Documentaries and feature films
2015
Some time after the publication of the first Bauer biography by Irmtrud Wojak (2009) and the film by Ilona Ziok (2010), a visiting scholar from the institute named after the Attorney General in Frankfurt/M., the lawyer and journalist Ronen Steinke, published the book Fritz Bauer oder Auschwitz vor Gericht ( 2013) with Munich-based Piper Verlag. It was expected to be a sensation in insider circles. The protagonist’s private life was to be revealed, which the author and the Institute falsely claimed had been swept under the carpet by the director Ilona Ziok.
The result was an allegedly gay Nazi hunter who struggled to keep himself upright with pills and alcohol during his manhunt, allegedly betrayed his SPD party friends in the concentration camp with a “confession of loyalty” to the Nazis and, as if that wasn’t already lurid enough, also denied his origins from a family of Jewish faith out of fear of the new-old Nazis and anti-Semitism in Federal Republican offices. A short time later, this plot was turned into a feature film about Bauer, which further coloured in all the familiar prejudiced images of right-wing tendencies that were being played out here and turned the historical Fritz Bauer into a caricature of himself.
1964/2014
You would think that was enough of the “dismantling of the Attorney General Dr Fritz Bauer”, which Erardo C. Rautenberg, Brandenburg’s Attorney General at the time, publicised in the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT and the Bremen journalist and author Kurt Nelhiebel, in the Berlin TAGESSPIEGEL as well as in numerous articles. However, a tear-jerking Hollywood film about the Auschwitz trial was also released (IM LABYRINTH DES SCHWEIGENS, 2014, director Giulio Ricciarelli), in which Fritz Bauer pulls the strings in the background like a kind of guru, but was allegedly not really interested in the Nazi trials (which is quite absurd).
In contrast, a DVD with the original Fritz Bauer (“Gespräche, Interviews und Reden aus den Fernseharchiven 1961-1968”, edited by Bettina Schulte-Strathaus), which was also released by absolut Medien GmbH in 2014, is a success. The DVD is well worth watching and also contains perhaps the best-known interview with Dr Fritz Bauer in the Hessischer Rundfunk series “HEUTE ABEND KELLERKLUB”, which was recorded in 1964 and is available on YouTube. It’s always good to listen to the protagonists of history themselves.
2014
A German feature film by Berlin director Christian Petzold, who co-wrote the film script with Harun Farocki (1944-2014), deserves special mention. C. Petzold dedicated the film PHOENIX to Attorney General Dr Bauer in 2014 because he had seen a film about the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials at the Jewish Museum years earlier. The film is strange in every respect and impresses with its unusual openness in dealing with the history of National Socialism and its continued existence after 1945. The cultural editor of the TAZ, Christina Nord, has named in her review under the title “Aus dem Reich der Toten”why the film is also expressly highlighted here:
“The clarity with which ‘Phoenix’ dismisses the possibility of love between a non-Jewish German and a Jewish German makes it impossible to lose sight of the Nazi crimes. Something fundamental has happened, and we have to face up to it. It is not for nothing that the film is dedicated to Fritz Bauer, the remigrant who was the first public prosecutor in West Germany to ensure that Nazi criminals were brought to justice.” In contrast to THE STATE AGAINST FRITZ BAUER or IN THE LABYRINTH OF GUILT, C. Petzold’s film is not adapted to the mainstream of softened German success stories, the Germans are not a nation of victims for him and he is not in search of a “National Socialist morality” of decent Germans – a film about historical truth(s), betrayed love and unanswered questions.
2016
The media hype surrounding Fritz Bauer in 2014/15 upset some people, especially historians, a “Fritz Bauer wave” was proclaimed and a well-known contemporary historian, Norbert Frei, pointed out that a “hero” was being made here. Which would not have been so bad in the case of Fritz Bauer and the Federal Minister of Justice, Heiko Maas, for example, was not afraid to name the lawyer as such. In any case, the next film was announced soon after L. Kraume’s feature film, a “political drama” entitled THE GENERAL FILE. The film was directed by Stephan Werner and produced by Nico Hofmann and Benjamin Benedict.
Like THE STATE AGAINST FRITZ BAUER, this film also advertises Fritz Bauer’s alleged “secret sexuality” and uses the hunt for Adolf Eichmann as a teaser. Did the director and producers come up with anything new?
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Magdalena Köhler (M.A.)
Events and interactive Fritz Bauer Library
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