In Liebe, eure Hilde

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The Hilde in the title of this film is the Berlin doctor's assistant Hilde Coppi, who belonged to a loose network of anti-Nazi activists during the Second World War, which the Gestapo called the Red Chapel. Hilde, her husband Hans and his friends listened to Radio Moscow, pasted over Nazi posters and radioed military secrets to the Soviets (mostly in vain) and notified the relatives of captured Wehrmacht soldiers that their loved ones were still alive. In September 1942, almost all of them were arrested, convicted and executed within a year. Who, apart from a native of East Germany like the Berlin director and great humanist Andreas Dresen (Gundermann, Rabye Kurze vs. George W. Bush), still remembers them today, who might want to delve into that dark time of brown fanatics, their stooges and executioners? But after just a few minutes, you know that Dresen's film works differently. First of all, we see and hear no signs of war in 1942, only summer and sun in an allotment garden where a young woman picks strawberries with her mother. When Hilde's pursuers arrive, there are no Gestapo boots or shouting, but proper officials who recommend packing warm clothes. In other words, Dresen simply ignores the usual war and Nazi backdrop, showing only people doing their jobs on the side of the regime, and fear and capitulation on the side of those arrested. So no monsters here, no heroes there, just people in a terrible situation. And then this: from the moment of the arrest, the film constantly switches between scenes that tell the story forwards and backwards. On the one hand, there is Hilde in prison giving birth to a son and being lovingly cared for, giving and receiving comfort until her death under the guillotine. On the other hand, there is the story of how the well-behaved employee joined the inner-German resistance after she had married Hans – in this sequence of scenes – fallen in love with him and met him. At the end of this mirror dramaturgy, the cold Nazi killing machine directly encounters the happiness of first falling in love, but even this maximum contrast is not the crux of the matter. Rather, Dresen sounds out all the scenes, even the bleakest of the imprisonment, for traces of humanity and shows us how this leaps from the inconspicuous but steadfast young woman to fellow prisoners and even to her female guards. Needless to say, this is all the more painful, but Liv Lisa Fries, the young discovery from the series Berlin Babylon, seems to sense that Hilde Coppi may be the role of her life and, with irresistible modesty and authenticity, imbodies Dresen's basic confidence that humanity cannot be driven out of humans in the end. A historical film? Perhaps more of a utopian one, but definitely a magnificent one.