Berlin 36
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Berlin 36 |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2009 |
| length | Cinema: 101 minutes DVD: 97 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Kaspar Heidelbach |
| script | Lothar Kurzawa |
| production |
Gerhard Schmidt , Jörn Klamroth |
| music | Arno Steffen |
| camera | Achim Poulheim |
| cut | Hedy Altschiller |
| occupation | |
| |
Berlin 36 is a German film drama directed by Kaspar Heidelbach from 2009 with Karoline Herfurth in the leading role. The film is based on the fate of the Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann , who was kept away from the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin by order of the National Socialist Reichsbund for physical exercises .
action
Gretel Bergmann wins the high jump championship in England . Her father had brought the talented sportswoman, who, as a Jew, was not allowed to train during the National Socialist era , to safety in England in good time. Since the United States made their participation in the Olympic Games dependent on Jewish athletes, and especially the internationally known miners, being able to participate on an equal basis, the coordinated Olympic Committee in Berlin got into trouble.
When her family is threatened, Bergmann returns to Germany and is apparently accepted on an equal footing in the Olympic training camp for high jumpers. Trainer Waldmann, who is enthusiastic about Bergmann's talent, performance and discipline, refuses to give up sporting fairness and morality and to make them incapable of competition according to the instructions of the party officials. He is dismissed without notice and replaced by the party-loyal coach Kulmbach.
Bergmann's ordeal now begins. She experienced excruciating isolation, hatred and attempted destruction of her excellent athletic performance. Trainer Kulmbach tries by all means to unsettle the young woman's self-confidence and to force her to give up. Her only competitor on the sporting level is her roommate Marie Ketteler. This is actually a man with whom the Nazis are determined to win the gold medal for high jump in the women's discipline. A friendship based on solidarity develops between Ketteler and Bergmann despite all external threats.
Bergmann is banned from the Olympic Games for fake reasons, even though she is the best high jumper in training. When Ketteler finds out, she deliberately tears up the leap in decision-making. The bar fell, and with that the hope of a victory for the horrified party functionaries was gone. Ketteler only occupies 4th place. Bergmann watches the competition as a spectator, and the two secretly smile at each other when Ketteler transforms their mutual resistance into a defeat that is shameful for the National Socialist ambitions.
At the end of the film, the real Gretel Bergmann is shown in 2009, who emigrated to the USA in 1937 and lived with her husband in New York City until her death in 2017 .
production
Shooting for the film began on August 6, 2008 and ended on October 19, 2008. In the film, the “House of Sports” represents Bochum's town hall , which was closed for four days for shooting. In addition to the film location Bochum , various locations and cities in North Rhine-Westphalia , Lower Saxony , Hamburg , Schleswig-Holstein and Berlin were the motivators, including, for example, the Lower Saxony Castle Eldingen near Celle as an athletics training camp as well as the Wittringer Stadium in Gladbeck , the Berlin Olympic Stadium and film sets of the Film studios Babelsberg located in Potsdam .
The film had its German premiere on August 20, 2009. The cinema release was on September 10, 2009, the first broadcast on German television on July 11, 2012 on ARD , where the film with 4.43 million viewers and a total market share of 15.5 percent Victory of the day reached.
Historical background
The figure of Marie Ketteler did not exist like this. It is based on the real person Dora Ratjen , who took fourth place at the 1936 Olympic Games in the women's high jump competition with a height of 1.58 meters. The sex of Dora Ratjens was corrected on January 11, 1939 in the official documents and the first name was changed to Heinrich.
Dora Ratjen did not replace Gretel Bergmann, who was prevented from starting, but was only the remaining second team member. In order to be able to assert to the global public that third place is being kept free for the injured Gretel Bergmann, it remained vacant.
The central statements of the film do not correspond to historical reality. In fact, Gretel Bergmann was not aware that Dora Ratjen was a man. She gives this in the most recent interviews. It was not by chance that Bergmann discovered Ratjen's true gender identity while showering. A resulting intimate relationship between the two, as indicated in the film, did not exist. In truth, Bergmann and Ratjen had at best a loose relationship as athletic competitors. The fact that Gretel watched the competition from the stands does not correspond to the facts either. In truth, she wasn't in the stadium at all. As she had been kicked out of the Olympic squad a short time before, she prepared to emigrate. Dora Ratjen didn't tear the high jump bar on purpose either, but was probably not up to the nervous tension.
