Danger in the Past

out of the rubble: Young Ruth (Svea Lohde) awaits her mother.

Unearthing a story of German resistance to the Nazis, Margarethe von Trotta opens old wounds.

by Sam Adams

In a sense, it was by chance that Margarethe von Trotta ended up introducing Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru alongside her own Rosenstrasse at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. The director of one of the festival's gala films, she was invited to present one of her own favorites, but it was the festival's programmers who made the selection from her list of suggestions. At first glance, the two films don't have much in common: Kurosawa's is an invented tale of a drab functionary whose fatal cancer reawakens his interest in life, while von Trotta's is based on the true story of hundreds of German women who gathered outside a makeshift prison in Berlin to protest the internment of their Jewish husbands in the waning days of the Third Reich — the only successful protest against the deportation of Jews.

But if the stories differ, the similarity in their telling is striking. In Ikiru's brilliant final section, the already-dead functionary is remembered by his colleagues and those he helped, effectively showing how, in reconnecting with the people around him, he has forged a legacy that lives on after his death. Similarly, Rosenstrasse's remembrance is framed by the story of Hannah (Maria Schrader), a Holocaust survivor's daughter who returns to Germany to investigate the past her mother Ruth (Jutta Lampe) cannot or will not reveal. Posing as a student doing research, Hannah connects with Lena Fischer (played as a young woman by Katja Riemann), an Aryan German who defied her wealthy parents by marrying a Jewish musician, and took Hannah's mother under her wing awaiting the release of her husband and Hannah's grandmother.

Von Trotta's films often take on historical subject matter, but they're profoundly skeptical about the role of the impartial observer. In The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, co-directed with her then-husband Volker Schl°ndorff, a yellow journalist warps a woman's one-night stand with a suspected terrorist into evidence of collaboration, while in Circle of Deceit, directed by Schl°ndorff from a script co-written by von Trotta, Bruno Ganz's reporter struggles and fails to divorce his emotions from coverage of war-torn Beirut. The quasi-objective approach, it is clear, doesn't interest von Trotta much. Journalism, she says by phone from Italy, "doesn't speak from inside. I am starting from the inside and then I go to the outside. All my films are like that."

Though von Trotta began work on the Rosenstrasse script in 1994, shortly after seeing a documentary which unearthed the largely forgotten episode in German history, it wasn't until she hit upon the present-day framing device that the story fell into place. It wasn't simply a matter of demonstrating the historical event's contemporary relevance, but of phrasing the historical inquiry in individual terms. "The personal and the historical have to come together for me," von Trotta says. "It's not only the historical background and the big gesture. It's when I can go into the emotions of the people who are speaking to me."

Von Trotta once told an interviewer that she hoped "to have described the entire 20th century" through her films. But though her stories have touched on much of Germany's recent past, one period, the darkest in its history, remained notably unaddressed. "I had always wanted to make a story about this time, but I didn't find the right link, or the right story," von Trotta recalls, and by the time she had, funders in post-reunification Germany wanted to celebrate the future, not turn towards the past. "There were all these generations that wanted only to have fun," she says. "All the comedies in cinema — they didn't want to think about all that." Von Trotta relocated from Berlin to Paris, and spent most of a decade unsuccessfully trying to finance feature films while focusing on television projects.

Apart from the battle for funds, von Trotta had her own internal struggle to wage: finding the right story and how to tell it. Though von Trotta often focuses on women who resist the status quo, like the Communist revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg or the sisters in Marianne and Juliane, her films resist dogma and easy answers, even in a situation like Rosenstrasse's where morality would seem to be clear-cut. The movie has its share of evil Nazis, including an oily Joseph Goebbels, but there are many Germans who find ways to bend the rules, from Lena's boss who allows her to call out sick to attend the Rosenstrasse protests, to the Nazi prison guard who finds ways to let the women know if their husbands are inside the building or have already been taken away.

"For me it was important that these women did not make a political demonstration," Von Trotta says. "It was that every woman came there for her man, for her husband or her child, out of despair and out of rage. Through every day, coming more and more, it became like a political demonstration, but it was not meant like that."

Not surprisingly, Rosenstrasse's focus on "good Germans" who resisted the Nazis has led to charges that she is an apologist; on the day we spoke, the New York Times review accused the movie of contributing "yet another story to that already suspect subgenre of Gentiles rescuing Jews." Leaving aside the notion that any subgenre should be a priori "suspect," von Trotta allows that Rosenstrasse could not, and perhaps should not, have been made without the example of Schindler's List, which she calls the first cinematic portrayal of a "good German." "I think it was absolutely necessary that it was a Jewish filmmaker, a Jewish American, because if we would have done it in the first place, it would have been really painful. We did not make so many films about the time where we showed ourselves [to be] guilty." At the same time, von Trotta feels that Rosenstrasse criticizes, if only by implication, the vast majority of Germans who supported Hitler and did nothing to stop the Nazis. Looking at the Rosenstrasse protesters, von Trotta says, "you have the feeling, "Why did not other people do the same thing? Why didn't they resist the way these women did?' To say that we have also good Germans, that was really not my only purpose."

Admittedly, the criticism of the German populace remains implicit, though the elderly Lena calls the protests "only a small light in all this darkness." But the focus on an exceptional episode hardly amounts to a distortion of history — unless you'd apply the same term to Sobibor, Claude Lanzmann's documentary account of the only successful concentration camp uprising, which I doubt Rosenstrasse's detractors are likely to do. The movie's account is hardly rose-tinted. Among those who do not emerge from the Rosenstrasse prison alive are Hannah's grandmother, and von Trotta omits the most spectacular aspect of the story: The 25 Rosenstrasse prisoners who, as a result of the protests, were removed from Auschwitz and sent to the work camp at Grossbeeren. Rosenstrasse may not fit the picture of a German populace capitulating as one to Nazi rule, but history should not be written in broad strokes. Von Trotta characteristically describes her decade-long devotion to the Rosenstrasse story in personal terms, likening it to Hannah's investigations. "It's a very personal longing for knowing who you are. As long as you don't know who your mother is, you don't know who you are yourself."

Rosenstrasse opens Friday at Ritz Five. See Sam Adams' review on p. 40.