From a German life
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | From a German life |
 | |
| Country of production | Federal Republic of Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1977 |
| length | 145 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Theodor Kotulla |
| script |
Theodor Kotulla based on a novel by Robert Merle |
| production |
Volker Canaris Nils Nilson |
| music | Eberhard Weber |
| camera | Dieter Naujeck |
| cut | Wolfgang Richter |
| occupation | |
| |
From a German Life is a German feature film from 1977 based on the script and directed by Theodor Kotulla , with Götz George in the lead role. The implementation of the script is based on the 1952 French novel La mort est mon métier (edition translated into German: Death is my job ) by Robert Merle .
Like the novel, the film is based on interrogation reports of the trial of Rudolf Hoess , SS - officer and commander of the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz , and on whose autobiographical notes he had written in British and after his extradition in Polish captivity in 1946/47 before he was executed as a convicted war criminal . Instead of the name Rudolf Höß, on whose life the story is based, the pseudonym Franz Lang is used in the film - following a generalizing / anonymizing intention . After the Second World War, the real Rudolf Höß initially went into hiding under this (false) name as a supposed boat mate, until he was exposed and arrested in 1946.
The film is divided into 14 separate individual episodes, which fragmentarily trace significant stages in the life of the protagonist Franz Lang (actually Rudolf Höß).
action
Franz Lang, born in 1900, tried several times as a teenager during the First World War - initially in vain - to get to the front. Finally, he volunteers in a hospital , where he meets the wounded Captain Günther. He explains to him that there is only one sin: not being a “good German”; for Lang a key phrase that shaped his future life. The officer promises young Franz that after his recovery he will take him over to the rifle company he has newly established.
In 1917 Franz Lang was on a front-line deployment that he had longed for and was under the command of Captain Günther: Franz was supposed to take up a machine-gun position with three other comrades and had to watch two of his comrades fall at the front. A third tries to persuade Franz to desert. But the latter wants to carry out the will of his group leader who had previously fallen and to remain in the machine-gun position as long as possible and shoots the fugitive. Severely wounded, Franz Lang dragged himself back behind the front with the MG, where he was found passed out by Captain Günther. A little later he promoted him to sergeant, as Franz Lang is the only survivor of a hopeless fight.
Even after the war, during the Weimar Republic , Lang consistently maintained his attitude, which was characterized by the fulfillment of duty and a belief in authority, and this attitude repeatedly offended civilian life: with the help of a comrade in the war, he found work in a machine factory in 1919, from which he was already soon - after a conflict with an older colleague who is overwhelmed by Lang's pace of work - is dismissed under pressure from the workforce and the workers' council (comparable to today's works council ).
After his release, Franz Lang found himself in völkisch - nationalist circles. In 1920 he joined the right-wing extremist Freikorps Roßbach , which was deployed in the Ruhr uprising against left-wing revolutionary workers and in the Baltic States . He recognized a former war comrade in a group of captured insurgents, and Lang first campaigned for the commandant's release by drawing his attention to his front-line deployment and the fact that he was the bearer of the Iron Cross . The group leader of the unit convinced Franz Lang that these were communists who could not refer to previous comradeship with the troops. These are ideologically blinded by “Jewish-Marxist agitators” ; Furthermore, an order is always binding and must also be carried out against personal interests. Lang is reluctantly satisfied with this explanation. When Lang's former war comrade tried to escape a little later, the latter shot him while trying to escape.
After the Freikorps dissolved , Lang found employment as a construction worker. He used his first wages to pay off his debts to comrades. There is hardly any money left to live on. In addition, the physical exertion overwhelms him so much that he becomes desperate under the impression that he cannot conscientiously fulfill his duty. Lang decides to go out of life willingly. But before he can shoot himself with his pistol, a colleague from the construction department visits him: He immediately guesses Lang's plans and admonishes him to “remain loyal to Germany”. Long was responsible for Germany, even if he was no longer a soldier. Lang's work colleague, who he suspects to be a member of the NSDAP , gives him a copy of the Völkischer Beobachter . Impressed by the combative language used there, Franz Lang decides to also join the NSDAP.
In 1922, Franz Lang went to a local SA storm bar : he wanted to take responsibility and help Germany rise again, he explained to the SA Obersturmführer who was there . When he filled out his admission and commitment form for joining the NSDAP, the Obersturmführer declares that Lang was immediately accepted into the Sturmabteilung as an SA candidate and that he would be given a temporary NSDAP membership card, since he was an old Roßbach -Relatives act. Lang confirms that he took part in all "combat missions after the war" ( Ruhr area , Baltic States and Upper Silesia ) with the Freikorps . However, Franz laments to the SA leader that he has no money to be able to afford an SA uniform. The latter then gave him the uniform of a previously shot SA man.
As a member of the NSDAP and a member of the SA, Franz Lang followed a call from some Mecklenburg landowners who were looking for a protection force made up of former Freikorps soldiers for their large estates.
Together with some comrades of the former Freikorps Roßbach , Franz Lang was deployed there in the Parchimer Fememord when the former cashier of the Freikorps turned up in the village. Years before, he had run away with the Freikorps funds and now appeared penniless in Mecklenburg. During a drinking bout, Franz Lang uncovered the (alleged) KPD membership of the former Freikorps comrade. The present Freikorps kidnap and beat up the alleged traitor in a forest; Franz Lang shoots him there. A person involved in the fememide reveals the crime out of fear, and Franz Lang is sentenced to ten years in prison in 1924. While in custody, he immersed himself in Hitler's book Mein Kampf and became a fanatical National Socialist there. After almost five years, Lang was released again in 1928 as a result of an amnesty .
