Christain Petzold: Ghosts and Myths that Haunt the German Present

Christian Petzold is probably the most important German director since the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s introduced the world to the great Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders. Petzold himself is a part of another movement called The Berlin School, a movement defined by sombre, slow dramas by modern German directors that, like the New German Cinema directors a generation before them, concern themselves with the impact of the tumultuous 20th Century German history and the effect it had, and still has, on the country and German identity.

Petzold is by far the most recognized director in The Berlin School, and while his films may be filled with slow, silent movements where little happens, if one pays the slightest attention to what he is ever so subtly doing, one discovers how profound everything is under his films’ stripped down and simplified outer layer. Petzold’s films may be slow burning historical dramas, but they also incorporate elements of other genres like suspense, melodrama, and even fantasy. The fantastical creature most often brought to life by a Petzold character is a ghost, but here the ghosts are not glowing, transparent phantoms, but instead take the form of real people and represent the ghosts of the German past that remain, like physical beings trapped by the emotional and political scars left by past generations that cannot be erased no matter how much one wishes to eradicate or forget them. Petzold even named his first trilogy the Ghost trilogy. The three films feature characters who live in a certain place and time, but who seem lost to it because their relationship with the past leaves them alienated from the world of the present. 

Petzold refers to his second conceptional trilogy as Love in the Time of Oppressive Systems. It is composed of Barabara, a film about a repressed woman in Stasi controlled rural East Germany, Phoenix, set in post-WWII about a woman trying to begin a new life after surviving Auschwitz, and Transit, a modern set WWII film in occupied France where a man takes another man’s identity as he tries to escape by ferry to Mexico. All three films delve into their time periods, yet they are extremely unique period pieces, unlike anything that would get produced in Hollywood. Petzold makes films about personal, individual stories that are highly symbolic and that represent the fragmented and complicated German past without using stereotypes and making the grand generalizations. Spielberg’s grand WWII war films Saving Private Ryan and Schilder’s List may be louder, starrier, and more expensive, but Petzold’s more intimate stories surely better reflect the reality of the emotional and ideological toll the events had on the German population and its collective psychology.

Petzold and his fellow Berlin School directors are especially concerned with reunified Germany, a theme that the directors of the New German Cinema preceded, and the effects it has had on the country. Barbara is a film that both shows the horrors of the East German state, but that also refuses to shy away from the benefits of the socialist state such as a first class health care system and a sense of community. The film features Petzold’s muse Nina Hoss, a tall, lean, stone faced presence, whose stern, silent demeanor matches perfectly with the tone of the Berlin School films. Her performances serve as an analogy to the movement’s style itself. She seems unreadable, distant, and emotionless. Yet she has an unequivocal ability to make slight facial expressions  that break out on her almost entirely indecipherable face, revealing cracks in her hard exterior that prove she is a human below her tough exterior and that there is much more going on below the surface of her performance. Both Hoss’ performances and Petzolds’ films are fascinating enigmas that command our attention in order to be understood. 

In Barbara, Hoss plays a woman trapped by the state in a life she wants to abandon. She receives constant visits from a Stasi officer who inspects her flat and, coldy and disgustingly, her person. She trusts no one, and with reason. Yet the young handsome doctor she works for, André, played by another Petzold regular Ronald Zehrfeld, breaks down her resistance little by little, making her wonder if she can let down her guard, or if he is nothing more than a spy. This claustrophobic, paranoid environment is typical of other Stasi films, yet Barbara features some aspects that are uncommon in the genre. For example, Barbara’s boyfriend and his business partner, with whom she hopes to escape, are little more than out of place images of capitalism that seem anything but romantic. A tragic scene shows a heart to heart Barbara unexpectedly has with the lover of her boyfriend’s partner. She is much younger and certainly does not have the world weary look of Barbara. She recants how her lover is going to buy her an expensive ring and bring her to the West. She seems more googly eyed for the stuff the West can provide, than the man she is sleeping with. 

