And what were the consequences of that decision? But the story unfolds in such an earnest, plodding, predictable manner, the end result feels worthy but a little dull. It was so thick you could cut it with a knife”, the director said. Even if all of the 18 had been read, what good had they accomplished? The Nazis dash their shot glasses against the top of their captive’s head, inflicting further bleeding. Fallada – the pen name for Rudolf Ditzen, the son of a judge – saw the couple’s Gestapo file after the war. Anna Quangel: You are a romantic, Otto Quangel. Otto Quangel: I want to know how people react. However, from the description from the janitor who chased him, the detective does have a crude drawing of the writer’s face. At the beginning of the film, set in France in 1940, a young German soldier Hans Quangel (Louis Hofmann) runs through a wood. Likewise, a subplot involving the sad fate of a Jewish neighbor in Otto and Anna’s building seems shoehorned in, largely as an unnecessary reminder that Nazis are bad. The lives of Otto and Elise Hampel are now closely interwoven with that of the German novelist Hans Fallada, birth name Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, who died in 1947 after writing his final novel about the Hampels. But when its harrowing pages were translated into English six decades after it was written, Hans Fallada’s book became an international publishing phenomenon.

The postcards called for civil disobedience and sabotage in the workplace, and the Hampels managed to keep it going for nearly three years before they were caught. “Based on a true story.” Now you know.

Movies based on actual events tend to announce their historical bona fides at the outset, knowing that audiences are often more affected by a story when they know that it really happened (even if they may suspect that it didn’t happen quite as depicted on screen). They had no political skills or allies, no kind of public voice. Nationwide News Pty Limited Copyright © 2020. The parallel story to that of the Quangels is that of the Police Detective Escherich (Daniel Brühl) who methodically places a pen with a small red flag on his large wall map of Berlin for every spot where a card is found. And yet, if one could imagine the author of “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” confronting Otto, I believe he would still say “Well done, good and faithful servant.” In the face of overwhelming evil, one does what one can. So it is for Anna and Otto Quangel (Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson), an ordinary couple living in Berlin at the beginning of WWII. Both are charged and brought to trial. March 8, ... And this act of bravery indeed happened in 1943. Thousands of people have enjoyed his books or the full Visual Parables Journal. Because Otto always wears gloves while handling the cards, there are never fingerprints. The KPD underground resistance, in the environs of which Fallada locates some of his characters, has been carefully removed from the film. Receive email notifications when new posts appear in Visual Parables. When the movie star finds one of the Quangels’ postcards in the hallway and shows it to the lawyer, distrust suddenly arises.

“I wanted to present this fear which was omnipresent. was made into an American film, which led to his blacklisting at home because it was made by Jewish producers. Although about a third of the film was shot in Berlin, so much of the city was destroyed in the war the producers went to Görlitz, a town close to the Polish border, to get the right look. His Spanish grandfather was shot for resisting fascism. The UK rights of Alone in Berlin were licensed to Penguin, and it sold an astonishing 400,000 copies.

Emma Thompson in a scene from Alone in Berlin.Source:Supplied, Starring Brendan Gleeson, Emma Thompson, Daniel Bruhl. Alone In Berlin was co-written and directed by Vincent Perez, a Swiss actor (best known in the U.S. as the star of The Crow: City Of Angels) who evidently equates “serious” with “drab.” In theory, the relationship between Otto and Anna should be the heart of the movie, but Perez has Gleeson and Thompson perform in opposing registers, with Thompson cranked up to 11 and Gleeson dialed down almost to zero. The risk of being observed yields a bit of mild tension, but this is fundamentally a stodgy affair, lent weight mostly by the knowledge that it actually happened. SMALL acts of disobedience can nevertheless have far-reaching consequences.


Sympathetic to Frau Rosenthal, she is shocked by her fate, though she dare not express any of her views to anyone. A shot rings out, and he falls dead as a firefight breaks out between the French and the invading Nazis. Otto Quangel: Its like with a machine. This, and not success, is the basis for discerning the character of a person. He dashes her illusion that her husband will return, but also says, “I have a mistress whom I obey. An episode from the April 6 talk, the story of Otto and Elise Hampel. Indeed, it’s easy to guess that the story is fact-based—it’s far too blah to have been invented from scratch.

