“Films against oblivion”

Artur Brauner, whose pro­duc­tion com­pany CCC-​Filmkunst LLC pro­duced “The Rose Gar­den,” played a key role in the way West Ger­man cin­ema dealt with the Holo­caust and Na­tional So­cial­ism: a Holo­caust sur­vivor him­self, he has pro­duced films that aim to re­mem­ber Na­tional So­cial­ist crimes and their vic­tims since 1948. The film “The Rose Gar­den” was di­rected by Dutch film­maker Fons Rade­mak­ers. It was shot in Eng­lish with Max­i­m­il­ian Schell and Liv Ull­mann in the lead­ing roles. The sup­port­ing cast in­cludes Hanns Zis­chler and Peter Fonda among oth­ers. When it was re­viewed by the Ger­man Mo­tion Pic­ture Rat­ing Agency Deutsche Film­be­w­er­tungsstelle in Wies­baden, the film did not yet have a dis­trib­u­tor; it was later dis­trib­uted by the Filmver­lag der Au­toren and, after pre­mier­ing in Los An­ge­les on De­cem­ber 20, 1989, it opened in Ger­man movie the­aters on No­vem­ber 15, 1990. In ad­di­tion to its “highly rec­om­mended” rat­ing, “The Rose Gar­den” was nom­i­nated for the Ger­man Film Awards Deutscher Film­preis in 1990, and Liv Ull­mann was nom­i­nated for a Golden Globe as ac­tress in a lead­ing role. De­spite the ac­knowl­edg­ment this rat­ing by the Ger­man Mo­tion Pic­ture Rat­ing Agency Deutsche Film­be­w­er­tungsstelle rep­re­sents, the film re­ceived only mediocre re­views and was not par­tic­u­larly suc­cess­ful at the box of­fice.

“The Rose Gar­den” is one of the films pro­duced by Artur Brauner which he calls “films against obliv­ion.” In the course of his ca­reer as a film pro­ducer, dur­ing which he mainly pro­duced en­ter­tain­ment films, he made more than 20 of these films that were meant to re­mem­ber Na­tional So­cial­ist crimes. This com­mit­ment to re­mem­brance and com­mem­o­ra­tion is present in Brauner’s en­tire work. One char­ac­ter­is­tic of these films is their at­tempt to com­bine re­mem­brance and en­ter­tain­ment. The fact that Brauner chose to pro­duce them al­though they were not likely to be prof­itable shows that they were and con­tinue to be im­por­tant to him per­son­ally. 21 of these films, in­clud­ing “The Rose Gar­den,” were added to the Yad Vashem on­line film data­base in 2009. Yet Brauner’s ef­forts had not al­ways been ac­knowl­edged in the way “The Rose Gar­den” was when it re­ceived its rat­ing from the Ger­man Mo­tion Pic­ture Rat­ing Agency Deutsche Film­be­w­er­tungsstelle. On the con­trary: Artur Brauner’s films about Na­tional So­cial­ism and the Holo­caust reg­u­larly flopped both com­mer­cially and crit­i­cally. When he wanted to adapt Oskar Schindler’s bi­og­ra­phy in the 1990s, for ex­am­ple, he was un­able to con­vince the Ger­man Fed­eral Film Board that it was a worth­while sub­ject.

“The Rose Garden” – film and historic context

The film tells the story of Jew­ish Holo­caust sur­vivor Aaron Re­ichen­bach (Max­i­m­il­ian Schell), who re­turns to Ger­many. At the Frank­furt air­port he rec­og­nizes con­cen­tra­tion camp com­man­der Arnold Krenn and at­tacks him. He is ar­rested and rep­re­sented in court by lawyer Gabriele Fre­und (Liv Ull­mann). Since Re­ichen­bach is highly con­fused and dis­tressed, she tries to re­con­struct his life story on her own. Aided by jour­nal­ist Georg Pässler (Jan Niklas), she finds out that Krenn was in­volved in the mur­der of 20 Jew­ish chil­dren in a Ham­burg school, in­clud­ing Aaron Re­ichen­bach’s sis­ters. It turns out that Ruth, one of Re­ichen­bach’s two sis­ters, ac­tu­ally sur­vived. More than 40 years later, brother and sis­ter meet again for the first time in the court­room. Yet the trial against Krenn is un­suc­cess­ful since he is de­clared unfit to stand trial and the charges are dis­missed. The film ends with the fol­low­ing epi­logue:
“This story is fully fic­ti­tious, but re­sem­blance to per­sons dead or alive is no co­in­ci­dence.
The killing of the chil­dren at Bul­len­huser Road ac­tu­ally took place.
The com­mand­ing of­fi­cer in charge of the camp on Bul­len­huser Road was de­clared
per­ma­nently unfit to stand trial by a Ham­burg court in 1985.
The pro­ceed­ings against him were there­fore halted, pro­ceed­ings that had al­ready been
halted once in 1967.
The rea­son­ing of the Ham­burg pros­e­cu­tor at the time went as fol­lows:
‘The in­ves­ti­ga­tion has failed to pro­vide suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence that undue pain was in­flicted
on the chil­dren be­fore they died…
Ex­cept for the ter­mi­na­tion of their lives, no fur­ther harm was done to them. They
es­pe­cially did not have to suf­fer phys­i­cally and men­tally for very long.’”

