PHOENIX BREAKS NEW GROUND
Stories of Germany’s postwar divide
One might think that all the stories that can be told about the Holocaust have been told, that any new explorations of the topic are merely rehashing familiar themes.
German director Christian Petzold was drawn to the subject because he saw an opening, something that, though it had been done before, had not been done in relation to the German experience in the wake of the Second World War.
“All countries, when they have lived through a traumatic situation like war or genocide, they tell stories or sing songs where they work through these traumatic experiences,” he said, in an interview during last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “In America, after Vietnam, there were so many stories about coming home — Deer Hunter is one of the greatest movies ever made. Or think of Odysseus coming home after Troy. Why don’t Germans have these stories?”
That was the starting point for Petzold’s ninth feature, Phoenix. Written with filmmaker Harun Farocki (who died in July 2014), based on the novel Le retour des cendres by Hubert Monteilhet, it tells of a woman who returns from Auschwitz following the Second World War and attempts to rekindle her relationship with her husband, who doesn’t recognize her but recruits her for a scheme to lay claim to his presumed-dead wife’s estate.
Disfigured, Nelly has had reconstructive surgery. The doctor offers her the opportunity to change her appearance, to take on another identity, but she refuses, asking to look like her former self. Reclaiming and reframing the past is a running theme in Phoenix, as characters find different ways of coming to terms with trauma.
Particularly striking is the sense of a divide in German society between those who went to the camps and those who did not. Nelly walks around postwar Berlin like an outsider, invisible to everyone, including her husband.
“Harun and I thought, ‘These are ghosts,’” Petzold said. “Nobody wants them. Ghosts are always dematerialized characters. They want to be human beings, but nobody lets them in. They’re standing in front of windows, knocking on doors, but nobody is opening. This was my subject: a ghost coming home. Her face has been destroyed, her body has been destroyed. She wants her love back, her body back, her life back. This is Nelly’s story, but it’s also the German situation of 1945.”
Petzold’s last film, Barbara, told of the repressed love between two doctors at a rural East German hospital in the 1980s, one of whom hopes to escape to West Germany. Despite evidence to the contrary, the director swears he isn’t a fan of political films. Politics may infuse his narratives, he insisted, but only and always in deference to character-based drama.
“I don’t like movies where the protagonists are ideals of a political situation,” he said. “I like it the other way around, where it’s a choreography of love or a choreography of desire, then you feel, ‘Hey, this is political.’
“I don’t want to destroy these little human beings with ideas. I want to show the fight of human beings against ideas. I don’t have big ideas about the German state of 1945. I didn’t do big research about Holocaust survivors. I know many things, but I didn’t want to give the actors too much. ... During shooting, reflections about what happened came into the scenes (naturally). I like that.”
Frequent Petzold collaborator Nina Hoss (who plays Nelly and also had the lead in Barbara, alongside her Phoenix co-star, Ronald Zehrfeld) feels compelled by the director’s scripts, which offer her complex roles while probing broader issues in German society.
“I feel like I can tell two things at the same time (with Petzold),” she said, “a very personal, private story about someone’s life; and at the same time we can talk about our country, what we’re dealing with right now or where it came from, without it being a lesson. He doesn’t tell you what to think. He raises questions.”
The driving force to Hoss’s performance came from understanding what her character is looking for, why she returns to a husband who may have betrayed her, who doesn’t recognize her and isn’t particularly compassionate or likable.
The tension between the two former lovers — who move around one another in close quarters for much of the film, without acknowledging their common bond — is loaded with a cruel irony reminiscent of Shakespeare.
“She wants to be loved,” Hoss said, explaining why Nelly remains in such a poisonous environment.
“If you don’t have anyone who loves you, you’re very lonely, you don’t get reassurance about who you are. She needs that reflection so badly because he is what made her survive (the concentration camps).
“She believes in love. Love is the motor that makes you survive the most horrific things. That is the beauty of the film.”