One can imagine him as a criminologist during the Weimar Republic. Characters have been deleted or smoothed over. In my mind, I see lots of people throwing sand into the gears. Do the postcards fluttering outside, an image with which the film closes (the scene does not exist in the novel), indicate a twinge of conscience on Escherich’s part? “Hitler’s war is the workers’ death!” reads the opening line on one of Otto and Elise Hampel’s postcards. Based on Hans Fallada’s novel Jeder stirbt für sich allein” (Every Man Dies Alone), it is a fictionalized version of what happened to the real-life Otto and Elise Hampel. Anna Quangel: Some people will be afraid, probably. You feel you really are in that world,” said Trijbits.

Find out more about our policy and your choices, including how to opt-out. The new Franco-German production appears at a time when far-right movements such as the National Front in France and Pegida and Alternative for Germany are on the rise and state violence increasingly dominates everyday life. Back in Berlin Hans’ father Otto (Brendan Gleeson) is a foreman supervising worker building wooden coffins. Most of the more than 200 cards left around the city are being turned in! He doesn’t want anything to do with politics. It took him just 24 days while hospitalised, and tells the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel. At his factory, following a pep talk by a Nazi functionary trying to whip up workers’ enthusiasm to increase production, Otto finds his fellow workers reacting hostilely to his criticisms. Gleeson is superb in the role of Otto — stoic, decent, proud. In the 1975 West German film (directed by Alfred Vohrer), Anna was the stronger character and the initiator of the postcards protest, in the spirit of the women’s movement of the day.

The Hampels’ anger at the Nazi party was apparently provoked not so much by ideological horror as by the death of Elise Hampel’s brother while fighting in France. Virtually every adult was vulnerable to official persecution at some point in the Nazi period, if one only dug deep enough into his or her past. Otto is humiliated by his treatment by the Nazis in a scene in which the tortured prisoner is kneeling and the SS and detective drink a toast over him touting their victory. Anna at first is fearful and skeptical, but also becoming disillusioned with the regime, demands that she be allowed to go with him. In both novel and film, it’s the couple’s only son who’s killed, lighting a fire within mild-mannered factory foreman Otto Quangel (Brendan Gleeson). They had accomplished nothing by their treasonous acts. Intent on discovering a pattern and possible home of the man the SS regard as a traitor, he is convinced he will capture his quarry when he makes a mistake. To his credit, Herr Fromm attends the trial, the fleeting moment he and Otto exchanging knowing glances speaks volumes. The latest remake of Alone in Berlin (directed by Swiss actor Vincent Pérez) also rejects a collective guilt thesis. The film version is a British, German and French co-production. Alone In Berlin features no such opening text, perhaps because it’s technically based on a novel: Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, originally published in 1947 (but not translated into English until 2009).

Johnson was astonished to discover that it had not been translated before, particularly as Primo Levi, the Jewish-Italian writer and survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, once described it as “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis”.


The following scene shows a tenement building with countless empty windows. One of its UK producers is Paul Trijbits, whose acclaimed films include Saving Mr Banks, which also starred Thompson. This would have made plausible, and us prepared for, the plot twist at the conclusion of the film. He did not live to see his novel published, dying from a morphine overdose in 1947, aged 53. Denounced and arrested, they were beheaded in 1943. The ultimate price he pays for this because his reading of Otto and Anna’s cards have affected him adds to the tragedy of the story. He is no longer her son. The author’s aim was not to reconstruct the real case of Otto and Elise Hampel, from Berlin’s Wedding district, who were executed in 1943 by the Nazis. One can sense new social questions and emphases being explored in the film. Think of a time when you have had to make a very difficult decision –it might be about what to choose for GCSE, or how to decline an invitation from a friend without upsetting them. A leading resource for faith-and-film reviews and study guides. The figure of Baldur also jars in the film. Those who give the impression they are not devoting all their energy to “ultimate victory” (“Endsieg”), quickly find themselves clapped in a concentration camp.

The cast is headed by Emma Thompson, who won an Oscar for Howards End, and Brendan Gleeson, who received an Emmy for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Into the Storm. Fallada leaves no doubt that his social indifference, his hunter’s nature was decisive for his Nazi career. A NOTE ABOUT RELEVANT ADVERTISING: We collect information about the content (including ads) you use across this site and use it to make both advertising and content more relevant to you on our network and other sites. All times AEDT (GMT +11). When thugs living in the squalor of the building’s basement break into her apartment intent on looting it, she manages to escape.

Otto and Elise Hampel were a working-class German couple who created a simple method of protest against Nazism in Berlin during the middle years of World War II. Fallada’s novel gained renewed attention following its translation into English in 2009. The other citizen obviously sympathetic to the old woman is the woman postal worker whom we first see delivering to the Quangels the sad news about their son.

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