The Counterfeiters
Philip French
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Guardian
The grim German movie The Counterfeiters , written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, opens intriguingly in a bleak, rundown Monte Carlo days after the end of the Second World War. A weary, poorly dressed man carrying a small case full of money books into a smart hotel. He has a new suit of clothes made, goes in a dinner jacket to the casino, plays recklessly and picks up a high-priced whore. While having sex, she is shocked to see a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. Why is he here and apparently bent on losing? The answer is given in flashback form, starting in 1936.
The antihero is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a Russian Jew celebrated in the underworld as a master forger. Arrested in 1936 by Inspector Herzog, head of the Berlin CID fraud squad, by 1939 he is in the dreadful Mauthausen camp in Austria, wearing the green triangle as a habitual criminal and the yellow star as a Jew. His skills making sketches and portraits of guards and propagandistic murals bring him special privileges.
Then in 1944, he's moved to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, where, appropriately, his prewar nemesis Herzog is in charge of a top-secret forgery unit. Their principal task is to produce vast quantities of pounds and dollars as a way of financing the war and undermining the British and American economies.
This is a fictionalised version of a true story not unlike that of Eddie Chapman, the British criminal released from jail in the occupied Channel Islands on condition that he became a Nazi spy. A respectable Jewish banker from Hamburg brought in for his professional skills despises Salomon as a professional criminal, while a communist master printer from the Resistance views him with contempt for his determination to survive.
Salomon and his fellow inmates are faced with a choice. They can collaborate, thus helping the German war effort, they can refuse and be shot, or they can compromise, walking a tightrope of subtle prevarication. When the Germans quit Sachsenhausen, the moderately privileged forgers must justify themselves before the ill-treated, emaciated prisoners from the rest of the camp. This is a fascinating, low-key movie about moral choices and life-and-death decisions made in terrible conditions. Few will emerge from it without considerable respect for its antihero and without asking how they themselves would have acted.
Philip French
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Guardian
The grim German movie The Counterfeiters , written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, opens intriguingly in a bleak, rundown Monte Carlo days after the end of the Second World War. A weary, poorly dressed man carrying a small case full of money books into a smart hotel. He has a new suit of clothes made, goes in a dinner jacket to the casino, plays recklessly and picks up a high-priced whore. While having sex, she is shocked to see a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. Why is he here and apparently bent on losing? The answer is given in flashback form, starting in 1936.
The antihero is Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), a Russian Jew celebrated in the underworld as a master forger. Arrested in 1936 by Inspector Herzog, head of the Berlin CID fraud squad, by 1939 he is in the dreadful Mauthausen camp in Austria, wearing the green triangle as a habitual criminal and the yellow star as a Jew. His skills making sketches and portraits of guards and propagandistic murals bring him special privileges.
Then in 1944, he's moved to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, where, appropriately, his prewar nemesis Herzog is in charge of a top-secret forgery unit. Their principal task is to produce vast quantities of pounds and dollars as a way of financing the war and undermining the British and American economies.
This is a fictionalised version of a true story not unlike that of Eddie Chapman, the British criminal released from jail in the occupied Channel Islands on condition that he became a Nazi spy. A respectable Jewish banker from Hamburg brought in for his professional skills despises Salomon as a professional criminal, while a communist master printer from the Resistance views him with contempt for his determination to survive.
Salomon and his fellow inmates are faced with a choice. They can collaborate, thus helping the German war effort, they can refuse and be shot, or they can compromise, walking a tightrope of subtle prevarication. When the Germans quit Sachsenhausen, the moderately privileged forgers must justify themselves before the ill-treated, emaciated prisoners from the rest of the camp. This is a fascinating, low-key movie about moral choices and life-and-death decisions made in terrible conditions. Few will emerge from it without considerable respect for its antihero and without asking how they themselves would have acted.
The bitterest pill
German film-makers are now daring to tackle the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Can they portray the reality, or must history be sweetened? Jonathan Freedland reports
Friday October 12, 2007
The Guardian
Draw up a list of the major films dealing in the history of the Third Reich, and especially the Holocaust, and a striking fact emerges: none of them is German. Schindler's List was American; Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour masterpiece, Shoah, along with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, were both French. Roman Polanski's The Pianist had a Polish director, British screenwriter and American star. Whether documentary or drama, The Diary of Anne Frank or The Pawnbroker, Holocaust movies have come out of every place but Nazism's country of origin. On the subject that lies at the heart of contemporary German history, mainstream German cinema has remained all but silent.
Now, though, there is a change. The release of The Counterfeiters, a dramatised account of Operation Bernhard - the plot to flood Britain and the US with forged pound notes and dollar bills, perfectly faked by a squad of mainly Jewish artists, printers and crooks imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp - marks something of a shift. Along with 2005's Downfall, the meticulous study of the last days of Adolf Hitler, holed up in his Berlin bunker, it suggests Germany's film-makers are at last offering an international audience their own interpretation of the events that have shaped them.
