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      ‘From Where They Stood’ Review: Auschwitz, as Seen by Prisoners

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      Christophe Cognet’s documentary pores over photographs, some of them clandestine, taken by prisoners, inside the Nazi concentration camp.Christophe Cognet’s “From Where They Stood” scrutinizes an astonishing record of the Holocaust: photographs secretly taken by prisoners within Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps. Cognet’s analytical documentary adopts the stance of an investigating historian to explicate the pictures, which were made and smuggled out at mortal risk.Unlike many documentaries about the Holocaust, this film hinges on still images rather than archival footage or interviews with survivors. Cognet joins scholars to pore over these pictures and their silent testaments; in one clutch of images, women displaying wounds on their legs are revealed to be subjects of Nazi medical experiments. Other portraits catch people in eerily calm-looking repose.But the clandestine pictures known as the Sonderkommando photographs carry the gravest weight of all. These ghostly images depict nude women on the way to the gas chamber and, afterward, corpses left in the open air (both scenes overseen by the cremation prisoner workers known as the Sonderkommando). Shot from a significant distance, apparently through holes in the gas chambers, these figures are small and not greatly defined, but no less devastating.Cognet (who also made a documentary about artworks created in the camps) visits camp sites to re-create the precise positions and sightlines of the photographers and their subjects. His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.From Where They StoodNot rated. In French, Polish and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Overlooked No More: Klaus Nomi, Singer With an Otherworldly Persona

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      His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A wide range of musical genres fueled New York’s nightclubs in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including new wave, no wave, punk and post punk. Klaus Nomi, who performed during that era, defied being categorized under any of them.“I wouldn’t give it a label,” Nomi said of his sound in a Belgian television interview. “Maybe the only label is my own label: It’s Nomi style.”His music combined opera, infectious melodies, disco beats, German-accented countertenor vocals and undeniable grandeur. He influenced everyone from the singer-songwriter Anohni to Lady Gaga; in 2009, when Morrissey was asked to select eight essential records for the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs,” Nomi’s version of Schumann’s “Der Nussbaum” made the list.Nomi’s stage look was equally eclectic, and inseparable from his sound. The gender-fluid mix included dark, dramatically-applied lipstick as well as nail polish, the occasional women’s garment and often a giant structured tuxedo top that suggested Dada as much as sci-fi. His style influenced the fashion world as well, in collections by designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Riccardo Tisci.Nomi’s look was indisputably nonbinary, and a bit otherworldly. “He still comes across as an outrageously expressive and strange figure,” Tim Lawrence, author of the 2016 book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983,” said in a phone interview.“There was something about his entire being, which seemed to be queer, around makeup and voice and music and dress,” Lawrence said.Nomi — or Klaus Sperber, the name he was born with — moved to New York City from his native Germany in the early 1970s. He fell in with a group of creative friends and in late 1978 joined many of them to perform at New Wave Vaudeville, a series of quirky variety shows. The bill included a stripper, a singing dog and a performance artist dressed as a sadistic nun.Nomi, in the background at center, at the Mudd Club in Manhattan in 1979, the year he met David Bowie there.Alan KleinbergAs the closing act, Nomi sang an aria from Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila” while wearing a transparent raincoat over a shiny, fitted top and pants along with dramatic eye makeup and lipstick.“He really blew people’s minds,” Ann Magnuson, who directed the shows, said in an interview. “He had all these snarky punk rockers out there who were speechless.”With the performances came a new name, inspired by the name of a magazine focused on outer space, Omni.“Klaus said, ‘I can’t go out as Klaus Sperber,’” his friend Joey Arias, the singer and performance artist, recalled by phone. “‘That’s not a star’s name.’”Soon he was performing as Klaus Nomi at tastemaker Manhattan clubs like Max’s Kansas City and Hurrah, with a set list created with the help of Kristian Hoffman, a musician who served for a time as his musical director. The material included edgy originals and unconventional takes on well-known hits. Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” became an enraged dirge, for example; the chorus of “Lightnin’ Strikes” morphed into an aria. The thought was that pop songs would “catch the ear of an audience who isn’t ready for opera,” Hoffman said in an interview.As The New York Times put it in a review of one of his performances, Nomi’s music was “positively catchy, in a strange sort of way.”One night in late 1979, Nomi and Arias were at the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, when they met David Bowie there. Nomi called him later — Bowie had asked him to, scribbling his phone number with a friend’s eyeliner — and Nomi and Arias were recruited to be Bowie’s backup singers for an appearance that December as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”For the show’s three songs, they wore clinging women’s Thierry Mugler dresses, purchased at Henri Bendel. The look was extremely provocative at the time, especially on national television. Throughout, the TV cameras’ focus seemed to be as much on them as on Bowie.“It legitimized everything, because it had been sort of a private scene, and all of a sudden there it is, right in front of you on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Katy Kattelman, a designer who is known professionally as Katy K and who was a friend of Nomi’s.Soon after, Nomi signed a record deal with RCA France. His debut album, titled simply “Klaus Nomi,” was released in Europe in 1981; a second album, “A Simple Man,” came out the next year. The records sold well — “Klaus Nomi” earned gold-record status in France — and he performed abroad to packed venues.Nomi returned to New York toward the end of 1982, excited by the prospect of possible American tours and releases. But he arrived gaunt and exhausted — he had contracted AIDS. He died of complications of the illness on Aug. 6, 1983. He was 39.A scene from the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song” showing Nomi getting ready for a performance.Palm PicturesNomi at Hurrah, one of many nightclubs he performed at in New York City.Harvey WangKlaus Sperber was born on Jan. 24, 1944, in Immenstadt, a town in what was then West Germany. He was raised by his mother, Bettina, who worked odd jobs. A fling with a soldier, whom Klaus never met, resulted in his birth. When he was a child, he and his mother moved to the city of Essen, about 400 miles away. Opera music was often playing in their house, and it set Klaus on his path.