Between yesterday and tomorrow

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Movie
Original title Between yesterday and tomorrow
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1947
length 109, 112 minutes
Rod
Director Harald Braun
script Harald Braun
Herbert Witt based on a template by Jacob Geis
production Harald Braun for NDF
music Mark Lothar
camera Günther Anders
cut Adolph Schlyßleder
occupation

Between yesterday and tomorrow is a German feature film from 1947 by Harald Braun . It belongs to the genre of the homecoming and debris film typical of the first few years after the end of the Second World War in Germany .

action

Like so many other German cities, Munich’s cityscape is dominated by ruins immediately after the war. It is from here, in 1938, that the painter, draftsman and caricaturist Michael Rott fled to Switzerland. Now, in March 1947, he has returned, and as soon as he arrives at Munich Central Station, he stays in the Regina-Palast-Hotel , which is about halfway destroyed and where he had stayed earlier. Hotelier Rolf Ebeling meets Rott with open rejection, because he considers him to be the thief of a valuable piece of jewelry that the Jew Nelly Dreyfuss harassed and persecuted by the National Socialists on March 22, 1938 for safekeeping and passing on to her divorced husband, the actor Alexander Corty , had entrusted.

Flashback: Michael Rott embarks on a journey back in time to the relevant year 1938. He tries to remember what happened on that day. At that time he was in love with the student Annette Rodenwald, with whom he spent the evening at the Regina Hotel. That same night he had to leave Annette head over heels - via the hotel's own fire brigade ladder - and flee to Switzerland. The reason: A mocking cartoon had caused him political anger and he was written out for arrest. Back to the present: The following day Michael meets his Annette again in the hotel. He learns from her that she had waited for him for two years and that after his sudden disappearance, she finally married Ebeling.

In a second flashback, Ebeling describes the events of that March day 1938 from his perspective. On this day, Nelly Dreyfuss met her ex-husband Alexander, from whom she had divorced under pressure from the Nazi authorities in order not to endanger his career in the Reich. As Corty was in dire financial straits, she asked Michael that evening to hand over the jewelry to her ex the day after she left. A short time later her presence at the hotel was discovered by a high party official. In the greatest desperation, Nelly evaded her arrest by suicide. Rott makes it clear to Ebeling that he threw the jewelry in the mailbox of Corty's room before he escaped.

It soon turns out that Michael Rott is actually innocent and that he did not commit the theft alleged to him. The young Katharina, with whom Rott became friends, provides an explanation: In 1944 she was employed as a waitress in the hotel's own bar. One day she served Alexander Corty there, who gave her the jewelry for safekeeping. In an Allied bombing raid on Munich a little later, the underemployed actor was killed while calmly waiting for the bombed house to collapse. Since then, Katharina had planned to sell the jewelry, which had meanwhile been recovered from the rubble, with the help of a black market dealer. However, when she learns how important the jewelry is for Rott, she prevents the deal at the last moment and can rehabilitate Rott with this act.

Production notes

Between yesterday and tomorrow , from mid-April to the summer of 1947, the Bavaria Film studios in Geiselgasteig and the Regina-Palast-Hotel were filmed and, in addition to the film made in Berlin ... and above us, the sky was the first in the US occupation zone with an American Feature film produced under license as well as Harald Braun's first post-war directing, made possible by the American film officer and former UFA star producer Erich Pommer . The first performance took place on December 11, 1947 in the Luitpold Theater in Munich. On March 19, 1948, the film also ran in the western zones of Berlin.

Walter Bolz was in charge of production. Robert Herlth created the film structures, Walter Rühland supervised the sound. For Willy Birgel , between yesterday and tomorrow was the first opportunity after the war to get back in front of the camera. Due to his prominent position in the Third Reich ( ... riding for Germany ), he was not allowed to play until then. His young colleague Werner Peters made his film debut here.

In order to make the hotel business with its waiters, porters and chambermaids as realistic as possible, Braun quickly hired the employees who had become unemployed due to the destruction of the real Hotel Regina as extras and let them play their actual roles in the film. According to Riess, director Braun wanted to set a monument to his secretary and good friend Nelly Dreyfuss with the role of the persecuted Jew. Ms. Dreyfuss looked very much like Sybille Schmitz , so much so that she was often stopped on the street as Ms. Schmitz and asked for autographs [...] ”

Reviews

The contemporary reviews as well as the retrospective ones from the Adenauer years were quite positive and mild, while in later years the noncommittality, the unanalytical and the self-pity of this film and also of numerous other films from the years before the founding of the two German states (1949 ) was attacked. Only Der Spiegel showed a tendency towards dissatisfaction as early as 1947. Here are seven examples from half a century:

