I attended the opening night last night of this year’s Berlin and Beyond film festival,
sponsored by the Goethe Institute of San Francisco and by Lufthansa. The film chosen for the opening was Georg
Maas’s Zwei Leben (Two Lives).
The film is not light entertainment. It is exceedingly dark, right down to the
shooting technique of placing characters in a claustrophobic setting and
lighting little more than their faces, leaving most of the screen pitch black. If you have the patience, however, the film
will reward you in the end.
There is a good review of the film by Boyd van Hoeij available
on The Hollywood Reporter, giving film details and explaining what
the viewer is up against going in.
Because filmmaker Maas chose to make the kind of film that doesn’t
insult an audience with too much explanation and simplification, and doesn’t
tell a story chronologically, the audience has to work hard to figure out
what’s going on. That approach probably
appeals to the sort of people who enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles. For many, though, it’s a stretch.
There are other layers of difficulty. The film addresses a historical wrong it
clearly wants to put right. That will
lose the folks who will feel they are watching a message movie. It’s a fictional account of a child born to
a Norwegian woman and her lover, a German soldier of the occupation in
1941. It was originally based on a
considerably reworked unpublished book by Hannelore Hippe. Full
comprehension of the plot depends on a knowledge of the Cold War and the
conflict between two divided and antagonistic Germanys, and events that took
place at a time when twenty-five-year olds today were not yet even born. Given
the surprising number even of young Germans who cannot tell you who was on the
two sides during the Second World War, and the fact that half of American high school kids cannot identify the Holocaust, this, I expect, will severely limit
accessibility.
How many Americans under thirty know, for example, that
Germany was divided into four zones and occupied by the British, Americans,
French and Russians, that the zones of the first three became the West German
Federal Republic and the Russian zone became the German Democratic Republic
(GDR – or DDR, in German.) And that the
west experienced an “economic miracle” early on, while the communist GDR became
a police state with a “security service” known as the Stasi, which kept particularly close
track of the comings and goings of its own citizens and brooked no dissent.
We know a lot these days about the NSA and their spying
activities in the Warsaw Pact nations, including the GDR, but we know much less
about how the West was infiltrated by GDR agents working abroad.
Zwei Leben is the
story of a woman taken as a child from an orphanage and groomed to make her way
to Norway to spy for the Stasi. They
were aided in this program by the fact that German soldiers had occupied Norway
during World War II and left behind some 11,000 children from relationships
with Norwegian women. And because Hitler
saw these children as useful in building the future of the Reich, he had them
taken from their mothers and sent to Germany to be raised. The birth rate in Germany wasn’t sufficient
to his plans and these children, born to Aryan mothers, helped fill the gap.
An organization known as Lebensborn was set up outside of
Munich in 1936, and in 1941 the first branch was set up in Norway. Unmarried mothers, shunned by their family
and neighbors for being collaborators, could find shelter and pre-natal care
and give birth without social stigma.
The mothers were commonly “persuaded” to give up their children for
adoption. In the absence of any
alternatives, most did. There were
nine such facilities in Norway (as well as two in Denmark, seven in Poland, and
one each in France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.)
Once you get past this exceedingly challenging wall of
historical detail, the film opens into a powerful drama of a family dealing,
forty-five years after war’s end (the film takes place in 1990), with having
its wounds reopened, as it becomes the story of a girl who made her way across
the Baltic first to Denmark and finally to Norway in search of her mother. The mother, Åse Evensen, now a great-grandmother, is played by Liv Ullmann. Watching her face throughout is one of the
reasons one goes to the cinema.
She is not the main character, though. That role is the character of her daughter,
Kristine, who we eventually discover has been working as a Stasi agent, played
by Juliane Köhler (Aimée & Jaguar, Nowhere in
Africa – she also played the role of Eva Braun in Downfall). Also in this superb cast are the German action film hero Ken Duken (Max Manus, Inglorious Basterds) and Rainer Bock (White Ribbon, War Horse, Inglorious Basterds)
and Norwegian actress Julia Bache-Wiig (A Somewhat Gentle Man, Max Manus), and one of Norway’s top-ranked actors, Sven Nordin (Elling).
We have to choose
between condemning Kristine for her deception and sympathizing with her for her
growing sense of moral responsibility for it.
The clear villain
of the story is the GDR. They are no
more, and cannot defend themselves, and no doubt that’s just the way everybody
involved wants it. What’s to defend of a
country who might have exposed the Nazi crimes in its past, but manipulated
them to its advantage, instead?
After taking
perhaps three-fourths of the movie or more to set this all up, when the
full complexity and the moral challenge of the daughter’s character are brought
to the surface, the last half hour becomes a thriller. I won’t spoil the ending, except to say you
are brought back in a big way to the cause on which the plot is based. So much of war’s injustice involves the shame
of victims for just being victims. Like
the “comfort women” of Asia, to use the word preferred by the brutalizers
(because it is also the word used by the media), pressed into prostitution by
the occupying Japanese army, the “love children” of soldiers and women in
countries they occupy, as well as the women themselves, are still climbing out
of the shame. With Nazi war criminals in
their 90s, we feel a statute of limitations is nothing more than a further
injustice, so we keep after these criminals till their dying day.
The women (also now in their 80s and 90s) and children of
occupied nations torn from each other and forced to live a lifetime of shame
are no less worthy of our dogged efforts to put right a wartime wrong. Such, at least, is the message of Zwei Leben.
The film was highly acclaimed in Germany, where it opened
last September. It has been nominated as
Germany’s candidate for Best Foreign Film at the upcoming Oscars. According to Maas, who was present at last
night’s showing, it was less well received in Norway. When asked why this is, the filmmaker could
only speculate. One Norwegian complained
that he portrayed them as more vulnerable to espionage than they actually
were. That may have something to do with
it. And it would come as no surprise if
the shame of so many Norwegian women still lingers. Audiences were sparse, compared to audiences
in Germany. Which leads me to speculate
that the shame associated with being part of an invader nation doesn’t rise to
the level of shame associated with being part of a nation that is invaded.
When the movie comes to a close you are hard put to identify
its genre. It is a psychological drama,
and a thriller. It’s part action film,
part didactic historical documentary, part courtroom drama. And in the end, it’s a human drama about the
yearning for family, love and security at all costs. One that leaves you wondering whether it’s a
cost you yourself would be willing to bear.
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