Berlin Hero (2025) Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstasse
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 52 m, rated 6.3 by 389 cinematizens.
Genre: Satire.
DNA: Deutschland.
Verdict: All too true.
Tagline: Believe it or not!
Bear runs a bankrupt video store in Berlin of 2020. It is more like a derelict museum than a business. When a cheque-book journalist in search of a story offers him Euros to tell his tale, he obliges for the geld. Since there was no story to tell he makes one up to jack up the price. He is surprised when that works, but Euros are Euros.
Once the lie is out there, it takes on a life of its own, and then it takes over his life. It cannot be un-lied for now he has something to lose – money and respect.
He may have been unhappy in his squalid store before the journalist disturbed the cobwebs, but now he is miserable, living and lying up to the expectations his story has ignited. The Euros are important but it isn’t just them. The respect, the civility, the admiration that the lie has brought him, starting with own adult daughter, are heady and addictive.
The fact that it is all lies does not phase the journalist at all who is eager to keep riding the wave as long as it lasts, and later when it does crash, he switches to another without missing a beat. He is an accomplished lie surfer.
Some comments on the IMDb suggest it is unrealistic. Oh hum. Watch Fox News for five minutes. Lies are swallowed whole everyday.
I enjoyed seeing some Berlin sites, though most of filming was done in Leipzig, including the Friedrichstasse station which when I went through it in 1994 still bore the marks of East Germany with a kind of internal Berlin Wall. I also noticed the chain link fence with the posters of the Wall martyrs on it. When I examined it in 1994 the last one to be killed in the Death Zone was a 25-year-old student two weeks before the Wall fell. Several hundred were killed in the Death Strip. Regrettably most of my photographs from that visit got lost somewhere along the way.
The Bear is played beautifully on this emotional roller coaster.
But the best line is dipped in acid when the retired, reptilian, repugnant, and rapacious Stasi officer says, ‘The mother of fools is always pregnant.’ It is from an Italian proverb: ‘La mamma dei cretini è sempre incinta.’ Ergo in German: ‘Die Mutter der Idioten ist immer schwanger.’ Words to live by these days.
The director died before the final shoot and the editing, and it was finished by another with some re-shooting to patch it up. That may explain why the reconciliation in the lavatory seemed too quick and easy. Time to get it done and out the door.
In the last week I have been asked to rate and comment on a variety of experiences, events, interactions, and transactions. The list includes purchasing a rubber door stop for $6, receiving a parcel in the mail, the quality of packing of said parcel, the courtesy of a receptionist, the speed of response to a question, the ease of use at a website, a taxi ride, punctuality of a bus, the hygiene of a toilet, quality of an online purchase in the parcel above. Most readers have similar experiences on the computers screen, on the pocket phone, and in person.
Those who employed will add to this list the numerous in-house surveys they are obliged to complete on this, that, and everything else. Retired though I am, I see some of these go by on email, and, now I think of it, even as a retiree I have been required to complete one on modern slavery and another subject I can’t recall now. I was required to do them, else risk my access to certain services supplied to we doddering emeriti.
These requests often come with a dozen or more items, with a response required for each, and with an additional open-ended dialogue box that must be completed with a minimum number of characters. These questionnaires are designed to avoid response-set bias and so take some little thought and attention to complete.
Each instance of this request has the ostensible purpose of improving the customer experience while its immediate effect is to degrade one customer’s experience.
Most of the time there is nothing to report. The parcel was delivered, the door stop went home….
At times I feel an obligation to comply, say with local business which I hope will continue or a personal online retailer, e.g., through Etsay. I feel no such obligation to corporate giants but I have found if I do not reply, the request remains like Banquo’s ghost. I cannot delete the request just as McBeth could not delete Banquo.
These requests do provide an opportunity to flag a problem, but my personal experience with that is negative. When i ordered a six-pack, among other things, from an online retailer and found on delivery only four bottles in the pack, whereas, on checking, I had paid for six, I reported this in a feedback request to blind eyes. There was never a response, let alone restitution. It was simply a corporate routine.
