Berlinale: 'Elser' highlights moral courage

Good films about history always tell two stories: that of what actually happened, but also something about our current age. "Elser" by director Oliver Hirschbiegel, which was premiered at this year's Berlinale, exemplifies both.

It looks back at an attempted assassination against Adolf Hitler from November 1939. At the same time, "Elser" also makes an appeal to today's viewers to show courage and take a political stance.

"Today the boundary between freedom fighters and terrorists threatens to erode more and more," says Fred Breinersdorfer, who wrote the screenplay together with his wife Leonie-Claire. "The events in Ukraine or in the Arab World give us an alarming reminder that we need a value compass that lets us make this distinction."

Breinersdrfer sees a connection between the events that came shortly after the Second World War, which are treated in "Elser," and some of today's pressing political issues.

13 minutes that changed the world

What does the film tell viewers? Georg Elser, a tradesman from rural southwestern Germany, was a freedom-loving individualist who decided he couldn't watch idly as the mounting insanity of Nazi Germany took hold in the late 1930s. But Elser was detached from the political parties and resistance movements of the time.

He came to the idea of taking drastic action himself. The handy tinkerer built a bomb, which he then spent multiple nights placing just above a speaker's pulpit in Munich's Bürgerbräukeller beer hall. It was there that Adolf Hitler was set to deliver a major speech to Germany on November 8, 1939.

The bomb did indeed explode, but Hitler had left the room a mere 13 minutes prior to its detonation. Eight people were killed, but the Nazi dictator survived unscathed. The assassination attempt that could have changed the course of world history had failed.

Georg Elser was arrested soon thereafter before being tortured and interrogated. Years later - in 1945, just before the end of the war - he was ultimately executed by the Nazis. Although it was quickly clear that Elser had been the one who planted the bomb, the Nazi leadership long didn't want to believe that a lone wolf could have come so close to killing Hitler.

'Clarity of vision'

Oliver Hirschbiegel's film shows these torturous interrogation sessions and also shows how steadfast Elser remained - asserting the truth even when facing the most severe torment. The movie also cuts back repeatedly to Elser's Swabian home region, narrating how the German countryside was slowly poisoned by Nazi ideology. It shows how pervasive such attitudes became and that those who resisted openly were sent off to labor camps.

What fascinated Oliver Hirschbiegel, who celebrated an Oscar nomination in 2004 for "Downfall" about Adolf Hitler's final days, about the protagonist at the center of his latest offering?

"It's his clarity of vision," the director says. "Elser wasn't a person involved in political organizations; he was simply a free spirit who believed in individuality and self-determination."

Elser, Hirschbiegel continues, "sensed an energy at the time that he viewed as highly destructive - a system that controls everything, that believes in violence and that suppresses all individuality and creativity."

No Hollywood drama

Georg Elser's story has already been filmed twice in Germany - once in a TV version from the 1960s and more recently in 1989 by director Klaus-Maria Brandauer, who also stars in the movie.

Why a third version now? Hirschbiegel says that for the first version, Germany still thought of Georg Elser as a rather naive outsider, while Brandauer produced a classic Hollywood style drama. He explains he wanted to avoid that approach specifically, saying instead, "Here the drama is generated by way of psychology - through the situation in which an entire people finds itself."

Viewers experience the failed assassination and Elser's arrest right at the start. What follows are flashbacks that give answers to how things could have gone so far off the rails in Germany. Hirschbiegel presents the Nazis' conviction that Elser must have been part of a broader group of opponents to Hitler, and the director notes that conspiracy theories long circulated in Germany regarding the case.

"Some said Elser was acting on behalf of foreign intelligence agencies and, as such, was acting as a traitor. Other said the Nazis put him up to the deed so that they would have grounds to celebrate Hitler as untouchable," he says.

'Shameful' revelation

These theories persisted stubbornly in various forms until they were finally put to rest in fairly recent memory. "There's also the aspect that a little tradesman from Swabia is the only one who really sees what's going on in Germany and does something about it - that's shameful," the director says, adding that it explains the reflex at the time to simply sweep his story under the rug.

Hirschbiegel and his screenwriters now want to show what really happened by way of the film they're premiering at the Berlinale. "Elser" doesn't attempt to be a documentary or essay on film. It's a solid piece of filmmaking about a noteworthy episode of resistance.

How does the movie relate to us today? Hirschbiegel says the decisive phrase there is "moral courage," asking, "When do people arrive at the point where they say, 'I can't keep taking part in this - it's unconscionable'?"

Although Hirschbiegel stresses he does not want to compare Nazi Germany with the US, he says he immediately thought of Edward Snowden when making the film.

"Over the years, he saw what was happening in an ostensibly democratic system. It agitated him until he left the system and delivered his information to the public - although he knew that his life as it had been until that point would definitively come to an end," Hirschbiegel says. "When it comes to this inner impulse, Snowden is closely related to the highly intelligent and sophisticated man who was Elser."