The second half of last year meant for many, especially for those of us who lived in the half of Europe which fell under the control of the communist dictatorships imposed by the former Soviet Union, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain and of the Berlin Wall. The events were celebrated and remembered with documentary films and speeches by politicians, but on this occasion we could see how few people remember how the world was before 1989, with the divided Europe, the ideological polarization, the Cold War, and most of all the dull and hopeless life in the countries of the communist bloc. Some, the young people or those who lived in the West, did not know it. Others seem to want to forget. Reviewing movies like ‘The Legend of Rita‘ (German title is ‘Die Stille nach dem Schuß‘) can make a contribution against forgetting. The film made in 2000 by the German director Volker Schlöndorff returns 25 years after his great success ‘The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum‘ to the theme of terrorism in Germany in the 70s, presenting it from the perspective of those who at one time or another were small wheels in the mechanisms of history, and which must live the rest of their lives the consequences of their acts of youth and of their adherence to a murderous ideology.
Hanna Arendt was writing about the ‘banality of evil’. It can be said that Schlöndorff expands her idea in this film and that he performs a kind of ‘humanization of evil’. The two main characters in the ‘The Legend of Rita‘ are Rita Vogt, a young woman from western Germany, involved in robberies and armed attacks, some of them resulting in the death of innocents and Erwin Hull, a communist bureaucrat serving Stasi security services in eastern Germany. Both are executors in a totalitarian terrorist mechanism. She is an anarchist terrorist, he is an agent of state terrorism. On the one hand both serve anti-capitalist ideologies through violent means without manifesting too many moral scruples, on the other hand they both aspire to a normality of their lives in complete contradiction with the goals of the organizations and of he system they serve. Does Schlöndorff absolve them from guilt? I do not think so, because it is very clear in the film that everything that happens around contradicts the supposed humanistic ideals of the system. It can be said that the two characters are the only ones in the film who still believe in ideology, who do not understand or accept the changes that are happening around them. The refusal to assume any personal responsibility for the actions committed in the name of the ’cause’ is also the root of their personal failures.
Between a prologue that presents Rita’s terrorist activities in the mid-1970s and the epilogue that happens immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, most of the film describes the main heroine’s attempt to build a new life, under cover, in a anti-Western activist protection program sponsored by Stasi. Against the course of history, she travels the opposite way to the one made by hundreds of thousands of East Germans who during the Cold War took refuge in the west. ‘The Legend of Rita‘ belongs to the category of German films that reconstitute life in the so-called German Democratic Republic, being a more sober variant of the excellent ‘Good Bye Lenin!‘ The two actors who play the lead roles (Bibiana Beglau and Martin Wuttke) as well as the whole team around them seemed excellent. The directorial performance is remarkable both in terms of the ambience details, and especially of the characters psychologies. Rita’s attempts to restore her life manage to create, perhaps unmerited emotion and empathy towards the character. Neither personal happiness nor peace of mind are possible for those who compromise by collaborating with a crooked system. Schlöndorff does not avoid controversy, his intention seems more to open the discussion, but the main idea to me seemed clear.