The Sonnenbrucks

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title The Sonnenbrucks
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1951
length 99 minutes
Rod
Director Georg C. Klaren
script Georg C. Klaren
production DEFA
music Ernst Roters
camera Fritz Lehmann
cut Friedel Welsandt
occupation

The Sonnenbrucks is a German DEFA film by Georg C. Klaren from 1951 based on the play of the same name by the Polish writer Leon Kruczkowski .

action

In 1943, Professor Walter Sonnenbruck celebrated his 30th anniversary at the University of Göttingen. To this end, he invited his family and former employees. One of these employees is the laboratory assistant Hoppe, who serves as a field police officer in the so-called General Government. When the seven-year-old fugitive Jewish boy Chaim was brought in front of him by a Nazi farmer shortly before he went on vacation, he saw no other way to avoid all difficulties than to shoot him “while on the run”.

In Norway, the son Willi Sonnenbruck is doing his duty as a member of the SS and is also preparing for the trip to Göttingen. Shortly before leaving, his agency arrested several Norwegian resistance fighters. Among them was the son of his girlfriend's seamstress. She asks Willi to do something for her release. His answer to the mother was that the son had escaped from the SS. Out of gratitude, the mother gave her friend a precious necklace, which in turn passed it on to Willi. It turned out that the arrested man had died as a result of the interrogation methods and was therefore no longer available to the SS for information.

In the restaurant of a French town, the pianist Ruth Sonnenbruck, the professor's daughter, is waiting for the trip to Göttingen to continue. Through the French waitress Fanchette, she learns that the departure is delayed, as several, arbitrarily selected, male residents of the place have to be hanged in revenge for a bridge that was blown up by the Resistance . The young French woman's father is also among them. Ruth becomes an eyewitness to the crime.

The whole family is now preparing for the celebrations in the professor's house. A former employee of Sonnenbruck, the lecturer Joachim Peters, a communist who managed to escape from a concentration camp after three years in prison bursts into the preparations . He asks his former boss for help. Although the latter does not betray him, it will not support him either. Unlike his daughter Ruth, who hides him from the others so that he can escape. Her sister-in-law Liesel Sonnenbruck, a staunch National Socialist who lost her husband on the Eastern Front and whose two children were killed in a bomb attack in Berlin, reports the incident to the Gestapo . Ruth no longer wants to hide her help and lures the police in the wrong direction with her car. When stopped, she runs away and is shot by the pursuers. Bertha Sonnenbruck, the professor's wife, who was very socially committed under National Socialism, did not survive all the turmoil. Now there is no longer any support from those in power even for the apolitical Walter Sonnenbruck.

After the war, he thinks that his attitude will allow him to regain a foothold at the university. But he has to realize that there are still many colleagues and students who cling to the old days. Even his son Willi, returning from captivity, is expelled from the house by him. But he meets Joachim Peters again, who invites him to a congress in Jena. Here the professor signs a declaration of peace. With this signature he got even more trouble at the University of Göttingen, which convinced him to move to the GDR.

production

The play was edited for the film by Leon Kruczkowski and Kurt Maetzig . The shooting time was from October 1950 to January 1951, the recordings were made except in the Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal in Potsdam and in the public scientific library in Berlin.

The Sonnenbrucks premiered on March 1, 1951 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin , in the presence of the Deputy Prime Minister of the GDR Otto Nuschke . The festive Polish premiere took place in Warsaw in mid-May 1951, with the participation of a film delegation with Georg C. Klaren, Eduard von Winterstein and Ursula Burg.

criticism

Hans Ulrich Eylau found in the Berliner Zeitung that the filming goes further than the drama. It in no way leaves the basis of human debate. But it develops the necessary political consequences from it logically and in detail. What was a short epilogue on stage becomes the decisive element of the plot in the film. The present speaks the weighty word, no longer the past. Herman Müller said in New Germany : Kruczkowski, Maetzig, Klaren, who worked together, have the opportunities that they had to take advantage of. to exploit the depth of the material in the film, seen and designed. It proves with the realism of the play that it was to be expanded and deepened, for this shows that there is real life behind the stage dialogue.

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ CineGraph - Lexicon for German-language film - Georg C. Klaren
  2. ↑ Hans Ulrich Eylau in the Berliner Zeitung of March 3, 1951
  3. ↑ Herman Müller in Neues Deutschland, March 3, 1951