The dead of Hameln
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The dead of Hameln |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2014 |
| length | 89 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Christian von Castelberg |
| script |
Annette Hess , Christiane Hess |
| production | Marc Müller-Kaldenberg |
| music | Ralf Wienrich |
| camera | Eeva Fleig |
| cut | Dagmar Lichius |
| occupation | |
| |
Die Toten von Hameln is a 2014 feature film by Christian von Castelberg . Julia Koschitz as choirmaster Johanna Bischoff, Matthias Habich as Johanna's father, Bjarne Mädel as a former partner and Ruth Reinecke as Johanna's aunt, with Hannes Wegener in the main roles , Luise Befort , Lilli Fichtner , Charley Ann Schmutzler and Camille Dombrowsky .
Choir director Johanna Bischoff gives a concert in her old hometown Hameln . There she is forced to deal with her past.
action
Johanna Bischoff, who leads a girls' choir, is on her way to her hometown Hameln, where a concert is on the program. When she falls asleep briefly during the bus ride, she is transported back to her childhood and is confronted with a dead person. Johanna is happy when she starts up. Of course, she also visits her father Dr. Georg Bischoff, who lives with her aunt Charlotte in Johanna's parents' house.
Before the girls have their performance, they go on a hike in the Ith , a mountain range there , with Johanna and the young organist David Fernandez, with whom Johanna has a love affair . Four of the girls secrete near the red stone cave and remain gone. About 725 years ago , the Pied Piper from Hamelin is said to have led children who were never seen again into the aforementioned cave of the legendary mountain . David Fernandez, who tried to find the girls, does not reappear either.
For help, Johanna turns to her former friend Jan Faber, who is now head of the local police station. He notes that there was a collapse in the front part of the cave that must have happened shortly before. Heinz Sewening and his team are mobilized to scout out the conditions in the cave and to draw up a rescue plan.
Johanna's superior Beate Lange arrives and makes bitter accusations that culminate in the fact that she thinks she has to give her notice. She should pray to God that this thing would end well, otherwise she and she would no longer be happy with her life. In addition, the parents of the missing students arrive. Johanna, who is unstable anyway, is devastated. After falling asleep, a call on her cell phone wakes her up. Ilka Peters, who has disappeared, is on it and stutters that everyone is dead. Then the connection is broken. When Johanna looks around in the area one more time, she comes across Ilka by chance, who is totally confused. She says Marie screamed and then the whole earth came down. At the hospital, she was diagnosed with a severe shock and two minor sprains.
When Johanna wanted information from her father, the former mayor of Hameln, about an archaeologist Rudmann, who at the time wanted to look for children in the cave and had a fatal accident shortly afterwards, as she learned from Jan Faber, neither her father nor her aunt wanted know something about it. Johanna is convinced that she is being lied to. The archaeologist's daughter allows Johanna to look through her father's files. Johanna finds a drawing and is convinced that the missing are in the Spiegelberg cave. The task force does not believe in it as this cave is on the opposite side of the mountain. Johanna then sets off on her own. She doesn't know that her father has since told the emergency services that they would do well to believe Johanna. There is a connection between the two caves in the mountain. While penetrating deeper into the cave, Johanna finds many corpses, they appear to be young soldiers. She takes his name tag from one of them. Then she hears the voices of those buried and wants to get help. As soon as she has left the cave, she meets Jan and her aunt at the entrance, who gives her an injection, saying she must protect her. Now Johanna's father steps in, the girls can be freed from the cave, but David remains missing.
Johanna learns from her father that it was he who betrayed his younger brother during the Hitler era because, when he was still very young in the last days of the war, he was hiding with his comrades in the Spiegel Valley Cave, i.e. had deserted. After this betrayal, the young men were all shot dead and Georg Bischoff was forced to push the button himself, which closed the cave by detonating it. Rudmann had found out his involvement in the matter and put him under pressure to get permission to excavate the cave. Since he persisted, Charlotte had killed him to keep the family secret. A little later Georg Bischoff shoots himself.
