"Rosenstrasse"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Rosenstrasse" begins at the home of Ruth Weinstein (Jutta Lampe), a 
sixty year old German Jew, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where 
she, family and friends are "sitting shiva" (a Jewish mourning ritual) 
for her recently deceased husband. Her nonobservant daughter Hannah 
(Maria Schrader) is not only turned off by the ritual; she is outraged 
at the cold reception accorded her fiancé Luis, a non-Jew from 
Nicaragua. When he arrives at the apartment, her mother bristles: "What 
is he doing here?"

Eventually Hannah discovers the source of her mother's anger from a 
guest, who knew her from the time she entered the country immediately 
after WWII. When Ruth was an eight year old in Berlin, her mother had 
been divorced by her non-Jewish husband, thus making her eligible for 
internment in a death camp. The Nuremberg racial laws had protected the 
Jewish spouses in such marriages, but the "Aryan" partner often 
succumbed to enormous social pressure to divorce the "untermensch", no 
matter how long they had been married. Such was the case with Ruth 
Weinstein's husband.

Hannah learns that the only thing that saved her mother was that she had 
stumbled into the arms of Lena Fischer, a German Aryan aristocrat who 
was standing in front of a detention center where her own Jewish husband 
and other spouses from mixed marriages were awaiting their final fate. 
Fischer takes pity on the abandoned child and takes her home to raise 
her as "Helga".

Upon this discovery, Hannah goes to Berlin where she looks up the 90 
year old Lena Fischer (Doris Schade) who recounts the remarkable story, 
based on a true incident, of one of the few public protests in Nazi 
Germany. Not only was it remarkable for being held at all; it was all 
the more remarkable that it was successful/

In a series of flashbacks, Lena Fischer tells her story to Hannah. We 
see the young Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann) falling in love with Fabian 
Israel Fischer (Martin Feifel). The two play classical piano and violin 
together professionally and seem poised to enjoy fame and fortune in the 
waning years of the Weimar Republic, even though her aristocratic 
parents disown her after she decides to marry a Jewish man. Their Berlin 
is aglitter with interracial night clubs, champagne and cocaine. In a 
few years, it would be turned into a grim wartime hellhole, with Jews 
being rounded up like cattle and German men sent off to die on the 
Eastern Front.

Every day the young Ruth joins her adoptive mother on the sidewalk of 
the detention center where first a dozen or so, and then over a hundred 
wives congregate to learn word about their detained Jewish husbands. 
Eventually they begin to draw upon their own inner resources to 
challenge the guards at the door and the jailers inside. They shout out 
"We want our husbands" and refuse to disburse even when machine guns are 
directed against them.

Although the program notes for director Margerethe von Trotta's film 
does not mention this, any viewer who has kept track of more recent 
history in Latin America will be reminded of vigils mounted by "Mothers 
of the Disappeared" in countries like Mexico or Argentina. In Argentina, 
over 8,000 men were "disappeared" by a junta taking its marching orders 
from the United States. The rock group U-2 dedicated a song to these women:

Midnight, our sons and daughters
Were cut down and taken from us
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

In the wind we hear their laughter
In the rain we see their tears
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

Night hangs like a prisoner
Stretched over black and blue
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat

In the trees our sons stand naked
Through the walls our daughters cry
See their tears in the rainfall

Margerethe von Trotta has been both an actress and a director. In the 
first capacity, she was a frequent star of movies directed by Rainer 
Werner Fassbinder, the late German director whose open homosexuality and 
hatred for class injustice was reflected in nearly every film he made. 
Von Trotta began directing in 1977 and has devoted herself to making 
politically and socially relevant films, including one based on the life 
of Rosa Luxemburg.

In the program notes, she explains what drove her to make this film:

"I once, perhaps thoughtlessly, announced that by the end of my film 
career, I wanted to have described the whole of the 20th century. Rosa 
Luxemburg had already taken me up to 1919. With Jahrestage I had dealt 
with the periods before and after the war. I portrayed 1968 and the 
1970s in Marianne and Julianne: the German Sisters. The Berlin wall 
years between 1961 and 1989 were the theme of The Pledge. What was 
missing from my '20th century collection' was a film dealing with 
Germany's darkest period.

"But above all that, the resistance of the women of Rosenstrasse was 
almost unknown until the 1989; it was a forgotten miracle of the courage 
of the women's convictions. Sixty years after these events it was 
important to express this incredibly steadfast loving honor."

"Rosenstrasse" is scheduled for release later this year. I will make an 
announcement when it opens in New York City.

Websites of interest:

http://www.chambon.org/rosenstrasse.htm

http://www.rosenstrasse-derfilm.de/

http://www.rosenstrasse-protest.de/index.html


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