Naked Among Wolves in the ARD: blood on the floor – STAR

U nth in the bunker, this worst place in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which knows so many places of suffering and death, are the torture tools neatly lined up like surgical instruments , Mandrill, the executioner wants to have everything at hand when he drives his sadistic game. With a smile on his lips, he pulls his victims up the rope and beating them with iron rods. Until the bones break, until the drain all the blood unable to swallow and a red lake under the feet of the hanged man is.

There are cruel, hard to unbearable scenes that his audience expects of the TV movie “Naked Among Wolves”. Images that have not been shown in this hardness in public television. Hardness, although we know from the American Cinema, Tarantino about, but there is often tempered by irony. And the prohibitive on an issue such as Buchenwald, of course. On April 1, the ARD radiates from the film Berlin director Philipp Bach Kadel – prime time at 20.15 clock. Rating:. From twelve years

About demand is the goal

“Naked Among Wolves” is a radical and militant response to the question of how the atrocities of the Nazis today still can be told. Kadel Bach and the writer Stefan Kolditz take the audience into the stranglehold: There are few relieving moments in their concentration camp drama, no room for reflection – after a torture scene follows a panning shot into the sky, then it goes on

The excessive demands of the audience is the goal. Man is always looking for support in this stream of images, but there is nothing that could support a nowhere. The story would have on motives of the novel by Bruno Apitz, which first appeared in 1958 in the GDR, more reverberation and tranquility needed. It is the story of a three-year-old Jewish boy who is smuggled in a suitcase in the Buchenwald concentration camp, a few weeks before the liberation by American troops in April 1945. ‘/ P>

In Buchenwald cares the political prisoner Hans Pippig to the boy. Pippig is a member of a Communist resistance organization in the camp and will soon be overshadowed by his comrades to leave the boy deported to Bergen-Belsen, even though it meant his death. The Communists fear that the boy discovered by the Nazis and the resistance group could be smashed. They see their goal – a revolt in the concentration camp – threatened. The boy’s life is against the fate of 50,000 inmates who want to rid the Communists. Gradually, the mood turns in the group. Many comrades join Hans Pippig and protect the boy. Even under severe pain in the torture chamber of Mandrill, they do not reveal the child.

“as authentic as possible,”

For the research on the film visited director Kadel Bach and Author Kolditz the Buchenwald Memorial. Kadel Bach spent hours in the exhibition that documents life in the labor camp. Between 1937 and 1945, 250,000 people were imprisoned; 56,000 of them died in the camp, which is only ten kilometers from Weimar, the city of Goethe and Schiller. Kadel Bach says, it was clear to him after the day of the memorial, as if to say “Naked Among Wolves”: “. Be as authentic as possible, hard and relentlessly, the film must as this exhibition” It Kadelbach failed.

No drama, no matter how drastically can make with the means of fiction credibility as the documentation with original recordings assets. Probably for this reason ventured over decades no German director from a concentration camp to film history. The horror, the unimaginable, was not considered to be staged. The last attempt of a filmmaker is from 1977. “From a German life” with Götz George tells of the cold cruelty with which Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, the gasification of inmates with Zyklon B planned.

Kadel Bach draws on in his imagery on concentration camp documentation. He shows emaciated bodies behind barbed wire, prisoners, where the hair is shorn; and in the barracks they spoon thin soup made of sheet metal plates. There are images that have been engraved in the collective memory. In Kadelbach they act like quotes. They unfold in density while an atmosphere of anxiety, but they do not point beyond themselves. The film opens no second floor; the horror remains the horror -. without one would have understood even begin

“Anything but honesty”

Nico Hofmann, the “Naked Among Wolves” has produced, sees no weakness. “We wanted a film that dissolves from all didactic constraints. Just do not honesty. For us it was a new, direct access to this difficult German issue.” In Hofmann’s work as a producer is “Naked Among Wolves” a turning point. Indicated has it already in the series “Generation War” (2013), which tells the story of a youth gang in World War II from varying perspectives.

Previously, Hofmann had historical subjects after the same old pattern worked Subjects such as flight and expulsion, the night of bombing in Dresden and Stauffenberg’s attempt to assassinate Hitler, backed by a melodramatic structure, a hero with whom the viewer can identify, because the emotional world is carefully laid out, accompanied by moving music , With this recipe Hofmann achieved enormous distances. His films have seen up to 14 million people. Already applies a “crime scene” with nearly ten million viewers a great success.

Distance to staff

And now, “Naked Among Wolves”. The complete counter-proposal. Where Hofmann’s films were earlier ranschmeißerisch close to the figures, is “Naked Among Wolves” cool now distanced itself from the staff. So one of the hero Hans Pippig remains alien – despite the disturbing images. Pippig sets in an overly large ensemble of characters. Since the scenes from his life before the arrest did not help. Pippig, we learn that becomes a father himself. He had to leave his pregnant wife, when he was deported to a concentration camp.

The flashback is to make Pippig’s heroic act, the rescue of the Polish boy, understandable. He sees the boy his own son, that’s the message. Otherwise, this Pippig is a pale character. No one could lean on the the viewer.

Nico Hofmann know that it has entered into a venture with this rugged work. “I’m grown up in my films,” he says. “I hope the audience as well.”

“Naked Among Wolves” First, Wednesday, April 1 at 20:15 clock