And it's not only movies depicting the catastrophe of the 1940s that are gaining worldwide attention. Last year's Academy award for best foreign film went to The Lives of Others, a gripping tale of an East German Stasi agent who eavesdrops on a dissident playwright, his cold, authoritarian heart eventually melted by what he hears. Earlier, foreign audiences had embraced a very different look at the now-vanished German Democratic Republic: the comedy Good Bye Lenin!, in which a young man is forced to maintain the illusion that the Berlin Wall never fell, at least inside the apartment he shares with his mother, who has slept through the great upheaval of 1989 thanks to an eight-month coma.
Cinephiles admire this clutch of new films as evidence of a welcome resurgence in German cinema. But there's more at work here than a boom in German movie-making. In their examination of the consecutive tyrannies that arose in the country, they also afford a glimpse of how Germans currently see their history - and themselves.
Both Downfall and The Counterfeiters suggest a watershed has been reached, part of it simply chronological. "Those old enough to remember those events directly are no longer part of the cinema audience," says the Frankfurt-based writer and publisher, Dr Cordelia Borchardt. "For most of those watching, Hitler is a figure from ancient history. It's less of a taboo." That, she suggests, has freed up film-makers to enter terrain previously considered too sensitive, to tell Germany's darkest stories. "This is about accepting as our own heritage what for so long has been left to others. We dare do it now."
The results are powerful. Karl Markovics's central performance as the Jewish master-forger Salomon Sorowitsch in The Counterfeiters is grimly haunting. The humiliation he undergoes when a Nazi officer casually urinates on him is a scene that lingers in the memory, as is the image of a fellow Jewish inmate processing discarded passports only to chance upon the documents of his own children, both murdered in Auschwitz. The film also lays bare the terrible dilemma that confronted those forced to work for the Nazis. The tension in the story turns on the figure of Adolf Burger - now aged 89 and on whose memoir the film was based - who is determined to sabotage the dollar operation, even at the risk of his own life and those of his fellow inmates, rather than help the Nazi war effort. Similarly, Downfall's evocation of the claustrophobia and delusional madness that engulfed the Führerbunker is flawless.
And yet one senses a subtle form of evasion in both films. "Welcome to the gilded cage," a veteran prisoner tells Salomon when he arrives at the section of Sachsenhausen cleared for Operation Bernhard. The captives are well-fed, sleeping on beds with real sheets and blankets - conditions utterly unlike those elsewhere in Sachsenhausen or in any other concentration camp. More importantly, they are ruled over by an SS officer who is venal, but not murderous. Now, this exceptional situation at least provides The Counterfeiters with a way around the perennial obstacle confronting all films about the Holocaust, namely how to portray the unportrayable (clearly no actors can ever be as bone-thin, as starved, as the camps' real victims). And, to its credit, it repeatedly reminds the audience that what it is witnessing is atypically moderate by Nazi standards. Characters say as much explicitly - "We have it so good in here, while out there ... " - and occasionally reality intrudes. At one point a bullet, fired in an execution in Sachsenhausen proper, pierces the wall of the forgers' enclave.
But that only emphasises the point that the real action, the real horror, is underway on the other side of the wall. The same was true of Roman Polanski's The Pianist, which followed a lone man who escaped the fate visited on every other Jewish inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto. The cinematic logic for these choices is wholly understandable, but it means that ultimately these films avoid the harshest truths. What we see in The Counterfeiters is, ultimately, a criminal conspiracy rather than a genocidal one. It is showing a corner of the calamity of the Final Solution, but it avoids the vast, looming bulk of it.
Downfall can be viewed the same way. Borchardt remembers her discomfort seeing the film for the first time: its relentless focus "on a few senior Nazis, as if that was the only thing that mattered". The film does depict the destruction of Berlin, and we see the loss of civilian life, but it is true that the key action is behind the reinforced, underground walls of Hitler's bunker. The full horror of that period remains unglimpsed, even unmentioned until a sentence flashed on screen before the end credits, reminding us that 50 million people were killed in the second world war.
There are other concerns at work too. The obvious criticism of Downfall was that it humanised Hitler: Bruno Ganz's Führer is gently solicitous towards his secretaries, kind to his dog and stoic, even brave, when making plans for his own death. (He is also shown hunched, palsied and flying into delusional rages as he orders imaginary armies into battle.) But the truth is that Hitler was a human being, rather than a mythic monster, and the film forces us to confront that much more uncomfortable fact.
