The 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film went to an Austrian movie about Nazi crimes. You may not have heard about these crimes — yes, there are still Holocaust stories to be told. So when two different producers within a week approached director Stefan Ruzowitzky with survivor Adolf Burger’s memoir, The Devil’s Workshop, he knew he had to do this project.
“In a way, I’m privileged to be a filmmaker,” Ruzowitzky told JTNews. “For me, this is my way to deal with it: part of my family’s history, my country’s history.” Born in Austria, raised in Germany, and the grandson of people who were (“some more, some less”) attached to the Nazi party, he says, “I always felt that I have to comment on this issue as a filmmaker.”
Determined not to make a didactic movie, Ruzowitzky crafted a tale of suspense and moral ambiguity, based on the top-secret “Operation Bernhard” in Blocks 18 and 19 of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Jewish prisoners — some professionals in graphic design, printing, and banking, and some criminal expert counterfeiters — were pressed into service from 1942-1945 to create fake pounds sterling and dollars, with which the Reich planned to disrupt the economies of its British and American enemies.
Passports and identification papers also came out of this workshop, dubbed the “Golden Cage” because of the comparatively “luxurious” treatment given to its workers. They had real food and real beds, space to move around, and rewards, like a ping-pong table. They received good clothing, too, although not without pain: the film makes clear their awareness that the clothing came from other, murdered captives.
Part of the brilliance of Ruzowitzky’s film is his use of sound — just sound — to indicate the torture and death we all know are happening outside these privileged blocks: a threat; a beating; a shot. We hear these sounds just outside the wall, but what we see inside is ping-pong. And tension. The craftsmen know their skills, desire to sabotage the oppressors’ plot, and have no doubt that overt sabotage would mean their deaths.
This is the privilege of a filmmaker in our generation: the audience already knows what kinds of horrors were going on in those camps. Other Holocaust movies were “milestones in how to deal with these issues cinematically,” says Ruzowitzky, asked to compare his work with, say, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. His own cinematic concept was to tell the “whole story through the eyes of Sally.” That would be Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), based on the historical character of Salomon Smolianoff, a gifted artist and by all accounts the master counterfeiter of his day. Criminal, cynical, talented, he is the prize asset in Block 19.
“Not one scene in the movie is without him,” Ruzowitzky emphasizes. “The audience is forced to experience by his side.”
Introduced as a lonely postwar high-roller in Monte Carlo, Sally’s story is a feature-length flashback: from his arrest in the midst of decadent Berlin cabaret life, to his release into the landscape of death. A chance to help a fellow prisoner touches, briefly, Sally’s empathy, but this is a film in which whatever might pass for a happy ending is over at the beginning.
Adolf Burger, author of the memoir that inspired the film, is played by August Diehl. Originally titled The Devil’s Workshop, the book is being newly released in English translation with the same title as the film.
The film includes few women, though they frame the story: at one end, stylish cynics in a Berlin bar; at the other, polished courtesans at men’s elbows in Monte Carlo, and in the middle, the steely cold beauty of the wife of Sally’s Nazi handler.
The soundtrack, which elevates this film to a haunting obsession, was released this week on the Milan label. A combination of tango, operetta, and specially composed sound design, it all started while the director was writing the script:
“By chance a friend gave me a tango CD, and I was listening while I was writing. It made sense!” Ruzowitsky says. “Tango was the music of crooks, gangsters, at that time. And after the war, the real Sally actually settled in Argentina.”
Ruzowitzky describes the tango music as “sad, but full of passion and energy” — words that could just as well describe this film. And as for the other music: “Operetta music — so cheesy, these cheesy lyrics, in contrast to the precision of the camps,” he says. Operetta, especially at the end of the Third Reich, was full of escapism, and all about love, Ruzowitsky says, while the world was full of death. By all accounts, operetta, like “The Merry Widow,” was music beloved by those who ran the camps.
One additional soundtrack element unique to The Counterfeiters is the original work of the German composer Marius Ruhland.
“This music is interwoven with sound design, very much in the background,” according to Ruzowitzky, who was eager to talk about this aspect of the film. “What we tried to do with the soundtrack is the opposite of what you’re usually trying to do.” This is not music designed to swell the viewer’s feelings, but rather “a score for character,” to give each character a sonic heart.
In his acceptance speech at last month’s Academy Awards ceremony, Ruzowitzky received the first Oscar ever given to an Austrian film by paying tribute to some celebrated filmmakers we may not even think of as Austrian:
“Thinking of Billy Wilder [Sunset Boulevard], Fred Zinnemann [A Man for all Seasons], Otto Preminger [Exodus], most of them had to leave my country because of the Nazis. So it sort of makes sense that the first Austrian movie to win an Oscar is about [the] Nazis’ crimes.”
Lawrence Malkin’s 2006 book Krueger’s Men tells the true story of Operation Bernhard in detail, and there’s that new translation of the Burger memoir that inspired the film. But with his award-winning fictionalized version, Stefan Ruzowitzky takes the bigger truths of this story directly to the human heart.
Oscar makes it real