“The Rose Gar­den” thus makes ref­er­ence to ac­tual his­tor­i­cal events: first, to the events oc­cur­ring at the school on Bul­len­huser Damm 92-95 in Ham­burg’s Rothen­burgsort dis­trict, where 20 Jew­ish chil­dren were hanged on the night of April 20 / 21, 1945. They had pre­vi­ously been vic­tims of med­ical ex­per­i­ments at the Neuengamme con­cen­tra­tion camp and were mur­dered in the school that func­tioned as a satel­lite camp when the Neuengamme camp was evac­u­ated. Sec­ondly, it makes ref­er­ence to the legal pros­e­cu­tion of the per­pe­tra­tors in two tri­als (in 1967 and 1985), both of which were un­suc­cess­ful and can be re­garded as ex­am­ples of the West Ger­man jus­tice sys­tem’s fail­ure to pros­e­cute Nazi crim­i­nals. “The Rose Gar­den” is based on the epony­mous novel by Paul Hengge and ad­di­tional re­search by jour­nal­ist Günther Schwar­berg. It was Schwar­berg who ini­ti­ated the in­ves­ti­ga­tion into what oc­curred at the school on Bul­len­huser Damm, and the char­ac­ter of jour­nal­ist Georg Pässler is based on him.

In 1986, as part of com­ing to terms with these events, an as­so­ci­a­tion called “The Chil­dren of Bul­len­huser Damm” held an in­ter­na­tional tri­bunal at the school that was chaired by for­mer con­sti­tu­tional court judge Mar­tin Hirsch and sought to re­veal the jus­tice sys­tem’s omis­sions and foot-​dragging. It was mo­ti­vated by the fail­ure to con­vict Arnold Strip­pel, one of the per­pe­tra­tors in the chil­dren’s mur­der. When Aaron Re­ichen­bach tells his lawyer Gabriele Fre­und in the film that he wants a tri­bunal for Krenn, this is a ref­er­ence to this event. Ger­man tele­vi­sion jour­nal­ist Lea Rosh sub­se­quently made a doc­u­men­tary called “Das Tri­bunal – Mord am Bul­len­huser Damm” [The Tri­bunal – Mur­der on Bul­len­huser Damm], which was screened at the 1987 Berlin Film Fes­ti­val and broad­cast on tele­vi­sion. The fea­ture film’s title “The Rose Gar­den” refers to the rose gar­den that was planted in the 1980s next to the school­yard in mem­ory of the mur­dered chil­dren.

The film’s cinematic treatment of the National Socialist period

De­spite weak­nesses in its cin­e­matic sto­ry­telling “The Rose Gar­den” is a unique ex­am­ple for films deal­ing with the Holo­caust, not only be­cause it makes the mur­ders at Bul­len­huser Damm and the sub­se­quent mis­car­riage of jus­tice known to a larger au­di­ence, but also be­cause it very clearly shows the psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age and trauma suf­fered by Holo­caust sur­vivors. More than 20 years ear­lier an­other film pro­duced by Brauner ti­tled “Zeu­gin aus der Hölle” [Wit­ness out of Hell] (work­ing title “Bit­tere Kräuter” [Bit­ter Herbs]) was not given the “highly rec­om­mended” rat­ing by the Ger­man Mo­tion Pic­ture Rat­ing Board Deutsche Film­be­w­er­tungsstelle. The cen­tral char­ac­ter in “Zeu­gin aus der Hölle” is also a trau­ma­tized Jew­ish Holo­caust sur­vivor who, sup­ported by her lawyer and a jour­nal­ist, is sup­posed to tes­tify in a trial against a Nazi doc­tor. At the time the jury jus­ti­fied its de­ci­sion with “tech­ni­cal weak­nesses.” When a new cut of the film was re­leased on DVD in 2013, it did re­ceive the “highly rec­om­mended” rat­ing; the Mo­tion Pic­ture Rat­ings Agency (re­named Deutsche Film- und Me­di­en­be­w­er­tung in 2009) re­ferred to its ear­lier de­ci­sion, es­pe­cially stress­ing un­re­al­is­tic as­pects of the plot that im­paired the film’s ef­fect in their opin­ion. In­ter­est­ingly, the opin­ion of the rat­ing com­mis­sion for “The Rose Gar­den” high­lights the film’s cast­ing, act­ing per­for­mances and its nu­anced char­ac­ter de­vel­op­ment while the film’s treat­ment of ac­tual his­tor­i­cal events is not men­tioned at all. There is no spe­cific men­tion of the film’s sub­ject.