In his social reintegration, the NSDAP lends a hand and helps him to find employment on the agricultural property of the former Colonel Baron von Jeseritz, who is close to the party. He is soon very impressed by Lang's achievements and encourages him further: So he leaves him a neglected farm to run independently and suggests marriage to Else, chosen by the baron himself, who according to the Nazi “racial doctrine” is the ideal of an “Aryan “Woman conform. Lang complies with this request and marries Else. At a later reception at the estate, he met Heinrich Himmler . Himmler heard about Lang's reliability and organizational talent, he was told there. Franz Lang received the order from Himmler personally to set up a cavalry squad that would ultimately be transferred to the protective squadron.
After the end of the republic and the rise of the National Socialists to power , Himmler offered Lang, meanwhile Unterscharführer of the Reiter-SS , an administrative post in the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Although he and his wife would have preferred to stay in agriculture, Lang accepts this offer from the Reichsführer SS in the sense of an “obligation for the party and the fatherland”. Thanks to his loyalty to the party and his organizational talent, Himmler told him that Lang could best serve the state and the party. Lang emphasizes to his wife that the Reichsführer SS selected him primarily because of his organizational talent and because he knew the prisoners, after all, he himself had been a prisoner for almost five years.
In the Dachau concentration camp, Franz Lang was being prepared for his role as the future camp commandant. There, too, he carried out the tasks assigned to him without contradiction, and thus rose to become SS-Sturmbannführer over the years . During the Second World War , Lang was called to Himmler again in 1941, who informed him, subject to confidentiality, of the planned " extermination of the Jews " ordered by Hitler and the camps in Poland intended for this purpose. Lang then took over the Auschwitz extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Lang is instructed by Adolf Eichmann about the required "destruction capacities". The killings carried out up to that point were still too ineffective for the party leadership. More or less by chance, Lang came up with the idea of using the poison Zyklon B as a hygienically clean and effective solution for the mass gassing of prisoners deported to Auschwitz. In order to implement this method, he was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer with immediate effect after Himmler's visit to the camp in 1942 .
When his wife Else saw through the extent of what was going on in the camp during a meal with the head of the Chelmno extermination camp and confronted her husband, the latter pleaded his sense of duty. Nor does he contradict his wife's shocked assumption that he would also kill their children if he was ordered to do so, on the contrary: of course, Lang replied, he would do it if he were ordered to. He argues to his wife that he is not responsible for what he does in the camp, but that the responsibility for what he does lies with whoever gave him the order.
After the end of the war, Lang went into hiding on a farm in the US-occupied part of Germany . He is tracked down and imprisoned by American soldiers. During an interrogation, Lang replied to a question from a US officer whether he believed the extermination of the Jews was right: “What I believe is immaterial. I just obeyed. "
Franz Lang is extradited to Poland, sentenced to death as a war criminal and hanged in Auschwitz.
Content intentions
In the film, director Theodor Kotulla deliberately largely dispenses with background music. In this way the oppressive, almost documentary character of the events depicted is underpinned.
In the credits of the trailer for the film, Lang ( Rudolf Höß ) and the film about his life are described as follows:
“This man wasn't a killer. For the Hitler regime at that time he was a 'national comrade', a good German: obedient, conscientious, reliable, orderly, hardworking, fond of children and resilient. - The film 'From a German Life' shows how a man comes to the point of building a concentration camp on command and installing a killing facility in it that works as efficiently as the assembly line of a factory. "
From a German life tries to contribute to the coming to terms with the National Socialist crimes and the Holocaust by providing a psychogram of the perpetrator Rudolf Höß with the curriculum vitae . The focus is on the question of how a person can be made to be capable of such serious acts as genocide . A biography - shaped by career thoughts - which in its normality and honesty hardly differs from the résumés of many other Germans. So Höß - anonymized and generalized to the pseudonym Franz Lang - implicitly becomes a figure of identification of horror by trying to hold up a mirror image to the viewer in a figurative sense.
Awards
The film was in 1977 by the Film Review Board with the predicate particularly valuable award and in 1978 received the award at the German Film Awards , the film strip in silver in the category Other feature-length movies .
Review / criticism
“[…] The interchangeability of collective thinking and the image of the enemy becomes frighteningly clear through the emotionless psychohistorical analysis of Kotulla, which can be traced back to the core and mechanics of such 'movement'. Political and moral superficiality and volatility of thoughts of an irrationally propagated sense for 'calm, order and above all cleanliness' - under this pretext up to 9,000 people were sent to the 'shower room' every day in Auschwitz - appears in Kotulla's film rightly as the main cause of the totalitarian abuse of power, as it is therefore able to continue to function openly or covertly worldwide with different forms and ideological symbols. In this respect, this fact-oriented fiction is a didactic piece that every pedagogue, especially every history teacher, should deal with young people [...] "
Web links
- From a German living in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- From a German life at filmportal.de (including a contemporary review, premiere poster, photos)
- Movie trailer on YouTube (4:04 min.)
- Hans C. Blumenberg: A Career Commander in Auschwitz ; Review of the film for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit on November 25, 1977
- Rajko Burchardt: From a German life ; Film review on kino-zeit.de
- Entry to the film on deutsches-filmhaus.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ film-dienst No. 25, December 1977