#TIFF15 Review: Fritz Bauer

"We tell the redemption story of a man who returns to Germany after the Second World War as a broken pessimist and discovers his calling in the fight against collective forgetting." It worked for the Swiss world premiere audience, who awarded it; it worked for an appreciative Toronto audience during the sold-out North American premiere; it will work in theatres around the world, while admittedly not reinventing the well-made (coming-to-TV) film either.

Another segueway from A HEAVY HEART: I am confident that I just witnessed the 2nd of the next best actor nominations for the German Film Awards, with Burghardt Klaussner as the title's 1950s German attorney general. Klaussner has been convincing in too many international hits to list --among them GOOD BYE, LENIN!, REQUIEM, THE EDUKATORS, THE READER, THE WHITE RIBBON, and last year in Volker Schlöndorff’s DIPLOMACY. In Oliver Hirschbiegel's current feature film 13 MINUTES he played the role of SS Major General Arthur Nebe, which earned him his fourth nomination for the German Film Award. Most recently he was in front of the camera in Steven Spielberg's espionage thriller BRIDGE OF SPIES.

Here Klaussner quite simply becomes Bauer, surrounded by a solid ensemble including Sebastian Blomberg, who we recently showed you as part of our Goethe Films Toronto series in "Age of Cannibals", and Jorg Schüttauf as his opponents, both of whom I would have wanted to see more of. Petzold & Graf favourite Ronald Zehrfeld plays a bit too tame for me to love him in this role, but his challenge here is to serve perhaps one too many dramaturgical purposes to create a rounded image of one personality.

It is always interesting to watch films with a Nazi theme with North American audiences, who understandably don't have all the detailed historical background to assess what is based on real events and what is fiction (nor does today's younger German generation, as Klaussner pointed out after the premiere). Here, it's dramatized reality --the team met with Gerhard Wiese, the last living public prosecutor in Bauer's group--, zooming in on the story of the (as a sideline: gay) Jewish Social Democratic attorney who would, through having the Mossad apprehend the heinous Adolf Eichmann who so fascinated Hannah Arendt in her investigation of evil, pave the way to the later Auschwitz trials in Germany. A sea change in the new democracy that West Germany was trying to build -- with the legacy of having thousands of former or not so former Nazis in places of power for decades, as FRITZ BAUER also shows. The German title DER STAAT GEGEN FRITZ BAUER is even more revealing, as in Germany not "the people" but the state officially prosecutes. Fritz Bauer does not (only) face opposition from an un-enlightened public who want to move on from the horrors they brought about and witnessed, but ill-will and sabotage from his own colleagues and other agencies of the state.

"What can we be proud of as Germans today?" demands a young woman of Bauer on a TV talk show, nearly desperate. Not Goethe, not Schiller. "The good we've done ourselves." With similar moral clarity and human warmth Bauer simplifies his young protege's decision-making on how far to join his fight: "Do you want justice or do you want a new kitchen?"

Klaussner remarked that it was great to play a hero. Because that is what Fritz Bauer was. And "hero" is not a moniker Germans use lightly.

+++Watch our Goethe Director’s Talk during TIFF15 with Locarno audience award winner Lars Kraume, director of THE PEOPLE VS. FRITZ BAUER, and lead Burghardt Klaussner, at the Goethe-Institut Toronto.+++


by Jutta Brendemühl

image courtesy of Beta Cinema