The Motion Picture Rating Agency in the context of Germany’s remembrance culture

The Ger­man Mo­tion Pic­ture Rat­ing Agency Deutsche Film­be­w­er­tungsstelle in Wies­baden is a gov­ern­ment agency es­tab­lished in 1951 that rates Ger­man and in­ter­na­tional films upon re­quest for a fee, award­ing the qual­ity rat­ings “rec­om­mended” and “highly rec­om­mended.” These qual­ity rat­ings are in­tended to rec­om­mend a film to au­di­ences and to iden­tify pro­duc­tions of par­tic­u­larly great merit, thus pro­vid­ing ori­en­ta­tion in a di­verse film in­dus­try. Films are re­viewed by an un­salaried jury made up of ex­perts ap­pointed by each fed­eral state. The jury re­views the film’s qual­ity with re­gard to its sub­ject, for­mal as­pects and re­al­iza­tion. Re­ceiv­ing the qual­ity rat­ing from the Mo­tion Pic­ture Rat­ings Agency Film­be­w­er­tungsstelle may not only re­sult in pos­i­tive ad­ver­tis­ing, there also is a fis­cal ben­e­fit as films awarded the qual­ity rat­ing are ex­empt from en­ter­tain­ment tax. How­ever, au­di­ences and crit­ics do not nec­es­sar­ily agree with the opin­ion ex­pressed by the rat­ing agency, as the ex­am­ple of “The Rose Gar­den” shows.

The rat­ing agency’s de­ci­sions can also be un­der­stood as an in­di­ca­tor of the themes and por­tray­als that are con­sid­ered rel­e­vant and ap­pro­pri­ate at a par­tic­u­lar time and there­fore wor­thy of sup­port. The ex­pla­na­tion given by the jury re­view­ing “The Rose Gar­den” pro­vides clear ev­i­dence of this when it makes ref­er­ence to its time of re­lease: ten years after the Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion se­ries “Holo­caust” first aired, which es­tab­lished the fic­tional and victim-​focused Holo­caust nar­ra­tive for a mass au­di­ence, the cin­e­matic por­trayal of a trau­ma­tized sur­vivor was no longer con­sid­ered un­com­fort­able or ob­jec­tion­able, but had be­come well-​established in cin­ema and mass media. The date of the film’s re­view fell be­tween the fall of the Berlin Wall and Ger­many’s so-​called re­uni­fi­ca­tion, a time that brought forth new rea­sons for think­ing about the his­tory of one’s coun­try. This cre­ates the im­pres­sion that the con­tem­po­rary po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion was of pri­mary im­por­tance and con­sid­ered more sig­nif­i­cant than the his­tor­i­cal events the film is based on. Among the films Artur Brauner pro­duced, this is one of many op­pos­ing the Fed­eral Re­pub­lic’s fail­ure to re­mem­ber Holo­caust vic­tims as well as its per­pe­tra­tors. As many of his films do, it com­bines the goal to en­ter­tain with the pur­pose of re­mem­ber­ing the Holo­caust. The fact that his later pro­duc­tions such as “Hitler­junge Sa­lomon” [Hitler Youth Sa­lomon] (1989 / 90) gained recog­ni­tion while ear­lier films such as “Mori­t­uri” (1948) and “Zeu­gin aus der Hölle” [Wit­ness out of Helll] (1965) were re­ceived badly by crit­ics and au­di­ences alike was a re­sult of a change in Ger­man so­ci­ety’s at­ti­tude to­wards its Nazi past and the chang­ing cul­ture of re­mem­brance.

Select Bibliography