“The first time I heard an opera singer on the radio I said, ‘My God, I want to sing just like that,’” he said in interview footage that is included in the 2004 documentary “The Nomi Song.” As a teenager, he became equally fond of Elvis Presley.He moved to West Berlin and worked as an usher at Deutsche Oper, where he sometimes sang for colleagues after the audience had left. But he aspired to sing professionally, and, Arias said, “he felt like he was at a dead end.”“He wanted to come to New York because he felt like it would change his life,” Arias added.Nomi settled in Manhattan’s East Village. He worked for a while in the kitchen of the Upper East Side cafe and celebrity hangout Serendipity 3 and started a baking business with Kattelman called Tarts, Inc., supplying restaurants with desserts made in Nomi’s St. Marks Place apartment.Nomi was known to frequent after-hours clubs, like the Anvil and Mineshaft, where casual sex was commonplace. There were sexual encounters at home as well — Arias said he once arrived at Nomi’s apartment to find a naked Jean-Michel Basquiat toweling off.To get a green card, he married a woman, Melissa Moon, a U.S. citizen, in 1980.“I don’t think he was in any way being anything that wasn’t himself, which was pretty gay as far as I knew,” said the artist Kenny Scharf. “When you’re creating your persona, the sexuality part is obviously part of the persona. It was all part of his sense of style and him being an artist in every way.” More

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      Klaus Schulze, Pioneering Electronic Composer, Is Dead at 74

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      In a prolific career spanning five decades, he helped pave the way for ambient, techno and trance music.Klaus Schulze, a German electronic musician whose hypnotic, pulsating, swirling compositions filled five decades of solo albums, collaborations and film scores, died on Tuesday. He was 74.His Facebook page announced the death. The announcement said he died “after a long illness” but did not provide any details.Mr. Schulze played drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. But he largely abandoned them in the early 1970s and turned to working with electric organs, tape recorders and echo effects, and later with early analog synthesizers. His music thrived on every technological advance.He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, “The Ultimate Edition.” But he was far from finished.While he announced his retirement from performing in 2010, he continued to compose and record. A new album, “Deus Arrakis,” is due in June.Mr. Schulze’s music encompassed the psychedelic jams of early krautrock, orchestral works, song-length tracks with vocals, an electronic opera and brief soundtrack cues. Much of his music was extended and richly consonant, using drones, loops and echoes in ways that forecast — and then joined and expanded on — both immersive ambient music and beat-driven techno and trance music.He was habitually reluctant to describe or analyze the ideas or techniques of his music. “I am a musician, not a speaker,” he said in a 1998 interview. “What music only can do on its own is just one thing: to show emotions. Just emotions. Sadness, joy, silence, excitement, tension.”Klaus Schulze was born on Aug. 4, 1947, in Berlin. His mother was a ballet dancer, his father a writer.He played guitar and bass in bands as a teenager, and he studied literature, philosophy and modern classical composition at the University of Berlin. Drawn to the avant-garde scene around the Berlin nightclub Zodiac, he played drums in a psychedelic rock trio, Psy Free.He became Tangerine Dream’s drummer in 1969 and performed on the group’s debut album, “Electronic Meditation,” a collection of free-form improvisations released in 1970. He was also experimenting with recordings of his latest instrument, an electric organ. But Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream’s guitarist and leader, didn’t want to use Mr. Schulze’s organ tapes onstage and told him, “You either play drums or you leave,” Mr. Schulze said in a 2015 interview.Mr. Schulze left. He formed a new space-rock trio, Ash Ra Tempel, and played drums on the band’s 1971 debut album before starting his solo career. Instead of drumming, he recalled, “I wanted to play with harmonies and sounds.”He didn’t yet own a synthesizer in 1972 when he made his first solo album, “Irrlicht” (“Will-o’-the-Wisp”). Its three drone-centered, slowly evolving tracks were made with his electric organ and guitar and with manipulated cassette recordings of a student orchestra.Mr. Schulze began playing solo concerts in 1973 and amassed a growing collection of synthesizers. “By nature I am an ‘explorer’ type of musician,” he told Sound and Vision magazine in 2018. “When electronic musical instruments became available, the search was over. I had found the tool I had been looking for: endless opportunities, unlimited sound possibilities, and rhythm and melody at my complete disposal.”Mr. Schulze’s 1975 album “Timewind,” dedicated to Richard Wagner, is widely regarded as his early pinnacle.Made in Germany MusicUsing drum machines and sequencers, Mr. Schulze introduced propulsive electronic rhythms to his music. His vertiginous album “Timewind” (1975) is widely regarded as his early pinnacle. In France, it won the Grand Prix du Disque International award, boosting his record sales with compulsory orders from libraries across the country. He moved to Hambühren, Germany, and built the studio where he would record most of his music over the next decades.