The sense of duty and community Barbara develops over the course of the film also shows another side of the socialist ideology of the East. The hospitals and medical care are top notch, and the doctors have a real sense of purpose. Neither Barbara nor her love interest chose this countryside location as their first choice, but they find peace and meaning in their work. The color palette of the film is also much different from the grim grey communist look that most films that depict the period have. The film takes place in a town surrounded by lush green nature and a strong wind that constantly blows the greenery to and fro. Petzold finds a way of critiquing the human rights offences of the East without demeaning everything about it outright, or portraying it as a grey, hostile wasteland. His critical eye depicts the flaws of East and West Germany through the experience of the title character, who will have to make a choice at the end of the film between two possible lives, her conscience split between two possible homes.

Phoenix is the second film in the trilogy, and is perhaps Petzold’s most visually impressive period piece. Every shot is so perfectly composed that many of them look like paintings. The film takes place in post WWII Germany where parts of the city remain in rubble. It begins with our protagonist, Nelly, again Hoss in a career defining role, being driven through a checkpoint with a completely bandaged face as if she had come right out of Eyes Without a Face. This is the beginning of a wildly unlikely melodramatic story told with Petzold’s steady, frilless style. Despite the unexaggerated tone of his films, they are anything but realist. They are not meant to be taken at face level, but are extremely symbolic. This explains the unbelievable plot of a woman who has reconstructive plastic surgery after she is burned in Auschwitz, seeks out her husband who she loves despite rumors that he sold her out to the Nazis, finds him, and when he, believing his wife to be dead, asks her to pretend to be his wife to collect her inheritance, starts to pretend to be herself. Nelly plays along with his game seemingly in the hope that he will recognize her or that she will make him fall in love with her again. 

The film is deeply allegorical. Phoenix is not only the name of the Cabaret where Nina finds her husband Johnny, again played by Zehrfeld, working, but is also, obviously, her, a woman reborn from the flames, quite literally. It is not until the breathtaking last scene of the film that we finally discover who this new, reborn version of Nelly will be, but it is fascinating watching her process of self creation and discovery. She is physically scarred by the horrific events of the holocaust, as the entire country would become mentally and emotionally scarred by the reality of the atrocities their government had committed. She is as damaged as the city in ruins she walks through. Hoss gives a truly outstanding performance here. Everything about her is changed. Her eyes are black and bruised and her skin color looks a bit off due to the surgery, but perhaps the horror she lived through is best represented by her physicality. She moves, dragging her long feet, wide eyed, almost stumbling, seemingly constantly afraid. In one particular scene Johnny tells her bluntly to stop and she quickly, as if stunned, jerks herself back against the wall, an obvious reflex from the concentration camp. Her body now responds automatically to commands, having been trained to expect violence at any moment.

One sees that though Germany was rebuilt after the war, it was forever scarred and changed. Nelly’s post war and pre war life and relationships are so different that they cannot be compared. Her husband turns her into the woman she once was in sequences highly influenced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and even the fairy tale Cinderella. Yet Johnny is so blinded by the war, his sins, and his survival, that he is unable to see the truth banging him on the head. The final scene is one of the greatest in recent cinema history. It is a gut punch that hits the audience as hard as it does the characters. Petzold, as subtle as ever, shoots the film in the simple shots. The fantasy of the Nelly Johnny created comes to life in a way completely unexpected, and breaks the spell conjured to reveal a brutal reality - the reality that what once was is gone forever. One must rise from the flames and start again, one’s previous life is gone forever.

The final film in Petzold’s Love trilogy is Transit. It is perhaps the most experimental of the three, as it recreates Nazi occupied France in WWII, but instead of recreating the 1940s, Petzold chooses to film the story set in what looks like 2018. There is another big change from the previous two films which is the absence of Hoss and Zehrfeld, replaced here by two younger, sexier stars. Georg, played by Franz Rogowski, is our protagonist, and Marie, Paula Beer is his elusive love interest. It is also the most unique of Petzold’s filmography for its use of narration, filling the many moments of silence from his other films and explaining characters' emotions for us. It gives the film a Kafkaesque feeling that makes it more difficult to identify among Petzold’s other more similar efforts.

