Film Review: "Rosenstrasse"

I first heard of the film Rosenstrasse several years back.    I don’t think it was as far back as 2003, when the film was originally released.  At any rate I heard an interview about it on Fresh Air on NPR.  I got the impression that the film dealt with a woman who helped Jews escape from Nazi Germany. I thought it was a true story.  It took me this long to actually watch the film.

I was right and wrong about the material.  It is about a woman who saved a little girl from the Nazis—one girl, not many people.  The film is based on a true incident; but the incident did not involve a gentile woman who hid Jews from the Nazis; it involved one of the few known acts of resistance to the Nazi—and it was public resistance, by non-Jewish Germans.

Yet it was an isolated incident.  Early in 1943, just after Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels called for “Total War” against the Allies.  There were still thousands of Jews living in Berlin.  Many were rounded up and detained in a former Jewish Community Center in downtown Berlin—less than a mile, I would guess, from what became Hitler’s Reichsbunker.  Many of the men were married to non-Jews.  These women gathered across the street from the detention center and kept vigil for their husbands.  They refused to disband, even when threatened by the police and by soldiers with machine guns.  After a week, the detainees were released from the threat of deportation—which would have sent them to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

This much is historically true.  I think the actual characters in the film were fictional, however.

As a film, I found it confusing.  I sometimes lost track of the various characters.  The film follows several sets of people impacted by the detentions.  It starts in the present with an older Jewish woman in New York whose husband dies.  During the mourning, the woman seems to “go Jewish,” causing her daughter to go to Berlin to try to find the woman who saved her during the Nazi years.  The film hops between different time periods and characters—rather hard to follow.  It was also difficult, sometimes, to believe some of the situations.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the film and found it interesting.  I’d recommend it—especially for anyone interested in that historical period.