did see Gansel's excellent film NaPolA ( American movie title Before the Fall) which dealt with similar themes.

Ken Burns' Mega-Documentary The War Comes to German Television

I have to confess that like most Americans I am a sucker for Ken Burns' films. The soothing voice of the omniscient narrator, the zooming and panning across still photographs with the plaintive piano or violin as the background music - the frank sentimentality of the narrative - lulls me into a sense of shared national heritage. It is a pleasant place to be, even though historians find the absence of context and analysis appalling.  For a nation that suffers from historical amnesia, the non-historian Ken Burns is the closest thing we have to a national historian.

What is good about a Burns film is that he goes to original sources and shows history "from the bottom up".  This was particularly effective in his Civil War documentary, as the narrator read from (remarkably eloquent) letters from soldiers and their families.  What was also admirable about that documentary was the acknowledgment of shared sacrifice on both sides of the conflict: at no point did Burns vilify the Confederacy.

Unfortunately this balance is totally missing from The War, which is a frank celebration of the American triumph of good over evil in the Good War. There is zero analysis of the origin of World War II or how America got into it. Rather, war is presented as something that is an immutable aspect of human behavior.  This from the very first episode: the narrator tells us"The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power".  The first episode is titled "The Necessary War", so everything that comes afterward is legitimized.  The firebombing of German cities, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - these aspects of the Good War are not questioned: the destructive brutality (and the film does not shirk from showing this, at least) is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of "The Necessary War". 

Still, The War contains some compelling film footage.  I also thought the focus on the war experience from the perspective of four medium-sized American cities - both on the battlefield and the home front - was effective. Ken Burns also does an excellent job on in conveying the terrible price of war, the pervasiveness of death.  This war was fought before PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) was a known affliction, but it is clear from the letters from the front and the eyewitness accounts of the living survivors that it affected many of the soldiers.

The War will be broadcast on the German TV network ARTE starting this Wednesday for seven consecutive weeks.

I found only one review so far in the German press: Silke Lührman  writes about the  Burns' documentary  in the völkisch weekly Junge Freiheit.  Lührman's tone in her review is predictably sarcastic, but she does have one great line at the end of the piece:

"Geschichte, wie sie Sieger schreiben? Mag sein, aber sicher auch Balsam auf der wunden Seele einer angeschlagenen Supermacht, die demnächst in das sechste Jahr eines unnötigen Krieges geht."(History from the pespective of the victor?  Perhaps, but it (The War) is also a balm for the wounded soul of a beleaguered superpower, which shortly will be entering the sixth year of an unnecessary war.)

You can read my translation of the entire review over at Watching America.

Sexy European Union

Are European films sexier than American ones?  Most definitely yes!  And the dreary bureaucrats in Brussels have created an ad for YouTube to broadcast this cinematic fact to the world.

(Note: Look for the snippet from the German classic Goodbye Lenin!)

And The Best Film of 2006 Is...

The nominations for the Oscars were released this morning. I was pleased to see that my choice for the best film - Letters from Iwo Jima - received nominations for Best Motion Picture, Best Director (Clint Eastwood) and Best Original Screenplay.  Letters from Iwo Jima  shows the battle for Iwo Jima from the perspective of the losing side.  The film is in Japanese, which is why it is somewhat unsual to receive the Best Picture nomination.  The screenplay is gripping - showing the lead up to the American invasion and then the battle itself from the perspective of a simple (and reluctant) Japanese soldier (the character Saigo) and his interaction with General Kuribayashi (played by Ken Watanabe, who deserved an nomination for Best Actor).

Is Letters from Iwo Jima an anti-war film?  Certainly not in the way Platoon was, but any film that depicts the realities of combat as Letters does is inherently anti-war. Letters from Iwo Jima shows the whole gamut of human warfare: heroism, cowardice, absurdity, honor, valor, brutal cruelty and compassion.

Breife aus Iwo Jima opens in German theaters on February 22.

Das Leben der Anderen (Lives of Others) was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film of 2006.

Limits to Free Speech in Germany

Here is another unintended consequence of Germany's well-intentioned effort to ban hate speech:

A human rights group campaigning for gypsies has filed a complaint against British comic Sacha Baron Cohen over his "Borat" film featuring a spoof Kazakh journalist who calls himself a former "gypsy catcher," German prosecutors said.

The state prosecutor's office in the northern city of Hamburg said the European Center for Antiziganism Research had brought the complaint accusing Cohen of slander, inciting violence against the Sinti and Roma gypsy groups and violating Germany's anti-discrimination law.

I haven't seen the film, but Sacha Baron Cohen is a hilarious comedian who doesn't shy away from insulting anyone and everyone. This complaint was filed in accordance with laws in Germany meant to suppress right-wing extremist speech.

