First Run Features has released three provocative films on DVD that delve into the complex consciousness of the German people. From the atrocities of the Holocaust to the repressive post-war socialist government of East Germany, these films offer fascinating glimpses of artists and historians struggling to come to terms with their nation’s past while battling forces—in the form of both the government and the people—who would rather keep such horrors hidden.
The Second Track
Joachim Kunert’s The Second Track went unseen for decades, only recently resurfacing and taking its rightful place among Germany’s greatest films. This 1962 noirish thriller examined the burden of the Holocaust on the German conscience at a time when the country as a whole was eager to forget and move on.
A freight yard inspector stumbles upon a robbery but does not inform the police that he has recognized one of the perpetrators, a man from his past whom he is eager to avoid. This sparks a chain of events in which the inspector’s daughter begins delving into her father’s past as well as her own, uncovering a debilitating cache of Nazi-era secrets.
The movie is filled with spectacular black and white photography, juxtaposing emotional close-ups with stunning imagery of trains and railroad tracks, of steam drifting across black skies, of glistening cobblestone streets, and impressionistic shots of industrial architecture: freight yard bridges, passageways, stairwells, and gleaming tracks that merge and separate and crisscross the frame.
The film has been compared to the dark tales of suspense crafted by Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, but its most apparent influence is Carol Reed’s English masterpiece, The Third Man (1949). Traces of that film can be seen in the angled shots, atmospheric nighttime photography and zither score, and most decidedly in the closing shots, which seem to deliberately draw a parallel with the earlier film. But whereas Reed’s film ends with a single long take of the heroine walking toward and past the hero in what amounts to a romantic rejection, The Second Track closes with a much more troubling and ambiguous rejection, as a woman walks along railroad tracks, toward and past a man who turns to follow her until they approach a gate. The gate may represent passage to another plain, but does it lead to a purgatory in which the German people acknowledge and do penitence for the past, or does it mark entry into a hell of recrimination and reproach? And will the these two figures pass through the gate at all? The image fades to black before we find out.
Extra features include a short film about Second Track’s cinematographer, Rolf Sohre, and an essay and newsreels about the film.
The Rabbit Is Me
A few years later, Kurt Maetzig’s The Rabbit Is Me (1965) shined a light on the opportunism, careerism and political calculation that undermined the professed principals of the repressive East German socialist government.
A young woman’s brother is imprisoned for subversion, though his crime is never revealed to the public or to his family. The sister embarks on an affair with the judge who sentenced her brother, and eventually the truth behind the sentencing is exposed. Though the film was made with solid studio backing, the final product proved too hot to touch, the film’s politics, sexuality and frank moral discussion deemed too dark and skeptical by government censors.
It was not the only film to draw the government’s ire that year. Many more were likewise banned in the wake of Rabbit Is Me, the whole lot of them thereafter referred to as “the Rabbit films.” The Rabbit Is Me was not screened for the public until after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Rabbit calls to mind the films of the French New Wave, and anticipates the edgy youth-centered films of America in the 1950s. The movie not only challenges the validity of government institutions but sets up a generational conflict between the young heroine and her much older lover, between the energy and idealism of youth and the stodgy, self-interested avarice of the establishment. Maetzig delights in some of the new tools available to filmmakers, most notably the zoom lens, which would become a common fixture in American films of the 1960s and ’70s, allowing the director to create both establishing shots and close-ups without a cut.
The disc includes a 1999 interview with director Kurt Maetzig and an essay and brief documentary about the banning of the Rabbit films.
The Unknown Soldier
First Run has also just released an intriguing documentary, The Unknown Soldier (2006), that tracks the volatile controversy surrounding a museum exhibit that first opened in Germany in 1996. The Wehrmacht Exhibition documented the complicity of the German Army in the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Waffen SS and the Gestapo. For decades, the accepted portrait of the German soldier was that of an innocent pawn, who knew nothing of the crimes being carried out by the Third Reich. While many were oblivious to the horrors of the Holocaust, many were fully aware, and the exhibit featured evidence, in the form of personal letters, photographs and film footage, of knowing collaboration between the army’s common foot soldiers and Hitler’s Nazi forces. The exhibition sparked riotous protests from an outraged populace and revealing a split in the German psyche as the nation struggled to pay tribute to its veterans while confronting once again the horror of its past.
It wasn’t only the neo-Nazi skinheads who were angry; World War II were incensed, as were the children and grandchildren of deceased soldiers who felt the memories of their loved ones were being tarnished. A second exhibit a few years later, which sought to correct a few troubling issues with the first, elicited a similar response. Michael Verhoeven’s film captures the pain and conflict of a nation caught in the midst of an identity crisis.
First Run Features. www.firstrunfeatures.com.
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