Rosenstrasse (film)

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Movie
Original title Rosenstrasse
Country of production Germany , Netherlands
original language German , English
Publishing year 2003
length approx. 135 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 10
Rod
Director Margarethe von Trotta
script Margarethe von Trotta
Pamela Katz
production Henrik Meyer ,
Richard Schöps ,
Markus Zimmer
music Loek Dikker
camera Franz Rath
cut Corina Dietz
occupation

Rosenstrasse is a film by the German director Margarethe von Trotta . The drama is based on the so-called Rosenstrasse protest that took place in Berlin in 1943 and was produced by Studio Hamburg Letterbox Filmproduktion and Tele-München (TMG).

action

Ruth, who lives in New York, has just buried her husband when she recollects her Jewish roots in what her children consider to be an extreme way. Bitterness has taken hold of her, which leads to the point that she forbids her daughter Hannah from marrying her non-Jewish friend Luis. During the funeral ceremony, Hannah gets to know a cousin of her mother who she didn't know about before, and she realizes that she has never learned anything about her mother Ruth and her past either. However, it weighs down and buries the memory in itself.

After Hannah learns from her mother's cousin about a woman named Lena Fischer, who saved her mother from being murdered by the Nazis during World War II , she begins to research. She manages to locate the woman - now 90 years old - in Berlin and to contact her. Without first revealing her identity, she asks Lena about her experiences during the Nazi regime.

So Hannah gradually learns of the events that took place in 1943 in Berlin's Rosenstrasse, where Jewish men and relatives from so-called mixed marriages were rounded up and imprisoned at the time. Ruth, who was just 8 years old at the time, was also one of those affected, as her mother was also being held in Rosenstrasse. Completely on her own, she sought and found refuge with Lena. Lena also missed her husband and tried to influence those in power with the help of her brother Arthur.

Little by little, more and more wives came together in front of the building on Rosenstrasse. There they waited for their husbands to be released and verbal protests were raised. In fact, Hannah learns, the detainees were eventually released. For some, however, the happy ending came too late, as some of the prisoners had already been deported to the extermination camps - including Ruth's mother. Ruth initially stayed with Lena, but she could never explain what had happened to her mother. Eventually she had to send Ruth to live with her relatives in America.

Through the contact that Hannah made with Lena after all these decades, she takes on a mediating role. With a symbolic ring from that time, she brings Lena's greetings to her mother and in this way can alleviate at least part of the bitterness of past memories.

backgrounds

Margarethe von Trotta researched for several years in order to find out stories and backgrounds of individual fates in personal conversations with contemporary witnesses , which she links to fictional characters in the plot. She herself describes Rosenstrasse as a love story on various levels, which is on the one hand about spouses, but also about the love between daughter and mother or brother and sister.

The processing of historical events is surrounded in the film by a framework story that takes place today. This opens up the possibility of narrative reflection through the figure of Hannah, who acts as a link between today's perspective and the painful memory of those affected at the time.

The main part of the outdoor shooting was recorded in the large open-air backdrops on the premises of Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam .

After screenings at film festivals in Toronto and Venice , the film was released in German and Swiss cinemas on September 18, 2003.

Reviews

Despite numerous awards, the film also provoked harsh criticism from historians. It lit up on a board at the beginning of the film that claims authenticity with the actual events of 1943. Wolfgang Benz criticized the Süddeutsche Zeitung : “Entertainment, the free use of historical material, is legitimate. But to give the impression in the opening credits that what was offered was authentic and that it happened, then to turn the story upside down and invent new myths, that is dishonest and makes enlightenment into a mess. ” A critic like Rüdiger Suchsland also judged similarly : "ROSENSTRASSE confirms pretty much every objection that can be raised against films about real events during the Nazi period: It doesn't show a single one of the more than 6 million dead, it just shows Nazis as harmless grimaces, it doesn't show the murderers and the victims, but the survivors and the rescuers. "

The historian Beate Meyer initially pointed out several errors in her detailed account of the film. It is considered certain that the vast majority of the Jews detained in Rosenstrasse were not obliged to wear the Star of David and did not wear it either. In this context, a Gestapo official incorrectly cites the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935; However, the status of a privileged mixed marriage did not exist before 1938. The threat to the protesting women from machine guns and their “murderer, murderer” shouts, which are interpreted as an active resistance, cannot be proven historically. The film lays the wrong track because it depicts the transport of 25 men to Auschwitz, but withholds their return. The film also leaves out how it would have gone on with the supposedly rescued Fabian and Lena: At the beginning of 1945 the Jewish spouses were deported to the East and only escaped death through the rapid advance of the Red Army. The film does not go into the interpretation of the “ factory action ”, according to which in 1943 the Jewish spouses held in Rosenstrasse were only to be checked and then released. He leaves open why the detainees were released. The only possible explanation he offers is the sensation that the protest arouses or Lena's fictitious intervention with the minister.

In mixed marriages, the constellation that - according to the definition of the National Socialist racial laws - the husband was Jewish prevailed. Although the “ German-blooded ” wives would not have withstood the pressure relatively more often and initiated the separation, the film projects this behavior onto Ruth's father and would record reality. In addition, a feminist act of solidarity is inserted into the film in which little Ruth is saved by women.

Beate Meyer criticizes that the film portrays the utopia of a successful resistance and projects contemporary hopes and myths into the historical material. The film could be the viewer with the question alone, "how could it have actually come to the murder of Jews when it still took only seven days of steadfastness, to prevent it."   The deportation of German Jews and the Holocaust could not at that time by such demonstrations more to be prevented.

Awards

The film was also nominated for:

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Age rating for Rosenstrasse . Youth Media Commission .
  2. ↑ The Making of… , DVD bonus material
  3. ↑ PNN: "Rosenstrasse" and "Herr Lehmann" - German films also feel at home in Babelsberg , http://www.pnn.de/ (accessed on February 27, 2012)
  4. ↑ imdb.com: Rosenstrasse (2003): Release Info
  5. ↑ Critique in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (accessed on November 18, 2007)
  6. ↑ artechock.de (accessed on November 18, 2007)
  7. ↑ Beate Meyer: History in the film: persecution of Jews, mixed marriages and the protest in Rosenstrasse 1943. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtsforschung 52 (2004), pp. 23–36
  8. ↑ Beate Meyer: History in the film ... p. 35
  9. ↑ Beate Meyer: History in the film ... p. 36