Obituary: Michael Verhoeven: Cinema as consultation hours

Years ago, an nd journalist traveled to Passau, Bavaria, to interview the historian Anna Rosmus. In a neighborhood shop he asked the saleswoman which flowers would suit Anna. The older lady’s prompt answer: “Grapfflänzln.” Anna Rosmus, a teacher’s daughter from a black CSU household, born in 1960, had researched the regional resistance under Hitler as a student, firmly believing that the citizens of Passau were very different from the evil rest of Germany . Mistake. Crucifixes so close above your head that you have to bend down, but the city: a stubborn, conservative Nazi denouement. The bravely incorruptible Anna Rosmus became the “Witch of Passau”.

Based on this experience, Michael Verhoeven made the film “The Terrible Girl” in 1989, which was nominated for an Oscar and won a Silver Bear at the Berlinale. A haunting story: Dirting the nest can be a true ideal of beauty, and violating taboos is always self-liberation.

Verhoeven – his father Paul Verhoeven, a Bavarian theater great, made the legendary Defa fairy tale film “The Cold Heart” – was a doctor before he became a director. It was Friedrich Wolf too, as was Anton Chekhov. For a doctor, the path to art means no longer being a therapist, but “just” a diagnostician: art offers help for self-help – true consolation lies not in health, but in the healthy feeling that nothing in existence is permanent. Acceptance of pain can alleviate suffering more than constant anesthesia.

Verhoeven liked to be described as a craftsman. Because what in art comes from the secret and may aim at a secret, must still have a real core of techniques that can be learned. In this sense, Verhoeven had a pleasant incapacity for pride. He never wanted to be harder than necessary. There was probably a reason for the effortless versatility of his work, which nimbly changed styles and combined serial, market-driven elements (“Lilli Lottofee”, the TV series “The Fast Gerdi”) with committed, enlightening films.

Mentioned is “The White Rose”, the story of the Scholl siblings (Lena Stolze as Sophie). Moving controversy between the dangerous pull of a collective collectivity and the bold courage of individuals whose young faces are scratched by a barbaric system with the signs of death. And “Mother’s Courage” was a homage to the cosmopolitan George Tabori and his mother, who was saved in a strange way from the German gas ovens. A work by Verhoeven even blew up the Berlinale in 1970: “ok,” a story against the Vietnam War. The young Eva Mattes in the role of a raped Vietnamese woman. A heated debate about alleged anti-Americanism led to the festival being canceled.

For years, Verhoeven owned the Toni cinema in Berlin-Weißensee; after 1990, he saved it from predatory rivals. And with his wife Senta Berger he founded the film production company Sentana. Probably also in order to be able to make works like the ones just mentioned, in the calming and worrying spirit of critically questioning independence. The goodness of Verhoeven’s films came from the desire for a good world, his works did not shy away from the didactic element – often touched by social misery and probably believing just a little bit that they could help change the great metabolism that processes us all.

Dr. Michael Verhoeven, who wrote his dissertation on brain tumors: Again and again we come back to the dual world of doctor and artist. The human innermost being as a field of research. Muscles and nerve tracts, blood and water, skin and hair form the shell and support for a consciousness that, of course, cannot be grasped surgically. We are made of building blocks, and the miracle of humanity takes place according to the banal laws of wear and weathering – but at the same time, in our imagination, we are endless. Michael Verhoeven’s films: helpful consultations for life. Now the compellingly approachable, broadly friendly artist has died in Munich at the age of 85.