In many companies the volume of this feedback must be considerable, and the harvesting must be technical, identifying only the more egregious remarks. The rest of us are chaff.
The solution is to do another survey about surveys! Managers must have something to manage.
Of late, I find that even the most casual purchase is met with a request for my phone number. Why? So I can be sent a Survey Request Form about buying a pack of chewing gum. My response to this request now is ‘No.’
When I search the web I find the management and business industry is formulating tactics to trick customers into replying.
I listened to it on Audible during my daily Newtown peregrinations. It was read by Derek Jacobi.
It starts with a long, wandering backstory from Dr Watson. Boring.
Then comes Holmes enters and livens things up. Briefly.
That it interrupted by five or was it six long chapters on the backstories of the victim(s). This was also boring, though of course I warmed to the portrayal or Mormons as sadistic, sex-crazed, slavers, and worse.
Then we have some more Holmes wrapping it all up from a footprint.
It really cooks when Holmes is being Holmes and that is about a third of the total length of the book. (That disproportion reminded me of the first Charlie Chan movie when he only appears half way through.)
It is surprising that it caught on.
Banned in Utah and Florida for its anti-Mormonism.
Derek Jacobi is brilliant even when the material is not.
This was the first of four Holmes novels to go with the fifty-six short stories. This one has been the basis of films and literary tributes most of which are much snappier and paced than this turtle.
Good Reads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 2.93 by 273 raters.
Genre: Screwball comedy.
DNA: Heartland.
Verdict: Charming.
Tagline: Nebraska red. Big, indeed!
It is light, bright, and breezy, so different from some of the author’s other novels, like Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) or Hitler’s Niece (1999) though both of these are memorable, too.
Nathalie is a Bibliothèque nationale librarian specialising in Americana who flees from her very ex-fiancee le beau Pierre. She is Helen of Troy beautiful and he is Achilles manly, but… destiny takes its course.
To avoid him she signs up for a See America tour by bus from New York to San Francisco, sure that he would never follow her, but he does, setting off in love-struck pursuit with only the clothes on his back (a white silk shirt with gold cufflinks and a designer necktie, an Armani black suit, a painted necktie, and handmade tasseled loafers – elegant yes, travel durable no, and a black AMEX card in his wallet) and appears in Omaha to join the tour. As they travel, they bicker continuously in Franglais even when visiting such compelling sites as a spam cannery, the Vermillion corn palace, a talk from a man who had shaken Larry Bird’s hand, stockyards in Chicago to hear Sandburg recited, the view of the fog from the St Louis Arch, Harold Warp’s collection of collections, and then…when Pierre had supposed it could not get worse the bus broke down in the Nebraska Sandhills atop the Ogallala Aquifer on the way to Mount Rushmore skirting Ted Turner’s ranch.
Beau Pierre, tattered from travel, angry at her continued rejection, confused by the English he cannot quite understand, caught between the Loup and Niobrara Rivers in the Sioux country of James Neihardt’s poetry and Maria Sandoz’s novels, he stays with the bus as the driver discovers that the lug wrench isn’t quite right, there is no mobile phone coverage, the spare tire is low, and the jack can’t stabilise the load. Still the driver remains confident he can fix it! In time.
Once again to avoid Pierre’s passive-aggressive hectoring and pleading she stalks off, with her red roll-aboard bouncing and dragging behind her over road grit and sandreed grass to the water tower down the road. In a seething rage, Pierre follows unencumbered by any baggage. So they come to earth in Seldom Nebraska, population 395.
Here they will stay until the next bus, if there is one. Here they discover an unknown world across the language barrier or maybe because of it. She speaks textbook English, unlike the residents of Seldom, and he has a few words and phrases mostly from films. Comedies of error follow.
He discovers from Owen, the town’s one and only (not a very good) mechanic, that red has at least two meanings in Seldom, and she finds a farmer who reads in the air conditioned cabin of a combine harvester. In so doing, they (re-)discover each other. Their carpet ride takes along several Seldomites, too. And while things remain the same, they have also changed.
