Christian Petzold: How Germans today confront the Nazis

For decades after World War II, German filmmakers avoided the subject. But that has now changed, and one new film addresses the period with great sensitivity, reports Christian Blauvelt. ‘Just bury everything. Don’t talk about anything. No one knew anything. Just look forward, don’t discuss.  We have a lot to do with building up the country.’” That’s how actress Nina Hoss describes the attitude of many Germans, and German filmmakers in particular, in the first few decades after World War II. “It worked well to not look at it, what had happened in this country,” she says. But in the past 15 years, that attitude has changed dramatically, and German filmmakers have turned their cameras on the nation’s darkest hour in films and TV miniseries like Downfall and Generation War.
Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is one of the latest German films to address the war and its aftermath, and it was a sensation at the Toronto Film Festival. It stars Hoss as a Jewish woman who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp and searches the rubble of post-war Berlin for her husband, who may have betrayed her to the Nazis. Petzold, a prominent member of the Berlin School of filmmakers, wanted his film to empathise with the victims of the Nazis rather than tell another story about the Nazis themselves.
Reporting for Talking Movies, Christian Blauvelt examines the recent slate of German films about World War II and the difficulties German filmmakers face when depicting the period.