German Film Festival 2022 - Barrie Pattison uncovers THE FORGER (Maggie Peren) and A STASI COMEDY (Leander Haussman)

It’s early days yet but so far nothing in the German Film Festival is startling enough to draw attention from competing attractions.

Louis Hofmann, The Forger

First out of the gate for me comes Maggie Peren’s Der Passfälscher / The Forger from the autobiography of  one Cioma Schönhaus, a half way plausible account of WW2 Germany and a curious companion piece to Stefan Ruzowitzky’s 2007 Die Fälscher/The Counterfeiters or even 5 Fingers and Casablanca, backed with convincingly drab art direction. It seems that European film makers now see WW2 in

shades of khaki, as with Leander Haussmann’s Stazicomödie or Emmanuel Finkiel’s 2017 Marguerite Duras film La douleur, though Der Passfälscher shows Berlin rather than Paris. It’s more probing realist than the 3rd Reich movies we are used to. 

 

Jewish 21-year-old Samson "Cioma" Schonhaus (Louis Hofmann) looks like the Gestapo will get him at transport Lost & Found in what proves to be a flash forward opening. He has survived by getting about with a service man haircut and a dodgy transport pass that means he canget a bus rather than walk to work in the dark for three hours, though he still just makes it to the factory where he saws off lengths of metal pipe in a Reserved Occupation which will soon be turned over to wounded servicemen. 

 

Hofmann and friend Jonathan Berlin manage to live quite well in the flat left by his late grandmother. The Tax Inspector inventories the items there and puts a Double Eagle stamp paper on the door, which doesn’t stop Berlin inviting in the women he does black market trades with to buy them. However, mean landlady Nina Gummich, who hovers round the house putting up signs about the black-out, is awake to them and sends his customers on their way. She buys the Jewish family possessions at a fraction of their value making sure she gets receipts so she can’t be accused of exploiting them after the war. 

 

Hofman’s workmate, aware of his brief run at art school, sends him off to the lawyer who is (pro bono) producing fake documents for the city’s fugitive Jews. He isn’t satisfied with Hofman’s work (broken grommet) and dismisses him, warned to walk rather than use his transport pass.

 

However, getting a grommet press to go with his low tech art school materials, our hero continues his document faking with the door unlocked, and parties in purloined navy uniforms, which he sees as “mimicking” the prey copying the behaviour of their predators. Going to a dance, he picks up Luna Wedler who proves to be a Jewish fugitive after his ration coupons - scenes of him bringing re-cycled flowers to their rendezvous at the cafe with the leaded windows, where the waiter greets them “Heil Hitler” and serves them chocolate tart which he tells his fat woman customer is off the menu because of shortages.

 

The whole masquerade unravels and he has to flim flam a document inspection checking the police officers’ own papers and getting back to the cafe to see Wedler already pairing with a soldier and the waiter serving him water chocolate without charge to get him out of the place.

 

It’s a case of using his desperate charm to get into a freezing hideaway and work on a new set of documents despite his fingers trembling and an air raid which proves fortuitous. 

 

Even with the menace of the death camps hanging over the film, the tone is surprisingly comic. We find ourselves watching a tightrope walk between self-respect and self-preservation. 

 

A Stasi Comedy

Stazicomödie is set in Cold War East Germany but it’s the same game of outfoxing a comic regime where an error can be fatal. 

 

The opening incident where David Cross (Balloon) waits at an interminable traffic light, seeing a loveable kitten in the path of a mechanical street sweeping machine, proves to be a reference point for the film as does the declassifying of his released Stasi file thirty years later, in the presence of his family.

 

Cross was recruited to be a police spy on the Nev Degs, the hippy "Negative Degenerate" community which had squatted a rundown area of East Berlin and whom the Stasi were convinced were holding subversive meetings in churches, if they could only find when. This puts a couple of young women who are willing to get naked with him in Cross’ path because they believe the police report he is furtively typing is actually a poetic work exploring their alternative society.  There’s also a visit by an Allen Ginsberg imitator who sees Cross breaking the transvestite’s string of pearls as an art statement.

 

That’s actually nearly funny but most of the film is ponderous - the undercover trio, who can’t blend in, playing like the Three Stooges, the rejected admirer who has to have his head dragged out of the gas oven or the headquarters cellar bathroom serving double duty as a place for police murders and secret promotions. The department head staging costume balls in the manner of a Hans Steinhoff period movie spectacle is a step further into weird, though passing off Cross’ superior Henry Hübchen to his alternative society as his distraught middle class parent does generate a few laughs.

 

Now a respectable family man who keeps his Stasi items in a glass case, the character grown to be Henry Hübchen finds the released Stasi file a considerable embarrassment. 

 

I met someone who had actually lived this scenario and eventually put his own file up at an exhibition, after he found that the cops documented him in the belief that he was the other person in a two man photo. We compared notes and he recognised my description of that always open window in the building opposite 52 Philip Street, where the Realist Film Society operated. After a while I used to acknowledge the dark room as I went in. I wonder if they’ve shredded the ASIO dossier with photos of my teenage self waving at them.