“Timewind” was dedicated to Richard Wagner; its two tracks were titled “Bayreuth Return,” named after the town where Wagner’s operas are presented in an annual festival, and “Wahnfried 1883,” named after Wagner’s villa there. Mr. Schulze would later record a series of albums under the names Richard Wahnfried and then Wahnfriet. “The way Wagner’s music introduced me to the use of dynamics, subtlety, drama, and the possible magnitudes of music in general remains unparalleled to me,” he said in 2018.Another acknowledged influence was Pink Floyd. From 1994 to 2008, Mr. Schulze and the German producer and composer Pete Namlook collaborated on “The Dark Side of the Moog,” a series of 11 albums drawing on Pink Floyd motifs.In the mid-1970s, Mr. Schulze visited Japan to produce and mix the Far East Family Band, whose members included the electronic musician who would later go solo and achieve fame as Kitaro. He also recorded and performed with Stomu Yamashta’s Go, a group that included the English multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Steve Winwood, the American guitarist Al Di Meola and the American drummer Michael Shrieve. And he continued to pump out solo projects, including the soundtrack for a pornographic film, “Body Love” (1977).He collaborated through the years with Ash Ra Tempel’s guitarist, Manuel Göttsching. In 2000 Mr. Schulze and Mr. Göttsching revived the name Ash Ra Tempel for a duo album, “Friendship,” and a concert recorded as “Gin Rosé at the Royal Festival Hall.”Mr. Schulze toured Europe extensively from the 1970s until 2010, though he did not tour the United States. In 1991, he performed for 10,000 people outside Cologne Cathedral.In 1979, the German division of Warner Bros. Records gave him his own imprint, Innovative Communication, which had one major hit with Ideal, a Berlin band. He started his own label for electronic music, Inteam, in 1984. But he abandoned it three years later after realizing that it was losing money on every act’s recordings except his.Mr. Schulze in concert in Berlin in 2009. He gave up performing the next year but continued to compose and record. Jakubaszek/Getty ImagesMr. Schulze announced his switch from analog to digital synthesizers with the 1979 album “Dig It.” As sampling technology improved in the 1980s and ’90s, he incorporated samples of voices, instruments and nature sounds into his music. In the 2000s, as faster computers fostered more complex sound processing, he turned to software synthesizers.In 1994, he released “Totentag” (“Day of the Dead”), an electronic opera; in 2008, he began recording and touring with Lisa Gerrard, the singer and lyricist of the band Dead Can Dance. By the 2010s, he was mixing his new compositions in surround sound.Mr. Schulze is survived by his wife, Elfi Schulze; his sons, Maximilian and Richard; and four grandchildren.Through his copious projects, Mr. Schulze’s music maintained a sense of timing: when to meditate, when to build, when to ease back, when to leap ahead, how to balance suspense and repose, dissonance and consonance.“I prefer beauty, I always did,” he told an interviewer in 1997. “Of course, I also use brutal or unpleasant sounds sometimes, but only to show the variety. Beauty is more beautiful to a listener if I also show him the ugliness that does exist. I use it as part of the drama of a composition. But I’m not interested in music that shows only ugliness.“Also,” he added, “I believe that ugliness in music is more easy to achieve than — excuse the expression — ‘real music.’” More

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      When Classical Music Was an Alibi

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      The idea that musicians and their work are apolitical flourished after World War II, in part thanks to the process of denazification.On April 16, 1955, the soprano Camilla Williams became the first Black singer to appear at the Vienna State Opera, bowing as Cio-Cio-san in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Critics hailed it as a landmark and said it illustrated how much Vienna had changed since the end of World War II, a decade earlier.What went undiscussed by the newspapers at Williams’s debut, however, were the colleagues she performed with: among others, Wilhelm Loibner, Erich von Wymetal and Richard Sallaba, all of whom were active musicians in Austria under National Socialism.Sallaba, a tenor, sang in several special performances of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” for the Nazi leisure organization “Kraft durch Freude” (“Strength Through Joy”) between 1941 and 1943. On July 15, 1942, Loibner conducted a performance of Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride” for the Wehrmacht, and barely a month after Hitler committed suicide, he was back on the podium at the Vienna State Opera leading Puccini’s “La Bohème.” Von Wymetal, who coached Williams for her debut, assumed his position as the State Opera’s stage director after Lothar Wallerstein, a Jew, fled in 1938.Was Williams’s milestone tainted because she worked with those whose artistic careers directly benefited from the Nazi regime? Faced with such a question, we might be tempted to say that politics has nothing to do with classical music. It is an argument that has been heard again and again when artists come under scrutiny for their involvement in current events — most recently, musicians whose ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia have been questioned.When the soprano Camilla Williams became the first Black singer to appear at the Vienna State Opera, it was alongside musicians who had been active when Austria was occupied by Nazi Germany.Archive/AlamyPerforming classical music, or listening to it, has never been an apolitical act. But the idea that it might be flourished in the wake of World War II, thanks in part to the process of denazification, the Allied initiative to purge German-speaking Europe of Nazi political, social and cultural influence.The American and British military demanded that German and Austrian musicians who wanted to resume work fill out “Fragebogen,” comprehensive questionnaires that sought to determine the extent of their political complicity. This resulted in lists of “white,” “black,” “gray acceptable” and “gray unacceptable” artists — categories that were immediately the subject of disagreement. The process also varied widely by region. American officials were initially committed to systematic denazification and decried the “superficial, disorganized and haphazard” efforts in the zones occupied by France, Britain and Soviet Russia.But even in the American zone, strict blacklists were short-lived. By 1947, responsibility for assessing guilt was transferred to German-run trial courts, which were invested in resuming the rhythms of institutionalized music-making, for cultural and economic reasons. The moral aims of denazification quickly conflicted with the realities of music as an industry and a set of labor practices. Austria’s often-claimed position after the war as “Hitler’s first victim” likewise meant that musical affairs there resumed quickly — with even less public conversation about accountability.Musicians slipped through the denazification process with relative ease. Many rank-and-file artists had been required to join Nazi organizations