August Habermann (Mark Waschke) is a German living in a town in Northern Czechoslovakia, the Sudeten land that Hitler maintained was historically German. His family business, a lumbermill and flour mill, is the town's biggest employer going back generations. While his national identity is German, he sees himself as part of the town and rejects the politics of Hitler, but when the Nazis invade, he dismisses the fears of his best friend Karel (Karel Roden), a Czech national married to a German woman, and refuses to take a side.
He protects his Czech workers from the Nazis as best he can while distancing himself from the Resistance fighters, and he maintains this apolitical stance even after he discovers that his Czech wife Jana (Hannah Herzsprung), an orphan raised Catholic by nuns in the convent, is half-Jewish, a secret that could be betrayed to the occupying Nazis at any time.
Based on a true story, this 2010 German-Czech co-production tackles a provocative history little known outside of Czechoslovakia and attempts to explore complete issues in a drama that compresses eight years into 100 minutes, which is the film's biggest weakness. We never get to see the culture of the town before the German occupation and the characters, while engaging, are barely more than two-dimensional. What the film does well is showing how the years of Nazi occupation created a division between the German and Czech citizens who coexisted peacefully for decades.
Filmmaker Juraj Herz, a Czech Jew, and concentration camp survivor began directing during the lively era of the Czech New Wave (his 1968 black comedy The Cremator is a minor classic) and often collided with Soviet censors before the fall of the Iron Curtain. He leans into the rage and injustice here, opening the film on Czech reprisals against German civilians in 1945, then jumping back to 1937 to show how August Habermann, a seemingly moral force in the community, remains willfully blind to the injustice, bigotry, and tyranny of the Nazis until he himself becomes an unwilling participant in their atrocities.
Far from an innocent victim who becomes the target of Czech rage, Habermann reveals this well-meaning community leader as a man who denies the oppression and tyranny around him until it finally turns on him. It was released in the U.S. in 2011 to mixed reviews but I find it a provocative portrait of a little-known piece of World War II history with themes that are resonant in any era.
Not rated, features brief nudity, sexuality, torture, and violence. A strong option purchase.