Who, if not we
Who if not us is the first feature film by theater and film director Andres Veiel . He illuminates the prehistory of the RAF using the example of a main character and a marginal character who were a couple for almost a decade: Gudrun Ensslin and Bernward Vesper . The material on which the film is essentially based is derived from Veiel's long-term research on the subject, interviews with contemporary witnesses, but also from Gerd Koenen's study Vesper, Ensslin, Baader. Primal scenes of German terrorism .
With Lena Lauzemis and August Diehl in the leading roles, as well as Alexander Fehling as Andreas Baader , Wer if not we ran as a Berlinale competition film in 2011 and was released in German cinemas in the same year. The critics reacted more cautiously to Veiel's feature film debut than to some of his previous works, such as the thematically related but artistically more unconventional documentaries Black Box BRD or Der Kick .
action
The protagonists of the film, Bernward Vesper and Gudrun Ensslin, met in Tübingen in 1961 as students of German . She wants to be a teacher, he feels called to be a poet. Bernward's authoritarian father, almost 60 years his senior, the völkisch writer and anti-Semite Will Vesper , has made his son promise to see that his works are reprinted. With this goal in mind, and Gudrun as an employee, Bernward founded a small publishing house and moved into a flat with her. Their business relationship quickly turns into a relationship, at times even a ménage-à-trois with a friend. Your publishing idea is not bearing fruit for the time being; In order to get out of the red, they don't shy away from trying to ingratiate themselves with right-wing national newspapers. Gudrun counters the criticism of her father, the liberal-minded Protestant pastor Helmut Ensslin , with the accusation that he was more guilty during the Nazi era than Bernward's father: he was "only" blinded, but he "knew better" and still "participated". Intellectually, Gudrun quickly gains profile and security, but she appears emotionally unstable. Sometimes she forces herself to tolerate something she actually rejects, such as Bernward's infidelities. If you overstrain yourself, you will attempt suicide . Bernward shows up just in time, and both decide to start over together in West Berlin .
There Gudrun was awarded a PhD position ; The subject of her dissertation is Hans Henny Jahnn - actually Bernward's “discovery” and domain. In the period that followed, neither their research work nor their joint publishing work progressed. University life is becoming politicized, both get infected and join an SPD group. Gudrun regains a foothold more quickly and lets Bernward feel that she would continue on her way without him. When he also learns that he owes his life by no means to his (now deceased) father's wish to bear children , but to the Nazi ideology of the “ Führer ”, he attempts suicide. His mother saves him, but only the arrival of Gudrun leads him out of the crisis and both to the decision to get engaged. Two years later, in 1967, their son Felix was born. Shortly thereafter, however, there were two events within a very short time through which Gudrun became further - and, it seems, finally - radicalized: the Shah's visit , whose violence she witnessed on the street, and the encounter with Andreas Baader.
Baader impresses her as a man of action with a macho , arrogant, anti-intellectual attitude. Suddenly she ends up in bed with him; she justifies herself to Bernward by saying that she is just like him. She only acts once more with him, translating speeches by the Black Panther fighter Stokely Carmichael , which Bernward publishes; at the presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair, however, she interferes in an interview with him, brushing up against confrontation while he seeks a pragmatic balance. When she finally breaks away from her “shitty nuclear family” (Baader), she does so, not without scruples, but believing in a kind of “mission”. Following the maxim “Talking without acting is not possible”, from then on she became a protagonist in contemporary history: department store arson , trial, escape underground, violent liberation of the arrested Baader . Bernward, for his part, fights for her: defends her in court, writes her letters in prison, visits her there - in vain. His attempt to cope on his own, too, was in vain, which even with her at his side he was barely able to do: to look after Felix appropriately, to be successful as a publisher, to gain recognition as a writer. Drugs do the rest to put him in a state that eventually leads to his being admitted to a psychiatric ward, while Felix is in the care of an acquaintance. - A few sentences in the credits provide information about what follows and is historically documented ( RAF , Stammheim , both suicide, Bernward's posthumous success as a writer, Felix's acceptance by a foster family).
analysis
origin
"The many other RAF films", according to screenwriter and director Andres Veiel, "usually all start with the shooting at Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967. " The associated invitation to simplified thinking through the formation of "causal chains" he wanted to escape. He wanted to penetrate deeper into the "thicket of causes", further back in time - into "the early years". Logically, he takes a look at his parents' homes. The Vespers and Ensslins, as he shows them, have at least two things in common despite their differences: the classic distribution of gender roles (dominant fathers, submissive mothers) and the as yet unprocessed Nazi past of these fathers. The fact that the refusal is much greater with the father, whose guilt was much greater (Vespers), is only one thing. It is even more important to see that his attitude does not turn the son into a rebel. Why is a "thicket of causes" in itself. It takes Bernward years (basically his life) and hard internal struggles to at least create critical distance, which puts him among the “father children who are typical for Veiel, who have reproduced the totalitarian structures of [their] fathers up to Self-destruction".