The film gives the impression that it was the Nazis who made Ratjen a high jump star. This is not true, since Dora Ratjen had been Gaumeisterin several times since 1934 and German champion in high jump in 1936, making her one of the top performing candidates for the German Olympic squad. The claim that Ratjen was blackmailed by the Nazis to participate in the games is also false. According to the sources still available, the National Socialist rulers only found out after Ratjen's arrest on September 21, 1938 in Magdeburg that she was a man.
These deviations from historical reality as well as artistic freedom for the dramaturgy of the feature film caused discussions in the media, especially since the film claims in the subtitle to tell “the true story of a winner”.
Reviews
"The staging based on sentimentalization does not do justice to the explosiveness of the historical facts, rather dilutes and distorts them, so that the drama becomes nothing more than kitsch cinema based on clichés."
“The fact that we finally found out about it today is the most gratifying thing about this film. Despite good acting performances, including Axel Prahl as a discreet, non-Nazi trainer, the lacquered, naturalistic painting of brown everyday life and the simplification of the characters are a penetrating underchallenge for the viewer. An extraordinary story - badly presented, but sold in a speculative picture frame - that can be perceived as an imposition. "
“The whole thing is decently executed in terms of acting and staging, but does not cause any noteworthy irritation for the audience. [...] In “Berlin 36” Kaspar Heidelbach does not tell us a story about winners and losers, perverted reasons of state and individual decency, but rather one about outsiders. The Jewish woman and the transsexual are practically in the same situation here, which is a delicate thesis that extends the Bergmann case very broadly. It goes with the fact that the harassment that the Jew is exposed to in the training camp simply looks like bullying. You understand what this is all about with the audience: recognition and empathy. But six million murdered Jews were not the result of bullying. "
“Berlin 36 tries to do some justice to both characters and invents a friendship between the athletes. The intention was probably to find out whether the encounter between the two high jumpers would have been different if they had known each other better and better. That's an interesting hypothesis, but you can tell in the film that it was overloaded, that the historical corset is pressing, that the time, which is far too short for two fates, constricts the plot and makes it appear far too thin. One can blame the production for that, on the other hand the story of Gretel Bergmann and Dora Ratjen was lost for too long. To discover them at all is the achievement here, and Karoline Herfurth and the ensemble are also very much enjoyed to watch. "
Awards
- The German film and media rating awarded the film the rating valuable .
literature
- Berno Bahro; Jutta Braun: Berlin '36 - The incredible story of a Jewish sportswoman in the “Third Reich”. The book about the film. vbb Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86650-037-2
Web links
- Berlin 36 in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Internet presence for the film
- Berlin 36 at filmportal.de
- Karoline Herfurth in an interview: “I take compliments with distance”. In: Friday , September 10, 2009
- Ten truths from ... Gretel Bergmann: "I wanted to show that a Jewish girl can defeat the Germans" . Spiegel Online , August 25, 2009
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Berlin 36 . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , July 2009 (PDF; test number: 118 766 K).
- ↑ Bochum: The town hall becomes a cinema star in DerWesten on August 8, 2008
- ↑ Visit to the set at Schloss Eldingen: “Berlin '36”. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on April 26, 2019 ; accessed on April 26, 2019 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Wittringer Stadium in Gladbeck as a film location for Berlin . WAZ; accessed on March 7, 2014
- ^ Thomas Klein: 100 years of Studio Babelsberg on Berliner Strasse . tip-berlin.de, 2012; accessed on March 7, 2014
- ↑ Nazis are missing from the World Cup in the daily newspaper of August 21, 2009
- ↑ ARD with sports drama "Berlin 36" in first place . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Stern , July 12, 2012
- ↑ a b c Bahro / Braun: Berlin '36. Berlin 2009
- ↑ Stefan Berg: The real Dora . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 2009 ( online ).
- ^ Stefan Berg: Olympia 1936. Scandal about Dora. one day , September 17th, 2009
- ^ The film "Berlin 36": Construct instead of truth in Frankfurter Rundschau , September 14, 2009
- ↑ No true story: controversy over the movie "Berlin 36" comes to a head in Germany Funk 19 September, 2009.
- ^ Berlin 36. In: Lexicon of international film . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ "Berlin '36" in Radiofeuilleton , September 9, 2009
- ↑ They wanted to win . In: Berliner Zeitung , September 10, 2009
- ^ Jewish woman in a swastika jersey . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , July 11, 2012