in order to remained employed, and the correlation of such membership to ideological commitment was often ambiguous. Individuals tended to lie on their forms to obtain a more advantageous status. And artists such as the eminent conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler referred to music’s apolitical status as a kind of alibi, even when they had performed on occasions, and as part of institutions, with deep ties to the regime.Allied forces were keen to “clean up” the reputations of musicians whose talents they valued, and even aided some in gliding through the denazification process. On July 4, 1945, the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was asked to fill out a Fragebogen because she was on the Salzburg register of National Socialists in Austria. Had the form been deemed acceptable, the American military would have approved her return to the stage.But when the American intelligence officer overseeing her case, Otto von Pasetti, realized that she had lied on the form, he destroyed it. The following day, she was asked to fill out another one. Although it was not any more accurate, Pasetti accepted it because Schwarzkopf’s status as a celebrity diva had convinced him that “no other suitable singer” was available for major operatic performances. Shortly thereafter, she climbed into a jeep driven by an American officer, Lieutenant Albert van Arden, and was driven 250 kilometers to Graz, Austria, to sing Konstanze in Mozart’s “Die Entführung aus dem Serail.”After 1945, then, career continuity was more the norm than the exception. Denazification status defined immediate employability but was only one factor in musicians’ prospects. Artists looking to resume their careers readily identified themselves as POWs, refugees, bombing victims, disabled soldiers and widows, many facing housing and food insecurity. Reference letters used postwar hardship as a justification for priority consideration or tried to explain how a person had been pulled into, as one put it, the “vortex” of Nazi politics. One baritone assured administrators that although he had been detained in a prison camp for several years, he still “had the opportunity to practice.”These claims of hardship easily slid into narratives of victimhood. Bombed concert halls and opera houses in formerly Nazi territories were potent symbols of destruction and the necessity of rebuilding, but also enabled the focus to shift from Nazi atrocities to German suffering. At the opening of the rebuilt Vienna State Opera on Nov. 5, 1955, just months after Williams’s debut in “Butterfly,” the conductor Karl Böhm — who had led concerts celebrating Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938 — was on the podium for the celebration. No Jewish survivors were invited to participate.Performances amid the rubble reignited a sense of community and attempted to rehabilitate classical music as inherently humanistic, universal and uplifting after its supposed “corruption” by propagandistic use during the Nazi era. In “The German Catastrophe” (1946), the historian Friedrich Meinecke evoked the power of German music as a restorative force: “What is more individual and German than the great German music from Bach to Brahms?” For Meinecke, the country’s music was redemptive, expressing the national spirit while still possessing a “universal Occidental effect.”Some composers, encouraged by the Allies, promoted the idea that modernist musical techniques were particularly antifascist because they had been banned by the Nazis — an exaggeration both of Nazi officials’ stylistic understanding and of the level of control they exerted over the arts. Winfried Zillig, a German who composed in the 12-tone style, had many career successes from 1933 to 1945, including major opera premieres and a position in occupied Poland, granted as a reward for his operas’ political values.The composer Winfried Zillig’s career flourished under the Nazis, but he later claimed that the regime had repressed his music.Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesBut Zillig later claimed that the Nazis had repressed his music. Around the time of his denazification trial, he expressed outrage at being “one of the few surviving ‘degenerates’” — that is, composers who, as modernists, were targeted by the regime — who was facing the indignity of being labeled a propagandist. Zillig’s self-flattering version of events was enshrined in Adorno’s writing about him and was not debunked until 2002, long after his death. His career as a conductor and radio director flourished in West Germany, and he played an important role in the dissemination of modern music.Despite the black-and-white thinking that too often accompanies these topics, and how easy it is to retrospectively condemn, Zillig’s career is a reminder that all working Austrian and German musicians were implicated in the Third Reich. The fact that classical music was the industry they worked in does not mean they transcended politics.The more uncomfortable truth may be that the ambiguity of classical musicians’ status under Nazism makes them prime examples of “implicated subjects,” to use the theorist Michael Rothberg’s phrase. Rothberg writes that “implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit or benefit from regimes of domination, but do not originate or control such regimes.”Many German and Austrian musicians occupied this liminal place, neither victim nor perpetrator but a participant in the history that produced both those positions. The well-meaning but blunt categories of denazification after 1945 actually blurred our understanding of the complex systems that led to war and genocide and how musicians operated within them.In 1948, seven years before Camilla Williams sang “Butterfly” in Vienna, the Black American soprano Ellabelle Davis gave a recital there, marking the first time a Black concert singer had performed in the Austrian capital since the outbreak of the war. Calling Davis’s performance “the first fully validated representative of the vocal arts from overseas since the war,” one critic heralded her debut as a turning point in Vienna’s musical journey, an opening of borders and an acceptance of voices that only a few years earlier would have been unthinkable.Commentators also pointed out that Davis was the first Black singer to perform in a Viennese classical venue since Marian Anderson in November 1937, a few short months before the Nazi annexation. At last, these critics said, the city was being restored to its previous era of musical openness. Such comments created a timeline that bridged the Nazi era, cordoning it off as an aberration.Yet other competing continuities also defined Vienna. Only a few months before Davis’s recital, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was Jewish, shared