The state against Fritz Bauer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title The state against Fritz Bauer
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2015
length 105 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 12
Rod
Director Lars Kraume
script Lars Kraume,
Olivier Guez
production Thomas Kufus ,
Christoph Friedel
music Julian Maas ,
Christoph M. Kaiser
camera Jens Harant
cut Barbara Gies
occupation

Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer is a German feature film by Lars Kraume from 2015. The focus of the political drama, which is largely based on historical facts, is the struggle of the Frankfurt Attorney General Fritz Bauer to track down, arrest and confront one of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals with Adolf Eichmann to face a German court. The film also shows the administrative and social resistance that Bauer encountered in Germany in the late 1950s. The subject of homosexuality , which was punishable at the time and to which Bauer indirectly confesses to his closest colleague, the young public prosecutor Karl Angermann, is also discussed.

Lars Kraume, Grimme Prize winner from 1998 and 2007, not only directed, but also wrote the screenplay with Olivier Guez , inspired by his book The Homecoming of the Unwanted. A history of the Jews in Germany after 1945 . The 105-minute film premiered at the 2015 International Film Festival in Locarno , where it received the Audience Award. Other awards followed, most often in the categories of Best Fiction Film and Best Actor ( Burghart Klaußner ). At the presentation of the German Film Prize 2016 , Der Staat versus Fritz Bauer emerged as the big winner with six prizes and three nominations. The film opened in German cinemas in October 2015 and was first shown on German free TV on April 25, 2018 on Arte .

content

Attorney General Fritz Bauer has influential friends, above all his immediate superior, Georg-August Zinn , Hessian Prime Minister and Minister of Justice in personal union . But he also has numerous enemies who intrigue against him behind his back , such as the careerist Chief Public Prosecutor Kreidler and the BKA man Gebhardt, who has a Nazi past , who are both interested in spreading the rumor that Bauer's swimming accident was a suicide attempt . When Bauer returns to work a week later, he misses a file, not for the first time, and appoints his special department heads. The short survey ends with no results. Afterwards, however, one of them, Karl Angermann, confessed to him in private that he had the files; Bauer himself commissioned him to work on it. When asked why he hadn't said that beforehand, Angermann replied that he didn't mean to expose him.

Soon afterwards, Bauer received a letter addressed to him personally from Argentina with the information as to where Adolf Eichmann , the organizer of the Holocaust and thus one of the world's most wanted Nazi war criminals, might be hiding. Bauer is electrified. He avoids going through the German authorities, which are interspersed with old Nazis, because he fears that Eichmann will be alarmed rather than caught; Interpol has already signaled that they are not responsible for political offenders; therefore Bauer is considering calling in the Israeli secret service Mossad . But he would come behind bars for treason himself, warns the only one he lets in on his plan, his longtime friend and former comrade in arms, Prime Minister Zinn. Nevertheless, Bauer sticks to his plan and secretly flies to Israel. Mossad followed up on his informant's lead, with negative results. Bauer complains that they also had to check the names of the house's two electricity customers, but nothing more than a promise that Mossad will take action if he can provide a second, independent source.

To achieve this, Bauer tries to win an ally: Angermann. He now knows that the young man is not only loyal but also courageous, as he pleaded for a scandalously low sentence in a homosexual trial (5 D-Marks) - citing a court ruling that Bauer had pointed out to him. Angermann's request initially met with skepticism; his impatience almost leads to rift; but in the end he indirectly wins him over through his personal credibility in a television appearance on the same evening. The informant Angermann contacted presented a tape that proved that Eichmann was actually in Argentina. For his part, Bauer correctly speculates that he could be on the payroll of a German company under one of those two unchecked names, and blackmailed him from an ex-Nazi from the Mercedes-Benz personnel department . Mossad acts and kidnaps Eichmann to Israel. The result is a worldwide sensation, but not the extradition request to Germany that Bauer was hoping for - political and economic interests that go beyond national borders oppose this.

Bauer's opponents still want to bring him down; one knows that he was secretly in Israel and wants what one suspects correctly - his involvement in the Eichmann kidnapping - when he is blackmailed into incriminating statements from Angermann. The BKA also has something in hand against him. A direct consequence of Angermann's "scandalous trial" was that a friend of the defendant thanked him and gave the business card to the night bar where she appeared. Angermann shows up there and catches fire when it is revealed that she is transgender . BKA man Gebhardt presents him with photos as evidence of his criminal relationship and gives him a week: Either he betrays Bauer or has to go to prison. Angermann has a lot to lose: He has been married for two years and has recently even been looking forward to fatherhood. Nevertheless, he decides against the treason and reports himself for violating § 175 . Before that, he urged the farmer, who was seriously disappointed by the failure of the extradition request, to keep fighting. He does this by announcing to Kreidler: “Be sure I will do my [work]. As long as I live, no one can stop me. "

Emergence

Director Lars Kraume, who grew up in Frankfurt am Main himself , had never heard of Fritz Bauer before when he read him in 2011 when he read The Homecoming of the Unwanted. A story of the Jews in Germany after 1945 , written by Olivier Guez , with whom he then wrote the script together. There were two main reasons that moved Kraume to make a film about Fritz Bauer. On the one hand, the attraction of drawing an " archaic ' ' hero removed from reality in an all-alone constellation, and on the other hand, the desire to honor his part in the Eichmann kidnapping - a fact that only happened ten years after Bauer's death became public at all and waited a long time afterwards to be told as a story. Kraume welcomed the restriction to a relatively short excerpt from the life of his protagonist ; he had never had his eye on a biopic that traces his entire life story.

