Europa Europa
Hitlerjunge Salomon
Agnieszka Holland (1990)
A voice introduces itself:
‘I was born on April 20, 1925, in Peine, Germany, Europe, fourth child of Azriel Perel, the owner of a shoe store, and his wife Rebecca.
I was born on April 20, 1925, in Peine, Germany, Europe.
You won’t believe it, but I remember my circumcision …’
These are the first words spoken in Europa Europa. The last line encapsulates the story of the narrator, Solomon Perel, in which unbelievability and the absence of a foreskin are major elements. Near the end of the film, Solomon (Solly) is reunited with Isaak, one of his elder brothers, in Soviet-occupied Berlin in 1945. Isaak has just been released from a concentration camp. Solly’s wartime experiences have been, for a German Jew, less predictable. ‘Don’t ever talk about what happened,’ Isaak advises Solly, after hearing his tall tale. ‘Nobody will believe you’. The two brothers then stand side by side, in the open air, for a fraternal pee. Relieving himself al fresco is for Solly the essential expression of freedom. He’s spent the war years concealing his penis and thereby his Jewish identity. And he’s succeeded in doing so.
Europa Europa, with a screenplay by Agnieszka Holland and Paul Hengge, is based on Solomon Perel’s memoir, Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon, which was published in 1989. The book’s title conveys more explicitly than the film’s the extraordinary life led by Perel between the ages of ten and twenty. In 1935, Azriel Perel’s shoe shop in Peine was pillaged by the Nazis and the family relocated to Lodz. After the German invasion in September 1939, Isaak and Solly tried to escape to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. The brothers became separated in the process; Solly was placed in an orphanage in Grodno run by the Komsomol. The staff and children fled the orphanage when German forces invaded Soviet territory and Solly Perel was among those captured by a German army unit. As a native German speaker, he was able to convince his captors that he was a Volkdeutscher. He proved useful to the German army as a Russian-German interpreter: his bilingual skills enabled him to play a key role in the capture of Stalin’s son, who was serving in the Soviet army. In spite of making repeated attempts to escape, Perel gained such kudos during his time with the German army unit that its commanding officer planned to adopt the ‘orphan’ and arranged for him to transfer to train at a Hitler Youth school, since he was still not old enough to fight in the armed forces. He was, though, thanks to his time with the German army unit in Poland, welcomed into the school as a military hero. Perel lived in continuing danger of being exposed as a Jew: circumcision rates among Gentiles were so low in continental Europe that any circumcised male would have been assumed, almost certainly correctly, to be Jewish. His difficulties were compounded when he fell in love with Leni Latsch, a German girl who was a fervent Nazi. Fearful that Latsch would reveal his secret to the authorities, Perel would not have sex with her and the relationship foundered. On the eve of his twentieth birthday, he was captured by an American army unit but released the next day. He returned to Peine and eventually located Isaak, who was married and living in Munich. Azriel Perel had died in the Lodz ghetto; his wife and daughter were murdered by the Nazis. Solly’s eldest brother David was alive and in Palestine, and Solly decided to join him. He travelled in 1948 to the newly-declared state of Israel. Once there, he became a soldier in the First Arab-Israeli War.
The narrator Solly’s ‘You won’t believe it’ at the start of the film is an immediate challenge to the audience. Of course we don’t believe that Solly remembers his own ‘bris’ (Jewish boys are normally circumcised eight days after birth) – but he knows that, and it doesn’t stop him claiming that he remembers. Agnieszka Holland exploits the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction material cleverly and with sustained flair. The narrative often has an almost jaunty tone, which both reflects the absurdist, fabular quality of Solly’s extraordinary coming-of-age and throws into relief its grim context. Blending the reality of war and the Holocaust with comedy sounds potentially confusing and distasteful but Holland’s approach – grounding the incredible in the undeniable – makes moral as well as dramatic sense. (The score by Zbigniew Preisner supports this treatment effectively: the string chords, for example, are a melodramatic knife edge between horror music and a send-up of horror music.) Another important part of Holland’s technique is to encourage suspension of disbelief by acknowledging questions that are bound to be in the viewer’s mind.
