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Friday August 27, 2004

A daughter’s journey into mother’s wartime secret

by michael fox
correspondent

Exquisitely constructed and supremely satisfying, “Rosenstrasse” effortlessly erases the distance between the 1940s and today, Germany and America, and above all, a Holocaust survivor and her daughter.

An intricate, intimate epic, this stunning film succeeds as both a portrait of unwavering humanity in a terrible time and a journey in which the second generation corrals its parents’ ghosts.

“Rosenstrasse,” which opened the Goethe-Institut’s annual “Berlin & Beyond” series of new German-language films at the Castro in January, begins its theatrical run Friday, Sept. 3.

The veteran director Margarethe von Trotta, who was born in Berlin the year before the climactic events in her movie took place, has always highlighted strong female characters.

“Rosenstrasse” begins with an assimilated New York widow’s unexpected adherence to the rituals of Jewish mourning. Ruth’s daughter, Hannah (Maria Schrader of “Aimée & Jaguar”), doesn’t know what to make of her mother’s embrace of Jewish tradition, and Ruth refuses to explain.

Instead Ruth (Jutta Lampe) is thrown back to wrenching memories — presented as flashbacks — of her childhood in Nazi Germany. Dodging a roundup of Berlin’s Jews that snares her mother in the winter of 1942, Ruth is left to fend for herself.

Hannah learns that Ruth had been saved by a non-Jewish woman. With no idea if this woman, Lena Fischer, is still alive, Hannah sets off for Berlin determined to get the whole scoop.

Hannah indeed locates the now-elderly woman and, pretending to be a writer doing research, inveigles her into recalling the period in question. Lena’s gripping saga consumes most of the two hour-plus film, and it offers a rare and emotionally complex glimpse of the difficult lives that German women endured during the war.

The vivacious Lena von Eschenbach (Katja Riemann) was a baron’s daughter and concert pianist who, demonstrating both her love and strength of will, married a Jewish violinist named Fabian Israel Fischer over the objections of her father.

After the war began, Fabian and other Jewish husbands of Aryan women lost their jobs and were forced to work in a factory producing ammunition. It was hardly an easy life, but they were at least spared the fate of German Jews deported to concentration camps in the East.

And then, without warning, the policy changed. One day, Fabian was picked up and imprisoned in a building on Rosenstrasse with other Jews. It’s only a matter of time before he and the others are put on a transport.

Lena and her brother, an injured war hero, desperately use their status and contacts to free Fabian, but without success. In the midst of this crisis, Lena befriends Ruth and takes her into her home.

(Although Lena and Fabian’s story is fictional, it is based on actual events. )

Hannah, who is engaged to a non-Jew from South America, is both impressed and shaken by Lena’s chronicle. Would her own fiancé, Luis, be as steadfast and go the same lengths to save or protect her?

But if Lena’s story provokes questions about Luis, it also provides answers about Ruth. The great triumph of “Rosenstrasse” is that it achieves its revelations and reconciliations without contrivance or sentimentality.

“Rosenstrasse” opens Friday, Sept. 3, at the Opera Plaza Cinemas, 601 Van Ness Ave., S.F., and the Shattuck, 2338 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.

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