Gudrun is not such a “father child”. She's too extroverted for that . However, contradiction is also tolerated on her father's side. It is also suggested that the Ensslins opened up to the world in the 1960s. When Bernward's first visit was anything but free and at ease, three years later they made it possible for a lively engagement party with a rock'n'roll band. And two years later, the younger sister, who was sent to Berlin as a nanny, dares to tell her parents over the phone that Gudrun is prevented because she is "fucking" with someone else. The film therefore suggests that, contrary to expectations, “it was children from a relatively liberal family who formulated the resistance against their parents' generation in an extremist way”. Using the Ensslins as an example, he also demonstrates that the daughter could have judged her father's behavior very differently during the Nazi era.
Alternatives
Simply by the fact that the protagonist who has the more weighty reasons does not become the perpetrator, the film exemplarily shows that there were no simple "causal chains" in the personal decision for or against the RAF and its goals. As mentioned several times, Gudrun also has alternatives. So she knows that her father was at a distance from the Nazi regime , if not even in resistance, and that later he only volunteered for military service to protect the family. So she would have good reasons to be proud of her father. Instead, she accuses him of having supported the system despite better knowledge. When she expresses this in full sharpness, perhaps more out of conviction than arrogance, he replies in all seriousness: "You can do better!"
Even later, when she is becoming increasingly radicalized, there are always moments when, as Verena Lueken and Martina Knoben note in unison, as a viewer, “it could have turned out differently”. Lueken emphasizes the scene in which Gudrun leaves husband and child as one that convinces her through its closeness to the characters and gives the impression that Gudrun might have made a different decision if Bernward had only offered a little more resistance. Another alternative opens up to Gudrun, who is in custody , when the director of the institution suggests the " March through the institutions " - very similar to what her sister Christiane Ensslin does in the 30 years earlier film Die Bleierne Zeit , which contrasts with you choose this path. Martina Knoben judges the openness to options that the film leaves as the "immensely political" thing about it, and Verena Lueken sums it up: "We may never find out why Gudrun Ensslin became a terrorist and Vesper and many others didn't."
title
Although not taken up literally at any point, there are several scenes that implicitly refer to the film title Who if not we - most clearly the one when Gudrun comes back from the demo against the Shah's visit, hurt herself, and in her outrage ( “They shoot at helpless people”) confronts her younger sister once again with what she believes to be her father's neglect and in no way wants to be reproached: “Recognize something and still do nothing.” At least once the film suggests then that she tries to fill the resulting commandment with meaningful content: When Baader urges action in view of the political unrest outside Germany, she does not just want to “go on” and says: “Let's do better!” Baader, however, interested only the act itself: “Nothing will come after us anyway.” When Bernward finally visits her in custody, she speaks for the first time of an “order”, specifically of that they both have “different assignments”, to which he asks: “Who assigned you and for what?” The film doesn't give an explicit answer, but leaves no doubt that Ensslin is acting in “self-empowerment”. However, the question that the opening credits ( the film title appears in the fully blooming mushroom of an atomic bomb explosion ) unspokenly addresses the parents' generation: Why not you?
Emergence
Gerd Koenen's study Vesper, Ensslin, Baader was the “inspiration and template” for the script . Primal scenes of German terrorism . Veiel was also able to fall back on extensive material of his own that he had collected over decades since he became an eyewitness to the Stammheim trials at the age of 15 . In preparation for the film, he also conducted interviews with around 40 (very different) contemporary witnesses, many of whom had not been questioned before. Most of them, according to Veiel, could not, however, have persuaded them to appear in front of a camera. That was also one of the reasons why he realized Wer if not us not as a documentary but as a feature film. The 3-hour first version of the film was shortened by around a third.
In connection with the genre , which was new to him , Veiel also commented on the term "reality". It changes, he says, not only depending on the subject, but also on age. The cinematic reality that he shows is composed of a “reconstruction of people who remember”. And memory is fiction. By choosing from the “many materials”, he then decides on a certain reading. However, despite many years of preoccupation with the subject, he would never presume to say, "This is now the last and only valid reading".
