Sunday Review: Barbara

A German Huckleberry Finn?

By Jonathan Price

Most of you, if you’re like me, will not have seen or have heard of Barbara (2012, directed by Christian Petzold), a film I saw recently at an art house (or what used to be called an art house, but is now a multiplex with an occasional “art house” film) in Berkeley near the University of California. It’s one of those small, simple, slight, unprepossessing but troubling films that don’t make it into the list of the same 15 films that are spread around every multiplex in your medium-size city and involve vampires or cars or teenagers or space travel or apocalypse or Presidents.
    Not that these big-screen big-budget films aren’t worthwhile, but to me it seems, having come of (film) age in the 60s, the availability of and interest in those small films has markedly diminished. Now I barely write that sentence and think of all those far more adept at technology and knowledgeable than I who will point out that there is a cornucopia of cineart available through legal and illegal download on the web and on indie cable channels and so forth. But I still bet in your intimate circle of friends you’ll be lucky to find one who’s even heard of the recent West German import Barbara. And now I’ll actually talk about the film itself, which is well worth seeing if you don’t want to be part of an audience jumping up and cheering or feeling good, or going to a chick flick with predictable lines and plotlines.
    This film, in German with English subtitles, is about the life of a woman doctor in East Germany during the 1980s while the country was still divided by Cold War establishments and tensions, and East Germany was a police state where a high percentage of citizens were spied on by the Stasi. The title is ambiguously nondirective, suggesting very little about the film’s topic or course. Of course Barbara is a character study, but it probes with some sympathy and surprising conclusions the inner life of those whose inner life was constantly watched by the state. If you want to enjoy the surprises the film has to offer, stop reading here.

We first see Barbara (Nina Hoss), from outside as she arrives for her first day of work at a rural hospital. It’s an open question whether we ever really see her from inside. She is an attractive, aging blonde, with her hair pulled back, who rarely smiles, but smokes nervously—perhaps to avoid what she is feeling, perhaps to delay whatever it is she must view next. She is being observed by two male onlookers, Dr. Andre Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld) and Klaus Schutz (Rainer Bock), who we later learn is with the state police, from a distant window as they discuss what they know of her. She is under suspicion immediately because she has been rusticated here after a prison sentence due to anti-state activities, presumably an attempt to escape. Nevertheless as the film develops we discover she is a competent, even compassionate and thoughtful, doctor who gets about town on a bike and rejects most offers and overtures from Andre, her colleague and superior. We realize eventually that he too has been rusticated after some kind of medical failure, but also appears to have made a pact with the Stasi; so his interest in Barbara isn’t disinterested or even romantic, yet this actor generates genuine interest and concern. He offers Barbara rides in his car and gives her a Turgenev novel and seems to want more.
    Stella (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a new patient, arrives, brought in resisting by a cadre of state police: she is a young girl sentenced to a work camp who has tried to escape but is also ill. Barbara diagnoses her meningitis almost instantaneously, supervises her treatment, and becomes a kind of substitute mother. The most powerful scenes are where she reads at night to the patient from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Such an eruption of classic great literature from a foreign society is not only a mark of the film’s culture and idiosyncrasy, but a clue to its intentions: Barbara and her charge are implicitly compared to Huck and Jim, refugees temporarily from a hostile society but doomed by geography (of the Mississippi River) and history to return. Like Jim, Stella must be returned to her plantation. Escape seems possible via water, but the outcomes are uncertain.
    As we follow Barbara we learn she makes clandestine connections with other dissidents and receives contraband currency. The police obviously suspect her and regularly visit her apartment at impromptu moments. We watch as Klaus sits dispassionately and a bit bored in a chair while his several underlings search the premises and a matron comes in donning rubber gloves to complete a search of Barbara’s body cavities: use your imagination, because the film doesn’t quite go there. There is a kind of bureaucratic brutality here, but it is extremely understated. It’s part of a ritual. We reevaluate its meaning as the characters and events in it recur. Later we see Andre attend to Klaus’ wife at home, where she is apparently suffering from a terminal illness, and Klaus himself seems stricken in a chair outside. When we add this to all the previous scenes, everyone in the film appears simply as an emotionally drained human being dealing with a common tragedy of existence.

    The film is often compared to another recent film, far more critical about the Stasi, The Lives of Others. The Stasi was, after all, the all-pervasive, seemingly all-inquiring, state police authority. Some time after the wall came down, ordinary East Germans were able to consult their own Stasi files, only to discover that the principal informant against or on them might be a wife or a husband or a best friend. But Barbara is a film that also tries to take into account that somehow real, non-heroic people, continued to live their lives; as Nina Hoss, who plays Barbara, has commented about her experience, “If you talk to the people who lived in the GDR…they say, ‘we loved, we had kids, the grass was green, I had a wonderful childhood.’”
    The atmosphere of a Hitchcock thriller or a Bergman psychological study is reinvoked by the vulnerability of the protagonist cycling along country roads, by her nervous cigarette smoking, by the several mysterious scenes in a windswept locale surmounted by a cross and rock where she buries certain contraband, in this case German currency from the West. Though we expect harm to come to her or there to be some dramatic confrontation, the climax comes on the night when Barbara had planned to escape to the West via water: as a wet-suited agent like a God or avenging angel rises from the sea to help her escape and raises one finger to indicate he can’t take her and Stella both. Barbara gives up her chance for a new life in the West and lets the girl go.
    Barbara has made the decision to remain in the East, and it forces us at the end to reconfigure the film. She has decided for the potential lover Andre, who though he may be in league with the Stasi, is fundamentally decent. She has decided for a life of work, where she can offer something, as opposed to an apparently pampered existence in the West where her clearly wealthy lover tells her she won’t have to work; he seems loving and attractive, but appears only episodically and doesn’t offer her much. Andre, however, whom she kisses once, is far more appealing and seems to know her at some depth, even if he may be in league with her apparent enemies. Oddly enough she has decided for humanity rather than ideology.
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Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Price

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