Director: Kilian Riedhof (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
August 1941, Berlin. A woman is stood in a spangly dress, preparing a speech. She looks at herself in the mirror and applies some lippy. As she prepares to leave, she kisses her reflection, leaving a blurred lipstick stain on the mirror. The next time we see her, she’s singing jazz songs, surrounded by a circle of musicians, mainly playing brass instruments. The lyrics are mainly in English, and they address each other with Anglicisms.
Stella is around 20, and an aspiring jazz singer. She’s been viewed by a US-American agent, who promises her work on Broadway. The trouble is, she is also a Jew in Nazi Germany. Getting out isn’t so easy, not even if a friend of a friend has access to a US Senator. We see her repeatedly putting coins into a pay phone while trying to negotiate her way out with the embassy. She insists that everything has been organised, but the person on the other end of the line isn’t having it.
One day, the trumpeter in Stella’s band breaks down. His parents have been taken away by the Gestapo- While his band mates comfort him, Stella looks irritated that their rehearsal has been interrupted. She addresses him more in anger than in sympathy, telling him that they’re not made out of sugar ( a metaphor I have never heard used in German). This is a telling foreshadowing of the lack of emotion which Stella will feel compelled to show as the film goes own.
Suddenly, it’s 18 months later. The lighting is subdued and more blue. Stella now wears overalls and a yellow star. She’s working in a munitions factory which is regularly raided by the Gestapo. Her work colleagues and parents trade rumours about the Concentration Camps, but no-one os really clear what exactly is happening. All they know is that Jews aren’t even allowed to sit down on public transport, and are surely liable to much more unspoken danger.
Despite the protectiveness of her parents, Stella never stops taking risks. In the evening, she removes her yellow star and goes out dancing. She picks up men in SS uniforms. At this stage of the film, you might write all this off as the impetuousness of youth, but there’s a case to be made that Stella’s reaction to antisemitism is to deny her Jewishness. After all, she’s blonde and pretty – quite unlike the stereotype of what Jewish women are supposed to look like.
One day, Stella returns home to find her house being raided. She hides in the shadows then goes on the run. She takes up with Rolf, a passport forger with limited principles. Rolf organises false documents for her friends, but these all come with a price. At the time of the vital handover, Stella informs her friends that the price has just gone up. If they can’t come up with the necessary extra money, their photo is ripped out of the ID and replaced with that of someone who can afford it.
This section of the film was unnecessarily repetetive to me. We see endless scenes of Stella and Rolf having close scrapes with the SS, like a pre-emptive Bonnie and Clyde. It’s interesting enough for the first couple of times, but starts to drag. There’s only so many scenes of people running away while being shot at strange camera angles which can hold your attention. A film which wants to address great moral conundrums spends too much time showing people running and hiding.
Finally, inevitably, Stella is captured by the Gestapo. She is brutally assaulted, and made to write a letter arranging a meeting with Jewish friends while she is still dripping with blood. What follows is not a plot spoiler to Germans for whom the name Stella Goldschlag is familiar, but everyone else look away now. Stella feels compelled – by torture and by greed – to start betraying her friends in return for lucrative payments and the false promise that her parents will not be sent to Auschwitz.
There has been wide discussion of the film in Germany, some of which is more useful than others. More than one review mentions Hamas and October 7th, as little discussion of the Holocaust Is possible here without the attempt to pass German guilt and responsibility onto Muslims and Palestinians. The German discussion is also full of philosemitism – the belief that Germany can atone for the Holocaust by refusing to believe that any Jew is capable of doing a bad thing ever.
This is a difficult yardstick to help you understand Stella Goldschlag, a Jew who unquestionably did bad things. She later converted to Christianity and became a raving antisemite (something which isn’t covered in this film). Philosemitism is not an adequate response to Germany’s dreadful history, rather a mirror of it. Jews are still seen as being something different to ordinary Germans – but here they are elevated onto a pedestal where they are not allowed to do anything wrong.
I also have my own problem with the film, not because it portrays Stella as a complex, contradictory character, but it does not do enough to explain where these complexities come from. Most importantly, we are shown Stella as being persecuted by the Nazis, then as a collaborator, but the change seems to happen overnight. We are denied a convincing portrayal of her falling over the edge, or of any misgivings she may feel as she takes the money and runs.
On the film’s poster stands the question: “What would you have done?”, almost an excuse for Stella’s appalling behaviour. Maybe I’ve recently spent too much time trying to talk with Germans about Palestine, but it feels horribly similar to the argument that Israel cannot do any evil because of the evil which have historically meted out to Jews. Trying to analyse the film through this prism just makes me realise that I may have been living in Germany too long.
Another serious charge is that the glamourisation of Stella – played by Germany’s go-to romantic lead Paula Beer – minimizes her crimes. At times it feels that the film is less interested in understanding Stella’s reprehensible behaviour that in exonerating her from it. To some viewers at least, Stella provides an opportunity both to push the Nazis into the background and to put the blame onto Jews, or at least onto one Jew.
Much of this discussion is less concerned with what the film is trying to say, but how it might be interpreted. But at a time when real antisemites make the core of Germany’s second most popular electoral party, some debates do lack nuance. Ultimately, though, I’d say that the film addresses an important and complicated subject with enough inquisitiveness to warrant seeing. But it lacks the sophistication to provide us with too much extra enlightenment. Close, but no cigar.
CinePhil 