criticism
“Who, if not him,” says Carolin Ströbele pointedly formulates the expectation of the director of Black Box BRD , “the psychologist among German filmmakers” who not only wants to know “why people do something, but what happens to them must be for them to do it ”. She attests Veiel to have done a lot of things right - in such a way that, with Bernward Vesper, he focuses on a marginal figure of the RAF and that he shows him and Gudrun Ensslin as two people who both do not know “who they should be” and believed they "had to bring their parents' lives to perfection". Peter Schneider emphasizes that Veiel told the prehistory of the 1968 movement and the RAF "like no one else before him" and "without speculating on the action bonus" . He pays unreserved admiration for the actors' performance: “ Lena Lauzemis as the first touching, then increasingly shrill and fanatical key figure of the trio, Alexander Fehling as a sometimes likable, sometimes disgusting daredevil and thug, August Diehl as a stray bourgeois son who is looking for the blue flower and carries the whole film. "
Martina Knoben also praises the main actors for their "enormously lively and multi-layered" figure drawing, but directs the attention more to particularly successful individual scenes and states that the film is "most beautiful" precisely where it has "no plan, no historically documented narrative" follow, from which she derives the "rarely voiced objection" that she would have liked the film to last longer. Christian Buß sees this aspect much more critically when he thinks that Veiel has “trimmed down the root cause” of which he himself speaks; Specifically, he dislikes the fact that the “daring documentary filmmaker” “organized all the turning points of political drama solely according to the logic of erotic drama” in his “astonishingly conventional” feature film debut. When it comes to erotic / sex, Verena Lueken thinks, the film offers a completely new perspective: Deviating from the previous reading (“bondage to Baader”), Ensslin is driven here by “curiosity for a harder pace”. Peter Schneider emphatically contradicts this: the sex scenes are “staged with great discretion”, but they all have the same effect; when Ensslin sleeps with Baader, it looks the same as it did before with Vesper, which is why it is hard to understand why she leaves one for the other.
On the other hand, he expressly praises the director for the “accuracy and patience” with which he cinematically captures the “aesthetic desert” in which his protagonists grow up: “the brownish, yellowish, flowered wallpaper and curtains, the dark furniture and cupboards , the angular, uptight, joyless of the apartments and their residents, the paralyzed conversations at lunch. ”Unfortunately, according to Schneider, this advantage has a downside. In Who if not we he misses the “outside world” and with it “freedom, imagination and recklessness”; the film takes place almost exclusively in apartments and is "organized as a chamber play ". For Carolin Ströbele, on the other hand, the film is not chamber play enough. Veiel had avoided the “pompousness” of the Baader Meinhof complex and revealed many hitherto little-known details of the RAF story, but ultimately fell into the “trap” of a typical biopic . The interspersed “black-and-white documentary snippets”, for example, are well known and stand in the way of Veiel's “attempt to awaken new, own images in the audience”. Ströbele sums up that the "classic narrative" probably fails on a subject like the RAF and indirectly asks the question of an alternative by reminding us that Veiel himself used the "medium of extreme abstraction" to create an "oppressive chamber piece" in Der Kick. and "great cinema" was successful at the same time.
Awards
The film won the Alfred Bauer Prize and the Guild of German Art Theaters Prize at the 2011 Berlinale . In the same year, five nominations for the German Film Prize followed (best film, best leading actor - August Diehl, best leading actress - Lena Lauzemis, best editing, best production design). The production was awarded the bronze film prize in the category. Andres Veiel also received the Hessian Film Prize 2011 in the feature film category .
In 2012, the audio description spoken by Suzanne Vogdt was awarded the German Audio Film Prize in the cinema film category.
The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) awarded the film the title “particularly valuable”.
Web links
- Who if not us in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Data sheet for Who if not us at berlinale.de (PDF, 136 KiB)
- Trailer on YouTube
- "Who if not we" - a "political love drama" - interview with director Andres Veiel, stern.de , February 17, 2011
- Martina Knoben: Poetry and Killing , sueddeutsche.de , February 17, 2011
- Who if not us will review Annette Vowinckel at Zeitgeschichte-online
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for who if not us . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , August 2011 (PDF; test number: 126 718 V).
- ↑ Age rating for who if not us . Youth Media Commission .
- ↑ a b c d e Martina Knoben: Poetry and killing in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 18, 2011, accessed on October 2, 2017.
- ↑ a b c d e f Who if not us. A "political love drama". Interview with Andres Veiel. in: Der Stern, February 17, 2011, accessed October 2, 2017.
- ↑ http://www.berlinale.de/de/programm/berlinale_programm/datenblatt.php?film_id=20113348
- ↑ a b c d Christian Buß: Bomb in bed in: Spiegel online, March 8, 2011, accessed on October 7, 2017.
- ↑ a b c d e Verena Lueken: The history of the RAF: "Who if not we" in: FAZ, March 9, 2011, accessed on October 7, 2017.
- ↑ a b Carolin Ströbele: In bed with Gudrun Ensslin in: DIE ZEIT online, February 18, 2011, accessed on October 7, 2017.
- ↑ a b c Peter Schneider: The joyless of those years in: Der Tagesspiegel, March 10, 2011, accessed on October 7, 2017.
- ↑ cf. German film award for "Vincent will Meer" ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at dw-world.de, April 8, 2011 (accessed April 8, 2011).
- ↑ 10th German Audio Film Award 2012
- ↑ Report of the German Film and Media Assessment
