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WSWS : Arts Review : Film Reviews

Margarethe von Trotta's The Promise: The Berlin Wall comes between two lovers

By David Walsh
25 September 1995

How can one explain the aversion to examining problems of history, particularly recent history, which currently dominates the film world except as an indication of a very stagnant and reactionary political climate? For all the media clamor about the "end of socialism," if not the "end of history," not a single major film, aside from Margarethe von Trotta's The Promise, has approached the earthshaking events which have taken place over the past six years.

Von Trotta ( The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), The German Sisters (1981), Rosa Luxemburg (1986)) deserves credit for attempting to confront the "years of the wall" and German reunification.

A group of young people in East Berlin, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, decide to make their way to the West through the sewer system. One member of the group, Konrad, trips and falls on the street as the others descend into a manhole. A truck rounds the corner. He urges the others to go on without him and promises his girlfriend, Sophie, that he will come later. In the next 28 years, they are to meet only three or four times.

One of those times is in Prague in 1968 where Konrad, now an astrophysicist, is sent to deliver a scientific presentation. Nothing has changed in the lovers' feelings for one another. Their reunion, interrupted by the Soviet invasion, produces a child. During another brief encounter, in East Berlin, Konrad insists that Sophie, who wants to stay with him, remain in the West. He is under the impression that he will be allowed to join her. When the plan falls through and their son is born, Sophie decides she can no longer tolerate the uncertainty and breaks off relations with him.

Twelve years later Konrad gets the opportunity to travel to West Berlin and meets his son for the first time, as well as Sophie's new husband. Konrad also has a wife and a daughter. His desire to see his child leads him to make various compromises with the Stalinist regime. In the end he strikes a Stasi (secret police) official and loses his position, as well as his new family. In November 1989, the night the Berlin Wall comes down, Konrad and Sophie are reunited on a bridge between east and west. Whether any feeling is left between the man and woman, whether they can even understand each other, is uncertain.

The strong point of The Promise is its refusal to be swept up uncritically in the wave of anticommunism unleashed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It treats the former citizens of the GDR sympathetically and grapples with the way they themselves must have viewed, at different stages, the Stalinist regime.

Class questions do arise. As von Trotta notes in the interview which accompanies this review, Konrad's father points out to him at the beginning of the film that, as a working class youth, a variety of opportunities might be unavailable to him in the West. As a middle class girl, Sophie is in a different position.

In another scene one of Konrad's colleagues, a middle-aged scientist, explains that he was invited by his former employers to Munich at the end of the war. He found such a repugnant, self-satisfied atmosphere, in which former Nazis thrived, that he decided to return to the East and build what he hoped was a new society. There were no doubt wide layers of the population which felt this way. The Stalinists cynically played upon popular hatred of the Nazis to justify their own crimes and betrayals.

Von Trotta is no doubt correct as well to treat Konrad's decision to stay in the GDR--and there is an element of choice in his actions--with a certain amount of respect. He increasingly views his situation as a prison, but von Trotta suggests he has his scientific work and, in any event, West Berlin was no paradise. In one sequence, Konrad's brother-in-law, a dissident, is expelled by the Stalinists to the West. He takes one look at the drug addicts, prostitutes and homeless hanging around the train station and essentially commits suicide by making an attempt to climb back over the wall.

The strengths of the film do not, however, compensate for its serious weaknesses. The results of von Trotta's foray into the field of recent German history are not satisfying, historically or artistically.

Neither the events nor the characters ever truly come to life. A kind of dullness envelops everything: the writing, acting, lighting and set design. The characters remain types, the fleshed-out expression of certain social tendencies. One can almost imagine the discussions during the writing of the script: "All right, let's give Konrad a sister he cares for, and then later she can become a Protestant minister and a dissident." The film remains very much on the surface, a journalistic account of events.

Naturally no artist should be expected to provide exhaustive answers to complex problems. But, in a work whose focus is political events and their consequences in the lives of various individuals, one would expect to encounter, even "feel," the results of serious thinking about the most difficult questions: What was the GDR? Was it a socialist state? What was the relationship between the West and East German regimes? Why was the wall built? Why did it come down? What was the nature of the dissident movement and what did it lead to? What have been the consequences of the confusion sowed by Stalinism?

There is very little indication that the director or screenwriters posed themselves any of those questions, or at any rate, attempted to find any dramatic means of probing them. In our conversation, von Trotta readily agreed that the GDR was not a socialist state. Yet she found no way in the film--irony, for example--of exposing the pseudosocialist rhetoric of the Stalinist officials.

The disrupted love affair between Konrad and Sophie ought to be profoundly moving, and it isn't. They are something less than real human beings with their own independent and spontaneous development. Konrad, in particular, seems to be the product of research, a sort of composite East German.

In the course of the interview von Trotta remarked on the fact that no other German filmmaker had attempted such a story, and therefore her film was expected to include and explain "everything," which no single film could possibly do. Her complaint has a certain element of justice to it. But the problem is not so much what her films lacks, but rather what it contains.