Downfall does, nevertheless, surrender to another common, if understandable, need: to find a "good German" in amongst all the evil. We see an SS medic, frantically scouring Berlin, seeking out the wounded and vulnerable. But it also works more broadly, leaving the viewer with the sense that the Nazis were a small ruling cabal, while the rest of the German people were its victims. Even Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, is presented benignly, pleading with the Führer to surrender, so saving Germany's cities and its people. Again, the film seems aware of the message it might be conveying and takes steps to correct it. "The German people chose their fate," says one character. "They gave us a mandate." The trouble is, the character saying these words - allowed to articulate the view made famous by Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners - is none other than Josef Goebbels, a somewhat tainted source.
The context is very different, but a similar dynamic might be at work in the recent movies about the East German experience too. When it comes to evading the full harshness of the past, few movies could touch Good Bye Lenin!. Its GDR is a place whose chief crimes appear to be drabness, naff brands and terrible clothes - with the oppression of state authoritarianism barely hinted at. It is an exquisite example of what became known as "Ostalgia", nostalgia for the Ost, the old East. The film is full of affection for a little country that for 40 years was a socialist holdout against the tide of capitalist consumerism. It is touching, teaching that no people should ever be expected fully, and so rapidly, to despise its own past. But it is a hardly a clear-eyed contemplation of the historical record.
The Lives of Others was hailed as an antidote to Ostalgia, with its fierce gaze on the work of the Stasi, but it too is, however subtly, guilty of some quiet evasions. Ultimately, its Stasi officer is a good man - a good German - who does the right thing. Yet historians concede there were all too few, if any, such cases: two disaffected officers were executed, one in 1979, another in 1981, but the film's hero is different. He gets away with his act of rebellion.
This is not to carp. Each one of these films is outstanding, richly deserving of international attention. They are good, reflective contemplations of the German past which, in turn, reflect well on the society that produced them. But they also hint at what may be a universal truth: that when it comes to its own history, there is only so much reality any nation can bear.
German film-makers are now daring to tackle the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Can they portray the reality, or must history be sweetened? Jonathan Freedland reports
Friday October 12, 2007
The Guardian
Draw up a list of the major films dealing in the history of the Third Reich, and especially the Holocaust, and a striking fact emerges: none of them is German. Schindler's List was American; Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour masterpiece, Shoah, along with Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, were both French. Roman Polanski's The Pianist had a Polish director, British screenwriter and American star. Whether documentary or drama, The Diary of Anne Frank or The Pawnbroker, Holocaust movies have come out of every place but Nazism's country of origin. On the subject that lies at the heart of contemporary German history, mainstream German cinema has remained all but silent.
Now, though, there is a change. The release of The Counterfeiters, a dramatised account of Operation Bernhard - the plot to flood Britain and the US with forged pound notes and dollar bills, perfectly faked by a squad of mainly Jewish artists, printers and crooks imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp - marks something of a shift. Along with 2005's Downfall, the meticulous study of the last days of Adolf Hitler, holed up in his Berlin bunker, it suggests Germany's film-makers are at last offering an international audience their own interpretation of the events that have shaped them.
And it's not only movies depicting the catastrophe of the 1940s that are gaining worldwide attention. Last year's Academy award for best foreign film went to The Lives of Others, a gripping tale of an East German Stasi agent who eavesdrops on a dissident playwright, his cold, authoritarian heart eventually melted by what he hears. Earlier, foreign audiences had embraced a very different look at the now-vanished German Democratic Republic: the comedy Good Bye Lenin!, in which a young man is forced to maintain the illusion that the Berlin Wall never fell, at least inside the apartment he shares with his mother, who has slept through the great upheaval of 1989 thanks to an eight-month coma.
Cinephiles admire this clutch of new films as evidence of a welcome resurgence in German cinema. But there's more at work here than a boom in German movie-making. In their examination of the consecutive tyrannies that arose in the country, they also afford a glimpse of how Germans currently see their history - and themselves.
Both Downfall and The Counterfeiters suggest a watershed has been reached, part of it simply chronological. "Those old enough to remember those events directly are no longer part of the cinema audience," says the Frankfurt-based writer and publisher, Dr Cordelia Borchardt. "For most of those watching, Hitler is a figure from ancient history. It's less of a taboo." That, she suggests, has freed up film-makers to enter terrain previously considered too sensitive, to tell Germany's darkest stories. "This is about accepting as our own heritage what for so long has been left to others. We dare do it now."
