Fuehrer Ex

Rating:
Summary: Story promised real bite but real issues never explored
Review: This German film, directed by Winfried Bonengel, who also co-wrote the screenplay alongside Douglas Graham and Ingo Hasselbach, is based upon Hasselbach's personal experiences as a neo-Nazi in the Communist German "Democratic" Republic (GDR) in 1980s' East Berlin, of which some contemporary propaganda footage is seen at the start of the film, with a pop song mimicking the GDR anthem on the soundtrack.

Heiko Degner (Christian Bluemel) and Tommy Zierer (Aaron Hildebrand) are two young ordinary workers who want out of the GDR and harbor a dream of going to Australia, a land of "complete freedom". Unfortunately, their dream receives a major setback when they both get arrested whilst trying to flee illegally to the West across the heavily guarded border at night.

They end up in the notorious Torgau prison, where both men are cruelly introduced to the realities of life behind bars. Tommy meets Friedhelm Kaltenbach (Harry Baer), a neo-Nazi who convinces him that only "the strong" were capable of fighting back against the Reds. Tommy tries to convince Heiko, but the latter wants nothing to do with it. However, he changes his mind after an attempted rape by another prisoner and feels he needs protection. Soon afterwards, with help, Tommy escapes and he ends up in the West.

Some months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tommy is reunited with Heiko in East Berlin. Heiko is now a hard-core neo-Nazi, but Tommy still wants to distance himself from party views. Out of questionable loyalty to Heiko, Tommy reluctantly accompanies the neo-Nazis when they attack a group of Turks, yet he is shocked to see one of the now-dead victims of the attack, a girl named Margit (Jasmin Askan), who had known the two men some years before. Tommy is not only disgusted at the girl's brutal death, but also at Heiko's total lack of compassion. Tommy walks out, but Kaltenbach uses this as a pretext to order Heiko to kill him. What happens finally is brutal and shocking.

This film is not meant to be a polemic about neo-Nazism, but the story leaves some questions unanswered. Tommy's sudden apparent abandonment of his neo-Nazi views, after he co-operated with the secret police in order to secure Heiko's release from solitary confinement, is inexplicable. On the other hand, having been almost raped by a Communist-appointed "stooge", whom the neo-Nazis hated, it is understandable that Heiko would want to receive the "protection" of his fellow prisoners and so he became heavily influenced by them.

The use of Jule Flierl as the boys' mutual love (and sex) interest, Beate, is so peripheral as to be questionable. Flierl is a very promising actress and plays the role of Beate, a very independent woman, very well, yet the character, whom the boys meet at a disco, adds very little to the plot. Even her so-called prison visit is hard to explain. She shocks Heiko by telling him, in effect, of her love for him, yet it serves no purpose in the film other than as a brief respite from what is happening in the main story. She turns out later to be a dancer at a Turkish club, of all places, which Heiko has no problem in visiting along with Tommy, yet his attitude towards the Turks almost immediately turns to hatred simply because Beate tells him she is sick of his Nazi views and that he should get lost.

Though the title of the film is "Fuehrer Ex", at no time was the "Fuehrer" mentioned, nor was a picture of Hitler ever seen. In fact, a picture of his deputy Rudolf Hess (who died in Spandau prison in East Berlin two years before the Wall fell) was to be seen on the front of Heiko's T-shirt. Given that Nazism and neo-Nazism are still sensitive issues in Germany today, one must understand that the amount of content in the film pertaining to these ideologies has to be minimized, although swastikas are clearly seen on armbands worn by members of Kaltenbach's neo-Nazi party.

However, this should not distract from the main idea that any political ideology, no matter how loathsome it may be, will do for any person who feels aggrieved and wants an outlet for his disillusionment and hatred. Heiko and Tommy, played convincingly by young actors Bluemel and Hildebrand, had started out as two young men simply wanting to leave the GDR, yet harbored neo-Nazi views because of what had happened to them after they tried to - in spite of never having harbored such strong political views before.

Winfried Bonengel has directed a thought-provoking film which is only partially about an ideology, which never quite died with the end of the Nazi regime, and the young (and older) minds which were still receptive to it because of factors never fully explored in the movie, such as lack of opportunities for low-educated workers in post-reunification Germany, where neo-Nazism, unfortunately, has survived.