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“The Counterfeiters/ Os Falsários”, by Stefan Ruzowitzky

GERMAN GUILT PROVOCKED IN TWO NEW MOVIES

After France, Germany is the one that has the biggest diversity in the cinema. There are fifty titles in the 57th Berlin Festival with twenty-two feature films spread across the various sections of the festival and other twenty-eight new ones presented in the ‘Perspektive Deutsches Kino’, the panorama that shows the riches and the scope of this welcome diversity every year. One of the movies from the competition – “Die Fälscher/The Counterfeiters/Os Falsários” by Stefan Ruzowitzsky – and another one from the Perspektive – “Mein Führer – Die Wirklich Wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler/My Führer – The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler/Mey Führer – A Verdade Mais Verdadeira sobre Adolf Hitler” by Dani Levy – are the ones that provoke the German guilt the most for their Nazi past.

The German producer points out that this guilt, even sixty years after the end of the Nazism and World War II, reaches 70% of the new generations in Germany. “From one generation to the next, this feeling of guilt rose over 20%,” he says, “due to the unification of the two Germanies.”

Not only does this feeling of guilt generate great expectation about Dani Levy’s movie internationally, but it also created a mistaken controversy. Levy is a Jewish Swiss filmmaker settled in Berlin. He dared to mock the devilish figure of Adolf Hitler. The misinterpretation was that part of the German press repeated that his mock comedy about Hitler was one about the Holocaust.

In another sense, Stefan Ruzowitzky from Austria leads us to get familiar with little-known stories about the atrocities of the Holocaust. In 1944, almost towards the end of the Nazism and the war, Nazis separate an elite of Jewish artists and counterfeiters in their concentration camps to draw a new plan of action against the allied troupes. They are sent to Mauthausen, receive special treatment, that is, less harsh than usual, but they have to work and counterfeit money in order to undermine the English economy as well as the American.

The cynical and aggressive interpretations by the Germans make the counterpoint with the ones by the Austrian Karl Markovics in the role of a Jewish counterfeiter, the main character of Ruzowitzky’s movie. This must be remembered as the greatest performance of all the movies from this selection. The recreation of Nazi terror by the German cinema itself, in co-production with Austria, does not stop the German people from countinuously being affected by this guilt. At the same time, these kinds of movie keep history alive and present for positive reflections.

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“My Führer – The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler”, by Dani Levy