In the end, The Promise is neither fish nor fowl. On the one hand, von Trotta's social views are too pronounced for her to make a love story in which political problems are simply ignored or excluded. Although such a story, it must be said, can have a subversive effect if it demonstrates forcefully how elementary human desires and needs are thwarted by a repressive society. On the other hand, von Trotta's radicalism is so amorphous and confused that it prevents her from making a film which truly illuminates the character of a historical period.

"We thought that after the wall came down, German filmmakers would rush to make something out of it"

An interview with Margarethe von Trotta, director of The Promise

DW: You've made a film on a very difficult question. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I haven't seen many films on the subject of German reunification.

MVT: There are no such films. That was our big surprise when the film came out in Germany. We started to write the script in 1990. It was more or less finished in 1991. Then we had to wait a long time to get the money together to do the film. But we thought that after the wall came down German filmmakers would rush to make something out of it. And we thought we might be only one stone in a big mosaic.

DW: What was your motive in making the film?

MVT: It was the first time you could speak about both parts of Germany in a film. Before that the East German directors told stories about their country, and we told stories about ours. It was something new for us to speak about the 28 years, the wall years, from both sides. I was often in East Germany because I had friends there and some of my films were shown there. But I never dared to ask the most essential questions because I knew beforehand that they couldn't answer them in an honest way. And then after the wall came down, people were very willing to speak, which they are not anymore.

DW: Why won't people speak today?

MVT: They now think more about the positive aspects of their lives in the DDR than they did right after the wall came down. Because so many people are very disappointed by how things have developed. They have a feeling that their lives and their past count for nothing in the new reality. Therefore a nostalgia for the old situation develops, and little by little they forget how they lived before, and about the dark side of their lives.

DW: Particularly if someone has lost his or her job.

MVT: Sure, so many lost their jobs. They had so many benefits in their system. The right of everybody to have a job. They had social welfare, they had child care, they had medical care, they had low rents and so on. They couldn't maintain these benefits without a strong economy. They survived on West German subsidies. One of the things I was very upset to learn was that in the DDR prisons where they put the political prisoners, they already knew at the beginning of the year how many they had to take in. I asked: how could you know how many dissidents you would have?

DW: A quota?

MVT: It was like textile production. They knew how many they had to have because they could sell them to the West. At the end every political prisoner sold to the West brought them 80,000 marks. In the main state hospital, without the knowledge of the patients, they sold some very ill patients to West German chemical industries for experiments. And the state got money for it. I've been a leftist all my life, but there were so many things I didn't know.

DW: I don't identify the DDR as a socialist country.

MVT: No, not at all. When I went around with the Rosa Luxemburg film in East Germany, so many people asked me: but do you think that if Rosa were still alive she could live in our country? I said: no, never.

DW: She would have been killed.

MVT: First, she would have been killed before, first by Stalin, then by Hitler. She would have had many chances to be killed before then....

DW: The film seems to suggest that Konrad does have a choice to stay or go, and that he has a psychological predisposition to stay. It suggests that perhaps there was a type that stayed and a type that went.

MVT: In the beginning he had no chance to go. He tried. You could say in the first place that by hanging back and falling on his knees that could express a psychological hesitation....

DW: That's the implication I took.

MVT: That was very much an open question for us. But they didn't go for political reasons. At 18 you just go because it's an adventure and you're in prison, so you have to do something. And Sophie has much more of a motivation to go to the West than he has. She has her aunt who she likes very much. She has already been in the West. She hates her mother because her mother is with this other man she blames for killing her father. Konrad has a family which he likes.

DW: I thought it was a little more critical of him, in the sense that it seemed to suggest that he was a little bit under his father's thumb.

MVT: He's just a complex and not a heroic character. But I think that people are more like that than film heroes. What the father says is also true: people like us, coming from the proletariat, we wouldn't have a chance to study and so forth in the West. The place where we were shooting was a real institute of astrophysics and the discoveries we showed in the film were made at this institute. I spoke with the physicists who did this work. It was well known that they were much more advanced in this field than the West. And so Konrad is satisfied by his scientific work. He's just unhappy that he can't be with her. But many people say: "Why didn't he fight, why didn't he do this or that?" Should he have gone and been killed climbing up the wall? That wouldn't have been a solution. Just to prove that his love was so powerful that he couldn't live without her?

DW: I think it's significant that so few European artists, and Germans specifically, have approached this problem.

MVT: I can't give you an answer why it's like that. When the wall came down I was living in Italy. Perhaps I was not paralyzed by the whole situation as the Germans were. And so out of naivete, being, in a way, distant from everyday problems there, I had the courage to do it. But I'm not sure if I had been living in Germany for the whole time whether I would have had the courage.

DW: Do you have any thoughts on the current state of German filmmaking.

MVT: I can't answer that because I haven't seen all the new films. They rarely come to Paris, where I live now. You never see a German film either in Italy or in France. The curiosity on the part of other countries in German films that we had before with Fassbinder, Herzog, etc.--when we were a very strong group--no longer exists.

DW: What was your motive in making the Rosa Luxemburg film?

MVT: That was something which came out of '68. I'd had the desire to make a film about her for a long time. I wanted to show that she was someone who very much lived up to her ideas. She was living what she was telling people. You see so many politicians who are one thing in public, but personally they are the opposite.