Homecoming (1941)

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Movie
Original title Homecoming
Country of production Germany , Austria
original language German
Publishing year 1941
length 96 minutes
Age rating FSK none
Rod
Director Gustav Ucicky
script Gerhard Menzel
production Wien-Film GmbH ,
production group: Erich von Neusser ,
production manager: Ernst Garden
music Willy Schmidt-Gentner
camera Günther Anders
cut Rudolf Schaad
occupation

Homecoming is a German anti- Polish propaganda film by Gustav Ucicky from 1941 .

Today it is a reserved film from the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation . It is part of the foundation's portfolio, has not been released for distribution and may only be shown with the consent and under the conditions of the foundation.

action

In the Lutsk Voivodeship , the Volhyn German minority is harassed by the Polish majority. The doctor Dr. Thomas does not have a hospital available for necessary operations. His daughter Marie teaches at the German school and has to watch this school being expropriated by the Polish state and demolished by angry masses. She brings her protest, in which she invokes the constitutionally guaranteed protection of minorities, to the mayor, but is not heard. Together with her fiancé, Dr. Fritz Mutius, she drives to the capital to present her concerns to the voivode , but is not even received there. The fiancées decide to use their stay in the capital to go to court the next day, but first go to the cinema in the evening. They are accompanied by their friend Karl Michalek, who was forcibly recruited by the Polish army . Since they refuse to sing the Polish national anthem in the projection room , the mob begins to beat them; Fritz is seriously injured. After being turned away at the hospital, he dies.

The violence against the German minority continues to increase; Marie's father is also the victim of an attack in which he becomes blind. When the Germans gather secretly in a barn to hear Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on September 1, 1939, they are arrested and taken to prison. They are mistreated by the guards and finally driven into a submerged cellar, where they narrowly avoid a massacre. At the last second they are rescued by the invading German soldiers .

The Germans are preparing to move back home. Now there are only small problems to be solved, e.g. B. that the widowed innkeeper Launhardt does not dare to hold the hand of the socially supposedly superior Marie. However, since she has already stepped in as a surrogate mother for his sons, the misunderstandings can easily be dispelled.

At the end of the film, the Wolhynian German motorcade crosses the border with the German Empire . The final shot shows a huge picture of Hitler set up at the border station.

Historical context

The secret additional protocol of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact , which regulated the planned division of Poland, also provided for the resettlement of around 60,000 Wolhynian Germans, whose settlement area was added to the Soviet Union . This resettlement took place shortly before Christmas 1939. The Wolhynia Germans on Polish territory were resettled in the Warthegau , where no Poles or Jews were to live in the future .

The screening of the film (see below) coincided with the initial phase of the campaign against the Soviet Union, which was successful for the German side . In this context, the film propagated an official German war goal, namely the "liberation" of all ethnic Germans in a Greater German Reich, which had already been partially achieved a few years earlier during the attack on Poland . Erwin Leiser also states that the film branded “the tactics and terror of National Socialism”, “but as Polish provocation and Polish brutality”, for which Leiser paradigmatically u. a. the scenes military parade, compulsion to sing along to a song, assaults on Germans (by “Poles as cowardly and wicked subhumans ”, with the swastika torn from a girl's neck and stoned in triumph ) and the impending death penalty for secretly listening to Hitler's speeches on the radio served by Germans.

Production and reception

Shooting of the film in Poland, recording by a propaganda company , 1941

The pictures of the painter Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhäuser , who in January 1940 at Heinrich Himmler's request accompanied a trek of resettlers from Wolhynia to the Warthegau and captured them in numerous sketches and drawings, served as a template for the film, the making of which he again documented.

The interior shots for the film were made between January 2 and mid-July 1941 in the Vienna studios Rosenhügel , Sievering and Schönbrunn. The outdoor shots took place between February and June 1941 a. a. in choir cells and Ortelsburg (East Prussia). Polish and Jewish actors who were recruited by the Polish actor Igo Sym also had to take part . Sym was murdered by the Polish resistance movement on March 7, 1941 while the film was being made. The role of the Jewish merchant Solomonssohn had to play a “non-Aryan” with Eugen Preiss. He accepted the role out of fear of deportation. Return home cost 3.7 million Reichsmarks in total .

When it was submitted to the film inspection agency on August 26, 1941, the film was classified as suitable for young people and was given the highest rating of "particularly valuable in terms of state policy and art". This was followed by the ratings "popular education" and "youth value" on October 10th and "film of the nation" on October 30th, 1941. UfA -verleih took over the distribution.

The premiere took place on August 31, 1941 in the Cinema San Marco in Venice . As part of the Venice Film Art Weeks, the film won the trophy of the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture. The German premiere followed on October 10, 1941 in the Scala cinema in Vienna. In the foyer there was a flower-wrapped bust of Hitler, and Reichsstatthalter Baldur von Schirach was present. At the end of the performance, which was interrupted several times by applause, the participants Paula Wessely, Ruth Hellberg, Gerhild Weber, Carl Raddatz, Werner Fuetterer, Gustav Ucicky and Gerhard Menzel appeared to the applauding audience.

The first performance in Berlin took place on October 23, 1941 at the same time in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo and in the Ufa-Theater Wagnitzstrasse. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on August 20, 1944 that the dungeon scene with Paula Wessely was “the best thing that has ever been shot in a film”. However, with a grossing of 4.9 million Reichsmarks, Heimkehr did not meet expectations.

After the end of the Second World War , the Allied High Command prohibited the performance of Homecoming . The film was not submitted to the FSK ; there was no public re-performance. The exploitation rights are exercised by the Munich-based Taurus-Film GmbH.

After the end of the war, the director Ucicky was banned from working for both Germany and Austria because of his directorial work for “Heimkehr”, which was lifted for Austria in July 1947. Paula Wessely was also banned from performing for her work.

The writer Elfriede Jelinek thinks that Homecoming is “the worst propaganda fictional film ever made by the Nazis”, and has processed parts of the film dialogue in her play Burgtheater .

See also

literature

  • Klaus Kanzog : “Particularly valuable in terms of state policy”. A manual for 30 German feature films from 1934 to 1945 (= Diskurs Film 6). Diskurs -Film-Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-926372-05-2 .
  • Gerald Trimmel: Homecoming. Strategies of a National Socialist Film. Werner Eichbauer Verlag, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-901699-06-6 (also: Vienna, Univ., Diploma thesis, 1992).
  • Georg Markus : The Hörbigers. Family biography. Amalthea Signum, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3-850-02565-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erwin Leiser : "Germany, awake!" Propaganda in the film of the Third Reich . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1968, p. 60 f.
  2. ^ Hans Schmid Heimkehr " ( memento from March 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at TELEPOLIS.