My life - Marcel Reich-Ranicki

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Movie
Original title My life - Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2009
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Dror Zahavi
script Michael Gutmann
production Katharina Trebitsch
music Annette Focks
camera Gero Steffen
cut Fritz Busse
occupation

My Life - Marcel Reich-Ranicki is a German TV film from 2009 . The film was based on the autobiography of the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki .

action

1949. Marcel Ranicki is Consul General of the People's Republic of Poland in London . He is ordered to Warsaw from the secret service headquarters. There he is arrested and interrogated by the officer Kawalerowicz. He is accused of participating in a Trotskyist conspiracy. Ranicki, on the other hand, suspects a Stalinist purge , which is initially directed against Jewish employees. During the interrogation, Marcel tells his life story, which interrupts the interrogation in flashbacks.

In 1929, nine-year-old Marcel came to live with his uncle Jakob's family in Berlin in order to receive a better education there than in his hometown of Włocławek . Marcel initially only speaks with a Polish accent and is teased at school. When his mother Helene also comes to Berlin, he finds emotional support from her. She encourages him to make an effort that he should always be the best. A few years later, Marcel is the best German student in the class and has good grades in all important subjects. After the seizure of power of Adolf Hitler , however, the bureaucratic prescribed anti-Semitism of the Nazis is also in the liberal Spruce High School in Berlin first consequences for the student Marcel. Jewish students are excluded from all school events and sports festivals. Only the theater, especially the theater on Gendarmenmarkt , the opera and literature bring joy to the young man. He wants to become a critic, while his childhood friend Angelika wants to become an actress. In 1938 Marcel was expelled from Germany in the course of the “ Poland Action ”, he was not allowed to take anything with him except a book and a suitcase and had to return to Poland at his own expense. In Warsaw, his older brother Alexander works as a dentist to keep the family afloat.

After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the occupation of Poland, the family experienced the first reprisals and humiliations from the anti-Semitic occupiers (beatings, insults and cleaning). Eventually the family had to move to the Warsaw ghetto . Father Reich decides that not all Germans are definitely barbarians, they would have been comradely to one another as early as the First World War. Marcel works as a translator for the ghetto administration. Tosia and her family are neighbors of the Reichs. When Tosia's father hanged himself, Helene Reich asks her son to take care of the young girl Tosia. Marcel and Tosia fall in love and stay together from now on. When the deportations from the ghetto began, Marcel married Tosia for her safety. Because of the shootings, which can only be heard, they shorten the ceremony to the bare minimum. In the next few weeks, both families will be deported from the ghetto to Treblinka . With a dog whip, an SS officer wordlessly selects the survivors of the ghetto according to age. When Marcel and Tosia Reich are also to be deported, they flee the ghetto. They escape the machine gun fire of a German soldier and wait until the evening for the best time when they can escape to the Jewish auxiliary guards against payment. In a suburb of Warsaw they are taken in by the unemployed typesetter Bolek Gawin and his wife Genia. There they survive with the illegal production of cigarettes and Marcel Reich recounts novels and plays after them while they work. Eventually they are liberated by the Red Army .

The life story of Marcel Ranicki touches the interrogator Kawalerowicz so much that he campaigns for his release. Ranicki is fired from the Communist Party, but gets a job as an editor in a publishing house. There he began to work as a critic for German literature. He organized Heinrich Böll's visit to Warsaw and met his childhood friend Angelika Hurwicz again during a guest performance by the Berliner Ensemble . Both were able to fulfill their childhood dream. In 1958 Marcel went to the Federal Republic of Germany against the wishes of his wife Tosia. When he got off the train in Frankfurt am Main , on his first steps in the west, he saw people on the street who reminded him of former henchmen from the Warsaw ghetto. The film ends when it appears in front of the editorial building of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . Four weeks later, his first literary criticism appeared in German under the name Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

background

The interrogation by the Polish secret service did not actually take place like this. Screenwriter Michael Gutmann invented this interrogation to get a dramaturgical framework for the film. The rest of the narration of the film corresponds to the autobiography of Marcel Reich-Ranicki. The film was shot in summer 2008 in Breslau , Liegnitz and Cologne . The final scene in which Reich-Ranicki goes into the building of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung shows the former main building of the Gerling Group (today: HDI-Gerling) in Cologne. The film premiered on March 18, 2009 in Cologne. The TV first broadcast took place on April 10, 2009 on ARTE . The film achieved a quota of 3.2 percent and thus four to five times the normal audience share of the station. Mein Leben is a joint production by WDR and ARTE. In the ARD evening program, 3.77 million television viewers saw the broadcast. Director Zahavi initially protested against this broadcast date, as he had to compete against a soccer game in the UEFA Champions League on ZDF .

Marcel Reich-Ranicki would have liked Moritz Bleibtreu in the lead role, but noted his age, which means that it would not have really been possible to cast it.

reception

Marcel Reich-Ranicki paid great tribute to the film after the premiere, saying that it had become “fabulous”. “He made me fabulous. This film is what I dreamed of but didn't dare to hope for. ”In fact, he secretly feared that the filming of his memories would fail. The biggest surprise for him, however, was "when the Schüttler appears at the beginning and says: 'I am Teofila Ranicki, the wife of the Polish consul.' I did not expect that. Well, these main roles were brilliantly cast ”. Reich-Ranicki also described the acting performance of Katharina Schüttler and Matthias Schweighöfer as “fabulous”. He was most touched by the scene in which Bolek opens the door and a Russian soldier stands in front of it, who asks out loud: “No Germans here?” Reich-Ranicki: “Where we constantly had to fear that someone would ask: 'No Jews here ? ', where this question would have meant death for us just an hour ago, Germans were now being sought. "Before the premiere, he only knew the first version of the script:" I didn't want this to be a film that I authorized , but a film about me. ”In an interview with Die Zeit on June 2, 2010, Reich-Ranicki called the film“ a great disappointment ”. The film offered “too little entertainment” and “didn't touch” him.

"Based on the autobiography of the 'literary pope' Reich-Ranicki, the film exemplarily depicts a Jewish fate during the Third Reich and tells a moving survival story from the time of the Holocaust."

- Lexicon of international film

Awards

Web links

Reviews

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from April 12, 2009, p. 19
  2. ↑ Alexander Krei: Reich-Ranicki gives ARD solid ratings , quotenmeter.de, April 16, 2009
  3. ↑ Biography has to assert itself against the Champions League quarter-finals , Hamburger Abendblatt , January 14, 2009
  4. ^ After the premiere: Marcel Reich-Ranicki speechless , dpa / Hamburger Abendblatt, April 9, 2009
  5. ↑ Frank Schirrmacher : The sources of his passion , FAZ , April 6, 2009
  6. ^ Mathias Döpfner : About love and death , interview with Marcel Reich-Ranicki. In: Die Welt , April 11, 2009, supplement Die literäre Welt , p. 1, p. 3
  7. ↑ “I'm not happy. I never was «. A conversation with Marcel Reich-Ranicki on his 90th birthday , interview with Marcel Reich-Ranicki. In: Zeit online , June 2, 2010
  8. ↑ My life - Marcel Reich-Ranicki. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used