a scathing critique of the city’s postwar racial politics. Schoenberg, who had fled Europe in the 1930s, wrote in 1948, “I have the impression that in Vienna racial issues are still more important than artistic merit for judging artwork.”Later, in 1951, he affirmed that judgment: “I would like it best if performances of my music in Vienna were banned completely and forever. I have never been treated as badly as I was there.” Appeals to continuity after World War II could condemn or vindicate. Both classical music’s history of racism and its universalist aspirations persisted.In moments of war and violence, it can be tempting to either downplay classical music’s involvement in global events or emphasize music’s power only when it is used as a force for what a given observer perceives as good. Insisting on a utopian, apolitical status for this art form renders us unable to see how even high culture is implicated in the messy realities of political and social life. We must work to understand the complex politics of music, even when that means embracing discomfort and ambiguity.Emily Richmond Pollock teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of “Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany.” More

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      'Great Freedom': Film Traces Long Shadow of Anti-Gay Law in Germany

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      A new film traces the many decades it took to abolish Paragraph 175, a measure criminalizing sex between men that was strengthened by the Nazis.BERLIN — A turning point arrives for Viktor and Hans, the central characters in the new film “Great Freedom,” when Viktor sees the concentration camp tattoo on Hans’s arm.It’s 1945, and Viktor has already forcibly thrown Hans out of the cell they share in a German prison after learning that Hans was jailed for having sex with men. But when Viktor, an ice block of a man with a murder conviction, discovers the tattooed number, he offers to give Hans a new design to cover up the past.“They put you from a concentration camp into the slammer? Seriously?” Victor (Georg Friedrich) stammers in disbelief, more to himself than to Hans (Franz Rogowski).The fictional character of Hans, liberated from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II only to be sent directly to prison, is based on a chilling and often overlooked chapter in German postwar history.Hans is repeatedly arrested under Paragraph 175, a law criminalizing sex between men that the Nazis expanded just a couple of years into their regime, and which was kept on the books for decades after.The law was used, sometimes with elaborate sting operations, to convict up to 50,000 gay men in West Germany between 1945 and 1994 — roughly as many as were arrested during the decade in which the Nazis used it.“For gay men, the Nazi era did not end in 1945,” said Peter Rehberg, the archivist of Schwules Museum, a gay cultural institution in Berlin.When Sebastian Meise, the director of “Great Freedom,” read about the men who went from the concentration camps to prison because of their sexuality, it “really changed my understanding of history,” he said in a telephone interview from Vienna. The discovery set him off on an eight-year project that resulted in “Great Freedom,” which was Austria’s submission to the international feature category at this year’s Oscars.Modern Germany has been praised for its efforts to keep the dreadful memory of the Holocaust present for the generations born after what Hannah Arendt called the “break in civilization.” The Nazi era is a mandatory part of school history curriculums, for example, and many schoolchildren and police cadets are obliged to visit former concentration camps. But for many decades, postwar Germany’s treatment of gay men was also neither liberal nor progressive.In 1935, the Nazis strengthened Germany’s law criminalizing homosexuality, which was originally introduced in the 1870s. This allowed the regime to criminalize not just gay sex, but almost any behavior that could be seen to run afoul of heterosexual norms, including looking at another man. While East Germany had a slightly less restrictive version on its books, West Germany kept the strict Nazi legislation until 1969, when it was first reformed.Peter Bermbach at his home in Paris. He left West Germany in 1960 after being imprisoned under Paragraph 175. Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesFor West Germans like Peter Bermbach, Paragraph 175 cast a long shadow over the postwar decades.In his senior year of high school in West Germany in the late 1940s, he was overheard turning down a date with another boy. School officials did not just suspend him, they also reported him to the police.“It was the typical German sense of order and justice of the time,” said Bermbach, now 90, in a telephone interview.The second time, he didn’t get off as easily. At 29, with a Ph.D. and a job in a publishing house, he was caught putting his arm around a 17-year-old at a public pool. Bermbach spent four weeks in jail and was fined 5,000 marks — a hefty sum at the time.After he paid off the fine, he became one of the thousands of gay and bisexual men who fled Paragraph 175. He moved to Paris in 1960 in search of more freedoms.Meise and his writing partner Thomas Reider collected many stories from Bermbach’s generation of gay men during the six years they spent researching and writing the script for “Great Freedom,” visiting the archives at the Schwules Museum and the Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation, which collects interviews with men affected by the law.Still, Paragraph 175 did not stop gay culture from evolving in Western Germany; the German title of the film, “Grosse Freiheit,” is a nod to a venerable gay bar in Berlin where the penultimate scene takes place. But it did push many aspects of gay life underground, according to Klaus Schumann, 84. He remembered Berlin police pulling up in large vans in front of bars known to be gay hot spots in the late ’40s and ’50s. No one was criminally charged, he said, but everyone, including staff, were taken to the local police station to to be identified.“It was basically a way to keep control over people,” Schuman said.Hans (Franz Rogowski) first arrives at the prison in 1945 after being held in a Nazi concentration camp.MUBI“Great Freedom” traces Hans’s many stints behind bars, where he was labeled a “175,” jumping between 1945 and 1969. To help mark that time shift, Rogowski lost more than 25 pounds during filming, to make himself appear younger (the later scenes were filmed first). Shooting in an abandoned prison close to Magdeburg in the former East Germany, Meise captures the slow course of incarcerated time, as well as social change.