"Rosenstrasse"

posted to www.marxmail.org on February 13, 2004

"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