How can Solly[1] possibly have spent years in single-sex military organisations without his genitals being seen, in the dormitory or the showers or at a medical inspection? On arrival at the Hitlerjunge school, Solly tiptoes around the showers fully dressed – apparently to check there’s no one else there. Another boy emerges from a cubicle, in underpants. It’s still hard to credit that the house rules guarantee privacy and promote such modesty but Agnieszka Holland indicates here that at least she’s thought about the matter. On the day of a medical inspection, Solly is shocked by the news that he must undress, immediately feigns toothache and is taken to the dentist rather than the doctor. This episode is a good example of Holland’s ability to be as resourcefully evasive as her young hero. The sequence in which Solly finds out that the boys have to strip for the medical is, in some ways, crudely silly. Solly is much too alert to his imperilled situation to be taken by surprise by this news – his reaction to it is so obvious and instant that you can’t understand why his colleagues don’t accuse him of trying it on. Holland’s escape route is the sequence in the dentist’s chair: the wrenching, bloody extraction of the offending tooth is, for the viewer, both viscerally painful and comic relief (especially when the dentist, after getting the tooth out, says in a mildly puzzled voice, ‘Funny – it doesn’t look infected’). The combination takes your mind off the sequence that got Solly into the dental surgery. Instead, you get for an excruciating moment a sense of what he has to do to stay alive. In dealing with a larger variation on this theme, Holland uses similar tactics and achieves a similar but stronger effect. Solly uses bits of thread to try and work the flesh of his penis into something resembling a foreskin. He does this not in order that the others in the school won’t see the truth but in order to have sex with Leni Latsch. Trussing himself up like this seems almost certain to interfere with intercourse (it results in an infection that causes Solly to abandon the project anyway) but no matter. The self-mutilation has done its emotional job: it powerfully epitomises the agonising nature of Solly’s concealment of his identity.
None of these elements convinces the viewer, on reflection, that the film has credibly answered how Solly keeps his secret for so long but they’re instantaneously successful, as part of Agnieszka Holland’s disarming strategy. The director justifies her approach by in effect saying: the whole thing is impossible yet it happened – why bother quibbling over details? Holland evidently believes that the real-life basis of Europa Europa allows her too to depart from some of the facts of the matter, in order to sharpen her main themes. She makes several changes to Solomon Perel’s life story – if the biographical details in his Wikipedia entry are to be believed. (These are the basis for the summary in the synopsis above.) The Nazi raid on Azriel Perel’s store occurs in the film on the eve of Solly’s bar mitzvah rather than when he’s a ten-year-old. His sister Bertha is killed in the raid, not shot on a death march some years later. In the 1945 sequence, Solly is arrested not by American but by Soviet soldiers, who ridicule his claim to be Jewish, show him photographs of death camp victims and ask how come he didn’t end up like them. The soldiers put a gun in the hand of a recently released camp prisoner to shoot Solly. The trigger is about to be pulled when Isaak suddenly appears, in concentration camp uniform, to bring about his younger brother’s latest incredible reprieve. (According to Wikipedia, Solly spent a long time searching for Isaak before tracking him down in Munich.)
Just as ‘You won’t believe it, but I remember my circumcision’ introduces ideas central to Europa Europa, so the early scenes foreshadow what come to be larger motifs in the film. At the bris ceremony, the baby gurgles contentedly until the snip, when he starts to cry in earnest. The priest who officiates has to be reminded by Azriel Perel (Klaus Abramowsky) of his new son’s name before intoning ‘Let this child live, this child Solomon, Solomon, son of Azriel …’ Solly (Marco Hofschneider) is enjoying a leisurely pre-bar mitzvah bath when the raid on the family store begins. He leaps naked out of an upstairs window and takes refuge in one of the barrels standing in the yard below. He hides there until the Nazis have gone, attracts the attention of a teenage girl he knows, and asks her to get him some clothes from his home. The girl tells him that her father has forbidden any contact with Solly’s family. Instead, she brings him a coat of her father’s that’s hanging out on a line. When Solly re-enters the Perels’ apartment, his mother (Michèle Gleizer) is astonished to see her youngest son wearing an overcoat with a swastika armband.
In his opening voiceover, Solly also notes that he shares his birthday with ‘the future Chancellor of the three-thousand-year Reich’. The coincidence somehow marks out Solly as special, at the same time as poking fun at Adolf Hitler. Nazis are presented in the film collectively as a constant baleful threat but individually often as comically ridiculous. On his train journey to the youth school, Solly is chaperoned by a woman Nazi (Anna Seniuk). She makes a play for Solly, admiring his dark hair, ‘like the Führer’s’, and remarking the birthday connection. She forces Solly to make love to her: in the darkness of the train compartment, she can’t see Solly’s equipment and she can fantasise that she’s experiencing intercourse with Hitler. The comedy at the school itself is expressed both through images, including a huge swastika emblazoned on the bottom of the swimming pool, and through the routines of the place: in the refectory, a ludicrous equivalent of grace is delivered by an enthusiast who warns ‘no slurping, no crumbs’ and exhorts the Jugendliche to ‘respect our German bread’. Marco Hofschneider’s most amusing and charming moment comes when Solly stands before a mirror to practise his Nazi salute then breaks into a little soft-shoe shuffle. Other sequences are poised more alarmingly between funny and deadly serious. In particular, an aggressively self-confident racial scientist called Goethke gives a demonstration to the Hitler youth students of the cranial differences between Aryans and Jews. He chooses Solly as his guinea pig for the exercise. Goethke (Erich Schwarz) concludes that, while the lad isn’t pure Nordic, there’s no mistaking the essential Aryan characteristics of his head measurements and the dimensions of his facial features.
