One of the best films i have seen

Brilliant and touching

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

"Die Wannseekonferenz" or "The Wannsee Conference" is a German television movie from 1984, so this one is already over 30 years old. The director is Heinz Schirk (turns 85 this year) and the writer is Paul Mommertz and for both it is probably their most known work from their careers. It is set in Berlin in the January of 1942, so during the years of the Nazi reign and World War II. Here we have the depiction of high-profile Nazi politicians deciding what would be the (in their opinion) right way to deal with the Jewish population of Germany, but also the countries they invaded. And this so-called final solution is a very cruel decision. You probably know about the contents, at least vaguely.The cast here includes not to many names I am familiar with, so most of these were probably much more famous in the 1980s compared to today. However, Robert Atzorn and Jochen Busse (really unusual role for him) will probably be familiar faces to German movie buffs. The film's biggest strength is probably how close it is to the real events. It is very close to documentary-style. It also runs for exactly the same duration as it really took the Nazi politicians back then to come up with their decision, namely slightly under 90 minutes. But this close proximity to the facts is also the film's biggest problem perhaps. There is really no additional dramatization added in here and I found it all very bleak and dry and there's so many characters in here where we have no clue who they are or how they made it big enough to participate at this convention. Character development is non-existent during these 85 minutes. These are the reasons why I would not recommend the watch. We saw this over a decade ago at school and I found it very unappealing back then already. Same today. Thumbs down from me.

Some years ago I saw "Conspiracy", an HBO-BBC TV movie about the Wannsee Conference, the secret conference in January 1942 where Hitler henchman Reinhard Heydrich laid out to a bunch of top German bureaucrats the Nazi genocidal plans toward the Jews in Europe. That film, which I liked quite a lot, has Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich, as well as other fine actors (Stanley Tucci was Adolf Eichmann, and Colin Firth has also a role there as a top Nazi lawyer, among others). It turns out Conspiracy was a remake of a previous German TV movie from 1984, called Die Wanseekonferenz. Both films are very similar, the conceit of the movie being the same (stagey setting with all the movie shot indoors, the conference is played in real time of about 85 minutes). Both movies shock the audience by having the characters talk dispassionately and matter of factly of killing the Jews in various manners. Whereas Conspiracy has a lineup of relatively famous thespians, the German movie is served by a little known but fine cast of German actors. Conspiracy has obviously a larger budget and is a bit more showy, yet I think Wannseekonferenz is probably more true to life. For instance, Branagh plays Heydrich as a master manipulator, a larger than life character, while Dietrich Mattausch, the German actor who played him in the earlier film in a more subdued form probably has him right. This is punctuated by small talk and several banal episodes, so as to point the banality of evil (for instance, Heydrich repeatedly joking about the barking dog of an officer, or some soldiers flirting with the secretaries).