When Jan asked when Johanna was leaving, she said she was waiting until David was back. When they say that the search for him has been stopped, she only means, but she doesn't. In the last shot you can see David on the area above the Spiegelbach cave. Taking a deep breath, he sits there on a ledge. He is holding a flute in his hand.
production
Production notes
In the credits it says that the film was made using “Seven Magnificat Antiphons for Mixed Choir ( SATB ) a cappella ” Arvo Pärt . Thank you to the girls' choir of the Viktoria-Luise-Gymnasium in Hameln under the direction of Ute Sandfuchs. Klaus Richter and Cosmo Berger were the production managers for the film, Sabine Bischof for production and Angela Gillner for production. It is a production by Ziegler Film GmbH & Co. KG on behalf of ZDF .
Script explanations
Screenwriter Annette Hess lives near Hameln at the foot of the Ith, the mountain into which the Pied Piper 130 is said to have led. Together with her sister Christiane, she dealt intensively with the legend and its mystical origin and the various theories about it. Historians largely agree that the Pied Piper legend is based on an actual event. According to one theory, the children from Hameln may have followed a pagan sect leader to Mount Ith in 1284, where they died in a landslide. The authors were inspired by this mystical place for their script. Annette Hess said: “When you look at the Ith mountain, you inevitably ask yourself whether the Pied Piper legend is a fairy tale - or whether the 130 children of the city of Hameln actually disappeared here. And whether their bones can still be found in the mountain today. From this oppressive question we developed the idea for 'Die Toten von Hameln'. ”And Christiane Hess added:“ The figure of the gifted seducer, who leads individuals, their children, an entire city or even the general public to perdition, is timelessly threatening Appearance. In our script, too, we don't just tell about the one 'Pied Piper'. "
reception
Publication, audience rating
When it was first broadcast on May 18, 2014 in the ZDFneo program , the film was viewed by 4.72 million viewers. The market share was 16 percent. On May 19, 2014, the film ran for the first time in prime time on ZDF .
Studio Hamburg Enterprises released the film on DVD on October 2, 2014.
criticism
On the TV feature film page , the thumbs up showed that the film received one of three possible points for humor and standard and two for suspense. “A clever mystery thriller with Bjarne Mädel as Johanna's ex, based on the Pied Piper legend,” the editorial team assessed. Conclusion: "Suggestively illustrated psychological puzzle."
Rainer Tittelbach from tittelbach.tv gave the film four out of six possible stars and stated: “'Die Toten von Hameln' is a daring mixture of myth and reality that works better than other mystery dramas. As a viewer you feel less manipulated and the actors are in a class of their own. ”The critic went on: No matter how daring this mixture of myth and reality may seem, with the fundamentally different genres, the various motifs and storylines may also be (psycho) logical not always be compatible - that's how the story captivates you from the start. The authors mix a lot, but they don't pile up blindly, but carefully layer the motifs next to each other. [...] "A Julia Koschitz, a Bjarne Mädel, a Matthias Habich and a Ruth Reinecke" should be followed "on a modern, mystical journey into the German past driven by intuition and memories rather than others".
Hans Hoff rated the film in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and said that “even the dumbest” noticed “after a few minutes that things were not right in Hameln”. It is "something of a boon when a German television film gets by without the usual crime scene", the critic continued. The nested story, written by the authors Annette and Christiane Hess, seemed to the director Christian von Castelberg “apparently too complicated” to “simply be able to expose the ZDF audience subscribing to 08/15 thrillers to it”. That is why “the mysterious is simply served in a visual overdose”. One suspects "very soon, however, that everyone is insane, only the insane not". Julia Koschitz played this Johanna "very bravely". She could “send out this threatened look, shrug her thin shoulders and stage herself as a victim. But they cannot fight over-staging ”. Bjarne Mädel, who plays her police friend, is going down mercilessly. Even the seasoned Matthias Habich “doesn't have the slightest chance as Johanna's opaque father”. In the end, one suspects "how well the story could have worked if one had approached it with a little more confidence, if one had slowly developed the mysterious out of the normal and not squandered it in a screaming way at the beginning."