Germany has strict rules governing speech that could been seen as defaming minorities, particularly groups such as Sinti and Roma that were targeted for genocide by the Nazis.

You can read an interview in the Tageszeitung with the plaintiff here.

These restrictions on free speech are unnecessary.  The fact that they are now invoked to block distribution of a movie is particularly unfortunate.

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center

  I have always enjoyed the Oliver Stone's movies - especially Platoon, the best feature film about the Vietnam War.  Stone's edgy paranoia often surprises and delights.  So I was expecting some surprises in World Trade Center.  I am sorry to report that the film follows a typical Hollywood formula: Stone has transformed a world-altering event into a family melodrama that alternates between crowd-pleasing scenes of individual heroism and sentimental kitsch. Anyone looking for a probing analysis of the broader geopolitical context will be very disappointed.

Don't get me wrong: WTC is extremely well-done kitsch and will no doubt be a box office hit.  For any American who lived through those dark days in 9/2001 watching the film will be a gut-wrenching experience.  Because we all have an emotional connection to the attack.  For five years in the early 1990's I walked through the lobby of the WTC every morning on the way to my office at 222 Broadway. There I was nearly shaken off my desk during the first bomb explosion in 1993, and I have friends who barely escaped with their lives on 9/11.  Stone's set is meticulous: he recreates perfectly the concourse level of the Towers, etched into my memory. So the film works at that visceral level.  We identify with the working class central characters and their normal families.  We all share in the collective memory of that day and its unimaginable horror.

But ultimately the film fails because it simply permits us to replay our emotions of that day without connecting that day with the nightmare that followed, and from which we are still trying to awaken.

There is just one scene, where Stone takes us on a brief tour of the world just after the planes hit towers. The crowds are gathered around video monitors in Paris, in Tokyo, in Cairo and the faces of the people are twisted with horror and grief at what they are seeing.  That was the moment when we in America had the whole world behind us and which we have now lost. Stone takes us out in the world for just a moment, but then brings us back into a small circle that grows smaller as the film progresses, so that it concludes as a bürgerliches Trauerspiel (with a happy ending) between the main character (played by a low-key Nicolas Cage) and his wife (played by Maria Bello).

I watched the premier of World Trade Center out in the hinterlands, but Spiegel reporter Sebastian Heinzel was in Manhattan - close to Ground Zero - to see it.  Read his impressions here.

Stasi Film Gets Front-Page Coverage

This spring has seen an incredible amount of media hype for The Da Vinci Code, which I guess is raking in $$millions even though the critics have been less than enthusiastic.  German cinema rarely gets any notice in the US press, which is why it is an event worth noting when the Boston Globe has a front-page story about Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). The article discusses how the film has started a new discussion about the darker side of the DDR:

The film ``Das Leben der Anderen" -- ``The Lives of Others" -- has triggered what some call the first debate in the reunified nation about the realities of the communist regime, a Soviet satellite state that came into being in 1949 and collapsed with the Berlin Wall four decades later.

``In trying to rebuild a unified country, Germans have to some extent put the topic off-limits," said Jochen Staadt, a researcher at Berlin's Free University who is a specialist on the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, the formal name of East Germany. . ``Criticism of the GDR has been muted because many East Germans have felt that it was criticism of their lives."

Indeed, a recent poll found that 56 percent of Germans surveyed felt it was inappropriate to discuss wrongdoing of the fallen communist system.

But the drama directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a dark tale of love broken by the manipulations of the state security apparatus, has made the Stasi the talk of Germany and beyond. The movie this month won seven top awards from the German Film Academy and is quickly moving into theaters across Europe.

``German cinema has tended to portray the GDR as this funny place with quirky characters that no one takes seriously," Henckel von Donnersmarck told Der Spiegel magazine. ``This is really very different [from the true] atmosphere of great fear, of great mistrust."

The unsettling film comes just as former officers of the Stasi are mounting a controversial campaign to revise their image. With articles and books, rallies and swaggering takeovers of public meetings, the former officers seem determined to paint themselves as upholders of a firm but fair system that provided stable jobs, safe streets, and state-run day-care centers.

The film has not been shown in the US, so I haven't seen it (I'm still waiting for Sophie Scholl to be available on Netflix). If any readers have seen it and care to share their impressions, please leave a comment.

Not sure where I come down on the moral issues at play here.  It is easy for us who never lived in a totalitarian system based on fear and violence to condemn those who made their lives a bit easier by collaborating with the Stasi (as IM - Informelle Mitarbeiter).  On the other hand I understand the permanent rage of the victims who will never forgive those who persecuted them and their families. In any event, I am anxious to see Das Leben der Anderen.

