2023-08-24 11:01:18
When the perpetrators sat in court in Nuremberg, the American psychologist had his moment Douglas M. Kelley can hit. He examined them namely, the Goerings, Kaltenbrunners, Franks. Did Rorschach tests on them. He wanted to find the Nazi gene, to prove evil in itself. An evaluation of his tests has never been published.
It just didn’t come out easy, that’s how Dominik Graf’s masterful, monumental documentary film “Everyone Writes for Himself” begins.
But what is disturbing: that absolute evil does not exist at all, that even among those responsible for the greatest human murder in history there are very different manifestations of the inhuman, lacking in empathy and ruthlessness. That the culprits weren’t monsters either, they were human beings and, as such, naturally rather veiled beings.
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Douglas M. Kelley does not appear at all in the book on which Dominik Graf’s materially heavy, lightly constructed film essay is based. Anatol Regnier wrote the book Everyone Writes for Himself. Writers under National Socialism”.
Regnier is the grandson (and biographer) of Frank Wedekind. His mother Tilly was engaged to Klaus Mann. Whenever Erich Kästner visited the Regniers, Anatol had to be very quiet, Kästner was considered a child hater.
What Regnier is dealing with in his large-scale literary montage pretty much follows the reverse approach of the Kelley study. Regnier, who is a musician, actor and writer and has an infectious laugh, has descended deep into the basement of the Marbach literary archive.
Suicide with his Jewish wife and their daughter: Jochen Klepper
Quelle: picture-alliance/ dpa
Using original material from correspondence, diary entries and novels, he combed through the back shelves of various libraries in order to create a kind of psychogram of those writers who did not leave Germany after the seizure of power in 1933.
Graf takes up Regnier’s assembly structure. The screen is split multiple times. One sees original recordings, black-and-white everyday scenes, photos, rehearsal scenes from Graf’s film adaptation of Kästner’s “Fabian”, spooky game scenes (a night in a bookstore, where the poets who have been declared dead and forgotten roam around like ghosts).
Graf is traveling with Regnier in Marbach and in Sanary-sur-Mer, Klaus Mann’s place of exile, and in Hans Fallada’s place of refuge Carwitz and near Ina Seidel at Lake Starnberg and roams with him and Bernward Vesper’s sister Heinrike through the park of her father, the Nazi poet Will Vesper. Graf reflects conversations in which the good handful of characters whose path he follows through the “Third Reich” are mirrored from today and from their very own vantage point.
Anatole Regnier (left) and Dominik Graf in Graf’s “Everyone writes for himself”
Source: Piffl Medien GmbH
Günter Rohrbach tells the story, as does Anatol Regnier, of course, Florian Illies and the art historian Julia Voss. One hears Dominik Graf, which as always is a fabulous treat, reading Dominik Graf and excerpts from Regnier’s material and the works of the poets under discussion.
Gottfried Benn, the blind man who believed that his worldview would finally be implemented by the Nazis and their “German Revolution”, who offered the devil a pact, which he eventually rejected.
Erich Kästner, the Lavierer, the successful writer who, according to his own report, was present when his own books were burned on Bebelplatz, nevertheless stayed and, despite the publication ban, wrote the screenplay for the Ufa-Hans-Albers film “Münchhausen”, which, as he proudly told his mother after meeting top Nazis that everyone thought it was great.
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Hans Fallada, who withdrew into exile at the end of the Mecklenburg world, to Carwitz, avoiding everything political like the devil avoids holy water, wrote like the devil later the Nazi reckoning “Everyone dies for himself”, but was ready for the end of misery was to write an openly anti-Semitic novel about a Jewish Berlin swindler whose manuscript, fortunately for Fallada, was left with nothing.
Ina Seidel appears, who wrote a Hitler jubilation poem to her head and collar. And Jochen Klepper, who wrote a number of the most beautiful spiritual poems and a 1937 biography of the Soldier King, which became a bestseller. And who – worn out in the fight against German bureaucracy for his Jewish wife and her children from his first marriage – took his own life on the night of December 10th, 1942, together with his wife and their youngest daughter. And Hanns Jostthe toughest Nazi in Graf’s arsenal of authors.
Visiting Ensslin’s father-in-law
And Will Vesper, with whom after the war nobody wanted to have anything to do anymore, whose son worked on him until he committed suicide, but was always happy to visit Vespers Gut Triangel with his wife. Bernward’s wife was Gudrun Ensslin, in whose path to the lack of empathy and coldness of terrorism Grafs Großmontage sees a left-wing variation of fascism.
Graf and Regnier don’t denounce, Graf and Regnier weigh up, don’t moralize. Both Graf’s film and Regnier’s book are guided by two basic principles: to keep as far away as possible from the arrogance of those born later.
That they, knowing what happened and what Hitler’s dictatorship was like, would have behaved differently, better, more upright of course, more resistant. And to try to always tell the story from the everyday life of the people under National Socialism, who couldn’t have known how everything would turn out.
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If you live in a glass house and know exactly how you would have behaved, throw the first stone. With which Graf, who has carefully laid the traces there through his entire essay, finally arrives in our present. A time when contradictions, blurring, ambiguities, ambiguities, to a certain extent human nature, can no longer endure. Unambiguousness is required, such as Douglas M. Kelley sought in vain.
And in the end – at least that’s what Graf, this somewhat different Fabian, anticipates – ends in a new fascism: “We can’t cope with our own contradictory parts. Instead, we repress and judge. We talk about our values in order to bask in safety.” And, according to Graf, “what is important to those who pray for health is the flawless white or the complete black in the assessment of others. Good or bad, exclusion or belonging – for those who are actually born after fascism, there is nothing in between.”
Not shown at the Berlinale
Otherwise, says Graf, “they would have to confront themselves with their own dark selves. And so this simplification of the world view quickly becomes nothing more than a new totalitarianism, a new ideology of purity. This time it was created in the faith hell of good people with no alternative.”
“Everyone writes for themselves” should be running everywhere. It didn’t even run in the official program of the Berlinale, but in a supporting event, the “Week of Critics”. The avowedly political film festival instead showed the first part of a documentary about Boris Becker. You just have to make a decision.
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