Hendrik Steinkuhl stated in the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung : “What ZDF is offering today at 8:15 p.m. with 'Die Toten von Hameln' is far from quality television. The fact that the television film is spreading a lot of nonsense about the Third Reich makes it a debacle for the award-winning screenwriter. ”The critic was particularly offended by the suggestion to the viewer that members of the 1931/1932 years also belong to“ Hitler's last line-up ”. There is no mention of that in “any history book”. The historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler interviewed said that the film added three years to the historical Volkssturm without need and that, according to this history, even 12 and 13 year olds had to oppose the Allies, was “complete nonsense”. Steinkuhl was of the opinion that this judgment should “apply to the entire film”. Even if the film is “of course a fiction”, firstly “the statements about the Third Reich are too close to reality to be recognized as unreliable by the audience”. And secondly, it is "simply embarrassing to enrich the darkest chapter of German history with bad fairy tales just to give a retired film mayor a reason to first reveal himself to his daughter in a highly dramatic way and then shoot him." “Such nonsense” tarnishes “the filmographies of some great actors. In addition to Julia Koschitz ”, this is“ mainly Bjarne Mädel ”. The film, which was shot in August 2012, was definitely not lying around for almost two years on ZDF for a reason. The ZDF officials should have wisely simply forgotten him.
Oliver Junge, who wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine , saw it similarly : “ZDF is reissuing the saga of the Pied Piper of Hameln and has hired first-class actors for it. Nevertheless, the film turned out to be one of the flatest mystery-psycho-flicks that we have ever seen. ”Compared to what Christian von Castelberg made of the Pied Piper,“ the legend about the flute player from the Ith mountain is absolutely brilliant "Stressed boys. “'Die Toten von Hameln', after all, 'TV film of the week'” is a flick “that the (probably not spoiled) German flat screen TV ever saw, and that - not evenings - with a first-class cast”.
Ulrike Cordes spoke in Stern about a rather daring mixture of fiction and politics, psychology and family drama, history and modern everyday life. At first, the film by the Hess sisters seems constructed, remote and alienating, but it can soon pull the viewer more and more under its spell. "A well-founded quartet of actors, director Christian von Castelberg [...] as a master of obvious suggestion and, last but not least, camerawoman Eeva Fleig with atmospheric shots of misty forest heights and half-timbered urban areas make the film above all a contribution to the entanglement of National Socialism and the fate of the family."
Web links
- The dead of Hamelin in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The dead in Hameln at crew united
- The dead of Hameln on Fernsehserien.de
- For the dead in Hameln see page programm.ard.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ The dead of Hameln. TV movie of the week. The history of the making of the film see page presseportal.zdf.de
- ^ A b Rainer Tittelbach : TV film "Die Toten von Hameln". Koschitz, Habich, girl, from Castelberg. For family drama, crime thriller, mystery, fairy tale see page tittelbach.tv. April 25, 2014. Retrieved August 17, 2020.
- ↑ Die Toten von Hameln Fig. DVD case ZDF (in the picture: Julia Koschitz)
- ↑ Die Toten von Hameln see page tvspielfilm.de (including 6 film images). Retrieved August 17, 2020.
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↑ Hans Hoff : ZDF mystery thriller "Die Toten von Hameln". Mysterious overdose
In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . May 19, 2014. Accessed August 30, 2020. -
↑ Henrik Steinkuhl: Nazi passages are “hand-book”. “Die Toten von Hameln” on ZDF
In: Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung . May 19, 2014. Accessed August 30, 2020. -
↑ Oliver Junge: "Die Toten von Hameln" on ZDF. Cave cheese with music
In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . May 19, 2014. Accessed August 30, 2020. - ↑ Ulrike Cordes: Die Toten von Hameln on ZDF. The Pied Piper from World War II In: Stern . May 19, 2014. Accessed August 30, 2020.
