Stella Goldschlag: Film “Stella.A Life”: About German Obsessions

It’s not as if Stella Goldschlag’s biography isn’t known. After non-fiction books, documentaries and major media stories about the supposed “taboo of Holocaust research” (“Spiegel”), the life story of the young Jewish woman who tracked down countless hidden Jews for the Gestapo was published in 2016 under the title “The Blonde Ghost from Kurfürstendamm”. dragged onto the musical stage and sold off as a nonsense novel in 2019 by “Spiegel” editor Takis Würger.

At the time, journalist Micha Brumlik spoke of a “degrading exploitation and mockery of a Nazi victim.” Goldschlag, who narrowly escaped deportation as a forced laborer in 1943 and went into hiding in Berlin, was herself handed over to the Gestapo by a Jewish so-called grabber. She was tortured and blackmailed and attempted to escape before agreeing to work for the Nazis to save her parents and herself. She was unable to save her parents from death in Auschwitz.

But the culture industry is not yet finished with Stella Goldschlag, who was punished more harshly than most Nazi perpetrators with ten years in prison, converted to Christianity, made anti-Semitic comments and committed suicide in 1994. Because here two German obsessions come together: that of the beautiful Jew and that of Jewish complicity.

While the world is coming to terms with Israel, director Kilian Riedhof, known for contemporary historical dramas such as “Gladbeck” or “Barschel,” felt called upon to portray Goldschlag’s story in a feature film because: “For me, it is an important part of the German story Story. It happened in the land of my ancestors. The fate of the Jews in Germany is part of my history, for which I feel a responsibility.«

Presumably also because an heiress saw personal rights violated by Würger’s version and the musical, Riedhof and his producer Michael Lehmann, who claims to have experienced “how dictatorship affects people” in the GDR, wanted to do everything right. They overzealously explain in the press release how precisely they researched, how many trial files they pored over and how many contemporary witnesses they interviewed. They never tire of emphasizing that they were in “exchange” (of whatever kind) with the Jewish community, especially the historian Andreas Nachama, the Central Council and rabbis, as if that were some kind of carte blanche.

»Stella. A Life” does not add characters like Würger’s “Stella”, foregoes certain hackneyed Nazi representational themes and wants to show a more realistic and modern Berlin, but Riedhof also squeezes the real life story into the clichés of a German primetime aria. It begins with the rehearsals of Stella’s band, which serve the audience’s expectations of “Jatz”, and ends with “Berlin Babylon”-like wickedness and orgy ecstasy in a hail of bombs.

Even before Goldschlag becomes an informer, the film insinuates that the “blonde poison” is cold and unfaithful: “I’ve never been as lonely as I was with you,” says her first husband, the Jewish musician Manfred Kübler, who is hoping for a US career as a singer obsessed femme fatale. While the Nazis remain marginal figures who sometimes show compassion for those murdered in Auschwitz at Christmas, Goldschlag’s unscrupulous lover and later husband, the passport forger Rolf Isaaksohn (bold and devious: Jannis Niewöhner), represents the greedy Jew who takes advantage of the emergency takes money out of his peers’ pockets. When he too is exposed, he and his wife, who is always smartly dressed and enjoys her privileges, seem to enjoy going on a manhunt on behalf of the Gestapo. Both the script and the empty facial expressions of the constantly present Paula Beer reach their limits when it comes to making the psychological consequences of persecution and torture understandable.

It is important “to give the audience the chance to make their own moral soundboard resonate. So that people never again have to save their skin and lose their soul in the process,” explain the producers, whose moral soundboard seems to be rattling enormously.

“Who are we that we could presume,” Jan Süselbeck rightly asked five years ago in his strangler review in Die Zeit, to judge Goldschlag’s “moral involvement as a Holocaust victim?” The latest blow to the culture industry culminates in the lurid question to the German audience on the film poster: “What would you have done?”

»Stella. A life.«: Director: Kilian Riedhof. With: Paula Beer, Jannis Niewöhner, Katja Riemann. 121 minutes, start: 25.1.

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