troubling history

Some thoughts on

In Liebe, Eure Hilde (From Hilde, with love)
Andreas Dresen; starring Liv Lisa Fries
Germany, 2024

As I'm a massive fan of Babylon Berlin and Charlotte Ritter as played by Liv Lisa Fries, I would have watched anything with Fries in a vaguely pre-1945 role, and was lucky to catch this new film in Germany a few weeks after its release.

In a sense the role of Hilde Coppi is not that far away from Charlotte Ritter, only a couple of years younger and also a secretary, so one could almost read this as a Babylon Berlin sequel in which a romantic summer is interspersed with a rather brutal awakening. Except that Babylon Berlin was fiction and this story is real. And very much underappreciated so far.

I think I had heard the term Rote Kapelle for this network of anti-Nazi resistance activists before, but that's about as far as my knowledge went. (Wikipedia translates it as "red orchestra," but note that a Kapelle is rather a small orchestra as you would employ for a dance event or as a marching band, emphatically not a symphony orchestra.) None of the names rang any bells. The simple explanation: The resistance people who were celebrated (to a degree and not by all) in (western) Germany were christian-conservative nationalists who wanted to save their fatherland from that evil spirit that was bound to drive it over a cliff. Many of the members of the Rote Kapelle, on the other hand, were communists. (Note, however, that the Nazis liked to brand resistance activists with this label to tarnish them as communists - in reality some may have become involved with other motivations, eg humanitarian.) Thus, even though I think many more of them perished than from the July 20 coup attempt or the White Rose student movement, their memory was all but wiped out in the west - but celebrated in the GDR.

The other thing that left me stirred and shaken is that the film's protagonist Hilde Coppi, born in May 1909, is exactly the same age as my paternal grandparents whom I knew well in their later lives. Like them, she saw her world fall apart in her mid twenties, when fascism took over - something I often think about as it's now happening again. Ruth and Richard managed to keep a low profile and survived with luck, whereas Hilde happened to get involved with those communists and shared their fate. With some change of makeup, the same actors could have played my grandparents (in a less eventful movie) - and conversely, with a different set of personal contacts, my grandparents could have ended up in the red orchestra. Very troubling stuff.

Focussing on Hilde Coppi is also a clever trick as it enables the storytelling to avoid the gruesome torture that must have been inflicted on other members of the Rote Kapelle. Due to her rather marginal role and the fact that she was pregnant when she was arrested, she didn't get the worst treatment, and we are left to imagine what may have happened to her husband and his friends.

And then, if you're not sufficiently stirred by the end, there is a special guest for you - Hilde's son, whose birth in prison we witnessed in some detail, speaks an afterword. Now 81, historian Hans Coppi Jr. doesn't specifically talk about the present resurgence of fascism, but we are left to imagine what he thinks of it.

No sign of a UK release date so far - but I guess with all the Nazi history in it, this one must have better chances then most other German films. Might add it to my films not shown list for now, just to be on the safe side.