Leni Latsch (Julie Delpy) grows impatient with Solly’s sexual reserve and gets herself impregnated by his blonde-haired room-mate (Ashley Wanninger), with a view to making a gift of their child to the Führer. Solly learns this from Leni’s mother (Halina Labonarska), in a scene in which he admits, verbally, that he’s a Jew. Leni’s rabid anti-semitism is irrationally reinforced by the fact that her father has been killed in action but her widowed mother is not a Nazi supporter and honours her promise to keep Solly’s secret to herself. The secret has been revealed physically – at an earlier stage in the film, while Solly is with the German army unit – to just one other person. A fortyish soldier called Robert Kellerman (André Wilms) takes a shine to Solly – it’s clear the attraction is sexual. Robert was an actor during peacetime and Solly, who had childhood dreams of becoming a movie star, asks ‘Is it hard to play someone else?’ Robert replies, ‘It’s much easier than playing yourself’. This obviously ironic dialogue precedes a scene in which Solly is preparing to take a bath. His doing so immediately sounds an alarm to the viewer, after what happened during bathtime rhe night before his bar mitzvah, but Solly carefully boards up the barn where the bath has been placed, to guard against intruders. Robert, however, is already there and watching; once Solly eases himself into the water, Robert makes a move on him. Solly tries to get away and to prevent Robert seeing his genitals but there’s no place to hide. Robert is shocked but compassionate and protective, and tries to comfort the terrified, weeping boy:
‘Everything will be fine. I’ll be like a brother, like a friend. There now, calm down. Don’t cry anymore. Don’t be afraid. Germans aren’t all the same. There are other Germans, too.’
Robert means what he says and the emotional complexity of this sequence is impressive. The shared need to keep each other’s secret creates a bond between the pair. Robert is killed by a shell shortly afterwards.
Robert Kellerman is very well played by André Wilms and a twenty-year-old Julie Delpy gives Leni a hideous radiance – she makes this childishly capricious girl monstrous in her uninhibited prejudice. But Europa Europa depends heavily on Marco Hofschneider in the lead role. He too was just twenty at the time: he doesn’t pass for the thirteen-year-old that Solly is meant to be in the Peine scenes but Hofschneider isn’t tall and he’s credibly boyish in most of what follows. He’s not entirely satisfying, though. Hofschneider hadn’t acted before – he was suggested to Agnieszka Holland by his elder brother René, whom she knew from acting workshops that she’d run but who was clearly too old to play Solly (and who played Isaak instead). Marco Hofschneider has a shallowness that, much of the time, is effective. It gets across the desperately pragmatic, almost necessarily inconsiderate aspect of Solly Perel’s efforts to survive. When Hofschneider has to show greater depth, he’s less successful. He makes Solly’s helplessness poignant in the scene with André Wilms but his expressions of anxiety are somewhat forced – so that Solly still seems shallow – at the various points during his Hitler youth training career when exposure is threatened. This is a very difficult role. It’s essential to the material that Solly is an inchoate personality that we watch developing in the course of his amazing tale. The actor playing him needs to combine a tabula rasa quality with the engaging plausibility of a picaresque novel hero. All in all, Marco Hofschneider does well.
The film includes a couple of dream sequences. Perhaps Agnieszka Holland, as Terrence Rafferty suggested in his New Yorker review in 1991, is making the point that Solly’s dreams ‘are no more legible, and barely more preposterous, than his waking life’. But these sequences are not ‘grimly comic jumbles’, as Rafferty describes them. They feel less random and inexorable than designed to make points (Hitler and Stalin waltzing together, and so on). They’re too neat. Holland would have done better to avoid loose ends in the main narrative. The subplot about the plans of the childless army officer (Hanns Zischler) to adopt Solly, for example, fizzles out with no explanation. Holland ends Europa Europa with the living proof of the basic truth of her story. The real Solomon Perel appears on screen and sings, a cappella, a song in Hebrew. (The words are from the Book of Psalms.) The first thing that strikes you seeing Perel is that his cheating of death may in fact have been more incredible than the film has suggested. In his mid-sixties, at any rate, Perel looks much more recognisably Jewish than the young actor playing him ever does (the measuring of this man’s features in the Hitler youth school would surely have yielded very different results). Solomon Perel really is some survivor. This month, he celebrates his ninety-first birthday.
17 April 2016
[1] For simplicity, I’m calling him ‘Solly’ throughout this note, even though he pretends to the German army unit that his name is Josef Peters and his nickname, during his time with them and at the Hitler youth school, is Jupp. The real Solomon Perel gave the Germans a false name of Josef Perjell.