In the 1970s, when 35 European countries recognized the universal validity of human rights in the Helsinki Final Act, the death penalty fell into disrepute. This posed a problem for the GDR, which had co-signed the Final Act. She had already executed more than 150 people – Nazi criminals, murderers, sex offenders, political opponents – and did not want to waive this sanction.
So she decided to continue in silence, the killings were now declared as “heart failure”. Because the guillotine – because it was mechanical – was considered too unsafe, the delinquents were shot in the head. By an executioner who sneaked up from behind.
Franz Walter is as far removed from it as he could be. At the beginning of “Close Shot” he stands naked in front of a window and looks out into the night. Then he takes a few steps into the room, lies down with his girlfriend and proposes to her. Spontaneously they paint rings on their fingers with ballpoint pens.
Walter is an engineer, has just completed his doctorate at the Humboldt University in East Berlin and hopes to succeed his professor. He is on his way to a development aid mission in Ethiopia when he receives a tempting offer: sign up for the Abwehr headquarters for just one year, the Stasi foreign intelligence service, then the professorship.
This Walter – Lars Eidinger as the ideal cast – is not an unscrupulous type, not even an opportunist. What a little detour of a year! He is intelligent, is eloquent. A little unstable and perhaps a little naive, like a frog jumping into a pot of lukewarm water and not even noticing how it heats up more and more. Not that much different from most of us.
Luise Heyer and Lars Eidinger as Franz Walter and his girlfriend in “Close Shot”
Source: Franziska Stünkel
“Close shot” is above all a study of creeping appropriation. First the smartly furnished apartment, which an ordinary GDR citizen would never have come across; then the wedding, at which no old buddies are present anymore, only Stasi colleagues; then the close relationship with his commanding officer Dirk; finally the exciting business trip to wicked Hamburg, where otherwise he would never have gone.
In Hamburg, Walter begins to feel the water warming up. For the Stasi, it is a matter of persuading a refugee national soccer player to return to the GDR. To do this, she “decomposes” those around him in a tried and tested manner: informants report on his private life, sex traps are set for him, his wife, who was left behind in the east, receives a false cancer diagnosis from the doctor.
Once a Stasi is always a Stasi
Franziska Stünkel’s film is about how long you can look away and when that is simply no longer possible. And how long you still have a choice. When Walter and his girlfriend put ballpoint pen rings around their fingers, he jokes that you can make a new decision in the shower every day whether you want to stay together.
But once a Stasi is always a Stasi, there is no washing away, no way out into the open. Stünkel builds claustrophobic rooms, equips them with (from today’s perspective) gruesome furniture, films in the real Stasi headquarters in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, paints with a beige-gray-gloomy palette. Sometimes she exaggerates the symbolism a bit, with a trapped bird and the lusty Mephistophelian Devid Striesow as Dirk.
Mephistofelian tempter: Devid Striesow as Dirk Hartmann in “Close Shot”
Source: Franziska Stünkel
She designs the inside of a bubble. Stasi speech. Stasi celebrations. Stasi comradeship. “The Lives of Others” was also an interior view, but a contrasting one, on the one hand the state security, on the other hand the bohemian in Prenzlauer Berg. That was tragic and melancholy.
In “Close Shot”, on the other hand, the throat of one (and the protagonist) tightens centimeter by centimeter, a cinematic garrotte. There is only a human crushing machine and small or large cogs that work – or are ground themselves.
“Close shot” is a combination of two real cases, that of the financial economist Werner Teske and that of the footballer Lutz Eigendorf. However, as detailed as it may have been researched, “Nah Schuss” is also another contribution to the cinematic division of Germany. It’s a western production. Director and screenwriter Franziska Stünkel comes from Göttingen, Lars Eidinger grew up in West Berlin, the other most important actors are Western plants (with the exception of Striesow, who received the meanest role), the producers come from Western biotopes.
Now one should not fall into the wrong identity path, according to which only gays are allowed to play gays and Swabians Swabians and films about the GDR should only come from the new federal states. But it cannot be overlooked that a certain perspective is still connected with the origin and the East can do little with the Western fixation on Stasi stories and the West little with the Eastern insistence that one is quite comfortable with actually existing socialism can set up. Ultimately, it is the debate about the rule of law, and it is also carried out in the cinema.
After three decades of all-German films about the faded GDR, it must be stated that the division of Germany continues unabated in the cinematic view of the workers ‘and peasants’ state. You can still watch the vast majority of films where they come from, and essentially four types of post-GDR films have emerged.
The work-up began in the reunification feel-good mode: “Go, Trabi, go!” (1991), “Sonnenallee” (1999), “Goodbye, Lenin!” (2003), “Kleinruppin Forever” (2004), “Friendship! “(2010). The comedies spoke of the simple happiness of being together again. But luck did not last long, any more than in the trust reality.
In 2006 came “The Lives of Others”. And since then it has hardly been possible to negotiate a GDR issue without building in the Stasi, without the discourse of omnipotence and powerlessness.
The dominant western view of the lost second state is one of comforting horror and moral superiority: “The red cockatoo” (2006), “We wanted to go to the sea” (2012), “Barbara” (2012), “Germany 83/86 / 89 “(2015-20),” The silent classroom “(2018),” Ballon “(2018). Bully Herbig’s “Ballon” was more of a genre than a work-up, and “Close Shot” can certainly also be seen as a horror film.
There are a few works that problematize both West and East – “The Silence after the Shot” (2000), “West” (2013), “Free Land” (2020). There is also the series “Weissensee” (2010-2018), a rare case with a concept from the west and a full Osrt cast.
But all films that refuse to see the winner have their origin in the state that no longer exists: “Heroes like us” (1999, based on the novel by Thomas Brussig), “Boxhagener Platz” (2010, based on Torsten Schulz) , “The Tower” (2012, based on Uwe Tellkamp), “In times of waning light” (2017, based on Eugen Ruge) and above all “Gundermann” (2018) by Andreas Dresen, who deliberately does not rely on IM activity focused on his hero, but on his conflict between conformism and communism.
There are conversations from the East, so to speak, the West is not sitting at the table, there are balance sheets of those who have been there, not those who have flown in. At the “close-up shot” table, however, were Wessis.
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