July 20th
July 20 is a German feature film from 1955.
action
The film tells the story of the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944 . The events of July 20th are told as a flashback. The film tells the story of the two fictional people who remembered the events - the OKW secretary Hildegard Klee , who works for conspirators, and Captain Lindner, who has turned from a Hitler supporter to an opponent - the film tells the story closely based on historical facts in an almost documentary style.
Count Stauffenberg returns to Berlin after being wounded from North Africa and establishes contact with his old friends, the Hitlerites around Colonel General Beck. He also agrees to participate in the planned assassination attempt. After he smuggled a bomb into the Führer Headquarters and then left it, the bomb detonated. Convinced of the success of the attack, he returned to Berlin. There a struggle for command and control breaks out between the conspirators and the government, which the resistance fighters ultimately lose because Hitler survived the attack. They are arrested, sentenced to death and eventually shot.
background
Falk Harnack himself was involved in the resistance during the National Socialist dictatorship. Together with the resistance fighter and writer Günther Weisenborn , he worked on the script. One of the advisors was also Rudolph-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff , who had worked closely with Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg in preparing the assassination attempt on Hitler.
The film was produced in the CCC studio in Berlin-Spandau. The outdoor shots were taken in and around Berlin. The film had its world premiere on June 21, 1955 at the Berlin International Film Festival . Even during the shooting, there was a competition about the earlier completion of the film, as Georg Wilhelm Pabst was making a film on the same topic at the same time. His work, entitled It Happened on July 20, had its world premiere on June 19, 1955. The difference between the two films is that Harnack also gives a voice to the wider circle of resistance in the film, while Pabst focuses exclusively on events July 20th focused. Pabst Bernhard Wicki can be seen in the role of Stauffenberg .
The film It Happened on July 20 ended with the execution of the conspirators in the Bendler Block, the film July 20 with the suicide of Henning von Tresckow . At the end of the film, a voice-over speaks the final sentences: “Tresckow can now answer to God's judgment seat with a clear conscience for what he has done. God does not judge by success. He knows that your fight was a revolt of conscience. "
Reviews
- Lexicon of international film : A film that was carefully cast down to the smallest role and advised in detail by members of the resistance that made a positive impression in German cinema in the 1950s.
Awards
- The FBL awarded the film the title valuable.
- The screenwriters Günther Weisenborn and Werner Jörg Lüddecke received the Federal Film Prize in silver in 1956 .
- Wolfgang Preiss also received the Federal Film Prize in silver in 1956 for his performance.
- Producer Artur Brauner received the film award for the "feature film that makes a particularly lasting contribution to awakening civic awareness".
- The film was recommended by the Evangelical Film Guild as "best film of the month" (July 1955).
literature
- Drehli Robnik: Aesthetics of History and Affect Politics . Stauffenberg and July 20 in the film 1948–2008. Turia + Kant, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-85132-557-7 .
- Tobias Temming: Resistance in German and Dutch feature films. Historical images and culture of remembrance (1943–1963) . De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016. ISBN 978-3-11-045631-8 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ D. Robnik, Geschichtsästhetik und Affektpolitik, Vienna 2009, p. 33.
- ↑ Dr. Alfred Bauer: German feature film Almanach. Volume 2: 1946-1955 , p. 580
- ↑ July 20th. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
Web links
- July 20 in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- July 20th at Filmportal.de