FILM REVIEW: Barbara (2012)
Last week, I had the happy occasion to visit the Avalon in uptown Washington to see Christian Petzold’s new film Barbara. The work is a visual and dramatic feast which raises trenchant questions about the purpose of life and work, our human responsibility for one another, the meaning of happiness, and above all the nature of freedom – really, liberty not so much as a possession but as a vector, one which can be not only won but bestowed.
The title character (played by Nina Hoss) is a young doctor in East Germany; we pick up her story in 1980 on her first day of work at a provincial hospital after having been exiled to a rural district for the “offense” of having put in for an exit permit or Ausreisentrag to leave the GDR. Embittered, defiant and trusting no one, her standoffish persona and prestigious work history at the Charité Hospital in East Berlin combine to create in her the impression of the stuckup urban snob from the capital. Seeking to befriend her – partly because he is an informant for the Stasi (secret police) – is a handsome young doctor, André Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld).
Brilliant in her work as a doctor, the periphery of Barbara’s life is a hell of surveillance, a rotten apartment with a Teutonic shrew of a landlady, strip- and cavity-searches by the Stasi, strained relations with her fellow staff, and highly furtive efforts to lay the groundwork for an eventual escape to the West. The drama is heightened by the winds and storm clouds along the Baltic coast and the pervasive darkness which haunts her movements. The one bright spot in all of this – other than her work – is her relationship with her boyfriend Jörg, who lives in West Germany. We share in two of their assignations: one in a remote wood, and the other at an Inter-Hotel (special hotel for foreign guests) in an unnamed city.
The plot thickens the day that Stella, a young woman in a detention camp, shows up at the hospital. Manhandled by the Volkspolizei (the so-called “People’s Police” who were an arm of the repressive state) and regarded as a malingerer by Dr. Reiser, she finds compassion and care – and the correct diagnosis of meningitis – from Barbara only. Stella becomes, in fact, the recipient of Barbara’s focused humanity and care, as the doctor reads to her from Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (auf Deutsch, of course!). When Stella – who is pregnant and understands clearly that her child stands no chance for a real future in the GDR – is forcibly returned to the labor camp (which Stella refers to as an “extermination camp - a socialist one”), she looks for an opportunity to escape and makes her way to Barbara’s flat, just as the doctor is about to make her daring escape across to Denmark. This sets the stage for the conflict which will resolve in Barbara’s decision about what to do with the precious gift of freedom, itself the product of her long and defiant struggle for freedom.
Leaving aside the fact that Cold War movies are one of my very favorite genres, I find Barbara to be a masterpiece of psychological depth, cinematography, plot pacing and development, and the framing of philosophical questions (such as: “is it possible to have genuine relationship where it is tacitly acknowledged that trust is absent or at least attenuated?”). In a sense, the story unfolds almost as a kind of prison-literature, set as it is in the repressive East German state. As such, it challenges the trendy and often facile Western, especially American notions, which link freedom to prosperity, happy outcomes, and ethical certainty. Though not a religious work in any sense, it fits more in the tradition of classical Christian understandings of the meaning and purpose of true liberty.
Lusby, Maryland
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