Labyrinth of Lies

A film set in Germany. The year is 1958. Thirteen years have passed since the end of the war. The country has been rebuilt. The factories run, people buy cars, and nobody talks about the past. Johann Radmann is a young prosecutor. He handles traffic cases. A journalist comes to the courthouse. He has a claim: a man teaching in a school was a guard at Auschwitz. Nobody is interested. Radmann takes it on. From there the film is a story about documents. The young prosecutor gets into an archive and starts looking for names. The American army holds thousands of files. Nobody has looked at them for years. The problem is this: nobody knows what happened. Radmann hears the word Auschwitz for the first time and has to ask what it is. They start looking for witnesses. The survivors do not want to talk; nobody has asked them, and they do not believe talking will do anything. A list of nineteen hundred names emerges. Most of them are still working. Doctors, teachers, officials, bakers. What the narrative is interested in is not war but continuity: its idea is that the crime is not finished history and that the criminals went on living as neighbours. At one point Radmann loses his balance. He begins to think everyone is guilty and investigates his own father. The chief prosecutor Fritz Bauer is inside the narrative and is a real person. Radmann is invented. The character is a composite of several real prosecutors who ran the case. The result is the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, which began in 1963. The tone is conventional. The narrative follows the genre's known shape and takes no formal risk. Giulio Ricciarelli directed. The film was Germany's Oscar submission that year. Alexander Fehling, André Szymanski, Friederike Becht and Gert Voss are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone curious about postwar German history and courtroom drama. Who it is not for: anyone looking for formal novelty; the narrative is too neat and its main character's change runs to a template.