In this series, Germany faces the Holocaust. G³owacki: Auschwitz itself is not the topic here

The miniseries “In a German House” tells the story of a young German woman, Eva Bruhn, who learns about what the Holocaust was and what really happened in the Auschwitz concentration camp only when she is accidentally hired as an expert translator during the second Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. The plot of the series is based on the novel of the same title by writer Annette Hess, which has been translated into over 30 languages. The author does not hide the fact that she modeled the main character on real people – including her own mother. Hess was also the screenwriter and showrunner of the series, available from November 15 on the + platform. Some of the photos were shot in Poland, and the cast included, among others: , who talked to us about this production.

“The law has an extremely difficult relationship with justice.” A controversial series is coming

Justyna Bryczkowska: In the series “In the German House”, you play a witness testifying during the second Auschwitz trial. What attracted you most about the script?

Piotr Głowacki: This series deals with reckoning. It’s obvious when you read even the description: the main character comes of age in post-war Germany. He doesn’t remember the war, he grew up in different conditions. When she enters adulthood, a part of society comes to terms with a dilemma: she decides to settle the past. The fact that Auschwitz itself is not the topic here, but the accounts of people belonging to the society that contributed to it, makes it a universal topic. In fact, it applies to every community – none of them is sacred.

Your role seems to me to be very symbolic, including: because you played the main role in “The Master”*. This hero is like a guide to the truth.

The most interesting thing for me about the witness Jan Habuda was that there are two vectors in this man. One tells him: “You have to go there to tell the story.” Then disappointment sets in. During the process, he sees that what he has to say lands on hostile ground. He feels that the judicial machinery that has been set in motion there is not – at least at the time of his testimony – on his side. My fragment required me to talk about how much courage it took to go to the trial in Germany, as well as how much bitterness appears when, as a result of events in the courtroom, faith in justice is shaken. His story in the main character’s life is the first collision with a previously unknown reality. Someone tells her directly that what happened during the war is a matter of individual experience. It shows her how much depends on the parent-child relationship, and now also on her attitude. Thanks to it, he sees that it is you who decides whether you take part in something or not and in what way.

I read that you keep a notebook with notes about each of your characters. What did you note about this hero?

I drew a lot from the experience I gained while preparing for “The Master”. In a sense, this is a continuation of that dilemma or a temporal variation of it. What I had achieved then was paying off heavily now. I already had a very extensive library of memories, so I didn’t have to specifically acquire new images, just choose those that fit the story of this particular witness. What was specific here, however, was the interest in the Auschwitz trials themselves, how they took place, at the level of law and memory.

It so happens that several of my passions came together here. I have always been interested in history, and before the Theater Academy, I also studied law. Law is a very interesting phenomenon because it has an extremely difficult relationship with justice. To be lawful, the trial must be carried out through a specific closed system, and the final verdict may not seem fair to us at all – at least in relation to our expectations.

What interested me about these Frankfurt trials was, for example, that the verdicts passed in them were considered not very harsh, or even too weak. If you compare them with the verdict of the first Auschwitz trial in Krakow after the war in 1947, you can see something puzzling. A similar number of people were tried in Kraków as in Frankfurt. The difference was that in Germany, obviously after the war, the death penalty could not be changed to life imprisonment in the code, and by the judgment of the Tribunal in Małopolska, several people were hanged. There were also people sentenced to sentences of only a few years, and one was even acquitted. To build a sense of justice, the judicial machinery must, above all, be slow, sluggish and meticulous. What’s also interesting about this series is that we see situations that at first glance seem unfair to us, but they exist because that’s what the law requires.

How does playing such an episode differ in terms of emphasis from characters more exposed on screen?

All roles that are not formally primary are always primary for an actor. But they are functional to the main character or plot. As we work, we reach a point where we can show what this particular hero’s task is in the context of the whole. Please remember that there are several different witness episodes in the series, so the creators wanted to show different human attitudes in them. However, this is fiction, composed for a specific issue; an image that is supposed to give the viewer some questions. My character appears at the moment when we want to show the first interrogation of a man who comes to Germany especially for this purpose. I wanted my hero to be as factual as possible, because through this matter-of-factness he tries to defend himself against the escalation of emotions. Issues such as his personal honor and dignity were important to me. This concern is expressed in the way he speaks, steps, steps through doors, etc. He is aware that when he is in court, his testimony cannot be an emotional stance, he expects the court itself to give him strength. When it turns out that he is not doing this, he reverses the situation.

