The spring lid watch

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Movie
Original title The spring lid watch
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1991
length 88 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Gunter Friedrich
script Jochen Nestler
production DEFA
music Bernd Wefelmeyer
camera Wolfgang Braumann
occupation

The Sprungdeckeluhr is a DEFA - children's film directed by Gunter Friedrich . The film was made in 1989/90 and premiered on April 24, 1991.

action

Hansi lives in Munich in 1933. He took his father's spring lid watch with him to school without permission . While Hansi skipped classes, he met some boys in Hitler Youth uniforms . These are extras for a film. The film is called Hitlerjunge Heini - in reference to the actually existing UFA film Hitlerjunge Quex . Since there is a lot of pocket money for the extra work, Hansi likes to take part in the film. During the shooting the news comes that Hitler has become Chancellor of the Reich . The extras are allowed to keep their Hitler Youth uniform to “celebrate the day”.

At home, Hansi expects a nasty surprise. The Gestapo is with his parents. His father is a member of the Social Democrats. Initially, the Gestapo does not have an arrest warrant. After the Gestapo people left, the father explains to the boy that the spring lid watch is one of his important secret hiding spots and shows him that the lid of the watch can only be opened with a trick. At night - the children are already in bed - the parents receive a warning from a policeman friend that they have an arrest warrant. The parents decide to flee. In order not to endanger Hansi and Rosi, they leave the children behind, intending to send someone to look after them in the next few days. But the children notice their parents fleeing, but pretend to be asleep. After the parents leave the apartment, Hansi discovers that his father did not take the watch with him. Nor does he manage to open the secret hiding place in the clock himself. The parents want to send the children a message later. However, this proves to be very difficult because the secret police are watching the house. This is also supported by a neighbor who sends information to the secret police.

Eventually, however, the contact with the underground movement succeeds. In the process, Hansi learns that his father was captured and taken to a concentration camp . The mother unexpectedly comes back to her apartment, disguised as the neighbor, which the Gestapo reports. Together with Rosi and Hansi, she wants to flee the apartment under observation and place the children with comrades in Augsburg . The children can escape unnoticed by the Gestapo through a narrow cellar window. The mother, however, leaves the house through the regular entrance, as she believes she is well disguised - disguised as the neighbor. She wants to speak to one of the Gestapo men because he thinks he sees his informant. This is how the mother's disguise is discovered. She is arrested and Hansi and Rosi have to flee alone.

They re-establish contact with the underground movement. Hansi makes sure that the watch is sent to the father in the concentration camp. The resistance now wants to place the children with a married couple, but this fails. So they go back to their old apartment. In the meantime, her father managed to escape. So the spring lid watch did not reach the father. To get the watch to safety, Hansi and Rosi go into the camp. They pretend to be harmless and explain that they want to pick up their father's things. Among these things is the watch that has meanwhile arrived in the warehouse. After a brutal interrogation, during which a subordinate of the camp commandant also beats Rosi, the children come back home with the things and the watch. The secret police are already waiting for them there. Hansi is taken to a children's home run by nuns, while his older sister is put into an apprenticeship as a saleswoman. Hansi can take the watch with him as a toy.

While Hansi is in the children's home, he has to hand the watch over to one of the nuns, as such toys are forbidden. While Hansi is in the children's home, the film "Hitlerjunge Heini" is shown in the cinema. Since Hansi played as an extra in the film, he goes to the cinema. He is horrified to discover that this is a Nazi propaganda film. The film is about the “heroic” struggle of a Hitler Youth against his “evil” Communist father. Here excerpts from the Nazi propaganda film Hitler Youth Quex are shown.

Finally, the resistance manages to organize the escape of the children. Just in time, because the secret police want to pick the boy up from the children's home for Christmas. He is said to be tortured in the presence of his mother so that she can reveal information about the resistance. The secret police are hot on the heels of the refugees. So that the children can escape, a man from the underground sacrifices himself. He distracts the police and is shot. Meanwhile, the children can escape.

The escape across the Swiss border succeeds. And so they can see their father again a year later in Prague for a few hours. Here now Hansi hands over the spring lid watch to his father. He is amazed and explains to his son that the watch was a gift. The father had removed the note with the secret message before he fled. Hansi then says that it was all in vain. But the father says that no experience in life is free. Through a written board, the viewer learns that the children never saw their father again after this meeting. He died some time later fighting the Nazis.

background

The film was shot from December 1989 to April 1990 in Gera , Prague and Munich and at Weesenstein Castle (Eastern Ore Mountains, Pirna district ). Due to the turmoil of the political change and the associated privatization of DEFA, work on the film had to be interrupted several times. The film was initially made at DEFA-Studio for Feature Films, Artistic Working Group “Berlin” and was then completed by DEFA-Studio Babelsberg GmbH.

In 1992 the FWU released it as a teaching film.

The propaganda film Hitlerjunge Quex , in which children and young people were to be sworn to fight against communists, was made in 1933. Some original scenes from this film are also shown at the cinema screening.

There is an epilogue to “Die Sprungdeckeluhr”. In a postscript it is pointed out that Hans and Rosi's father was killed in action. This sentence refers to the fact that the film is linked to the life story of the communist member of the Reichstag, Hans Beimler , who later perished in the Spanish civil war. The director of the film was able to fall back on the personal conversations with Ms. Centa Beimler (the mother of the children).

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