Filmmaker Forces a Hard Look Back : Movies: Director Michael Verhoeven uncovers secrets buried in Germany’s past.

The week that East and West Germany became one again, Michael Verhoeven was in the United States drumming up publicity for his film about a far less jubilant era in German history--an era that, as his darkly comic film illustrates, the majority of Germans would simply prefer to forget.

Although “The Nasty Girl,” the story of a young woman who bucks scorn and terrorist attacks from the residents of her small Bavarian town to dig up some deep, dark secrets about the community’s complicity with the Nazis, was completed before the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, Verhoeven believes that with reunification, exposing the German tendency to lock away details of an all-too-painful past and move stoically onward is even more critical than before.

“The danger is that we will really forget,” Verhoeven said during a stop in Los Angeles. “But we are very rich right now, and it could happen that we become not quite so rich. Many social problems will show up with the so-called reunification, and with the social problems it could be that Germans again look for enemies. This is what I am scared of. We know so little about Eastern Germany, and the eastern people also don’t know too much about our history. What they were told in school is even more wrong than what we were told.”

Verhoeven’s fascination with the story of “The Nasty Girl” was born of his own frustration as a 1950s schoolboy in his teachers’ refusal to discuss what really happened during the Nazi era. When he met Anja Rosmus, the real-life “Nasty Girl,” whose efforts to expose the Nazi secrets of her hometown despite the townspeople’s vehement attempts to thwart her had made her a cause celebre throughout Germany in the early 1980s, he realized that her motivation to uncover the truth paralleled his own curiousity some 25 years earlier.

“When I was 14 or 15, in the history books you couldn’t find anything about this period,” said Verhoeven, 52, the director of films, television movies, documentaries and commercials. “The story always ended shortly before and the teachers would say we come to that subject next year. Then the next year it would be the same thing.

“You could never engage in a real discussion with the generation that lived through all this about what they felt and how it all came to be. The only thing the books would say is how terrible the war was. How many houses and factories were destroyed. We as a country never discussed it. That’s why I wanted to tell her story.”

“The Nasty Girl” is adapted from Anja Rosmus’ 1983 book, “A Case of Resistance and Persecution, Passau 1933-39,” dealing with her experience in writing essays about events in her hometown during the Third Reich. Rosmus, now 30, was awarded honorary degrees from universities all over Europe for her work, but in Passau, any reporting on her saga was banned from the local newspaper.

For the film, Verhoeven invented an ending in which the town finally acknowledges the heroic efforts of “The Nasty Girl” with a bust in city hall. In the middle of the unveiling ceremony, however, she runs out screaming that the town fathers are simply attempting to silence her with praise.

“I felt that she is still in danger because they honored her not with sympathy, but to quiet her,” Verhoeven said. “They are saying, ‘OK, that was great what you did, now be a good girl and stop.’ People still don’t want to be reminded of that. It is just too difficult. They think we have overcome that.

“If all these files would be known, some people would lose their good names. So many Jewish shops were overtaken by Gentile families when the Jews were sent away to be killed. You don’t think about that when you go shopping there today. Anja reminded them. She found photographs with ‘Nathan’ or ‘Bernstein’ written on the store. People hated her book. They didn’t open it. It was like a time bomb.”

Since he began making films in 1966, Verhoeven, who became a doctor before finally settling on a career in film, has a history of upsetting the apple cart. In 1970, his film “o.k.,” which told the same story about the rape of a Vietnamese woman by a group of American soldiers that inspired Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War,” was awarded a prize at the Berlin Film Festival. That decision was bitterly attacked because the film was perceived as anti-American.

In 1981, Verhoeven made “The White Rose,” the story of the Munich college student Sophie Scholl and other resistance fighters who were executed during World War II. Though the film was praised throughout Germany and the world--it is the only Verhoeven film to be released in the United States thus far--the German Foreign Ministry banned the film from the Goethe Institutes in New York, Paris and Milan.

“They didn’t like that I asked why so many of the judges in the People’s Court who killed so many Jews and sentenced people to death for stealing an apple, still made big careers after the war,” Verhoeven said. “Then the German government announced in 1985 that the People’s Court was no longer a valid court. It was a statement that people had waited for over 40 years. And that this could happen after my film, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It’s my greatest success.”

His latest project is “Wonderland,” a film about two East Berliners who escape to the West before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall to live in what they believe is a wonderland of dreams fulfilled. When the wall crumbles, they return to the East to tell their friends about the difficulties of adjusting to the Western way of life, that this so-called wonderland really doesn’t exist. The film will air later this month on German television, two weeks before the newly reunited country’s first national elections.

“I think what will go on in Germany during next few years will be of great interest, and not only for Germany,” Verhoeven said. “Because Germany, as an economic power in Europe, will always be a challenge for the world, not anymore in a military sense, but in an economic sense. And perhaps not only a challenge, perhaps even a danger. So I think to observe what will happen in my country in the next few years will be extremely worthwhile.”