“I would be very pleased if it was taken as a universal story,” Meise said of his film. “It’s so hard to disentangle the history and the current politics because it’s so virulent.” Meise noted that the issue is far from being a purely historical one, as there seem to be new pushes to reinforce heterosexual norms in places like some U.S. schools.For the men whose lives were affected by Paragraph 175, much has changed. After he settled in Paris, Bermbach built a career as a journalist and filmmaker. Last year he wrote an autobiography, and later this month the high school that kicked him out more than seven decades ago has invited him to visit and read from the book.“Honestly, I don’t really care,” Barmbach said of going back to the place that once expelled him. “As for being denounced for being homosexual, I’ve long forgotten about that.”After Paragraph 175 was reformed in 1969 and again in 1973, the last vestige of it was taken off the books in 1994. In 2017, a year after Meise started writing “Great Freedom,” the German parliament said anyone charged under the law would have their record expunged. It also agreed to offer a meager settlement to those who applied.Of the 50,000 men who might have eligible, only 317 had applied by last summer. More

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      ‘Mr. Bachmann and His Class’ Review: Learning From the Best

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      Maria Speth’s enthralling documentary spends a year in the classroom of an unconventional teacher in a German industrial town.The students in Dieter Bachmann’s class are sometimes bored. They’re in the sixth grade, so this is to be expected, though there’s a decent chance that these particular adolescents, observed by the filmmaker Maria Speth over the course of the 2016-17 academic year, are less bored than most of their peers, thanks to their energetic and unconventional teacher.What is certain is that, even at more than three and a half hours, the fly-on-the-wall documentary Speth has culled from her time in the classroom is the opposite of tedious.By virtue of its length, the elegance of its editing and the warmth of its curiosity, “Mr. Bachmann” and his class might remind you of a Frederick Wiseman film. The comparison only goes so far. Wiseman tends to be interested in how collective and impersonal structures — neighborhoods, organizations, institutions — illuminate individual personalities and relationships. Speth’s attention moves in the opposite direction.Her film starts with the teacher, whose patience and charisma draws out the children and magnetizes the viewer. Gradually, a group portrait emerges that is also a remarkably detailed and complex picture of a town and a nation. And more than that: an intimate, humanist epic.The town is Stadtallendorf, Germany, about an hour north of Frankfurt. A rural village for most of its history, it was industrialized by the Nazis, who built armaments plants and forced-labor camps. After World War II, “guest workers,” mostly from Turkey, were recruited for metalworks and other factories. (You’ll learn these facts and more on field trips and during class discussions.)Bachmann’s pupils are mostly the children of immigrants — from Bulgaria, Morocco and Azerbaijan, among other countries. Their proficiency in German varies, as do their academic prospects. Part of Bachmann’s job is to decide which secondary-school track is right for each student, a task he undertakes with clarity, compassion and some reluctance.A former sculptor and sociology student now in his 60s, usually dressed in a knit cap and a hooded sweatshirt, Bachmann is aware of the tension between his countercultural impulses and his bureaucratic duties. He administers tests and hands out grades, but also keeps musical instruments and art supplies on hand for jam sessions and creative projects. Even though his anarchist streak is partly what makes him a benevolent authority figure, you wouldn’t say he’s soft or lenient with his students. Instead, he’s honest with them, treating them not as friends or peers but as people whose entitlement to dignity and respect is absolute.They test and tease him and can be inconsiderate or cruel with one another. They’re kids, after all. A handful come into special focus, nearly upstaging their teacher and contributing to the emotional richness of the film. We don’t learn much about their lives outside of school (or about Bachmann’s), but each one is a universe of feeling and possibility, vivid and vulnerable.And lucky to have crossed paths with Bachmann. The film ends with his retirement after 17 years of teaching, a bittersweet moment that Speth observes with tact and understatement. This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.Mr. Bachmann and His ClassNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 37 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      in Movies

      Hardy Kruger, German-Born Hollywood Star, Is Dead at 93

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      Escaping execution by the Nazis for “cowardice” as a soldier, he found success in films because he found ways to portray “the new, good German.”Hardy Kruger, the first German actor to become a Hollywood star after World War II, died on Wednesday in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 93.His agent, Peter Kaefferlein, confirmed the death.For much of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Kruger — tall, blond and ruddy-cheeked — was the most visible German-born actor on American screens. He appeared in dozens of movies, among them “Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), with James Stewart; “Barry Lyndon” (1975), with Ryan O’Neal; “The Wild Geese” (1978), with Richard Burton and Roger Moore; and “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), with an all-star cast that included Sean Connery, Robert Redford and Laurence Olivier. But his screen presence had significance beyond the box office.Mr. Kruger, who was nearly shot for cowardice as a teenage soldier in Nazi Germany’s army, had left his war-ravaged homeland to pursue an acting career in Britain, where he initially met hostility in a country whose own war wounds were still raw. But he went on to play an important role in soothing the anti-German feelings that had spread during the war.