German Holocaust era film "Fog in August " (2016)
Uncorrected auto translation
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Review in DIE ZEIT
Original here: http://www.zeit.de/kultur/film/2016-09/nebel-im-august-ernst-lossa-euthanasie
Original here: http://www.zeit.de/kultur/film/2016-09/nebel-im-august-ernst-lossa-euthanasie
:
Murderous Care
The drama "Nebel im August" narrates the cruel
story of the young Ernst Lossa as impressively as the rest. In 1944 he was
murdered in a "Heilanstanstalt".
By Christoph Schröder
September 28, 2016, 4:45 pm 17 comments
"Nebel im August": Ivo Pietzcker as Ernst Lossa
and Sebastian Koch as a doctor in Kai Wessel's drama "Nebel im
August"
Ivo Pietzcker as Ernst Lossa and Sebastian Koch as a doctor
in Kai Wessel's drama "Nebel im August" © Studiocanal
In a moment when it is time again for a child to die, Sister
Edith Kiefer (Henriette Confurius) takes 13-year-old Ernst Lossa (Ivo
Pietzcker) aside and tells him the story of the deer that she shared at the
time as a child With her father in the forest. The deer, says Sister Edith, had
had two broken hind legs. She herself would take her home with her and take
care of her, but the father had realized that the animal was no longer to be
helped. That is why he had redeemed it on the spot. "Do you think,"
asks Edith, looking earnestly at Ernst, "that this was wrong?" It is
just a scene in this oppressive film, in which the perverse rhetoric of an
inhuman system flashes, which has given the painting of strict scientificity.
They say redemption and my murder.
Ernst Lossa is a historical figure. Lossa, born in Augsburg
in 1929, belonged to the Jenish people, a heterogeneous population group of
travelers who were designated and persecuted by the National Socialists as
"gypsies". Lossa's mother is dead, the father without a permanent
residence, and so the boy is passed from home to home, until finally, in May
1943, he is transferred to the hospital Irsee near Kaufbeuren, a former
Benedictine monastery. There, Lossa died in August 1944 through a poison.
The director Kai Wessel has accepted the biography of the
boy and made a film that can rely on the one hand on the penetrating effect of
his consciously unspectacular images and on the other hand on the
self-extinguishing power of the completely instrumentalized and transformed
language. Drama does not need pedagogical pathos. The perversity of the
euthanasia system reveals itself without explanation.
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Kino - "Nebel im August" (Trailer)
© Foto: Studiocanal
Mist in August sets in with Lossas arrival in Irsee. It's
nice here, at first sight. The chairman Dr. Veithausen (Sebastian Koch) makes a
friendly, factual impression. No monster, on the contrary, a sympathetic man
who appears as a paternal friend. It is only by degrees that Sister Edith
alone, but above all Veithausen, is a diabolic actor in Irsee. At first he
comes as a skeptic, who is only reluctant to carry out the instructions coming
from Berlin.
Irsee is an institution in which mentally conspicuous people
are accommodated. "I do not belong here," Ernst says on the first day
to his bed neighbors. "Everyone says this," is the answer. At regular
intervals, inmates from Irsee are transported by bus to the Hadamar killing
facility. When this causes disquiet among the inhabitants, the route is
changed: no more transports, instead the patients, as the staff calls them, are
to be "redeemed" directly on the spot.
Courteous wall of cowardice and false diplomacy
For this purpose, Sister Edith Kiefer is transferred from
Hadamar to Irsee, a "specialist", as Dr. Veithausen designates her
against Sophia (Fritzi Haberlandt). The Sister-in-law, a nun, a relic of former
times, is the antipod of Edith Kiefer, the beautiful Death Knight. While the
one on the death list is given the toxic dose in raspberry juice, so that dying
tastes sweet, ( "bronchopneumonia" will then write Dr. Veithausen in
the death certificate, pneumonia), the other presents with her bishop - and
encounters one Polite wall of cowardice and false diplomacy.
The contrast between the beautiful poison-bearer and the
wily, gray upper-sister is possibly the only constellation in this film, in
which she smells phishically for stereotype. However, this is at any time
intercepted by the discreet, therefore, even more powerful pictures of Hagen
Bogdanski's camera and, above all, by the precise performance of Ivo Pietzcker,
which lends deep depth to Ernst Lossa, the "asocial plague". Lossa is
a clever, bright boy with a tendency to subversive. And he is an accurate
observer who has looked through the system and therefore, as the historians who
have accepted the real case, had to die.
In the figure of the chief physician, Dr. Veithausen, the
entire amorality of the euthanasia program reveals itself: During a meeting
with colleagues and functionaries, he proudly presents his latest development:
a delicious soup, which has been deprived of all nutrients and by means of
which the patients within just one week nearly three Kilograms. Death by slow
starvation, scientifically founded. A more subtle and less explanatory
procedure than the frequent cases of sudden pulmonary inflammation.
"Yes," says one of the round, "there must be more death."
And so it happens so, even the terrible end of the film is staged with great
restraint.
It was not clear who was Ernst Lossa, who had the injection
syringe, whether the head physician or the nurse. Dr. Valentin Faltlhauser, as
the head of Irsee was actually called, was sentenced to three years'
imprisonment after the war, but the execution was repeatedly postponed until
Faltlhauser was pardoned by the Bavarian Minister of Justice in 1954 for alleged
imprisonment. The nurse Pauline Kneissler, real template for the jaw figure, is
calculated in Irsee more than 200 kills. She was sentenced to four years in
prison in 1948, released after a year - and then worked again as a pediatric
nurse. German post-war relations.