I can recommend a couple of novels that deal with the topic.  Alexander Osang's Die Nachrichten is a fascinating portrait of an Ossi who has made it big as a television news reader in Hamburg. He is thrown into an existential (and career-threatening) crisis when he is accused of being an IM.  He then begins a search for his own past in what used to be East Berlin. Osang, who is from East Berlin but is now the US correspondent for Der Spiegel, is an excellent writer and a keen observer of the human comedy (and also happens to be a nice guy).  Another novel - lesser known but quite good - is Novembermärchen. Keine bleibende Stadt by Otto Emersleben, an east German writer who, by a twist of fate, now lives just a few miles from me (he showed me the file the Stasi maintained about him). The novel deals with the momentous events leading up to Die Wende, as seen through the eyes of a woman activist whose husband is an IM (and who writes reports for the Stasi about his own wife).  Novembermaerchen is one of the few novels I know of that deals with Die Wende - the collapse of the DDR. If there are others, please recommend.

Das Leben der Anderen stasi DDR

Sophie Scholl Finally Opens in US

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (original Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tagen) opens today in New York for American audiences (unfortunately, I am on the other side of the country for a few days). The film was one of five movies nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Foreign Language Film. This is the year of political films, like Munich, Syriana, and Good Night and Good Luck, so hopefully it has a chance to win.  Stephen Holden reviews Sophie Scholl for the New York Times, and points out the relevance for the American audience today:

"Sophie Scholl: The Final Days" conveys what it must have been like to be a young, smart, idealistic dissenter in Nazi Germany, where no dissent was tolerated. This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances. Would you risk your life the way Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and a tiny group of fellow students at Munich University did to spread antigovernment leaflets? How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it? In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here?

Along these same lines - for readers of German - Hella Streicher's highly personal review/essay is a must-read.

resistance Widerstand Oscars

Spielberg's Munich

While in Chicago recently I had the opportunity to see Spielberg's latest film - Munich.  While I don't think it was the best film of 2005 - that honor belongs to Gegen die Wand/Head on - Munich is still a very powerful film and should be seen. The film has come under attack by neo-conservatives in the US for not being sufficiently pro-Israel (that is, not being anti-Palestinian).  Michelle Goldberg of Salon.com does a good job of exposing the stupidity of the neo-con critics. Her piece was picked up by Spiegel-Online.

The latest right-wing attack on Spielberg and Munich was launched last week by the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post: Munich, The Travesty.  Krauthammer is widely admired in the American press for his nuanced and "sensitive" defense of torture.  But while Krauthammer finds shades of gray in making his case for torture, his attack on Spielberg's film is black and white, echoing the US policy of pre-emption: either you're for us or against us.

The only true part of the story is the few minutes spent on the massacre. The rest is invention, as Spielberg delicately puts it in the opening credits, "inspired by real events."

But the events at the Munich Olympics run through the entire film - in snippets - and haunt the dreams of the central character, the Mossad assassin Avnar.  It is the horror of the massacre of the Israeli athletes that provides the backdrop for entire story.

Krauthammer then goes off on a diatribe where he accuses Spielberg of 'humanizing' the Arab targets of Mossad while depicting the Israeli's as crazed avengers:

The Palestinians who plan the massacre and are hunted down by Israel are given -- with the concision of the gifted cinematic craftsman -- texture, humanity, depth, history. The first Palestinian we meet is the erudite translator of poetry giving a public reading, then acting kindly toward an Italian shopkeeper -- before he is shot in cold blood by Jews.

Then there is the elderly PLO member who dotes on his 7-year-old daughter before being blown to bits. Not one of these plotters is ever shown plotting Munich, or any other atrocity for that matter. They are shown in the full flower of their humanity, savagely extinguished by Jews.

But the most shocking Israeli brutality involves the Dutch prostitute -- apolitical, beautiful, pathetic -- shot to death, naked, of course, by the now half-crazed Israelis settlingprivate business. The Israeli way, I suppose.

This is simply not true.  The PLO members (or sympathizers - it is never entirely clear) remain for the most part ciphers, while we learn quite a bit about the Mossad assassins and their sympathizers. The Isaraelis are three dimensional characters, with real fears, desires and complex motivations. But for Krauthammer, ascribing any human characteristics to the Palastinians is a travesty.  They are sub-human terrorists who must be hunted down and killed like animals. Here Krauthammer is consistent with his widely-admired torture essay where he complains that the "terrorists" at the Guantanamo Bay gulag are treated too humanely. 

Spielberg is asking a question in Munich and the same question is floating about in the minds of his characters in the film: where does the cycle of violence lead?  The answer is contained in the final frame of the film, as the camera pans to a view of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan.  My own criticism of Spielberg is that he wants to have it both ways: yes, violence begets viloence, but isn't it cool to watch these Israeli action heroes?  His entire cinematic genius is used to portray violence incredibly effectively: that is what keeps our eyes riveted on the screen.

Spielberg Movies Film neoconservatism