6 - Professor Mamlock (1961)

Summary

UNLIKE THE FILMS that preceded it, Professor Mamlock narrates an antifascist conversion that comes too late to save its eponymous protagonist. Hans Mamlock (Wolfgang Heinz) is an assimilated Jewish surgeon who served in the German military in the First World War; he cannot take the Nazi threat seriously, wants all political discussions banned from his clinic, and tries to forbid his son Rolf (Hilmar Thate) from participating in Communist resistance work. Only when his daughter Ruth is driven out of her school by anti-Semitic harassment, and he himself is paraded through the streets by SA men, wearing a sign inscribed JUDE, and his fellow doctors weakly agree to sign a statement against him, does he realize what is happening and commits suicide. In a subplot, one of the nurses, Inge Ruoff (played by Lissy Tempelhof, who would provide the omniscient voiceover narrator for Der geteilte Himmel), who is at first a Nazi sympathizer, turns to help Mamlock's son escape and defies Dr. Hellpach, a Nazi. Several of Mamlock's Jewish colleagues at the clinic (Drs. Hirsch and Simon) serve as foils to his heroic but flawed character.

A Splintered Parable

Even within a difficult body of work, Professor Mamlock is one of Wolf’s most opaque films: the knot of overdetermined contradictions, between didactic function and indirect stylistic autonomy, is unusually dense here. Professor Mamlock is not only an adaptation of a play by the director’s father, a powerful figure if ever there was one, but also a remake of a popular 1938 Soviet film the younger Wolf had seen as a child, and furthermore, a highly topical and tendentious public intervention on the eve of the building of the Berlin Wall. Historically, one has to see it as an implicit justification for GDR politics at the beginning of the 1960s, like Karl Gass's stridently agitprop “documentary” Schaut auf diese Stadt (Look at This City) from 1962. It touches on the sensitive topic of anti-Semitism and the relations between Jews, Communism, and the bourgeoisie. Its aesthetic combines both aspects of filmic modernism and overtly appellative, propagandistic function; if one finds this alloy suspect, one might remember that a similar linkage may be found in Kalatozov's I am Cuba from 1964 (not to mention earlier instances of political modernism in Eisenstein, Vertov, or Dovzhenko).