/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/madsack/FKU5OSMV45FEHB525RXUGQ7YA4.jpeg "Review of Andreas Dresen’s cinematic drama “In Love, Your Hilde”")
What does a person remember when facing death in prison? He knows that he can expect no mercy from the criminal rulers? Whose life will end under the guillotine?
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“What a lovely summer we had,” says Hilde Coppi (Liv Lisa Fries) during the only encounter she was allowed to have with her husband Hans (Johannes Hegemann) in prison – and in which she revealed to Hans everything she knew about her impending death Despite letting her practice changing her son’s diaper.
The name Red Chapel is never mentioned once
In her memories, Hilde repeatedly frees herself from the confines of her cell. She mentally travels back to the summer at the lake, to picnics, to camping and also to the typewriter hidden in the boathouse on which she types anti-Nazi leaflets. This form of review lacks chronological classification. But who remembers chronologically?
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The cinema audience has to reorient themselves every time they watch Andreas Dresen’s Berlinale competition film “In Love, Your Hilde”: Has she already met her future husband, Hans? Is she already involved in the activities of the resistance members of the Red Orchestra, as the Gestapo called the loosely connected group? The name is not mentioned once in the film. Is she currently smuggling the radio through Berlin? Does she stick notes against the anti-Soviet propaganda exhibition “The Soviet Paradise” on the walls of the bridge?
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Dresen deals with an almost forgotten resistance woman
Many stories of Nazi opponents have been dramatized for the cinema, films about Sophie Scholl from the White Rose, about the very different Hitler assassins Georg Elser and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. Andreas Dresen deals with an almost forgotten resister who, in his opinion, probably didn’t understand herself that well. The script was written by his favorite author, Laila Stieler. Stieler originally planned a series about women in the resistance.
If these two filmmakers do something different than so many before them, it is this: they do not tell Coppi’s life as a prelude to her tragic end. They give her space to live an almost carefree life beforehand. The depressing scenes with her son, who was born in Berlin’s Barnimstrasse women’s prison and narrowly escaped infant death, remain hard enough.
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Hilde on the pillion with Hans
But Hilde Coppi is also allowed to race down the country road with Hans on the pillion. At the lake, jealousy runs high within the clique. The couple practices Morse code together – during sex. We don’t hear a single heroic speech of resistance. We see young people who have settled into the permanent exceptional situation, who do something against the Nazis and still want to have fun.
Above all, Hilde had a good heart. When she heard news about German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union on a so-called enemy station, she sat down and wrote letters to their relatives. She may not have realized that she could be executed for this.
Director Andreas Dresen
“Above all, Hilde had a good heart. When she heard news about German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union on a so-called enemy station, she sat down and wrote letters to their relatives. It was perhaps not so clear to her that she could be executed for this,” said director Andreas Dresen in an interview with the Editorial Network Germany (RND).
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Courage to live, fear of death
This is Dresen’s tenth Berlinale film in almost three and a half decades. Most recently he presented “Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush” (2022) about a mother who fights for the release of her son who was kidnapped to Guantanamo. The film had many funny moments. However, things are different now.
At first Coppi is reserved. She is afraid. “Afraid of what?” asks her husband. “From spiders. Before the Nazis. Before love. Before the dentist. Before life,” answers Hilde.
Coppi is afraid of dying
In the end, Coppi is afraid of dying, just like the dozen or so women who are standing in line in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison yard in gray smocks and wooden shoes for their own execution. She is no longer afraid of life. She leans her head back into the sun, which is just peeking over the wall on this August evening in 1943.
The birth of her son Hans gives Coppi strength. “Please do not forget me. And be happy. Absolutely,” she says as she has to say goodbye to the eight-month-old child and hug her prison guard.
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“AfD MPs in particular could learn something from my film”
Andreas Dresen knows the Berlinale like hardly any other German director. Now he is back in the middle of the current festival, with a film about an almost forgotten Nazi resister.
A carefully researched film
From now on, his grandparents will take care of Hans. The prisoner asks her guard to make sure her mother-in-law covers the rain barrels. So that Hans doesn’t accidentally fall in. This request, like so much in this carefully researched film, has been handed down.
The prison guard Kühn (Lisa Wagner) is an ambivalent film character. At first she is hostile towards her prisoner. Then she lets Coppi touch her. It’s not just her: a Gestapo man offers Coppi a liverwurst sandwich. Not a single screaming Nazi anywhere in this film. But all of them serve the oppressive apparatus without hesitation.
“It goes fast”
“It’s happening quickly,” said Pastor Harald Poelchau (Alexander Scheer) in prison. But we have never seen an execution take place so quickly in the cinema. Killing in unison: More than 50 members of the Red Orchestra were murdered in Berlin-Plötzensee.
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At the end we hear the voice of Hans Coppi Jr., the son born in prison. The now 81-year-old historian has spent his life studying the fate of his parents. Only a single radio message from Berlin, he says, got through to Moscow: “1000 greetings to all friends.” But does that diminish his parents’ courage?
No historical and educational information
Anyone who is not familiar with the history of the Red Chapel will not know much more after watching this film. The director was interested in something other than historical and educational enlightenment: “Perhaps the audience will ask themselves: Where would I be in a story like this? Anyone and everyone can measure themselves against Hilde. How would I have behaved?” said Dresen.
The second German competition entry by director Matthias Glasner follows on Sunday. His family drama is about “dying”.