Filmed Literature : Germany

German directors have shown themselves to be particularly ambitious and often successful as well when it comes to filming major literary works. An outstanding example is Volker Schlondorff (born in 1939), who brought Robert Musil’s “Young Torless” (1965) and Heinrich Boll’s “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum” (1975) to the big screen. In 1979 Schlondorff was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for his adaptation of Gunter Grass’s bestseller “The Tin Drum”; in 1980 “The Tin Drum” won an Oscar for the best foreign film. In the years thereafter Schlondorff remained faithful to his genre. His adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel “Homo Faber” (1991) is considered a particularly successful example of filmed literature. In 1991 Werner Schroter filmed “Malina”, a coded autobiography of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Wolfgang Petersen’s international success “The Boat” (1981) was based on a novel by Lothar Gunther Buchheim. Re-released in a newly cut version, this film packed the theaters again in 1997.

A prime example of the new realistic homeland film is “Autumn Milk” (1988) by Joseph Vilsmaier. Based on the autobiography of Anna Wimschneider, a Bavarian farmwife, this film was one of the most successful recent German productions. After depicting the gruesome reality of war in the blockbuster film “Stalingrad” (1993), Vilsmaier movingly recounted the tragic life story of a gifted musician in his latest work, “Brother of Sleep” (1995).