This meeting in January, 1942, of 14 Nazi officers and bureaucrats was chaired by Himmler's golden Aryan and arrogant SS protégé, Reinhard Heydrich. The conference took place in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. In 84 minutes, the mechanics and coordination of the final solution, the murder of millions of Jews, men women and children, was agreed upon. The film is based on records and minutes kept of the conference, spoken by unnervingly convincing actors in carefully reconstructed surroundings and wearing meticulously authentic uniforms. The film runs 84 minutes, the exact time of the conference. It captures the bantering and pleasantries and casual racist jokes, and the bureaucratic trade-offs. The buffet lunch is excellent and the cigars and brandy are prime. The bullies, the bean counters, the bureaucratic time servers, the power brokers, the slightly worried, the professional toadies, the back-slappers and the paper shufflers are there, representing their key departments of the Nazi party, the SS and the government. The orders, Heydrich tells them, have been given. Now the organizers and expediters must agree and take appropriate action...how do we mobilize sufficient transport...what are minimum feeding requirements...what methods should be employed that will yield the most efficiencies? It is clear that Heydrich is a leader to be reckoned with, and that he is expecting results. It is equally clear that he will get his results. For those at this conference, the final solution is a problem of logistics and disposal, to be dealt with crisply and solved with German thoroughness. And if a Nazi faints during a mass execution of Jews? "It shows we Germans are human," says Heydrich with a pleasant smile. This German television reenactment of the Wannsee Conference, directed by Heinz Schirk with a disturbing performance of charm and calculation by Dietrich Mattausch as Heydrich, is horrifying. Don't mistake this for the film, Conspiracy, which covers the same meeting but with a sheen of "this is meaningful drama" about it, especially with Kenneth Branagh's Heydrich. The Wannsee Conference is central to the plot of that fascinating thriller, Fatherland, by Robert Harris. Here, Germany won the war. It's 1964 and President Joseph P. Kennedy will visit Berlin to celebrate Adolph Hitler's 75th birthday. An honest German cop and an American news reporter are going to make a terrible discovery. The book is first-rate. The television adaptation of Fatherland is less so, but it has its moments.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)What I want to do here is to note that The Wannsee Conference is a German language film with white English subtitles. Sometimes the subtitles are superimposed over a white background and the words disappear. That is why state of the art subtitles are yellow so that they don't get lost in the background. Otherwise the subtitles are very good, translating what needs to be translated and ignoring the extraneous.I also want to note that the somewhat miraculous script by Paul Mommertz is very much like a stage play with most of the action essentially confined to one set with the various players delivering their lines as the camera focuses on them, much as a spotlight might. I say "miraculous" because Mommertz forged his screenplay from the banal, bureaucratic and often euphemistic language used by the historical Nazis as they formulated the so-called "Final Solution." How to make such material dramatic was the problem Mommertz and Director Heinz Schirk faced. They achieved the nearly impossible through the subtle use of what I might call everyday "reality intrusions": the dog barking, the vainglorious Reinhard Heydrich tripping over a briefcase as he is posturing as the grand architect and fuhrer of the Holocaust, the stenographer flirting (and Heydrich's calculated, chilling affirmative response), the greedy drinking, the "Nazi rally" thumping of the table, the turf wars, the boorish jokes, etc. These served to highlight by contrast the horror that these men were so bureaucratically entertaining. Note too that when the stenographer asks if a verbatim report is desired, she is told that a detailed report will suffice. Thus the dumb brute reality could be edited later in a George Orwellian manner to further bureaucratize and euphemize what they were doing.What a truly verbatim report might have revealed is the point of this film. This is a work of art, and I want to say that real art, to the extent that it is didactic, fails. If the artist tries to teach a lesson or show us the way and the light through a human story, to that extent he or she loses control and becomes an advertiser, a propagandist, a preacher. We as audience or readers become not participants anymore but objects. A work of art is always a two-way street of participation between the artist and those viewing the art. We might agree with the message or we might not, but we are no longer equal participants in the experience.Yet what a work of art does is demonstrate a human truth through form. It is almost always an emotional truth. The Greeks emphasized tragedy because they understood the cathartic emotional experience that tragedy brings. What Mommertz and Schirk have done is present the truth as best they could discover it, and then they ran the closing credits. What we as audience experience depends on how well we participated, and what we brought as human beings to the experience. How well we concentrate, how aware we are of what is going on, how alert--these too are important. The Swannsee Conference is a demanding film, but it is surprising how quickly it moves, how engaged we become. The tension is not in what will happen at the end, of course. Instead the tension is in how it happens. We are held in thrall of discovering the essential nature of this most horrific and incredible evil done by the Nazis. And what we find out is that it was above all else banal and bureaucratic.This is its essence: the dehumanization of the objects upon which the evil is worked. It can be done no other way. It has been said that for good men to do evil it takes religious commitment. For ordinary men it is necessary to dehumanize. When Stuckart complains that women and children are being killed, he is told, "Women and children are Jews too."