There was no shortage of material on Fritz Bauer. By knowing exactly what his interests and preferences were, for example, he was able to adequately recreate the interior of his rather modest 2.5 single apartment in downtown Frankfurt. Kraume praises the good interaction of all involved in the production of the film ( Production Design , Costume Design , camera interface , actor), resulting in a coherent after his feeling self image of the late 1950s had arisen. On the set they had little improvised what the thorough research owed and the clear screenplay idea that was aimed, the Stuck at the beginning of heroes "redeem" doubly: by historically reliable and authentic, the track Eichmann, and fictitious Supplemented, the young fellow Angermann . The shooting lasted 30 days. The budget was around three million euros.

Kraume did not seriously consider working on the material in a documentary way. Nevertheless, he precedes his feature film with an archive recording by Fritz Bauer - mainly with the aim of showing the viewer that Burghart Klaußner is not inventing anything with the way he embodies him. To be able to do it at all seemed initially impossible to Klaußner when he first saw an original photo of Bauer. But the desire to give it a try was equally strong, and so he succeeded in transforming himself into a kind of "flash". According to Kraume, the cinematic result illuminates both Fritz Bauer himself and the time in which he lived. Bauer's “eccentric, tense gestures and physicality” show his personal willingness to make sacrifices (in that he completely renounced his sexual inclinations) and at the same time the young Federal Republic's self-consciousness in the traditional moral concepts from the Nazi era . Bauer's “ flabby ” style, on the other hand, indicates his origins from a strongly assimilated Jewish family and refutes the essential otherness of Jews claimed by Nazi ideology.

Reality and fiction

Based on thorough research, also in close cooperation with the Fritz Bauer Archive, the feature film faithfully reproduces the most important historical facts. The greatest artistic freedom that he allows himself is the invention of the young public prosecutor Karl Angermann. Kraume fictionalized this character because the obligation to do justice to another real person would have restricted him too much. So is Angermann symbolically for the men in Bauer's life, to which he was a mentor exemplary used ratio. Thomas Harlan , who was one of them, was out of the question because Bauer's friendship with him only began in the 1960s.

The "Valentin judgment" that Bauer refers his young colleague to is the so-called " three-mark judgment " from 1951, with which the Hamburg judge Fritz Valentin sentenced two men to eight months in prison for homosexual activity had been converted into the minimum rate of one day's imprisonment or three D-Marks . Another historical fact is Bauer's reference to Angermann that the tightening of Paragraph 175 , which was enacted during the Nazi era , was confirmed by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1957 . Behind the two men who "sneak around the protagonist like hyenas" in the film are people who actually existed in Bauer's environment (only under different names) and who in some points actually acted as the film shows. This included, according Kraume, such as the later BKA Chairmen Paul Dickopf aware launched misinformation that Eichmann in Kuwait staying.

The first source that led to Eichmann's trail in Argentina - Lothar Hermann's letter - is historically guaranteed, the second has not yet been clarified; According to Kraume, Bauer never commented on this either. The Eichmann interview by Willem Sassen mentioned in the film , which actually came into Bauer's hands, probably played a role in this. That “ Ricardo Klement ” (Eichmann's code name) could have been employed by Mercedes-Benz is a speculation that Kraume took over from a book: Eichmann vor Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth . What Bauer said when he appeared on TV in the film, he actually said on the show "Tonight Cellar Club", but only in December 1964. His hesitation at the beginning is made up - to show that he first had to overcome internal resistance. before it could open. The final frame of the film should show a fighting hero; one of the reasons why it does not end with his death, which has never been completely clarified. The opening sequence alludes to this all the more clearly : Bauer, sedated by sleeping pills , almost drowns in the bathtub, but is saved by his driver.

