Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema by Angelos Koutsourakis

Author:Angelos Koutsourakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Figure 6.1 Konrad Wolf, Professor Mamlock (1961)

One of the typical charges pressed against German filmic treatments of Jewish persecution was that they rarely showed history from a Jewish perspective (see Wolfgram 2002; Elsaesser 2014). Evidently Wolf, being a Jewish communist, does not preach through Mamlock as an armchair critic, but as someone with a historical experience of anti-fascist resistance. A true believer of socialist internationalism, Wolf fought with the Red Army2 against the Nazis and kept on arguing about the importance of civil courage until the end of his life. As he famously said, he did not hesitate to become a ‘Vatterlandsverräter’ (fatherland traitor) so as to fight the Nazi terror (1982: 10). Thomas Brasch rightly comments that his films radiate a sense of melancholy that deviates from the cathartic triumphalism of other DEFA productions, as if acknowledging in a roundabout way that the existing socialism of the time was not what he and numerous other communist antifascists fought for (see 1982: 13).

Michael Verhoeven’s Das schreckliche Mädchen (The Nasty Girl, 1990) is another good example of a revisionist history film committed to a historical re-examination of German fascism. Loosely based on the true story of Anna Rosmus, the narrative focuses on a young Bavarian woman, Sonja (Lina Stolze), who enters a school essay contest choosing to write the history of her hometown, Pfilzingen, during the Third Reich. Sonja has previously won another essay contest to her teachers’ and parents’ delight, but when she starts researching her town’s past, she realises that the official history she was taught in school is far from being true. When they ask her the reason for choosing to pursue such a project she naïvely responds, ‘to show Pfilzingen’s resistance against the Nazi dictatorship’. The town’s representatives use bureaucratic obstacles to prevent her from getting access to the necessary archives and she misses the deadline for the submission of her essay. Yet Sonja is determined to dig out the town’s uncomfortable past and enrols in the university to study history and theology, with the view to materialising her unfinished project. Again, she experiences hostility from the town officials and the community and despite winning a case in the court against the Pfilzingen borough, the librarians do everything possible to prevent her from accessing the sensitive archives that show the town’s and the Church’s complicity in anti-Semitic persecutions. Meanwhile, she experiences physical aggression, verbal abuse and attacks by anonymous members of the community, who even end up attacking her house with explosives. After numerous efforts and at the cost of her personal life, she manages to reveal the town’s unflattering history and write a book that brings her international recognition. Suddenly, the community changes its attitude towards her; the local bookshops place her picture and her book prominently in their storefronts and the mayor decides to reward her ‘fearless struggle for the truth’ by erecting a statue of her. During the ceremony, Sonja realises that by honouring her, the town aims to co-opt her research and inhibit any further work on Pfilzingen’s collaborationist past.

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