Based on the novel "La mort est mon métier" by Robert Merle

Germany in 1916: Franz Lang, a 16-year-old middle-class boy, wants to go to war and is initially allowed to work in a field hospital. He comes closer to realizing his intention when he meets Captain Günther. In 1917 Lang is fighting on the western front. In 1919, he is working in a factory, refuses to adjust to the slower pace of an older colleague and is sacked without notice. He joins the "Freikorps Rossbach" and shoots a prisoner. In 1922, Lang becomes a member of the NSDAP and is responsible for a Fehmic murder in Mecklenburg one year later. He is indicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. After being granted an amnesty, he finds work on a farm in Pommerania with the help of the party in 1928, marries and meets the "Reichsführer" of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. At Himmler's order, Lang is given a job in the administration of the Dachau concentration camp in 1934 and becomes commandant of the Auschwitz camp in 1941 with the order to make it even more "effective" than the Treblinka camp. Together with his family, he resides in a villa outside the camp. Upon discovering the remains of an insecticide in a basement room, he decides to use the poison gas (Cyklon B) to destroy people. Following Himmler's visit, Lang is promoted to "Obersturmbannführer" of the SS in 1942. His wife Elise unaware of what was going on in the camp until then discovers the truth, and a long dispute breaks out in which her husband repeatedly cites orders from above to justify his actions. Even as an American prisoner in 1946, Lang still maintained that "I merely obeyed orders". In prison he writes his "Reminiscences of life", a cold description of the machinery of destruction that he developed in Auschwitz. Franz Lang was executed in 1947.

The novel by Robert Merle, on which Theodor Kotulla's film is based, describes the career of a real person, the worker and SA man Rudolf Höss who perfected the art of mass destruction as commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Kotulla uses the film's reconstructive capabilities in such concentrated form and insists on his protagonist so strongly that this narration of biographical incidents has also become a work of reference on interrelationships which were frequently neglected in films on the Holocaust. The infinitely average and banal aspect of Höss/Lang is particularly evident.

AUS EINEM DEUTSCHEN LEBEN was overlooked by the author when Steven Spielberg's film SCHINDLER'S LIST was produced and the German news magazine "Der Spiegel" accused German filmmakers of never having dared to approach the subject of the holocaust directly. Spielberg's film may be emotionally more thrilling and may have attracted a wider audience, but Kotulla is several steps ahead of his American colleague in analytical terms. Franz Lang's development from a keen, patriotic youth to one of the most vicious of Nazi criminals is perfectly consistent in its banality. Lang is the product of extreme submissiveness to officialdom, one who discharges his duties without emotion and with the perfection of a machine. The mass murders for which he is but does not feel responsible are not the result of sadistic desires or fanatic hatred; but the result of a mentality for which orders from above cancel out the ability to think in the same way that they eliminate his own sense of guilt. Höss/Lang is convinced that he is merely "doing his duty"; he carries on even when he does not find it pleasant, carries on in a frighteningly thorough manner - although neither the administrative post in the Dachau camp nor the post as commandant of Auschwitz struck him as attractive jobs.

The detailed presentation of Höss/Lang's past life and the social distress in which he had lived also explain what paved the way for National Socialism following the First World War: a perverted patriotic ideal that became a perfect breeding ground for an ideology promising a better future, particularly in times of economic crisis, and demanded the "elimination" of certain population groups (Jews, communists) which it mercilessly declared to be guilty. Höss/Lang has little understanding of Nazi ideology and economic relationships. The only thing that matters to him is to carry out every command as thoroughly as he possibly can.

Kotulla relates his story with discretion, unlike Spielberg who does not hesitate to exploit the gruesomeness of the Holocaust following his victims into the gas chamber with his camera. Kotulla's camera remains outside when men silently enter the so-called shower room. Instead, it shows a man in uniform wearing a gas mask who throws the deadly "Cyklon B" down through a fanlight and then cuts to a smoking chimney at the end of the scene. This reflects the attitude of Höss/Lang who did not perceive his murder victims as human beings: for him, they were "units" to be eliminated. At the end, he declares "my duty is to obey!

Hans Günther Pflaum

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1976/1977

Production Year

1977

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,66

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Literary Adaptation

Topic

Film History, National Socialism

Scope of Rights

Nichtexklusive nichtkommerzielle öffentliche Aufführung (nonexclusive, noncommercial public screening),Keine TV-Rechte (no TV rights)

Notes to the Licence

03/2006 - bei Ausleihe bitte Rücksprache mit Film Bereich

Licence Period

31.01.2023

Permanently Restricted Areas

Germany (DE), Austria (AT), Switzerland (CH)

• Aus einem deutschen Leben
• Theodor Kotulla