In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (24 February 2016), Jochen Hieber called the fact that DIE AKTE GENERAL (directed by Stephan Wagner) and DER STAAT GEGEN FRITZ BAUER (directed by Lars Kraume) were filmed in parallel and shown in cinemas and on television in quick succession a “planning failure in public law”. Duplication of material and plot did not benefit either film.

In fact, anyone familiar with THE STATE AGAINST FRITZ BAUER might think that director Stephan Wagner merely had the story rewritten by AKTE GENERAL to make it a little more sedate and suitable for evening television programmes, the plots are so similar. Again it’s about the “Nazi hunter” Bauer and the search for Adolf Eichmann, again there’s a young public prosecutor who becomes a traitor and spies for the Bonn secret service, more precisely the Federal Criminal Police Office, because of Bauer’s contacts to East Berlin. Once again, it is Bauer’s alleged homosexuality that is used to make the story more interesting and spice it up: “I wish the judges were as afraid of the Nazis as they are of the homosexuals,” Bauer says meaningfully at the beginning. What you call meaningful, because once again the traitor is exposed and Fritz Bauer has to realise that he stands alone in the fight against the Nazis and – in this film – above all against Adenauer’s State Secretary Dr Hans Globke.

In the whole game of intrigue and confusion, the constantly fuming Dr Bauer seems lost. No person, let alone personality, is really recognisable behind the main character. Only occasionally, in rare original quotes, is the real Dr. Bauer recognisable, unlike in THE STATE AGAINST FRITZ BAUER – and an actor who recognised him far better than his predecessor in the role.

Only at the opera in Frankfurt does the Attorney General, who appears even more driven by the rapid film cuts, find the necessary distance from everyday life. Not least because he is surrounded by young men there, whom he sometimes invites to his flat. There is no lack of naked youths scurrying through Bauer’s bachelor pad, so fast that anyone who reaches into the crisp bowl for a second out of boredom will easily miss the speedster.

So it’s not all that bad, at least not as bad as in THE STATE AGAINST FRITZ BAUER, where the young public prosecutor becomes a traitor to Dr Bauer out of lust and ends up in prison himself. In DIE AKTE GENERAL, Bauer’s wife absolves everyone involved as a precaution. She has no problem with her husband’s preference for “young men”, she says, and finally he himself assures her: “It’s all just platonic. I’m a public prosecutor.” And he numbs his grief and supposed desire – as we already know from the previous film – with red wine and pills.

The only question that remains is what is actually at the heart of the story? Is it the man behind Adenauer, Dr Globke, whom Bauer visits in the Chancellery in his hunt for Eichmann, while the latter considers him a “warm brother” and has him watched? Unfortunately, he is not at all suitable as an anti-hero, nor is Adenauer, who seems to be talking to his “friend Ben Gurion” almost constantly in the film and only ever hears that he has done everything right in coming to terms with the Nazi past. So here, too, the tone is one of trivialising and playing down real history.

In the Jüdische Allgemeine (18 February 2016), Jörg Taszman wrote that the film says everything (Bauer the Jew, Bauer the social democrat and emigrant, Bauer is homosexual), only one thing is concealed, namely what we are supposed to have learned about the lawyer from Ronen Steinke’s book(Fritz Bauer oder Auschwitz vor Gericht, 2013): that Bauer had an ambivalent relationship with Judaism.

In fact, the opposite is true.

The drama of Fritz Bauer’s life, who did not have an ambivalent relationship with Judaism in the slightest, does not appear either in THE STATE AGAINST FRITZ BAUER or in THE GENERAL FILE. Fritz Bauer’s courage and conviction are once again obscured in DIE AKTE GENERAL by banal sideshows and intrigues: his self-sacrificing fight against anti-Semitism, his resistance against National Socialism, Bauer’s social democratic convictions, his “fight for human rights” in the concentration camp, in exile and afterwards – they continue to await a cinematic portrayal that makes the extraordinary courage and strength of this man visible.