How anyone could rate it below 5 is one of life’s mysteries to me, but Good Reads comments section is full of mysteries like that. I have read and commented on this book before I was in the mood to renew my acquaintance.
Strangely the Kindle version is available from Amazon USA but not Amazon AU.
Disclosure: I went to high school with Ron Hansen once upon a time.
The versatile novelist Ron Hansen strikes again. One change of pace after another from his ‘Mariette in Ectasy’ to ‘Isn’t it Romantic,’ the first a study religious devotion in a turn of the century convent and the second a contemporary screwball comedy and this, an examination of the BEAST seen through the eyes of one of his very few relatives, a niece of his half-sister.
It concentrates on the period between 1919 and early 1930 and is based on biographical details integrated by the novelist’s creative imagination spun into a tale of obsession, confusion, and colossal egotism. Hitler is almost human on occasion, but almost always playing a role to elicit the response he wanted from individuals at this early stage of his career. Pandering to some; bullying others; reasoning with a few; avuncular briefly.
I have never read anything about or by this the most famous man of the twentieth century, Adolph Hitler, so it was all new to me. The messianic self-confidence from the early 1920s on that he was Germany (‘Du bist Deutschland,’ as Hess always said), punctuated by lapses into exhaustion and doubt (human weakness) followed by a resurgence of manical energy.
The fulcrum of the novel is the niece Geli’s seduction by his aura, the prestige, and material wealth he increasing commands with his periodic moods of sexual attraction to her and then revulsion from her. She became a canary in gilded cage. Spoiled and then abused by turns, and at crucial moments lacking the will to break away when that might still have been possible.
This tension allows the author to offer an enlivened biography of Hitler, the man, through these crucial years. He had at the start an iron self-control in public, and volcanic temper tantrums in private, but as his success seemed to be more and more certain, the line between public and private became porous when he discovered that he could get away with everything and still be hailed a genius. The temper tantrums were unleashed in his tirades.
Hansen gives us Rudolph Hess, Jospeh Göbbles, Hermann Göring, and others, all mesmerised by Hitler’s charismatic personality. ‘Charisma’ is a tried and trite word these days, and I try never to use it, yet there is no doubt it applied here. Hess and the others simply melt in Hitler’s presence, losing their wills and personalities.
The same for the thousands in the audiences of his harangues, though at a greater distance, they too are also compelled, lifted out of themselves by his oratory. Hansen shows all of this, disgusting as it is, to be genuine, authentic. There is no cynical or instrumental calculation to explain their adherence, obedience, and the ensuing terrible deeds.
Long before he became Chancellor this man Hitler had a power over people that was tangible though invisible. There is the mystery at the core that continues to fascinate. After the explanations of time and circumstances are exhausted there is still that element left that defies conventional explanation.
Yes, there were aristocrats, financiers, and industrial barons who thought they could manipulate this rabble rouser to combat the menace of communism, and then discard him, but they, too, as they drew nearer to him soon enough willingly submitted to his will. Scenes in which Hitler seems almost by intention to turn on his magnetic gaze — think Superman engaging his X-Ray vision — and bring to heel a millionaire, a full general, an heiress, a professor, all his intellectual, organisational, and social superiors bowing down to this corporal without an education, a grating Austrian accent, a crude manner, a message dripping with the crudest vitriol is …. astounding. There can be no other explanation but that word ‘charisma.’ As an illustration of that phenomenon the novel is a case study of that C Factor. (Charisma, for those who have not been paying attention.)
In David Fraser’s ‘Knight’s Cross: the Life of Erwin Rommel’ (1994, p. 433) is an occasion when the war in July 1943 is going badly and Rommel had doubts about its conduct which as a good soldier he stifled, is scheduled to go to Berlin. This trip he welcomes because, he said, he would warm himself by the Fuher’s radiance, something like that. It is a wistful, school-girl-with-a-crush kind of remark made by a decent man who knew better and yet he could not help himself. He, like so many others, near or far, was hopelessly and helplessly in love with one Adolph Hitler.
