Film: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days by Marc Rothemund
Rating: 8/10. Pedestrian cinematography but reputedly a highly authentic telling of this story
It’s been a good week for biographical cinema. First there was William Wilberforce’s history as told in Amazing Grace and tonight I was pleased to learn for the first time that Sophie Scholl had lived among us. Sophie was one of five students who, with her university professor, published tracts calling on the German people to abandon Hitler and the war. She was arrested, interrogated, tried and guillotined, all in the matter of a few days.
For the most part, the film seems authentic in its portrayal of the parties. The director offers us a story where the Nazi captors behave with decorum and treat their prisoners with dignity. Actress Julia Jentche plays an intelligent woman with a profound trust in her convictions. Alexander Held who plays her interrogator is a father of a son about her age and is torn between, one the one hand, his duty and his conviction that Germany is better under Hitler than before and, on the other hand, his embarrassment at charging a young and principled woman with treason. He offers her an escape route which she rejects. Only the judge in a kangaroo style “People’s Court” smacks of caricature though it seems that the real judge Roland Freisler behaved in this way.
I’d have liked to see some early biography of the Scholls and to learn at the end what became of the principal participants in this affair. Otherwise, this was a worthy and interesting film. Compare with Verhoeven’s Black Book, another wartime heroine story to see two entirely different directors at work.
Addendum: In looking for a title for this review, I was reminded of a delightful book (sadly out of print) from one of Germany’s finest (and most under-rated in the English-speaking world) novelists. An Exemplary Life recounts, in a very droll and ironic manner, the efforts of a three-person committee to select a biography for inclusion in a school textbook. The hypocrisy and prejudices of the panel members cause them to recommend the most bizarre candidates for inclusion and it is safe to assume that Sophie Scholl could never have figured in their lists. How nice it is then to learn (from Wikipedia, of course) that in 2003, a German television audience survey to choose “the ten greatest Germans of all time” (ZDF TV), selected Hans and Sophie Scholl in fourth place, placing them above Bach, Bismarck, and Einstein.
Book: An Exemplary Life by Siegfried Lenz
Translated from: German
Rating: 9/10.
