Beyond a war and a wall

Germany is a bewildering closet of history. Images that seared the last century still smolder. Art and politics are often held against the prism of the Nazi era. But the grip of the past is slackening on a new generation of filmmakers increasingly intent on drawing narratives from their nation’s current troubles.

Unemployment, drugs, immigration and the failure of German reunification after the collapse of communism are prevalent themes in contemporary documentary and feature films. Young directors see a country whose international stature is rising while its internal problems are raising new questions about German identity and the once-romantic vision of a utopian society.

“People are saying there might be another golden age of German film coming,” said Teresa Renn, the 27-year-old director of “Janine F.,” a keen glimpse at an underworld of misfits and narcotics. “Maybe when you feel bad you make better art. Unemployment is high. Reunification has problems. Young people are more serious today about the future. They’re often going in circles. They don’t know what to do, who they are.”

To understand the directors’ focus on the present, one need only mention “Downfall,” a vivid accounting of Hitler’s last days in the bunker where he committed suicide in 1945. The film, nominated for a foreign-language Academy Award (Spain’s “The Sea Inside” won the Oscar last Sunday), humanizes the fuhrer to a degree many Germans had not seen before. It has led to debates over a nation’s complicity in being seduced by calculated evil masquerading as nationalism.

Some young filmmakers chose not to buy a ticket.

“Growing up in school, we talked for three or four years about Hitler and what happened,” said Till Endemann, a 28-year-old director. “We know the history. This baggage, which we should carry, is getting lighter, though, and I think it is allowing us to tell better stories. We see our country in a different light than the generations before us. We’re not nationalists or patriots. But we view Germany today as a country that needs to be filmed.”

Endemann’s clever and understated first feature, “Smile of the Monster Fish,” shown recently at the 55th Annual Berlin Film Festival, is an exploration of a boy’s search for himself against the deceptive facade of an east German seaside town. The charm withers two blocks from the beach. The outskirts are spiked with weeds, houses crumble, fathers drink too much. Fifteen years after the Berlin Wall fell, the East German expectation of prosperity is brittle and unfulfilled.

The boy, Malte, scrawls graffiti on trains that go nowhere. He waits for his 18th birthday and hustles black-market cigarettes to pay for a driver’s license he hopes will give him passage to a better life. He has a summer romance with Annika, whose divorced mother used to take her to Portugal for vacation, but with money low and unemployment at 20% brings her to Malte’s beach instead. Endemann’s skill is subtlety, letting a whisper, a glance reveal more than social statistics and soliloquies.

That sense of realism imbued other German films at the festival. “Dancing With Myself” is a documentary about confused souls seeking redemption through dance. “What’s Up?” explores the lives of four young Muslim men struggling in Cologne. “Let the Cat Out of the Bag” is a dark feature about lonely hearts and voyeurs. “Netto” is the story of a son eschewing West Berlin to help his sinking father in the east. And “Janine F.” is a documentary on a drug-addicted painter in a Berlin artist colony. When she jumps to her death, her body lies on the ground and passersby mistake her suicide for public art.

A buzz begins

Excitement over German films began two years ago with “Goodbye Lenin,” a bit of nostalgia about a son trying to conceal from his ill East German mother that the Berlin Wall has tumbled and the world has changed. In 2004, “Head On,” a gritty love story set amid Germany’s Turkish community, won the Berlin festival’s Golden Bear award and recognized director Fatih Akin as a visceral and poetic voice in a widening class of young filmmakers. It has just arrived in the U.S. and has been well received by critics.

German Culture Minister Christina Weiss said recently that German films accounted for 24% of this nation’s box office last year. That’s above the 17% in 2003 and higher than any year since such receipts were first recorded in 1990. German ticket sales are still dominated by international studios led by American productions. But films limning the contemporary German psyche are finding resonance, even if it’s premature to suggest a renaissance is underway.

There is, however, no escaping the tug of the past; this is a nation of memorials and concentration camps. The hallowed age of German film spanned the 1920s and early 1930s. Works such as “Metropolis” and “The Blue Angel” possessed story lines, cinematography and production techniques that would influence Hollywood. The Nazis ruined the film industry, chasing away directors such as Billy Wilder. But the Reich claimed a moment of film genius in “Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl’s mesmerizing propagandist documentary on the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.

Sixty years after the end of World War II, films like “Downfall” are needling history, examining its heroes and villains and adding nuance to an evolving mosaic. Two films at the recent Berlin Film Festival attest to this. “Fateless,” based on the novel by Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, tells of a boy who survives concentration camps. “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days” follows the fate of a small number of Munich students executed for opposing the Nazi regime.

Such tales echo like distant footfalls for many young filmmakers. It is the now, the new Germany that intrigues them.

Consider Mario. Wearing a thin beard and a funny haircut, he closes his eyes and dances, briefly escaping the wreck his life has become. Unemployed, divorced and living in a camper that trundles over Berlin’s streets, he is one of three characters in “Dancing With Myself.” Mario grew up in the communist east, but freedom and capitalism have brought him unexpected misery.

He’s a welder with an expired license. He’s not skilled enough for most jobs; overqualified for others. That matters little because there are few jobs anyway. His girlfriend refers to him as a shriveled potato. His mother, who visits his camper with a candle and a cake, is the only one to help him celebrate his birthday. And he wished she hadn’t. When he dances it all goes away, and in the cheap lights and music, he finds the man he wanted to be.

“The calm life and the romantic picture of the socialist system is over for men like Mario,” said Antje Kruska, 31, who directed the film with Judith Keil. “It’s hard for them to get free of that even 15 years after the wall fell.”

A culture clash

A different wall runs through the lives of four young Muslim men in “What’s Up?”, a documentary by Bettina Braun, 35. The men, sons of immigrants from Albania, Turkey and Tunisia and Morocco, live in Cologne and straddle worlds. They are tugged by the traditions of their parents and hungry, almost desperate, for a Western version of success they can’t quite define. Understanding them is key to understanding the complexities facing Muslim men in Europe during an age of terrorism.

Braun lifts them above stereotype. Alban is a mechanic who decides to be a hairdresser. Ertan battles with his father and struggles with his electrician’s job. Kais is a charmer who commits a crime and winnows his ambition while still rejecting certain jobs, insisting: “I’m not a Burger King guy.” Ali is the most charismatic and at times the most confused. He raps that he’s “full of tears, full of hate.” His grades deter him from technical school. He gets a part in a musical that he grows to despise but ultimately finds liberation in.

The film led Braun to contemplate German perceptions.

“Germans tend to consider our way of thinking as objective. We consider ourselves extremely liberal,” she said. “But suddenly you see that this liberal way of thinking may be a kind of prejudice.... Hopefully, we can look at these young men and see they are the same as us, they have the same desires.”

At the end of “What’s Up?,” Ali stands on a corner. The musical was a success and he was the star. For a beautiful, fleeting moment he feels lifted above his neighborhood, freed from his predicament. Maybe he will become a professional actor and prosper among the “blue eyes” of Germany. And then he wonders if he’s dreaming again.