Sterne - 23rd March 2006

The Cornerhouse was showing this as part of a series of Konrad Wolf films. I don't know much about his films, or indeed the films of the GDR (East Germany) so I thought I'd go along. It was introduced by someone from the Goethe Institute and was extremely interesting.

This film was made in 1959, a co-production between the GDR and Bulgaria, and it was interesting to see the attitude towards the Holocaust from an East German perspective. It dealt with a Nazi officer in Bulgaria in charge of a detention centre for Jews before being sent to Auschwitz. He falls in love with a Jewish woman and tries to save her from being sent away.

Of course there are better films about the Holocaust; what was special about this film was its portrayal of two different German officers. Note the contrast between the main character Walter, who was presented as extremely compassionate and disapproving of the inhuman treatment of the Jews, and his fellow officer, who was more concerned with drink, women and material posessions than humanity. This can be read as metaphor for the two different Germanies and if so, it seems that Wolf was absolving the East Germans from any responsibility for the Endloesung. Maybe I am over-simplifying things, but that was something I thought while watching it. Walter even co-operates to provide the communist resistance movement with weapons.

It was mentioned that some of the effects used by Wolf in this film, although seeming old-hat to a modern audience, were quite original and inventive in their day. Some of the editing and other effects were something different from other films of that period and it was indeed a well-made film. It's difficult to rate this in comparison with modern films, so I won't. I did enjoy it, as a film as well as because of its significance from an historical perspective.