Eine Liebe in Deutschland: a review

Stani (Piotr Lysek) and Pauline (Hanna Schygulla) in Eine Liebe in Deutschland

The 1983 East German film Eine Liebe in Deutschland (A Love in Germany), directed by Andrzej Wajda, is half-romance, half-political morality play. There is a semi-romantic central plotline in it. But more than that it is a film about moral trauma, specifically the moral trauma inflicted upon the German population by the fascist ideology. The presence of a mechanised, militarised state in the background running everything has a corrosive effect upon the soul. This film is, in a certain sense, a meditation on this corrosion: it is a meditation on how decent, caring, ordinary people in Germany could turn cruel in the presence of this ideology. It showcases how even petty jealousy, greed, suspicion, grief, fear of reprisal—what the Catholics would call ‘venialities’—can be alchemically transmuted into inhuman atrocities in the presence of such an ideology.

The framing alternates between Herbert Kropp (Otto Sander) and his son Klaus in the present day, exploring the town of Brombach in an attempt to find out what happened to Kropp’s mother; and flashbacks to the Second World War and Pauline Kropp’s life as a soldier’s wife on the home front. This device is, unfortunately, handled with all the narrative subtlety and deftness of a crowbar. The transitions between past and present are usually there to serve a cause. That is: they highlight a point of irony or black humour; or they demonstrate certain hypocrisies or euphemisms or failures of memory in those who lived during that time; or they explore the traumas and survivors’ guilt that afflicts them.

The central storyline, about the love-affair between the married Pauline Kropp (Hanna Schygulla) and the younger Polish POW Stanislaw Zasada (Piotr Lysak), is in a certain sense only the central hanger on which the rest of the mobile spins. The tale is told through the eyes of Kropp’s son Herbert, who provides the occasional narration from his current perspective. Even though Kropp is an adulteress and thus clearly morally compromised, in a certain sense she’s the most morally consistent and centred of her peers. Her ‘friends’ in the village all to some degree play a role in her and Zasada being discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. The case lands in the lap of an army commander, Lieutenant Meyer (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose intentions start off as ‘good’ to a certain extent, but whose decision-making is at every step compromised in grotesque ways: by Nazi ideology, by the orders of his superiors, and by ‘regulations’. In the end, Kropp is sent to a concentration camp, and Zasada is (incompetently) hanged.

For some reason I feel like the male characters in this movie got something of a fairer shake than the female ones. Whether it’s Herr Wyler (Gérard Desarthe), the sub-rosa antifascist who unsuccessfully pleads with his cupiditous wife not to inform on Pauline; or Melchior who allows Zasada to eat at the table with him despite it being against regulations—and later turns a blind eye to his affair with Kropp; or even Lieutenant Meyer who makes these half-arsed attempts within the scope of the Nazi bureaucracy to let Kropp and Zasada ‘off the hook’… they seem to get more sympathy from Wajda than the women do. At the same time, though, Wajda lets us see more clearly how the women face their moral universe and the contours within which they allow themselves to make compromises with the Nazi state and ideology.

To a certain degree, I feel like this movie deserved to have been scripted with greater subtlety and care than it was. The acting, particularly from Schygulla and Mueller-Stahl, is truly top-class; and the greater point of the film regarding the stories of the war that went untold and the secrets and small acts of collaboration that went unspoken in guilt or deliberate misremembrance—is a point worth exploring and telling well. (I feel like I need to watch that Kate Winslet movie The Reader after this; it seems to explore a similar point about guilt, memory and moral trauma.)

There are some darkly comedic moments to the movie, like when Meyer, his fumbling subordinate Schulze and Dr Borg all attempt to use hair and eye palettes, measuring tapes and phrenology equipment in an attempt to prove that Zasada is ‘Aryan’ so that Kropp can be gotten off of the charge of breaking the laws against ‘Rassenschande’; or when Meyer pathetically attempts to bribe a Polish high school teacher into being Zasada’s executioner. However, these flickers of farce only serve to demonstrate the dehumanising monstrosity that undergirds all of these comic absurdities: the treatment of human beings as essentially equivalent to breeding-stock, or the absolute negotiability of dignity and conscience in the face of a state with no regard for human life.

The romance plot is carried almost entirely by Schygulla’s on-screen magnetism – her complete command of her facial features and her ability to charm and smoulder with nothing more than a glance. Her male-lead counterpart, Lysak, is competent (and he can chew scenery with the best of them, especially during the medical examination scene), but most of the time he seems a bit hapless in the face of the shopkeeper’s shielded—but deep and scalding—emotions.

In the end, if I were to recommend A Love in Germany, it would be on the basis of Schygulla’s performance, as well as on some of the disturbing-but-needful ethical-psychological explorations in the middle. But the framing and a lot of the overarching narration is needlessly ham-handed, and I feel like the point about guilt and memory could have been made far better without Otto Sander’s fourth-wall-breaking monologues at the viewer at the beginning and end. I suspect that there are better movies about life-behind-the-lines in WWII Germany out there than this one.