Nina Hoss is ‘Anonyma’

This film seems to have gone straight to DVD in the UK. I would have liked the chance to see it in a cinema and I feel that some of its power is diminished on video. Based on diaries first published in book form Switzerland in the 1950s and then controversially in Germany in 1959 (after which the anonymous author withdrew the book until after her death) the stories finally re-emerged in Germany in 2003. The film details the last few days of war in 1945 when a Red Army company finds itself camped on the streets of Berlin. The soldiers don’t know why their commanders are holding them back from a final assault on the Reichstag, but in the meantime they take advantage of the local population – which means casual rape of German women. For the women, young and old, there are few options. ‘Fraternisation’ is not a moral choice but rather the only pragmatic course. ‘Anonyma’, an attractive younger woman who speaks Russian (and has worked in Moscow as a journalist), decides to seek out a Russian officer as a ‘protector’ rather than suffer continual attacks from soldiers. What will happen when the war ends?

Nina Hoss is terrific as Anonyma but there are other strong performances as well in a large cast playing the women and the Russian soldiery. It’s one of those films which ‘humanises’ war and its effects. Anonyma is certainly a patriotic and nationalistic German, if not a fascist (she refuses to directly answer the question “Are you a fascist?”). Her husband goes to the Russian front with the SS in 1941. But despite this we feel for her and the actions she takes. Similarly, the film shows the brutality of the Russians, but also discusses the atrocities they have suffered at the hands of the Wehrmacht and particularly the SS. The Russian soldiers and their officers become individualised. The casting offers us a variety of Soviet ‘types’ from the grizzled officer through the Mongolian soldier to young blonde men and women (we learn that there are over a million women in the Red Army). Quite noticeable too is the surprise that the older Germans show when they realise that the Russians are not ‘beasts’ and their slow understanding that the Russians were forced into a war to defend themselves. On the other hand, it is not all friendly discovery and there is tragedy as well. The film is a challenge for women in the audience since the Russian men view rape as relatively trivial compared to the atrocities they have seen and suffered (and committed).

What interests me most is that director Max Färberböck and co-writer Catharina Schuchmann have so deftly blended several genres and somehow caught the contemporary mood – that sense that a younger generation now wants to explore many of the stories of the 1940s in Europe before the last survivors of the action are gone. In this sense the film sits alongside well-known titles such as Der Untergang (Downfall) (Germany/Austria/Italy 2004), Sophie Scholl: The Last Days (Germany 2005), Flame and Citron (Denmark/Germany/Czech Republic 2008), Black Book (Netherlands/Germany/Belgium 2006)  Winter in Wartime (Netherlands 2009), Fateless, (Hungary/Germany/UK 2005), Defiance (US 2008), Max Manus (Norway 2008), Un Secret (France 2007), L’armée du crime, France 2009) etc. – all released in the last few years. Most of these films have been big popular hits in their domestic markets. Anonyma has been turned into a TV series in Germany this year (which reminds me of the UK TV series Tenko which involved a group of European women put into camps by the Japanese in 1942 after the occupation of Malaya and Java). This is quite surprising since the Lumière Database suggests only a modest performance at the German Box Office.

The fate of women in Berlin in April/May 1945 has appeared in other films. The two I remember are Carl Foreman’s The Victors (US 1963) which ends with a fight over a woman between a Russian and an American and Fassbinder’s wonderful The Marriage of Maria Braun (West Germany 1979) – the metaphorical tale of a woman standing alone in the rubble of 1945 and what happens to her in Adenauer’s West Germany. (There is a brief moment in Anonyma when two Germans discuss the future they hope to see when the war finally ends.)

But whereas Maria Braun escapes the rubble, a whole genre of films developed in both East and West Germany in the months and years following the final days of war in Berlin. These were Trümmerfilme or ‘rubble films’, the most famous of which is Die Mörder sind unter uns, the first post-war film in East Germany which deals with the problem of identifying former war criminals now living in a new society. Anonyma hints at this and raises questions about how she will survive. The most harrowing rubble film was arguably not German at all but Italian – Roberto Rossellini’s 1947 feature Germany Year Zero. One other point to make is that the contrast between the sunny (even when smoke-filled) streets outside and the dark and dingy rooms in which the women, children and old men hide recalls the high period of Hollywood film noir. Hardly surprising since this was the film noir period worldwide, both in terms of style and thematic. I was reminded of similar Japanese films set in the rubble of Japanese cities in the immediate aftermath of the war – both made in the late 1940s and in the 1960s – such as Suzuki Sejun’s lurid and delirious Gate of Flesh (Japan 1964). That would make an interesting contrast with Anonyma: Prostitutes in garish one-colour outfits versus the subdued realism/naturalism of Anonyma.