Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer (2018): Written and directed by Lars Kraume. Starring:
Leonard Scheicher, Tom Gramenz, Lena Klenke, Isaiah Michalski, Jonas Dassler,
Ronald Zehrfeld, Florian Lukas, Joerdis Triebel, Michael Gwisdek, Burghart
Klaussner, Max Hopp, and Judith Engel. Running Time:
111 minutes. Based on the non-fiction
book of the same name by Dietrich Garstka.
Rating:
3.5/4
Despite
modern classics like Goodbye, Lenin
and Das Leben Der Anderen, the
experiences of life in Communist East Germany remain a topic relatively
untouched by German cinema. Why this is
I couldn’t say, except to hazard a guess that it’s still #toosoon, too fresh
for many still alive who remember it and could claim offense or
misrepresentation. After all, how many
decades did it take American WWII films to move beyond simple, unquestioning
sanctification of “The Greatest Generation?”
This
makes Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer a
bit of an oddity in the recent upswing of major German movies to come out in
recent years. Starring a bevy of young
acting talents, it tells the story of a class of Abitur students (the German
equivalent of a high school degree) who find out the hard way the price of being
a disobedient teenager in a restrictive society. At first, they think nothing of meeting in
secret to listen to RIAS, the radio station of democratic West Berlin that was
explicitly forbidden as capitalist propaganda within East Germany. One day in 1956, a chilling report comes
through of the Soviet’s brutal repression of an attempted democratic movement
in Hungary. This immediately strikes at
their clear-eyed sense of a morally simple world- the eternal prerogative of
the young- and they decide rather spontaneously to hold a protest minute of
silence at school the next day, as a show of solidarity with their fellow
Hungarian socialists.
Such
an unplanned act of deviousness obviously sets off every alarm bell in the
heads of the school leaders, fine-tuned to turn every unplanned citizen act
into the mark of an enemy of the state; the eternal prerogative of the authoritarian. What begins as a simple trick to anger their
teacher soon pulls in the school principal, the parents, and eventually the
higher-ups from the education ministry, all threatening dire consequences if an
instigator is not thoroughly named and shamed by the entire class.
Most
of the film follows Theo, Kurt, and Lena, three students whose uneasy love
triangle with each other is easily the film’s weakest link, but to its credit
it never draws much focus. They are all
fine as performers, but in the end the movie’s heaviest moments and biggest
surprises are provided by many of the (at first) seemingly less-consequential
side characters. This is especially true
for Erik (played by Jonas Dassler), a more distant classmate obsessed with
living up to the perceived legacy of his dead father. You might assume at first that you know
exactly where the film is going with his character, but the film soon reveals
hidden depths to his story that culminate in him having arguably the best and
most emotionally gripping scene in the entire film. The entire young cast acquits itself well,
but Dassler shines the most with what he’s given.
The
older characters are filled out with mainstays of German film and television,
and here too, most notably with Kurt’s parents, there are things we eventually
learn about them or see them do that contradict what we may have assumed about
them from the start.
Authoritarian
societies, by their very nature, force nearly everyone living within them to
resort to secrecy, to always find ways to hide what they really think while
still communicating it to others when needed.
In looks, in glances, in how hard you hold someone’s hand, you have to
say more than you dare with mere words.
The cast and crew of Das
Schweigende Klassenzimmer clearly possessed a firm grasp of this
fundamental truth in their source material, and continuously find remarkable
ways to bring that across throughout the movie, making this film seemingly
simple, quiet, and unassuming on the outside, but with more than enough
emotional depth to resonate with any attentive viewer.
-Noah Franc
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