I won’t deny that watching this series wasn’t easy for me at the beginning. What do you think is particularly important for Polish viewers to find here? Because this perspective of ignorance is not obvious to us, and is even difficult to believe.

Every time, no matter what I do and whatever topic I touch on, I believe, above all, that film art is intended to make an individual viewer aware and provoke them to think that the perspective is individual. This “we” is misleading. “We” is a tool of populism in the hands of politicians and is not used to state facts, but to create some kind of fiction, a false sense of co-responsibility or heroism. And when “something” happens, it also goes down in history, it is the sum of individual acts, individual lives and glances.

When it comes to approaching the topic of people who did not know about Auschwitz or the Holocaust – I experienced it 20 years ago, working for two months with Rene Pollesch**, who was born in 1962. We talked about it a lot then and he shared his experience. It was just after the films “Sophie Scholl – The Last Days”*** and “The Fall” about Hitler in the bunker. Rene then felt betrayed by German cinema. He believed that both his individual work and that of the entire generation, their process of reaching knowledge and truth, leaving the family, leaving home, starting their own life, was simply used up in favor of making money. Not only that, but it also created a false image that, for example, all Germans were Sophie Scholl. Or showing Hitler’s human face. Because that’s what we get when we watch Hitler, and we wonder what he thinks, how he feels, how tired he is, when his hand trembles, right?

It is also very interesting that the culture saw very clearly what this movie Hitler from “The Fall” is and turned it into one of the most famous memes in the world****, to which every possible text is added. It is clear that the film structure has triumphed over the story there, and that is why it is meme.

Then, in those conversations with Rene, I experienced the perspective of a man who was born in 1962 and who suddenly realized, at the age of 14, what had happened earlier and that the people he was sitting at the table with were members of the Nazi party. And only because he started reading books in English. I think it would be good if what he had to experience and what decisions he made as a result were heard in Poland. Because he did a lot with it: he moved away from what he found, he went towards the left, art, internationalism, rejection of the nation. I think it would be good if the work done by other people from that generation was also noticed. It is worth being aware that, firstly, being a descendant of a Nazi is not a pleasant thing, and secondly, that you can also be a descendant of a Nazi in this country.

*”Master” – a 2021 film telling the story of boxer Tadeusz “Teddy” Pietrzykowski. Before the war, he boxed in Legia in the bantamweight division, and as prisoner no. 77 in Auschwitz, he fought in the ring for bread and life.

** René Pollesch – German writer and playwright, considered one of the most outstanding representatives of postdramatic theater. His performances depart from classic theatrical forms and are often a thorough analysis of sociopolitical and economic mechanisms that have a profound impact on the lives of modern people. Pollesch is he is also the author of stage texts in which he expresses sharp political views and criticizes contemporary times using the thoughts of philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard and Giorgio Agamben. “The theory of simulacra and the need to desecrate the idols of a manipulated consumer society fit his theater exceptionally well,” we read on the website of the Warsaw Rozmaitości Theater, where Pollesch also directed his own performances: “Ragazzo dell’Europa”, “Jackson Pollesch” and “Kalifornia/Grace “Slick”.

***Sophie Scholl – student of philosophy, member of the White Rose resistance movement fighting against the Nazi regime. From 1942, together with his brother Hans Scholl and his friend Christoph Probst, they printed, among others: leaflets calling on compatriots to resist, they also condemned Nazi crimes against Jews and Poles. All three were sentenced to death in a show trial for insulting Adolf Hitler, sabotage, defeatism and actions intended to reduce Germany’s defense capabilities. They were guillotined in Munich on February 22, 1943, and years later they were considered a symbol of a “different, better Germany”.

**** I’m talking about edited scenes with Hitler’s fits of rage from the movie “The Fall”. The series “Hitler learns about…” mockingly deals with various topics in subtitles, such as a fire in one of the most popular club cafes in Warsaw or Poland’s geopolitical successes. The motif became famous in our country thanks to a montage made by Taco Hemingway before he was still a famous rapper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3guCQt6AN0