Director Explores Germans’ Psyche Across Great Divide

“I am fascinated by people who destroy their lives for an idea,” says German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff, sitting recently in an outdoor cafe in Santa Monica, smoking a pencil-thin cigar.

The embodiment of that fascination is Rita Vogt, the protagonist of “The Legend of Rita,” who started out as a youthful idealist in the West Germany of the late 1960s and ended up as a hunted terrorist 20 years later.

The two decades covered by the film saw the rise and fall of radical left-wing groups in Germany, who began by robbing banks to “liberate” capitalistic money, then escalated the terror by killing politicians and judges, and bombing U.S. military bases in Germany.

Schlondorff acknowledges taking considerable liberties with the characters and chronology of actual events, but he says that Rita’s role and her actions are based “60% to 70%” on an actual terrorist, Inge Viett. In 1992, Viett was sentenced to 13 years in prison; she served half that time and has written an autobiography.

“Everything [in the film] is the way it was, but not exactly the way it happened,” explains “Legend of Rita” screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase.

Schlondorff, who was born 61 years ago in Wiesbaden, has consistently explored the German character in his works, beginning with the 1966 “Young Torless,” his first full-length film, set in a Prussian boarding school and credited with launching the New German Cinema. His explorations continued in such major films as “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum” (1975), “The Tin Drum” (1979), which won an Oscar for best foreign-language film, and “The Ogre” (1996), with John Malkovich.

“In conceiving ‘The Legend of Rita,’ I wanted to show the differences between East and West Germans, and the idea of illustrating them by way of the terrorist period came later,” Schlondorff says.

“After the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, there was a honeymoon where we were all supposed to be loving brothers and sisters,” the director continues. “Ten years later, we realize that we are two different cultures, we went to different schools, and we had different ways of working.

“For 40 years, we in West Germany were assured that East Germany was a huge prison, that there was no life beyond the wall. But the East Germans, though mainly opposed to the regime, went bowling, had birthday parties and felt that they were living a life.”

While Schlondorff graphically depicts the boredom and drabness of East German life in the film, its citizens come off as three-dimensional characters--including officials of the East German secret police. When “The Legend of Rita” was initially released in Germany last year, “those in the West hated it, they called it a propaganda movie,” he says. “By contrast, the East Germans loved it, they felt that’s the way it actually was.” The authentic portrayal of East German life owes much to screenwriter Kohlhaase, who worked at East Berlin’s DEFA studio in Babelsberg for 40 years.

Although terrorism is a worldwide phenomenon, the brand depicted in “The Legend of Rita” could have happened only in Germany, Schlondorff believes, and the people in it could only have been Germans. “First, you needed to have a divided country and city, where you could go from capitalism to socialism by taking the subway,” he says.

‘I See Everything in Political Perspective’

In returning to his preoccupation with the German character, and its contrast to the American character, Schlondorff allows himself some sweeping generalizations.

“The German, in the name of an idea, will suspend his judgment and lose touch with reality,” the director asserts. “I know that’s true because I can feel it in myself sometimes. We Germans have no immune system against ideas. I love Americans for the exact opposite, their incapacity, almost, to go for ideas. You’re so matter-of-fact, you first perceive reality. I think that’s an extremely positive trait.”

Schlondorff has made films in France--where he lived 10 years as a teenager and young adult--including an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s “Swann in Love.” In America, he has directed the TV adaptation of “Death of a Salesman” with Dustin Hoffman, and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Reflecting on the body of his work, Schlondorff muses that “I make films with political consciousness, and I see everything in political perspective, even today, when it’s no longer fashionable.” He recalls his first political act as a 16-year old, while attending a parochial boarding school in France, where “half the Jesuits were Communist sympathizers. I distributed leaflets against the torture of Algerians by the French military.” Today, he says, “I raise my voice in my own country when I see abuses, but I am not messianic about it. And I love films too much to make message or pamphlet movies.”

Like most foreign directors, Schlondorff faces considerable obstacles in getting his films before American audiences. It has been suggested that Americans avoid foreign-language films because they don’t like to look at subtitles, but Schlondorff believes that the problem goes deeper than that.

“The trouble is that to Americans, everything in foreign movies looks so . . . well, foreign,” he says. European viewers don’t have the same difficulty with American movies because they watch American television programs from childhood on and thus are familiar with American settings and characters.

“The American way of life is now universal,” Schlondorff says.

Schlondorff keeps in fighting time; he boxes and runs marathons and expressed his disappointment that he had to miss the recent Los Angeles Marathon. But he observes that “staying young has more to do with intellectual curiosity than physical conditioning.”