Director: Ilker Çatak (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
A school room in which members of the student council are being pushed by teachers to rat out their colleagues. There has been a spate of robberies at the school, and one teacher in particular, Herr Liebenwerda, is determined to find out who’s responsible. Aware that he cannot directly ask the kids to name names, he shows them a list of names of people in their class. He says that he’ll point to each name and all they have to do is nod when his pen is above the right one.
Sitting opposite Herr Liebenwerda, a younger teacher, Carla Nowak, looks at him and shakes her head. She tells the kids that they are not required to say anything. In doing so, she is undermining the school’s “Zero Tolerance” policy (zero tolerance of what, exactly?) which allows the teachers to accuse the most marginalised kids based on their own prejudices. It doesn’t matter that Herr Liebenwerda is himself Black. We will soon see how he embodies the racism expected of his role.
Not long after, Frau Nowak is teaching her kids maths. The lesson starts with a happy clappy call out, which seems to be new age hippy bollocks, but proves remarkably effective at asserting he authority. Clara is a good, liberal teacher, who resists her kids’ pleas to write all their test results on the blackboard as this will marginalise those with less good results. She tries to rule by consent, but also needs her kids to fear her.
The lesson is interrupted by a delegation led by the headmistress, The girls are told to leave the room (as an aside, may I just ask why? This may well be a Thing within schools, but the assumption that if anything’s gone missing it must have been the boys emphasizes the structural prejudices which feed the problem). The boys are asked to hand in their wallets. Of course they don’t have to, but “if they have nothing to hide, why wouldn’t they?”
One of the kids is immediately humiliated and put under suspicion because he doesn’t own a wallet. Another – Ali, from a Turkish family – hands in a wallet containing a wad of cash. This is seen as proof positive of Ali’s guilt, especially by Herr Liebenwerda who seems to have a thing about his Turkish students. Ali’s parents are summoned, and they explain that they’d given him the money to buy a present. Ali’s father explains: “my son is no thief. If he were, I’d break his bones.”
Carla decides to take the law into her own hands. She fills her purse with banknotes and leaves it in the staffroom, surreptitiously leaving her laptop open with the camera on. When the money disappears, the camera doesn’t directly capture who took the money, but there is a plenty of footage of a blouse of the sort only worn by Frau Kuhn, one of the secretaries. Carla confronts Frau Kuhn, who swears she knows nothing, then shows the film to the head who suspends Frau Kuhn,
What seems like a pat answer to the problem just opens a can of worms. Firstly, Carla has just broken German law, which makes it illegal to film either Frau Kuhn, or anyone else who just passes into shot. Secondly, Frau Kuhn’s son Oskar is Carla’s star pupil. As Oscar denounces his teacher for making his mother lose her job, the harmony of the classroom is shattered, and other kids refuse to take part in Frau Nowak’s bullshit start of lesson ceremonies.
Meanwhile, Carla is fighting a backlash in the staffroom from teachers who see kids as animals to be wrangled. After all, aren’t some of these kids the sons and daughters of taxi drivers? Carla is much too liberal for them, and if she gets her way, there’s the danger that anarchy will ensue. A similar atmosphere in the classroom leads to the isolation of Oskar. One kid notes that fat parents often produce fat children. If Oskar’s mother is a thief, why should they be able to trust him?
For all this racism and class prejudice, this all takes place in somewhere which is far from a “problem school”. Kids are allowed to sit on management committees, and run their own student newspaper. Notwithstanding the racial mix, the school caters for slightly better off kids. It is not that the problems experienced by Clara at work are not serious, but some teachers would love to just have to deal with the occasional case of petty theft.
As Lida Bach, one of my favourite German critics, notes: Clara’s school embodies an “almost ideal scenario which knows staff shortage, overwork, discrimination, abuse of authority, violence, family problems, reactionary teaching methods, nor structural disadvantage.” None of these issues is really addressed in the films. Instead, although the film nods at structural problems, it’s main plea is to watch out because these problems are now reaching middle class schools as well.
Das Lehrerzimmer never leaves the school grounds. We are never granted the slight glimpse into Clara’s private life, nor even do we learn whether she has a private life at all. There is some method in this. The message is that whatever individual mistakes made by Clara or other teachers, or by school students, their parents, or other staff, the education system has reached a point in which it can no longer cope. This is a plea for help, albeit one which offers no real answers.
For most of the time, Clara’s pupils respect her, they do what she tells them to, but they don’t necessarily like her. This means that when they feel disrespected, they can turn against her fairly quickly. I had slightly similar feelings about this film. It is well made, well-acted, and feels like a film that needed making. But after a while, it had said everything that it needed to say. So watch, admire it as far as it goes, but don’t expect anything groundbreaking.
CinePhil 