The film adaptation of historical events has a double effect.

On the one hand, she makes visible what is not or only fragmentarily preserved in text and image documents.

On the other hand, it makes disappear precisely what it wants to bring to mind.

She paints over real events with fiction.

For years there has been a loud debate in Germany about the reconstruction of destroyed historic buildings.

The reconstruction of history on television (and, more rarely, in the cinema) is not up for discussion.

It is one of the most ambivalent forms of collective memory there is.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Matti Geschonneck's "The Wannsee Conference" offers a vivid example of this. It is already the third film that attempts to put the events of January 20, 1942 in the SS guest house at Wannsee in Berlin into a narrative form. In Heinz Schirk's 1984 film adaptation, Reinhard Heydrich, the host of the meeting between high-ranking SS officials and representatives of various National Socialist Reich ministries in the former manufacturer's villa in Marlier, was portrayed by Dietrich Mattausch, in Frank Pierson's film "Conspiracy" from 2001 it was Kenneth Branagh. Neither of the two actors bore much resemblance to the real Heydrich, and above all neither matched his voice, which contemporary witnesses described as a high, penetrating falsetto voice. It is therefore difficult to say, as usual,the two would have embodied the role. You just played them.

Heydrich is a paragon of commitment

The Austrian actor Philipp Hochmair slipped into the role of Heydrich for Geschonneck's "Wannsee Conference". Hochmair lets the head of the security police and SD and deputy Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia speak in a slightly Viennese singsong, although there is nothing to be said against that, except that Heydrich grew up in Halle in central Germany. The gesture of his appearance weighs heavier. Measured by National Socialist standards, Hochmair's Heydrich is a paragon of commitment. The tone in which he explains to those present in the garden hall of the Wannseevilla that the "eradication of Judaism up to the Urals" is a "task that fate has set for us" has no aftertaste of the cold sharpness for which the historical Heydrich was feared .However, it also does not fit the administrative tone of the “Third Reich”.

The Wannsee Conference, at which the mass extermination of European Jews was officially agreed, served not least to determine the responsibility of the SS, SD and Reich Security Main Office for the "final solution". It was about power that had to be wrested from the civilian representatives of the Reich government with their consent. The film makes this clear by placing those in suits on one side of the long table and those in uniform on the other. At the head sits Heydrich with his paladins. After the conference he is said to have smoked against his usual habit and drank alcohol. The meeting, it seems, could have ended differently, for example with an objection from the Secretary of State for the Interior, Stuckart, against the planned measures. But there is no sign of this tension at Hochmairs Heydrich.When he interrupts the meeting and summons Stuckart to his office, the duel ends in a men's conversation about family matters. Questions of power were usually clarified differently under the swastika.