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| Klaus Detlef Sierck |
While Sirk was
alive he told Jon Halliday that he did not want him to write about the story of
his only son who was, according to one source, killed on the Russian front days
before his nineteenth birthday in 1944. The link below however dates his death in
the Ukraine as more than two months later.
A Time to Love
and a Time to Die is not
the story of his son, but a possible story. It is also, Halliday writes, in
part, about Douglas Sirk “who trudged through the ruins of Berlin trying to
find information about his son” when he returned to Germany in 1949.
The visual motif in
the film of cherry blossoms forced to bloom under the heat of a bomb explosion
is a metaphor for the young lovers. Sirk said that he hoped his son had
experienced love.
In a online tribute
to Sirk on his 120th birthday (26.4.2017) Will Scheibel quotes
historian Timothy Snyder who warns that “post factuality is pre-fascism.”
Scheibel continues: A Time to Love
and a Time to Die is not only an anti-Nazi period film and an under-estimated work of a
canonical director, but a reminder of immigrant contributions to American culture,
the urgency for art and critical thinking to understand the world we live in, and the
on-going potential for cinema as a response to institutional oppression. Sirk may be relevant
for us now more than ever before. Oxford University Press Blog, 30.4.2017
For more about
Klaus Detlef Sierck see http://www.germanfilms.net/klaus-detlef-sierck/
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| Klaus Detlef Sierck, Gustav Knuth, Schatten uber St Pauli |
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