There are many memorable scenes and events. Perhaps the best, for this reader, is the description of one of his early speeches. Hitler is tight as a spring before hand, nervous, angry, best avoided. He has ten pages he takes to the rostrum microphone in the hall with a crowd of three thousand. We later learn that on each pages is a bullet point in 30 words or so to act as a cue. He begins… The tirade mounts, it is becomes ever explicit about what the problem is what is to be done about it, and that Hitler alone sees the problem clearly and is willing to act on it. He rants for more than two hours. The reaction is spontaneous and tumultuous. This is early in his career, there is nothing coerced about the response as would be the case later. He has electrified a nerve shared by members of this crowd – the western nations are eating Germany and Germans alive through their despicable agents – the Jews, Jews and Communist are one and the same, wicked orientals.
After his speech, whisked away to his car where he is seen to be drenched in sweat, reeking of emanations, exhausted, pale, his gaze unfocussed, twitching in throes, as if possessed. This description reminded me of Biblical accounts of John the Baptist channeling God’s will. It nearly killed him, but do he must. The messianic element is manifest.
Some were resistant to his appeal like Geli herself, and they paid the price, but they seemed ever fewer.
Surprising was the cunning in which at times Hitler suppressed his compulsive urge to preach anti-semitism in an election campaign so as not to frighten off the voters. But by that time, like the racism that inhabits contemporary American politics, it was so well embedded that it need not be said for it was communicated by code. The red star of communism was also the Star of David. To attack communism was implicitly to attack Jews even if they were not specifically mentioned.
False notes, there are a few. The most striking to me was the way Emile at the end seems not to be bothered by Geli’s death.
Ron Hansen
Minor missteps? I wondered about the reference to a crossword puzzle in 1927 when the first crossword did not appeal in the ‘London Times’ until 1930, and the crossword was an Anglo-American invention. There is also a reference to a zinfandel-coloured carpet. I stopped at this, because the zinfandel grape skin is black and the use of it as a wine grape is American. (Yes, I know it has a long history and has been used in Croatia for centuries, but I doubt a German in 1927 would reach that far for a colour. I also found jarring the reference to kaiser rolls and Ferragamo shoes. The kaiser roll is Austrian and may be named for a baker, not The Kaiser. Ferragamo started making shoes in Florence in 1927 and went bust in 1933, to be reopened in the 1950s, leaving unsure that Geli could buy such shoes in a shop in destitute Munich in 1928.
One contrast to the Hitler, as shown in these pages, is Charles De Gaulle who also felt himself to be the saviour of his country and with a kingsize sense of his own importance as a result, and yet he seems modest, even self-effacing in comparison. I read Jean LeCourture’s multi-volume biography of Le Grand Charles. He did not use up people and then murder them when it was convenient as Hitler often did, like Ernst Röhm among many others, including Geli.
Jacqueline de Romilly, The Life of Alcibiades: Dangerous Ambition and the Betrayal of Athens (1995).
Good Reads meta-data is 228 pages, rated 4.18 by 139 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Greece.
Verdict: Superb.
Tagline: Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
If a single person dominates Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War it is Alcibiades (450 BCE- 404 BCE). Larger than life, he is a protean figure, a shapeshifter, born an Athenian, become a Spartan, then a Persian, again an Athenian, and finally nothing but himself. Each metamorphosis he made, he betrayed. Even knowing that, the next host welcomed him, and soon enough he betrayed that one, too. His motto must have been ‘All for me, and me for me, too. End.’ (Thanks to Michael Neylan for that phrasing.)
In fact, I grew weary and confused in following de Romilly’s map of his duplicitous and constant self-serving. The twists and turns come fast and furious: U-turns, hairpins, swerves, one-eighties, esses, reversals with spin, and more.
Teacher’s pet of Socrates and adopted son of Pericles, born an aristocrat with gifts of the gods in wealth, health, appearance, physique, and so on, he was also vain, arrogant, tempestuous, conniving, egoistical, solipsistic, and….a completely spoiled only child.
