The Kaiser's Lackey

The Kaiser's Lackey (Der Untertan) is a 1951 DEFA film of Wolfgang Staudte's. It is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann (Thomas' brother, who also wrote The Blue Angel). In some ways, the story resembles a satiric version of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, if the family novel had been reduced to the story of one of the sons. Diederlich Hessling (played beautifully by Werner Peters) is the only son of a paper manufacturer in the late nineteenth century. The story follows Hessling through his youth, his time in college, his brief sojourn in the military (he's let go after a few weeks for his flat feet). Eventually, after Hessling goes back home and takes up the reins of the factory, he turns in a fellow townsman for insulting the Kaiser. When Hessling denounces the man during the court case, he suddenly becomes popular with his fellow citizens. The height of Hessling's life (the end of the movie, though not the book) is his convincing of the town council to erect a statue of the Kaiser on horseback. The unveiling ceremony is hit by a tornado, but by God, the statue survives!
I think that the humor lampooning the bourgeoisie is broader than it may have been otherwise given the year, and the Communist hold on East Berlin. It is still funny.

Rotation

Wolfgang Staudte's next film was Rotation. It was extremely popular in Germany- many filmgoers felt that it mirrored their experiences under the Nazi regime. It, too, has expressionistic design elements. Staudte uses two flashbacks to show the action (it's not confusing, amazingly). It's the story of a family, the Behnkes, living through the inflation and unemployment of the 1920s, the rise of Nazism and World War II in Berlin. Like Rossellini, Staudte's theme is fathers and sons, though Staudte's take is much more hopeful. And his attention to detail is remarkable. In one scene in a streetcar tunnel, not only are there average Joes hiding from the bombing, but a mini-infirmary with patients, two women with their dogs (a poodle and a Great Dane) and a woman with a baby. When the tunnel starts to flood (the army has insisted on blowing up the bridge overhead), you know that those that the camera has dwelled on, aren't going to make it out. The Behnkes' son Helmut, thoroughly indoctrinated in Hitler Youth by his father, turns in both his mother's brother and his father in to the Gestapo. The uncle is murdered in Oranienburg; the father languishes in Moabit prison, and is released in the nick of time by Soviet soldiers. After the surrender, Helmut visits his father (his mother has died in the bombing) and receives his forgiveness. The end of the film is exactly like the beginning of the flashback, but it's Helmut and his girlfriend Inge meeting at the railway siding, just as his parents did 20 years earlier.
I particularly liked Staudte's music choices. The courting couple listens to "Valencia" on their Victrola, and at the wedding reception, the bride's Communist brother serenades the couple with both "What Keeps a Man Alive?" and "Who Knows How to Make Love Stay" from the then-new "Threepenny Opera."

Murderers Are Among Us

I have been doing research for a new play, which sort of about Berlin in 1945, and sort of not. Murderers Are Among Us (I will not attempt the German on Blogger) is the first of what are called the "rubble film"- films made right after World War II that try to deal with it in some way. Murderers Are Among Us is the very first German film made after the surrender. It stars Hildegarde Knef (before she changed her name to Nef) as a concentration camp survivor who returns home to Berlin. Living in her apartment is Ernst Wilhelm Borchert (a wonderful actor I'd never seen before).
The film is directed by Wolfgang Staudte, who worked with director Erwin Piscator in the 1920s. It was produced by DEFA, the Soviet-backed German film company. The Soviet Zone leapt right into film production, while the British and American Zones did not. They were more thorough about the process of de-nazification than the Soviets were. The sets get very expressionistic at some points, reflecting the interior life of the characters, nothing whatsoever like Nazi-era films. The basic plot is Borchert's character, Dr. Hans Mertens, is haunted by his experiences in the Wehrmacht; in particular, his permitting the slaughter of Polish civilians as ordered by his superior officer, Ferdinand Brueckner (Arno Paulsen, who I swear was in Brecht's plays in the 1920s, though I haven't been able to verify that). Mertens had assumed that Brueckner was dead, but it turns out he's very much alive, with a thriving business that recycles soldiers' helmets into cooking pots. Mertens is drawn to kill Brueckner in revenge. At the end of the movie, Knef (now his girlfriend) stops Borchert from killing Paulsen. It is a very raw film. The ruins of Berlin look real because they are- it was shot in 1946.
And then, thanks to IMDB and a book I'd read on rubble film, it got even more interesting. Knef was a rising starlet at UFA under the Nazis (she was 20 when the war ended), and was sleeping with one of the film executives. Perhaps not an ideal de-nazified first choice for a star. And while this was Borchert's first film role, he was an accomplished and popular stage actor during the 1930s and 40s. This I assume was possible because he was a Nazi Party member. Staudte himself appeared in "Jud Suess" the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made.
Just before I watched this, I saw "Germany Year One" by Roberto Rossellini, which was about similar themes (struggling family trying to make it through deprivation). It is a strange movie, made stranger by the fact that there are all these very Aryan-looking actors speaking Italian. It does not end with uplift, as Staudte's movie does. The younger son has murdered his father in response to a "survival of the fittest" type lecture from his old Nazi school teacher. At the end of this film, the boy is unable to deal with his guilt, and throw himself off of a mostly destroyed building, commiting suicide just as the rest of the family is leaving for the father's funeral.