What connects these three authors is the fact that Nazism played an important role in their lives and careers or at least was an important topic in their films



At first glance the four important films by three German authors from this program do not appear to have much in common. Their film expression and stylistic characteristics are far removed from one another. Moreover they were made in completely different historical and social circumstances as well as in different states - in the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany (before the unification). Today’s audience has not yet had a chance to see these films. The names of their authors are probably unfamiliar even though in the 1950s Helmut Käutner (1908 - 1980) was a popular German director even in this part of the world. His most popular films in our region were The Last Bridge (1954, in co-production with Yugoslavia), The Captain from Köpenick (1956) and The Rest Is Silence (1959), even though they were not as good as his previous works. In addition, Käutner was too young to be regarded as one of the classics of German film and too old to fit into that most important phase of German cinema in the second half of the twentieth century, New German Film, had a strong influence all over the world from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Helma Sanders-Brahms (1940) was an important director who belonged to the New German Film movement and one of the few authors who started her work in that period and continued to produce good films and win prestigious international awards even after it died down. However, her films and success have not reached us. Konrad Wolf (1925 - 1982), one of the most prominent East German filmmakers, never attracted much attention, even when he received the special jury award in Cannes for Stars. The German Democratic Republic lagged behind most leading cinemas of the socialist block and its films rarely reached our theaters even during the time when eastern films were part of our regular program.


However, what connects these three authors is the fact that Nazism played an important role in their lives and careers -- or at least was an important topic in their films. Käutner began his career as an actor and writer first in cabaret and later in theatre. After Hitler came to power and his stern ideological control destroyed the German cabaret scene, unlike his many colleagues and friends Käutner did not leave the country but rather began working on films as a screenwriter and later as a director. Nevertheless he did not choose to join one of the dominant movements in the Third Reich’s cinema - the glorification of Nazi ideals or escapist entertainment. Therefore his films were often banned, which was the case with his best films Romance in a Minor Key and Great Freedom No. 7. In these films, with elements of French poetic realism, the director turns complicated love relationships into first-class melodramas. Unfortunately, they were rejected by the government for their lack of optimism and failure to show the bravery of German men.


After the Nazis came to power, Konrad Wolf, who was at that time still a young Jewish boy, moved to the USSR with his family. When he was seventeen years old he joined the Red Army and took part in the Berlin siege. In 1949 he returned to Russia to enroll the VGIK Academy in Moscow where he got acquainted with classical Russian cinema. He became close friends with his colleague Angelo Wagenstein from Bulgaria who was the screenwriter of Wolf’s film Stars and a few others. His film Stars a drama about a German soldier who tries to save a young Greek Jewish girl. Even though he was exposed to communist indoctrination from an early age, Wolf gradually developed a critical viewpoint towards the existing socialist society and especially its relationship to culture and the arts. He soon became one of the most East Germany’s well known filmmakers, due to his sophisticated approach to a topic that in his country was usually portrayed in a simplified, rather black and white manner.


Even though Helma Sanders-Brahms was just a baby when WW II ended, Nazism had a huge influence on the characters in her film Germany Pale Mother. It is a dramatic chronicle of a family, beginning when the husband goes off to war, showing the war-horrors that the wife and the daughter experience, ending with his return from captivity and the early post-war years in which his traumatic experiences prevent him from leading a normal life with his family. Sanders-Brahms is successful in portraying the influence of Nazism and war on the destinies of ordinary people, especially focusing on mothers and daughters, and in doing so introduces a novelty to the cinema of that time - an element of feminism.


This program is interesting not only because it presents valuable films but also because it shows the relationship between film and Nazism, thus pointing to how the authors managed to find different ways to avoid ideological coercion and to put humanity before ideological intolerance. (Tomislav Kurelec)