With a tongue of electrum, time after time he talked his way out of his own lies. At one point he demanded Athens change its regime to suit him, and that is what happened but by then he had grown bored and had himself changed sides again. At times he was a fervent exponent of Athenian democracy and at other times an equally fervent exponent of Athenian oligarchy. And on one occasion he was both at once.
I struggled for a sporting metaphor to describe him. He changed team uniforms with record speed, but also positions of the field and sports at will. He was so versatile he could play both for an against himself to the cheers of the crowd.
(No good? Do better.)
Were he a fictional character, he would be unbelievable. Fiction has to be credible, but reality does not and that maxim applies to Alcibiades. De Romilly, too, is at times at a loss to understand why he got away with it time after time. All she can do is repeat that he did. See also David Stuttard, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens (2018).
The obvious comparison is Achilles in the Iliad whose astonishing attributes have a divine explanation.
* * *
On our visit to Athen in the Agora Museum I saw a shield with his name Ἀλκιβιάδης scratched into the forearm brace. Later at a virtual museum (the name of which I have forgotten but which must be recorded in the travel diary on the shelf) we saw an interactive video about ostracism and I cast my vote for Al to go. In the Kerameikos I saw the tombstone for his first wife, Hipparete. His is a long shadow.
He is a major character in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, and in many novels, particularly Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine (1956). Al has entered fantasy in Paul Levinson’s Sierra Waters time travelling series. There Alcibiades found someone else to believe his endless stream of lies.
Strangely, his name on the IMDb yields scant returns. He could give Hollywood lessons. Per Michael Netyan.
Jacqueline de Romilly
P.S. Madame de Romilly née David was 82 when she published this book in French. For the agrégation in 1936 she had learned Greek. Thereafter she stayed in the Greek world with a Sorbonne PhD on Thucydides, part of which was written while hiding in Aix-en-Provenance from the Vichy police rafle searching for Jews to murder.
The dissertation was reworked and became her magna opus as Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism (1947). It is one of her more than thirty titles on ancient and classical Greece. I saw her give a public lecture in 1980 in a campaign to stimulate popular interest in the past. A place near the Sorbonne now bears her name.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 41m, rated 5.4 by 115 cinematizens.
Genre: Satire; Species: dramedy.
DNA: Czech.
Verdict: [Gasp!]
Tagline: The story must go on…and on.
Czech Radio correspondent from a civil war in the Middle East makes a surprise return to his home in Prague, fearing his wife’s infidelity during his long absence. She, too, is a journalist at Czech Radio.
His fevered imagination misinterprets everything and he goes ballistic, confirming his worst fears, but he has to keep up the pretence of reporting on the spot from a state of emergency in Arabia. Ingenuity and laughs follow, as does his wife’s incredulity, exasperation, (im)patience, and then enthusiasm for the project. The deception is a circle as the television news plagiarises the radio news which plagiarises the news services and the television which plagiarises both. And repeat.
Some of the humour is adult, and there is some gratuitous violence at the end, but the result is upbeat. If you have seen His Girl Friday (1940) you get the idea, and if you haven’t: why not?
There is side story with a school teacher about disinformation that seemed tacked on and not integrated, and the final shootout started as farce and ends up with cadavers.
Most of this dramedy takes places in the apartment so there was no Prague travelogue to remind us of our visit there.
***
Speaking of patience, mine was stretched. This was the finale of the Czech & Slovak film festival at the local Dendy, it began an hour late while we sheep sat and waited. Grumble, grumble.
Good Reads meta-data is 339 pages, rated 4.25 by four litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Georgia, USA.
Verdict: Acute.
Tagline: Petunia did it, and how!
A hapless graduate student in a genetics PhD program observes the ignorant, solipsistic, corrupt, narcissistic, venal, alcoholic members of the department who ingest illegal substances, give rabbits lesson in libido, cheat and lie in research, and hate each other, enslave grad students, while the student befriends a gun-toting house maid, a voodoo practicing untenured English professor, a jive-talking janitor with occult powers and a cartographic knowledge of drain pipes, and then there is the soon-to-be, and sooner-not-to-be, Doctor Frankenstein.