“Hardy Kruger was more than an actor,” said the citation accompanying his Legion of Honor, which the French government awarded him in 2001. “He was an ambassador for Germany.” The German film critic Herbert Spaich said Mr. Kruger had succeeded in American films because he found ways to portray “the new, good German.”Mr. Kruger in 2008 at the Bambi Awards ceremony in Offenburg, Germany, at which he received a lifetime achievement award.Patrik Stollarz/Getty Images“Against the background of the disastrous Third Reich, he helped Germany create a new image for itself in the world,” Mr. Spaich said. “It was because he also had something international about him. He wasn’t restricted to only playing a German. He also had some of the sporty young-guy style that was so in demand in the U.S.”After leaving Hollywood (his last American role was as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the 1988-89 mini-series “War and Remembrance”), Mr. Kruger became an adventurer and conservationist, wrote novels, bought a farm in Africa, hosted a popular television series and campaigned against neo-Nazi movements.Eberhard August Franz Ewald Krüger (his surname originally had an umlaut) was born on April 12, 1928, in Berlin, to which he felt deeply connected throughout his life. His parents, Max and Auguste (Meier) Krüger, enthusiastically supported the Hitler regime and sent him to a Nazi boarding school. There he developed a lifelong interest in flying, which led to his selection as an actor in a 1944 propaganda film, “Young Eagles.” During the shooting, Mr. Kruger met two young Jewish actors, whose stories about Nazi crimes moved him.Along with his schoolmates, he was forcibly inducted into the army in 1945, then failed his first combat test, a firefight with American soldiers in which half his unit was wiped out.“When brown dots far away shot at me, I shot back,” he explained later. “When the dots came closer, I couldn’t shoot anymore because I saw the faces of human beings.”After a summary court-martial, Mr. Kruger was convicted of “cowardice in the face of the enemy” and sentenced to be shot. Just before the sentence was to be carried out, an officer took pity on his youth — “I was 16 but looked like 12” — and pardoned him. Soon afterward he abandoned his unit and lived in a forest. He ended the war in an American prisoner-of-war camp.“My generation was robbed of its youth,” he later said.Amid the devastation of postwar Germany, Mr. Kruger found work in theaters, acting in productions of “Bus Stop” and “The Glass Menagerie.” After a few years, he decided to seek a film career abroad. He moved to London, dropped the umlaut in his last name and practiced his English.No German actor had sought a career in Britain since the end of the war, and Mr. Kruger at first found himself unwelcome. He recalled a British actress telling him, “You have to understand, there is hardly anyone here at Pinewood Studios who hasn’t lost a lover, a husband, a son, a brother at the front, in an air raid or at sea.”In 1957, Mr. Kruger landed a lead role as a pilot in the film “The One That Got Away.” The news of his selection set off an uproar, but the director, Roy Ward Baker, stood by him.Mr. Kruger in the British World War II film “The One That Got Away” (1957). No German actor had sought a career in Britain since the end of the war, and the news of his casting set off an uproar. The film’s director, Roy Ward Baker, stood by him. Photo by ITV/Shutterstock “I will always be grateful to him, first for giving me a role in the film in the first place and second for the way he dealt with a problem during filming,” Mr. Kruger recalled years later. “I was having a war of words with the British press, and the producers wanted to abandon the film. But Roy Baker threatened to terminate his seven-year contract if they did.”The film’s success made Mr. Kruger famous and allowed him to begin fulfilling his American dream. He refused to play Nazi war criminals, he said, and “cliché figures like what you see in Otto Preminger’s ‘Stalag 17.’” Yet war is the background in many of his films. Several times he played a German troubled by conscience — for example, a monk living in occupied France in the 1968 French film “Franciscan of Bourges.”“I only played six or seven Germans in uniform, and none was a Hollywood cliché,” he said. “Why should I not try to show the world that there were also Germans who were good people?”Mr. Kruger was married three times. Survivors include his wife of 46 years, the American writer and photographer Anita Park, and three children from his previous marriages, Christiane, Malaika and Hardy Jr. Both Christiane and Hardy Jr. have acted in films. Mr. Kruger won three lifetime achievement awards in Germany: at the 1983 German Film Awards, the 2008 Bambi Awards and the 2011 Jupiter Awards. “Sundays and Cybèle,” a 1962 French drama in which he starred as an emotionally wounded war veteran, won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.In 2013, shortly before his 85th birthday, Mr. Kruger joined with several friends and colleagues to launch a project that uses sports and recreation to lure young Germans away from right-wing extremism.“I decided I had to do something,” he said. “We can’t forget that the seed is there.”In the 1980s and ’90s, he hosted a series of television documentaries in which he introduced Germans to faraway places like Chile, Macao, Tanzania, the Marquesas Islands and Utah. He described the episodes as “short stories written with a camera.”He also enjoyed telling stories from his Hollywood years.Mr. Kruger, right, was second-billed to John Wayne, third from left, in the 1962 film “Hatari!”LMPC via Getty ImagesDuring the filming of the 1962 adventure film “Hatari,” Mr. Kruger famously defeated his co-star, John Wayne, in a drinking bout. Years later, he admitted that he had prepared himself beforehand.“I knew he could hold a lot, so I stopped in the kitchen and drank several spoonfuls of cooking oil,” he recalled. “That helped. At the end I had to carry him to his room.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      in Music

      Can’s Live Shows Will Be Heard at Last, Thanks to a Bootlegger in Big Pants

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      A series of concert albums by the influential German band were made possible by Andrew Hall, a fan who followed the group around in the 1970s with a Sony cassette recorder hidden in his trousers.In February 1972, following the surprise success of the single “Spoon,” the experimental rock group Can staged a massive free concert in its Cologne, West Germany, hometown. To better entertain the crowd, it punctuated the music with a slapdash circus, including a juggler, a singing saw player and a team of acrobats.The band planned to document the event with a live recording, as well as a concert film directed by Peter Przygodda, who became Wim Wenders’s editor. The film footage turned out fine — shot in part by the renowned cinematographer Robby Müller — but there was a glitch with the audio. “Something went wrong and the equipment didn’t record,” Irmin Schmidt, one of the group’s founders, recalled ruefully in a phone interview last month. Schmidt’s keyboards and Michael Karoli’s guitar were inaudible. The film was rescued with overdubs, but the live album was scuttled.The incident was one of several mishaps that prevented Can from issuing a proper concert album during its 1968 to 1978 existence or since, despite numerous releases on its own Spoon label mining its voluminous archives. (A few odds-and-ends live recordings have arrived over the years.) But later this month, Mute Records will release “Live in Stuttgart 1975,” the first in a series of restored and remastered live albums made possible by Andrew Hall, a British fan who beginning in 1973 followed the group around with a Sony cassette recorder hidden in his pants.