Cinema Film Screening - Konrad Wolf: Professor Mamlock

During the first months of 1933, a Jewish chief surgeon at a Berlin hospital fatefully refuses to acknowledge the rising threat from the Nazis’ rise to power. Based on the 1933 play by Konrad Wolf’s father, the film is one the director’s most stylised works, capturing the devastating impact of Nazi anti-Semitism.

New Year’s Eve, 1932. Professor Mamlock, a renowned Jewish chief surgeon at a Berlin hospital, is celebrating with his family and friends. As they speculate about what the new year will bring, a Nazi squad clashes with a group of Communists in the street—among them Mamlock’s son, Rolf. Unlike his father, Rolf is convinced that resistance against the Nazis is essential to prevent their rise to power. Mamlock, however, dismisses both Nazis and Communists as dangerous extremists and insists that in Germany, the state, law, and science—reason and humanist ideals—will prevail, and the current turmoil will pass. But soon, new anti-Semitic laws strip Mamlock of his position at the hospital, replacing him with a loyal Nazi and outspoken racist. A Jewish colleague announces his plans to emigrate, and Mamlock’s daughter is terrorised at school—yet Mamlock stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the warning signs around him.

Konrad Wolf’s second film – besides Lizzy – that he sets during the rise of the Nazis in 1932 /1933, it is based on a play by his father, Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953), a renowned author and physician. Under threat as a Jew and member of the Communist Party, Friedrich Wolf fled Germany after the Reichstag fire in February 1933, passing through Austria, Switzerland, and France—where he wrote the play—before reaching Moscow. The play premiered in Yiddish under the title Der Gelbe Fleck (“The Yellow Badge”) at the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theater on January 19, 1934. The play would later also become part of the curriculum in GDR schools. An earlier screen adaptation, directed by Adolph Minkin and Herbert Rappaport and produced by Soviet Lenfilm in 1938, was among the first films to directly address Nazi anti-Semitism. As film historian Ulrich Gregor notes, that version emphasized resistance and the role of Mamlock’s son.

Gregor also highlights the strong stylisation and alienation techniques in Wolf’s film: dense sequences combining montage, shifting points of view, image superimpositions, the sounds of fireworks, and steps, voices, recorded speeches, music, and silences to convey emotional states—often terror and fear. One striking example is the nightmarish scene in which Mamlock’s daughter is chased out of her school: long shots show her from a distance, then shift to her subjective perspective, placing us in her shoes as classmates close in, staring at us, and we become the girl fleeing down the stairs in panic. This unusually high degree of stylisation makes the film more abstract than Wolf’s other works—closer to a Lehrfilm, a cinematic lesson, as Gregor calls it.

GDR, 1961, 93 min, b&w, German with English subtitles
Directed by Konrad Wolf, script: Konrad Wolf and Karl Georg Egel, dramaturgy: Willi Brückner, editor: Christa Wernicke, camera: Werner Bergmann, set design: Harald Horn, costume design: Werner Bergemann, make-up: Otto Banse, music (score): Hans-Dieter Hosalla, sound: Gerhard Wiek.

With Doris Abeßer, Ursula Burg, Harald Halgardt, Wolfgang Heinz, Manfred Krug, Franz Kutschera, Günter Naumann, Peter Sturm, Lissy Tempelhof, Hilmar Thate, Ulrich Thein.

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Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut London