"Wannsee 1942"
recreates the dry conference, which in form could just as easily be about an overview of parking rules in the traffic committee or about a letter in a couple of association statutes.
Here are meeting techniques, appendices, order of speakers and differences of opinion.
Now it's about the best way to murder eleven million people.
The previous Jewish laws produced in Nuremberg need to be tightened.
"The Jewish question can be considered solved only after a total biological cleansing of all Judaism up to the Ural Mountains".
It is quiet and terrible.
It is a
difficult balancing act to portray dehumanization and cynicism without the story itself becoming cynical.
Matti Geshonneck's film succeeds well.
Above all through the dry language, a display of the propaganda that the Jewish linguist Victor Klemperer analyzed in the book "Language of the Third Reich".
The dense, dehumanizing dialogue is taken from the neat meeting minutes kept by Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann's mild-mannered secretary Ingeburg Werlemann, also the only woman in the congregation.
With history
as a conclusion, the dry planning and concepts such as "special treatment" and "final solution" create a clash that settles like a physical pain in the stomach.
Beneath the gentlemen's cool talk and highly efficient meeting technique, internal battles, personal careers and anger over table placement bubble up.
The SS, the Gestapo and the Ministry of Security have their tailwinds, the political officials and bureaucrats try to slow the progress of mass murder by referring to existing laws.
The chairman of the meeting
is Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Ministry of Security.
A power player and diplomat at the tips of his fingers, portrayed to perfection by Philipp Hochmair.
With a soft voice and an iron fist, he disarms the critics and steers the conference into port with a warm smile.
Everything fits.
Acting, pacing, camera angles and the efficient way the genocide is planned make this gruesome chamber play a shocking nail-biter.