“We didn’t talk to each other onstage at all,” Schmidt said. “Everything we had to say to each other, we did with our instruments.”Sandra PodmoreHall’s job as a developmental chemist allowed him to travel, and he organized his schedule to coincide with Can gigs in the United Kingdom and northern Europe. “I think the number of live shows I attended was 44,” Hall said in an email. “I recorded every one.”Hall, who had a 28-inch waist size, wore 36-inch trousers to fit the recorder and threaded microphones down each of his sleeves. He donned a heavy overcoat to camouflage the illicit ensemble. “If the temperature was turned up,” he writes in the album’s liner notes, “I just about melted.”Whenever Hall couldn’t make a gig, he’d ask other fans to send their own cassettes. His bootleg archive ultimately reached several hundred recordings, “most of them in quite a bad technical state,” said Schmidt. “I refused all the time to go through it, but Hildegard is very insistent, and finally she convinced me,” he added, referring to his wife, who has managed the band’s affairs since 1971.The album is the first recording issued under the Can banner since the deaths of the bassist Holger Czukay and the drummer Jaki Liebezeit in 2017. (Karoli died in 2001; the band’s primary vocalist, Damo Suzuki, whom Czukay and Liebezeit recruited when they heard him busking in Munich, remains a globe-trotting troubadour.) For most of the last 40 years, Schmidt, 83, has lived in the south of France with Hildegard.Though they recorded their first several albums in a 14th-century castle, Can uniquely anticipated 21st-century music making. Blending the heady experimentation of Schmidt and Czukay, both former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen — including the use of noise, sampling and minimalist repetition — with the body-moving hypnotic groove generated by the jazz-trained Liebezeit’s drums, Can created a free-flowing improvisatory psychedelia that put the “trance” in “transcendent.”The group inspired multiple generations of post-punk and alternative bands and electronic musicians, and found its way to hip-hop (see Kanye West’s “Drunk and Hot Girls,” among other songs). It also made the opening boast of LCD Soundsystem’s debut single “Losing My Edge,” where James Murphy announced, “I was there in 1968/I was there at the first Can show in Cologne.”In everything Can, Schmidt said, spontaneity was crucial. “When we went onstage, we didn’t even know beforehand what we would play. We just reacted to the atmosphere, to the acoustics, to the public, to the whole environment spontaneously, and started playing something, which we had never played before,” he said. “We didn’t talk to each other onstage at all. Everything we had to say to each other, we did with our instruments.”Despite taping its marathon daily studio sessions, the group neglected to make any board recordings from their live concerts. “We should have,” Schmidt lamented, “but we didn’t and that’s a pity.”The Stuttgart gig derives from a tour around the release of “Landed,” Can’s sixth studio LP and its second without a vocalist, Suzuki having departed in 1973. The four musicians connect in a freewheeling pyroclastic flow not dissimilar from the futuristic fusion of Miles Davis’s electric bands of that period. Karoli’s guitar weaves between inner and outer space until several of the untitled, totally instrumental pieces culminate in freaked-out sonic squalls, outbursts the band called “Godzillas.”The Mute Records founder Daniel Miller saw the band in London on that same tour. “I just wanted it to go on forever,” he said. “I couldn’t believe how they worked together as a band, how they fed off each other in the improvisational sense. It was beyond anything I’d seen before.”From left: Czukay, Liebezeit, Karoli and Schmidt. “There were of course also concerts which were horrible, really bad, because we played without any net,” Schmidt said.Via SpoonSchmidt feels that the Stuttgart gig is a good example of Can’s stage interplay. On the second track, Czukay begins the bass line from “Bel Air” but the melody ultimately drifts away when nobody joins in. “If we played something which reminded or was near to a song, somebody just came up with it all of a sudden,” Schmidt said. “It was sometimes sort of like a game. You threw something towards the other, and he picked it up, or he didn’t use it and threw it to somebody else. When it worked it was very beautiful and inspiring, even very amusing, using parts of what you have already done, but giving it a totally new direction.”The band’s concerts were usually three hours long, comprising two 90-minute sets. For the live series, Schmidt plans to largely avoid single songs from different nights in favor of entire gigs, “which shows how we structured the set, how the flow was going, the feeling of a real concert,” he said.Can’s improvisatory ethic did not always guarantee consistent results. “You can’t play like this onstage, giving yourself totally up to the atmosphere and to the moment spontaneously, without sometimes risking failure,” Schmidt explained. “There were of course also concerts which were horrible, really bad, because we played without any net.”But even in the worst-case scenarios, there was still potential for magic. “Quite often, when the first set went terribly, people didn’t leave and the second set became really wonderful,” he said. “So the public sort of took part in our efforts to create. It was really like, if it didn’t work, they suffered like us, with us, and if it worked they enjoyed it like us.”The next release will be from the Brighton, England, stop on the same 1975 tour, Schmidt said, but he hopes to feature earlier performances, including potentially a recently discovered 1970 German TV performance.“When I more or less founded this group, I wanted to bring together totally different musical experiences and styles,” Schmidt said. “I wanted musicians who were professionally at home in different contemporary musics like jazz, rock, electronics, and neo-classical music. To bring it together was not easy and created a lot of tension, but that made the music so interesting because when it succeeded, the tension made sense, and created beauty.” More