This text was published for the first time at the theatrical release of “Deutschstunde” in October 2019.
Berlin reaches far, as far as the North Sea coast, where the country has an end. Jens Ole Jepsen, the village policeman, invokes official instructions from Berlin during his appearances. Also when he delivered the letter to the painter Max Ludwig Nansen, with which this painting was prohibited. The two men have known each other for a long time, Nansen is the godfather of Jepsen’s son Siggi. The painter is standing on the empty, muddy beach, at the easel that has been set up. The policeman holds the official paper in front of the picture, with the stamp of the Third Reich.
The war can only be felt every now and then in this landscape. When the imperturbable policeman Jepsen is on an official mission in his closed little district, he looks like he is from the 19th century, with a hat and a wide cape and a round face, holding the bike in quick motion with powerful pedal pushes. A messenger on horseback, romantic, from the beginnings of bureaucracy. A dynamic picture, but in which there is already the sadness of a decline. The new authority, the brutal National Socialist centralism, which wants to bring everything under control, makes use of the old insignia and disguises.
Half a century after its publication, “Deutschstunde”, Siegfried Lenz’s bestseller novel, has been filmed again by Christian Schwochow. In 1971 there was a film adaptation for television by Peter Beauvais, with Wolfgang Büttner as the painter Nansen and Arno Assmann as the policeman Jepsen. At Schwochow, these roles are played by Tobias Moretti and Ulrich Noethen.
It was time to remake it, and in interviews about the film, Christian Schwochow noted how strong discrimination, racism, anti-Semitism and a yearning for authoritarian systems have become again today. Has emphasized the universal, the exemplary of the story told by the novel. Is it a question of morality? The cinema, of course, is not a moral institution, and the film he made – and he absolutely wanted to make it for the screen – breaks the narrowness of the parable. “The special thing about it is that the individual characters get into such extreme situations in which it is almost impossible to do the right thing,” explained Heide Schwochow, who wrote the screenplay for her son.
The painter Nansen is a provocative figure, Tobias Moretti plays him edgy and obsessive
For the painter Nansen, Siegfried Lenz orientated himself vaguely on the painter Emil Nolde, whose pictures were classified as “degenerate” by the Nazis. It has long been known, however, that Nolde was an anti-Semite and that the Führer and the people felt bound by their duty, and that he also indicated that his colleagues were Jewish. More suspicious and dangerous for totalitarian regimes, however, are less the artists than their art, the subversion, the corrosive pull that emanates from it and reduces the principle of any order to absurdity. Nansen’s colored pictures are luminous dots in a gray, damp, tired world – Siggi tries to save them from access by the authorities by placing them in an abandoned house, a secret museum, a house that had to be left in a hurry is no longer inhabited and used. Gabriele Winzen worked on Nansen’s pictures in a painterly way – she has also worked for Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist”, Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” or “High Life” by Claire Denis, and she was also there for “Bad Banks”, the successful one TV series that Christian Schwochow made before “Deutschstunde”.
The painter Nansen is a provocative figure, Tobias Moretti plays him edgy and obsessive – already in Oskar Roehler’s “Jud Süß – Film ohne Konsissen” he embodied an artist in the twilight of National Socialism, the actor Ferdinand Marian, who was forced to work for Veit Harlans ” Jud Suess “to play. Nansen is a second father figure for Siggi, between him and the policeman father, who obliges him to take part in the surveillance of the painter, the boy rubs himself up. “The joys of duty” is what he is supposed to describe in an essay when he was put in a reformatory after the war, and when faced with the question of the perversity of power he fails.
It is the bodies over which political power rulers. The boy’s hand pressed on a glowing hotplate, a relentless body search, naked, in the institution. The regulated, vulnerable bodies of the sons, the rotting bodies of dead birds.
And the painter Nansen knows where to start in order to permanently shatter the order in the Jepsen family. He makes Siggi’s sister his model, lets her bare her in front of him.
German lesson, October 11, ZDF, 8:15 p.m.