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The oddly attractive Nina Hoss plays the real life, anonymous German woman who recorded a diary of her days during the beginning of the Russian occupation of Berlin. It is a compelling and gripping story of the rape of the unwilling who later became willing to survive. Hoss plays a photojournalist whose lover, an officer, leaves for the front when the war is young and the sugar plum fairies of victory filled everyone's expectations. We see the upbeat German attitude for a brief glimpse in the beginning before we are thrust into the harsh realities of Berlin succumbing street by street.
We wince at the boorish, animal behavior of the Russians preying upon the defenseless women but it soon becomes balanced as news and witness of the German horrors of the Russian conquest come to light. ("If the Russians do just a fraction of what we did in Russia there will be no one left alive.")
Hoss quickly becomes savvy to the sexual politics and soon solicits protection from the Russian Major who commands the troops in her neighborhood. They begin a relationship of mutual benefit that becomes real only to lead to his career demise. And, near the end, her lover appears having wondered home without capture only to become outraged at what the women had done with the Russians.
Her diaries were initially released in 1959 and caused such an uproar that the woman insisted that no more copies be released. After here death her publisher resumed with a new release. Her name has always been withheld and she died with out attribution.
This is a top flight film in all areas and a solid four out of five. It is worth a see.
Share a bowl of grits with someone you love tonight.
Follow Ups:
The book is harrowing, essential reading and should be better known. I'll look out for the film.
I wonder how the German public receives the self flagellating films? The uproar in 1959 was that no one wanted to accept the idea German womanhood would stoop so low with the enemy. Alas, the German public does not balance it with the atrocities of their sons in Russia.
Share a bowl of grits with someone you love tonight.
"Casualties of War" in Vietnam?
It's always the "other guy" who's the savage, isn't it? In war, men are quite the same.
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Share a bowl of grits with someone you love tonight.
d
You raise interesting questions.I'm reminded of the huge popularity in the UK in the mid-80's of the TV adaptation of Paul Scott's 'The Jewel in the Crown' tetralogy, which contradicted the dominant nostalgic vision of The Raj, elaborating on the themes EM Forster had begun to explore in A Passage to India. Two decades on, the murkier aspects of that period in our national history hardly feature at all in popular consciousness, I think.
As for the Mau-Mau period in Kenya .... !
I can't help feeling that current German society has on the whole a healthier engagement with its past, witnessed, for example, by the interest generated by Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, ten or so years ago.
Edits: 11/19/09
of Nazi atrocity in Russia. I felt the film was too long and should have cut to the chase more quickly. The final scene was Apocalypse Now meets David Lynch with the SS troops attacking a small village. Truly heady stuff.
Anglo cultured film makers just don't seem to have the yarbles to capture the feel and accuracy of such brutal history as the Germans are doing and Russians have done.
Share a bowl of grits with someone you love tonight.
'History is written by the victors,' so it's good to discover books and films that contradict or deepen the accounts of war and its consequences which gain greater popularity.I haven't seen Come and See but will steel myself to. Thanks for the pointer.
Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (of the same year, 1985) is probably the most affecting film I've seen on this topic, together with Pasolini's ghastly metaphorical Salò (1975).
Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War (1991) is a great novel about Vietnam that has not yet, I don't think, been filmed.
My wife has been telling me for years that I must see Harry Hook's The Kitchen Toto (1987), about British colonial rule in Kenya, but I've yet to track it down. It's most famous for the closing screen of text which lists the statistics of the mid-50's 'state of emergency': something like 80 Europeans and 14,000 Africans dead.
Sadly, the raw materials for future works in this genre are being enacted as we speak.
Edits: 11/20/09 11/21/09
About a rather large group of Britons who thought the Germans might actually win the war that set up house in Kenya. The story is based on a true event and trial.
Charles Dance excels at the dashing cad who steals Gretta Sacchi from the aging Joss Ackland. The end result of that relationship was ugly but the study of the decadence and mindless pursuit of pleasure is very interesting.
I had to buy a Region 2 dvd just to be able to get it.
Share a bowl of grits with someone you love tonight.
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