The touch is light but the macabre ending is not. Be forewarned.
Here are some of les bons mots, many of them quotations from literature. The author is clearly a reader of far more than genetics research.
_____________
‘To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering,’ quoth Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey.
He was a monk of science, who devoted himself to his calling, ignoring minor matters of light, air, sleep, or food.
Only fiction has to seem possible, reality does not.
Words advanced to convince her were doomed soldiers sent on a suicide mission.
To quote Confucius: ‘The wise man is informed in what is right. The inferior man is informed in what will pay.’ No prizes for guessing which sort dominates the academy in these pages.
Most men believe to be true whatever they want to be true. So said Caesar. he could say it today as long as he includes women.
Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt. William Thackeray, Vanity Fair might have been describing the successful professoriate.
Each day I received four or five emails from the university designed to relieve it of all responsibility for anything I might do or not do or think about doing or have done in the past. Daily, it disowned me and my works.
How void of reason are men, said Seneca. (Had he been watching Fox News?)
They may plan to burn you at the stake, but they begin with innocuous questions.
Selfishness has to be forgiven because there is no cure, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park.
How few know their own good, and fewer still who purse it, John Dryden in his introduction to Juvenal’s Satire X.
No amount of money is compensation for the grind of graduate school. (Amen. Hardest thing I ever did.)
To hate all the hate-worthy people leaves one no energy for anything else, Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism.
_____________
Gupta and I also did some vocabulary building: valetudinarian, maleficent, undulant, diurnal, stellate, arithmomania, flensed, eldritch, professosis, hebetade, ethology, soi-disant, and more. (Yes, some are coinages.)
Eugene M McCarthy
I see from the author’s Research Gate entry that he has retired from the lists of competition for research grants. Therein he describes this book as ‘a satire of academic life, based largely on my own experience (with names changed to protect the guilty).’ He is not going to be applying for more research grants after this delightful hatchet job.
I certainly recognised some of the personalities from my part of the jungle.
I read it during our stay at the zoo. Seemed fitting, right, Petunia?
Plod goes to an annual crime writers seminar (of 30 participants) to comment on the technical aspects of murder in the five krimis nominated for this year’s prize awarded by the sponsor of this seminar. In each case he faults the descriptions of the murders. The writers, each of whom is present, react to his critique in different ways. One welcomes it as a free professional consultation. Others pretend indifference, and another is passive aggressive hostile. A fifth stomps out of the room at the first quibble. (Yes, I felt like I had attended that seminar.)
The prize awarded; murder ensues. There is an Ellery Queen story with this setting that is lighter and brighter.
The authors and their companions are described, including the companion dog of one of them, along with some of the thirty attendees.
There are loose ends aplenty. Unconvincing characters who are also uninteresting and hard to tell apart rendered in forced prose. Yikes. I chose it for the ostensible academic setting, but that offered poor consolation.
B M Gill
Gill wrote many other krimis, using other pseudonyms. Her birth name was Barbara M Gill but she also used Margaret Blake and Barbara Gilmour.
Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages, rated 5.0 by two litizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: Bristol, UK
Verdict: Uphill.
Tagline: Deviants all.
Delightful chapter headings accompanied by epigrams from poetry, song, training manuals and other sources of high and low literature. These are worth the effort to read the book.
Yes, I did find it an effort. Much of it is presented in police interview transcripts – boring. The same person may be interviewed four or five times, and each time states her legal name and address, place of employment….
One of the police officers has hormonal surges that seem, well, adolescent in a trained-up cop.
It has an excellent plot all the same, and I enjoyed the descriptions of the academics, though I did not notice a seminar. The pompous, opinionated, solipsistic, alcoholic, and lecherous are all on parade. I certainly recognised some of them.
I did get muddled up about the presence of high school students. No doubt I blinked when that was explained. But there were a lot of explanations and I skipped many on the assumption they were padding and not blocks in the plot wall.
I hope the author has more to offer.
Read while disporting at the Retreat in Taronga Park Zoo.