In the issue of December 20, 1947, one could read in the Spiegel magazine : “It is a" homecoming "film of its own kind, a crime-political riot peppered with routine and high-profile moments. (...) The film shows today in the life-threatening crowd of the tram and the black market. There, Kat brings back the jewelry for which Michael was suspected. This Kat proves to be a true child prodigy of today, but the audience didn't quite believe it. It responded with intermittent giggles, even when the alarm sirens wailed. In general, those who came with high expectations were disappointed. Yesterday's fates combined with criminalistics, it didn't quite work. "

The following can be read in Curt Riess ' memento book Das There is only once : “This film, too, is an account of what happened. But Harald Braun does not hate - not even what he had to reject. He doesn't look for guilty parties either, and if he does, then he is more interested in why people had to be guilty than they were. "At a later point, Riess recalled:" The film will of course not be a success, despite the bombing . People in Germany are getting tired of dealing with the past. They want to laugh again before they have completely forgotten how to laugh. "

In Heinrich Fraenkel's Immortal Film you can read: Between yesterday and tomorrow “was a film which materially adhered to the sensible recipe that the artistic idea was the essential thing and that the contemporary material that grew out of one's own experience also attracted interest from abroad would awaken. ”Elsewhere, Fraenkel said:“ [...] the main thing about the subject is the design of the emotional and physiological ruins of the first post-war years ”.

Bucher's Encyclopedia of Films dealt intensively with the general problem of the rubble film genre: “More typical of early German post-war production, however, were the rubble films made from 1947 onwards, works that dealt with the Nazi era from the perplexed, hungover perspective of what followed, and many nullified well-intentioned approaches by restricting them to the lament of the already powerless little man or lost themselves in general accusations that did not affect anyone because everyone was affected. Typical examples of this were Harald Braun's Between Yesterday and Tomorrow or Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Love 47 ... "

Reclam's film guide, too, viewed between yesterday and tomorrow and the rubble film genre it represented quite critically: “But almost all of these 'rubble films' that brought ruins and emaciated people to the screen missed their target, if not their topic. They covered up the cause of the misery by portraying National Socialism either as an anonymous power or as the individual fall of Adolf Hitler, and they were not looking for a new path into the future, but an inconspicuous arrangement with the legacy of the past. "

The film's large lexicon of people called the strip in Harald Braun's biography an "unctuous homecoming piece."

The lexicon of international films wrote: "The conventional but well-acted drama avoids dealing with the problems of that time, but also dispenses with obvious sensational effects."

The verdict of Christa Bandmann and Joe Hembus in the book Klassiker des deutschen Tonfilms was particularly drastic : "The heroes of the Nazi film present themselves in their new roles as victims of the Nazi regime; an embarrassing case of self- denazification and a terrifying example for those who were persecuted by the Nazi regime Opportunism brought about the continuity of German filmmaking. "

literature

  • Curt Riess: There's only one. The book of German films after 1945 . Henri Nannen Verlag, Hamburg 1958, pp. 142–144.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Film studio right next door . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1947, pp. 19 ( online ).
  2. ^ Alfred Bauer : German feature film Almanach. Volume 2: 1946-1955 , p. 14
  3. ↑ a b Curt Riess: There's only one. The book of German film after 1945. Hamburg 1958. p. 145
  4. ↑ Curt Riess: There's only one. The book of German film after 1945. Hamburg 1958, p. 144
  5. ↑ Kat helps Michael . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1947, pp. 48 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Curt Riess: There's only one. The book of German film after 1945. Hamburg 1958. p. 143
  7. ^ Heinrich Fraenkel: Immortal Film. The great chronicle. From the first tone to the colored wide screen. Munich 1957, p. 151 f.
  8. ^ Heinrich Fraenkel: Immortal Film. The great chronicle. From the first tone to the colored wide screen. Munich 1957, p. 418
  9. ↑ Liz-Anne Bawden (ed.), German edition by Wolfram Tichy: Buchers Enzyklopädie des Films. Lucerne and Frankfurt / M. 1977, p. 180.
  10. ^ Reclam's film guide. By Dieter Krusche, collaboration with Jürgen Labenski. Stuttgart 1973, p. 147.
  11. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 1: A - C. Erik Aaes - Jack Carson. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 .
  12. ↑ Between yesterday and tomorrow. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  13. ↑ See: Christa Bandmann and Joe Hembus: Classics of the German sound film 1930-1960. Munich 1980, page 249