The results are powerful. Karl Markovics's central performance as the Jewish master-forger Salomon Sorowitsch in The Counterfeiters is grimly haunting. The humiliation he undergoes when a Nazi officer casually urinates on him is a scene that lingers in the memory, as is the image of a fellow Jewish inmate processing discarded passports only to chance upon the documents of his own children, both murdered in Auschwitz. The film also lays bare the terrible dilemma that confronted those forced to work for the Nazis. The tension in the story turns on the figure of Adolf Burger - now aged 89 and on whose memoir the film was based - who is determined to sabotage the dollar operation, even at the risk of his own life and those of his fellow inmates, rather than help the Nazi war effort. Similarly, Downfall's evocation of the claustrophobia and delusional madness that engulfed the Führerbunker is flawless.
And yet one senses a subtle form of evasion in both films. "Welcome to the gilded cage," a veteran prisoner tells Salomon when he arrives at the section of Sachsenhausen cleared for Operation Bernhard. The captives are well-fed, sleeping on beds with real sheets and blankets - conditions utterly unlike those elsewhere in Sachsenhausen or in any other concentration camp. More importantly, they are ruled over by an SS officer who is venal, but not murderous. Now, this exceptional situation at least provides The Counterfeiters with a way around the perennial obstacle confronting all films about the Holocaust, namely how to portray the unportrayable (clearly no actors can ever be as bone-thin, as starved, as the camps' real victims). And, to its credit, it repeatedly reminds the audience that what it is witnessing is atypically moderate by Nazi standards. Characters say as much explicitly - "We have it so good in here, while out there ... " - and occasionally reality intrudes. At one point a bullet, fired in an execution in Sachsenhausen proper, pierces the wall of the forgers' enclave.
But that only emphasises the point that the real action, the real horror, is underway on the other side of the wall. The same was true of Roman Polanski's The Pianist, which followed a lone man who escaped the fate visited on every other Jewish inhabitant of the Warsaw ghetto. The cinematic logic for these choices is wholly understandable, but it means that ultimately these films avoid the harshest truths. What we see in The Counterfeiters is, ultimately, a criminal conspiracy rather than a genocidal one. It is showing a corner of the calamity of the Final Solution, but it avoids the vast, looming bulk of it.
Downfall can be viewed the same way. Borchardt remembers her discomfort seeing the film for the first time: its relentless focus "on a few senior Nazis, as if that was the only thing that mattered". The film does depict the destruction of Berlin, and we see the loss of civilian life, but it is true that the key action is behind the reinforced, underground walls of Hitler's bunker. The full horror of that period remains unglimpsed, even unmentioned until a sentence flashed on screen before the end credits, reminding us that 50 million people were killed in the second world war.
There are other concerns at work too. The obvious criticism of Downfall was that it humanised Hitler: Bruno Ganz's Führer is gently solicitous towards his secretaries, kind to his dog and stoic, even brave, when making plans for his own death. (He is also shown hunched, palsied and flying into delusional rages as he orders imaginary armies into battle.) But the truth is that Hitler was a human being, rather than a mythic monster, and the film forces us to confront that much more uncomfortable fact.
Downfall does, nevertheless, surrender to another common, if understandable, need: to find a "good German" in amongst all the evil. We see an SS medic, frantically scouring Berlin, seeking out the wounded and vulnerable. But it also works more broadly, leaving the viewer with the sense that the Nazis were a small ruling cabal, while the rest of the German people were its victims. Even Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, is presented benignly, pleading with the Führer to surrender, so saving Germany's cities and its people. Again, the film seems aware of the message it might be conveying and takes steps to correct it. "The German people chose their fate," says one character. "They gave us a mandate." The trouble is, the character saying these words - allowed to articulate the view made famous by Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners - is none other than Josef Goebbels, a somewhat tainted source.
The context is very different, but a similar dynamic might be at work in the recent movies about the East German experience too. When it comes to evading the full harshness of the past, few movies could touch Good Bye Lenin!. Its GDR is a place whose chief crimes appear to be drabness, naff brands and terrible clothes - with the oppression of state authoritarianism barely hinted at. It is an exquisite example of what became known as "Ostalgia", nostalgia for the Ost, the old East. The film is full of affection for a little country that for 40 years was a socialist holdout against the tide of capitalist consumerism. It is touching, teaching that no people should ever be expected fully, and so rapidly, to despise its own past. But it is a hardly a clear-eyed contemplation of the historical record.
The Lives of Others was hailed as an antidote to Ostalgia, with its fierce gaze on the work of the Stasi, but it too is, however subtly, guilty of some quiet evasions. Ultimately, its Stasi officer is a good man - a good German - who does the right thing. Yet historians concede there were all too few, if any, such cases: two disaffected officers were executed, one in 1979, another in 1981, but the film's hero is different. He gets away with his act of rebellion.
This is not to carp. Each one of these films is outstanding, richly deserving of international attention. They are good, reflective contemplations of the German past which, in turn, reflect well on the society that produced them. But they also hint at what may be a universal truth: that when it comes to its own history, there is only so much reality any nation can bear.
No comments:
Post a Comment