Besides the cause of death, the most contentious points in Bauer's biography are whether he was homosexual and whether he submitted to the Nazis . The latter, says Kraume, was not fully documented, but from his point of view very likely, since Bauer and the others who had signed a declaration of submission were released from concentration camp and prison custody in November 1933 . That is why he invents a scene in the film in which Bauer confesses to this step, regrets it and - addressed to Angermann - derives from it the commandment to remain inflexible. Kraume thinks that he does not see that this will damage Bauer. The same applies to homosexuality. He also does not share the view that it is completely irrelevant. For Bauer there was only one either / or; if he wanted one, he had to leave the other; as a “Nazi hunter” he was not allowed to act out his sexual inclinations, not even in secret; like Angermann, he would have been blackmailed or prosecuted. That is why they were thematized in the film, as were more recent biographies (including those of Ronen Steinke ) or the 2014 exhibition curated by the Fritz Bauer Archive .

background

reception

Lars Kraume and Burghart Klaußner at the awarding of the Hessian Film and Cinema Prize 2015

In the German feature pages, the praise for Der Staat against Fritz Bauer clearly outweighed it . Die Zeit (“great”) and Der Tagesspiegel (“Meisterstück”) were unreservedly positive ; Der Spiegel (“convincing”), Süddeutsche and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung made minimal cuts . That truth and was highlighted, for example, fiction is ansteckten mutually in the film, which unclichéd Design , the jazzy music and the accurate choice of hero - a better than Fritz Bauer did not exist. For the actor Burghart Klaußner there was true praise hymns "with flying colors", "Anverwandlungswunder" " oscar mature performance." But the “rest of the ensemble” was also certified as “top form”.

Almost every second reviewer drew the obvious comparison with Im Labyrinth des Schweigens , the film made a year earlier about the prehistory of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials , in which Fritz Bauer, played by Gert Voss , appears as a supporting character. All settlements were to the advantage of Der Staat versus Fritz Bauer . In the labyrinth of silence , which was a candidate for the Oscar abroad in 2016, is an "honest film", but the state against Fritz Bauer is the more promising candidate. He is more restrained, puts his characters at the center and uses them to develop his dramatic force as well as his comedic breather. Kraume does not need to fall back on the narrative mechanisms of the political thriller, nor on the conventions of emotional or equipment cinema - problems that Im Labyrinth des Schweiss suffers from in places.

Critical voices to Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer came from the reviewers of the Frankfurter Rundschau and the taz . Both complained that the film did not honor Bauer's greatest achievements; the viewer learns about his attempts to rid the German judiciary of old Nazis, just as little about him as the initiator of the Auschwitz trials . Instead, the focus shifts to the unproven, such as his homosexuality or his submission to the Nazis , from which the film uses associative psychologizing to construct a questionable story of redemption. The Hollywood Reporter also made similar objections, but, like the taz , expressly excluded Klaussner's performance from criticism. Other features from overseas made a more favorable overall judgment, such as the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times , which certified the film with suspense from the first to the last minute.

The German film and media rating awarded the rating particularly valuable , as the film was “a well-staged, exciting and well-equipped film” “about a chapter of German history that has hardly been told.” The performers of the actors were praised, especially Klaußner , "Who takes over many elements of the real Fritz Bauer."

Awards (selection)

More films about Fritz Bauer

literature

conversations

Movie reviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , August 2015 (PDF; test number: 153 743 K).
  2. ↑ Age rating for Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Audience award for "The State Against Fritz Bauer". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 15, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  4. ↑ TV premiere: “The state against Fritz Bauer”. Film- und Medienstiftung NRW , April 25, 2018, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  5. ^ The state against Fritz Bauer. TV wish list, accessed November 17, 2019 .
  6. ↑ a b c I'm worried about what's going on in this country. Planet Interview, October 7, 2015, accessed November 17, 2019 .
  7. ↑ a b c The state against Fritz Bauer: Lars Kraume speaks about his film. Vierundzwanzig.de, August 4, 2016, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  8. ↑ a b Between the economic miracle and the ghosts of war. epd Film , September 29, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g h Goethe Director's Talk: Interview with Lars Kraume and Burghart Klaußner. Goethe-Institut Toronto , September 14, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 (English).
  10. ↑ a b c The Nazis did not come like a plague of locusts. Humanist Union , September 20, 2015, accessed November 17, 2019 .
  11. ↑ a b c d e f Oliver Kaever: The hero doesn't want revenge. Die Zeit , September 30, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  12. ↑ a b c Jan Schulz-Ojala: A man in the resistance. Der Tagesspiegel , September 30, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  13. ^ A b Frank Arnold: Great Nazi hunter cinema. Der Spiegel , October 2, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  14. ^ A b Paul Katzenberger: Held in Robe. Süddeutsche Zeitung , July 31, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  15. ↑ a b Verena Lueken : The man who did not want to forget. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 30, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Daniel Kothenschulte : In the wrong film. Frankfurter Rundschau , September 29, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Ulrich Gutmair: The lady is not a lady. The daily newspaper , October 1, 2015, accessed on November 17, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Boyd van Hoei: 'The People vs. Fritz Bauer '(' The State against Fritz Bauer '): Locarno Review. Hollywood Reporter , August 7, 2015, accessed November 17, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Kenneth Turan: 'The People vs. Fritz Bauer 'brings a largely unknown Nazi hunter to light. Los Angeles Times , August 18, 2016, accessed November 17, 2019 .
  20. ↑ Ken Jaworowski: Treasonous Play for Justice in 'The People vs. Fritz Bauer '. New York Times , August 18, 2016, accessed November 17, 2019 .
  21. ^ The state against Fritz Bauer: FBW press text. German film and media rating , accessed on November 17, 2019 .