I assume that the most obvious reason for changing the time setting of the film was because it would be much cheaper to film in modern day Marseilles than have to recreate the city during WWII, but by doing this the film also ties the fascist torn Europe of the past to our present times. As extreme right wing parties reemerge in Europe and currently govern in the United States, it is almost a dystopian film as much as a period piece. The military police of today dressed in black, heavily armed, and covered with identity hiding helmets look just as scary as the Nazi police or French collaboraters did. 

The film has ties to Casablanca as Georg falls in love with a woman and has to decide whether to travel with her or let her go with her older lover. The twist here is that Georg is going to travel on her dead husband's documents, and she does not know this. He must look something like him too because before they formally meet she constantly runs up to him on the street with a beaming smile, only to turn away, head bowed, on discovering that he is not the man she is looking for. The authorities also tell her that her husband has been in town to see them yet she seems to always just barely miss him. Here is another ghost who seems to be alive and dead at the same time, making it impossible for his loved ones to continue with their lives peacefully.

Petzold followed up his trilogy with this year's Undine, another sexy love story once again starring the actors from Transit, this time with Beer in the title role and Rogowski playing her love interest. The film opens up with Petzold reminding us he is back to his trademark style after experimenting a bit more with Transit. The scene is a simple shot reverse shot between Beer and a lover who is breaking up with her. She warns him that if he does this to her she is going to have to kill him. It is a fascinating scene for the inexplicable content and Petzold’s simple yet elegant way of shooting it. I went through the entire film confused by its fantastical elements, and upon doing a little research immediately after discovered that an Undine, the name of Beer’s character, is a mythological underwater creature that becomes a human when she falls in love, and, if her lover deserts her, must kill him and return to the water. Of course Petzold gives international audiences no hint as to what an Undine is if they do not know going in, and the action is so straightforwardly told that the fact that Undine is actually a fantastical being is not exactly obvious. We know some weird stuff is going on, but we don’t really know how to explain it to ourselves. It goes to show how captivating the film is that I was so perplexed and absorbed by it even without knowing this extremely important fact about its lead character.

Like Petzold’s ghosts, his undine is a person who looks and acts just like us, and inhabits the world of modern Germany. Here Undine is a guide in a museum that explains the development of the German city and how it went from a swamp, where Undine certainly came from, to the metropolitan capital that it is today. Rogowski plays Christoph, an underwater welder who wears a big scuba suit and helmet while at work and who, in one scene, sees Undine’s name written under the lake where he works. Undine sees him as a way to continue her human existence after she is dumped, but actually falls in love with him. Their romance is as sweet as on screen romances can be. Beer’s fiery blue eyes are fountains of emotion, and Rogowski’s hunky body and big brown eyes are so tender and loving that you want to fall into his arms. The Undine and the scuba diver seem like the perfect fairy tale couple, yet, like all fairy tales that aren’t Disney, things don’t end as we all might hope.

Petzold’s technical excellence is always on display. The film looks brilliant in every frame. The focus on water from lakes to canals along the city streets to fish bowls, to a wonderfully perturbing scene in a swimming pool puts a real focus on what Berlin rests on, and Beer’s turquoise water colored eyes and reddish hair make her beauty almost fantastical. At times the film reminded me of other underwater genre films like The Creature from the Black Lagoon or The Shape of Water, but here Petzold offers us up another type of fantasy, one that grounds its fairy tale story in the reality of the history of Berlin. The city may grow or shrink, it may overcome wars and walls, but the swamp below it remains. Petzold’s filmography takes us to modern Germany, to pre and post unified Germany, to pre and post WWII Germany, and finally to pre German Germany in showing us a woman who has seen Berlin from its first inhabitant to its current state.

Undine is a fascinating addition to his filmography. It seems like a simple, almost unintelligible love story that is so much more. I am sure German audiences get more out of the lectures on German city planning that I did, but it clearly has something to say about the architectural history of Germany and how buildings, streets, and cities take on new functions depending on what we use them for and how we destroy, design, and reconstruct them. Petzold’s films may be subtle, but they are anything but simple. They are complex, personal, political stories of a Germany that is constantly reinventing itself, rising over and over from the ashes of actions of previous generations.