Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Die Wannseekonferenz" or "The Wannsee Conference" is a German television movie from 1984, so this one is already over 30 years old. The director is Heinz Schirk (turns 85 this year) and the writer is Paul Mommertz and for both it is probably their most known work from their careers. It is set in Berlin in the January of 1942, so during the years of the Nazi reign and World War II. Here we have the depiction of high-profile Nazi politicians deciding what would be the (in their opinion) right way to deal with the Jewish population of Germany, but also the countries they invaded. And this so-called final solution is a very cruel decision. You probably know about the contents, at least vaguely.The cast here includes not to many names I am familiar with, so most of these were probably much more famous in the 1980s compared to today. However, Robert Atzorn and Jochen Busse (really unusual role for him) will probably be familiar faces to German movie buffs. The film's biggest strength is probably how close it is to the real events. It is very close to documentary-style. It also runs for exactly the same duration as it really took the Nazi politicians back then to come up with their decision, namely slightly under 90 minutes. But this close proximity to the facts is also the film's biggest problem perhaps. There is really no additional dramatization added in here and I found it all very bleak and dry and there's so many characters in here where we have no clue who they are or how they made it big enough to participate at this convention. Character development is non-existent during these 85 minutes. These are the reasons why I would not recommend the watch. We saw this over a decade ago at school and I found it very unappealing back then already. Same today. Thumbs down from me.

Dennis Littrell (Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)What I want to do here is to note that The Wannsee Conference is a German language film with white English subtitles. Sometimes the subtitles are superimposed over a white background and the words disappear. That is why state of the art subtitles are yellow so that they don't get lost in the background. Otherwise the subtitles are very good, translating what needs to be translated and ignoring the extraneous.I also want to note that the somewhat miraculous script by Paul Mommertz is very much like a stage play with most of the action essentially confined to one set with the various players delivering their lines as the camera focuses on them, much as a spotlight might. I say "miraculous" because Mommertz forged his screenplay from the banal, bureaucratic and often euphemistic language used by the historical Nazis as they formulated the so-called "Final Solution." How to make such material dramatic was the problem Mommertz and Director Heinz Schirk faced. They achieved the nearly impossible through the subtle use of what I might call everyday "reality intrusions": the dog barking, the vainglorious Reinhard Heydrich tripping over a briefcase as he is posturing as the grand architect and fuhrer of the Holocaust, the stenographer flirting (and Heydrich's calculated, chilling affirmative response), the greedy drinking, the "Nazi rally" thumping of the table, the turf wars, the boorish jokes, etc. These served to highlight by contrast the horror that these men were so bureaucratically entertaining. Note too that when the stenographer asks if a verbatim report is desired, she is told that a detailed report will suffice. Thus the dumb brute reality could be edited later in a George Orwellian manner to further bureaucratize and euphemize what they were doing.What a truly verbatim report might have revealed is the point of this film. This is a work of art, and I want to say that real art, to the extent that it is didactic, fails. If the artist tries to teach a lesson or show us the way and the light through a human story, to that extent he or she loses control and becomes an advertiser, a propagandist, a preacher. We as audience or readers become not participants anymore but objects. A work of art is always a two-way street of participation between the artist and those viewing the art. We might agree with the message or we might not, but we are no longer equal participants in the experience.Yet what a work of art does is demonstrate a human truth through form. It is almost always an emotional truth. The Greeks emphasized tragedy because they understood the cathartic emotional experience that tragedy brings. What Mommertz and Schirk have done is present the truth as best they could discover it, and then they ran the closing credits. What we as audience experience depends on how well we participated, and what we brought as human beings to the experience. How well we concentrate, how aware we are of what is going on, how alert--these too are important. The Swannsee Conference is a demanding film, but it is surprising how quickly it moves, how engaged we become. The tension is not in what will happen at the end, of course. Instead the tension is in how it happens. We are held in thrall of discovering the essential nature of this most horrific and incredible evil done by the Nazis. And what we find out is that it was above all else banal and bureaucratic.This is its essence: the dehumanization of the objects upon which the evil is worked. It can be done no other way. It has been said that for good men to do evil it takes religious commitment. For ordinary men it is necessary to dehumanize. When Stuckart complains that women and children are being killed, he is told, "Women and children are Jews too."

jandesimpson It was inspired programme planning on the part of BBC's Knowledge channel to preface Heinz Schirk's dramatised documentary with Alain Resnais's chilling piece of actuality footage "Nuit et Brouillard" made twenty years earlier. It is just possible that, without it, the more recent film might have lost something of its awesome impact. However, by preceding it with the most harrowing account of the consequences of that fateful meeting, there was no escaping the obscenity of what we were watching. The scene was one of glamour with smartly dressed high ranking Nazi officials being served refreshments by spotlessly groomed white uniformed young male waiters. With minutes detailing the planned murder of millions being taken by an attractive female stenographer with the calm impassivity of one recording an average business meeting, the underlying horror and grotesque irony of the occasion was complete. A masterly historical reconstruction.

larcher-2 The one really horrifying film about Shoah. None of the rest, especially Schindler's List, comes anywhere close. In this movie, nobody visibly dies; a roomful of bureaucrats chatters for an hour or so about the most efficient ways to go about the final solution. The ones who seem the worst (Eichmann, Heydrich) meet briefly to talk about co-opting the suckers; the one who seems the best horrifies us by dragging us in to cheering for him when he haggles about saving 70,000 "half-Jews." We are in the depths of Hell when we watch men in clean suits pencil in the details of every horror, pausing only for light refreshment and a bit of shagadelic banter with the babes.