Der Arzt von Stalingrad

Spätheimkehrer (= Late Returnees) was a legal term for all those POWs German or fighting for the Reich who hadn't been released by December 31st 1946. It should take till '55, the so-called Heimkehr der Zehntausend (= Return of the Ten Thousand), for the process of "repatriation" to find some kind of end (the fate of many remains unclear; they're formally considered MIA). Anyway: By the time Heinz G. Konsalik, a war correspondent ao. at the so-called Eastern Front (with a "not hostile' disposition towards the Nazis, at least according to his attempts at getting accepted in the Reichsschrifttumskammer...) and arguably the most (in)famous of all Bonn republic pulp writers, published Der Arzt von Stalingrad (1956) the subject was one of the past. Now began the time of myth-making – and few and far apart were the subjects more stories circulated about than that of the Soviet-run prison camps with their invariably brutal jailers and wardens, as well as the impossibly beautiful and fundamentally unreadable Russian women... In 1958, two films about Germans in Soviet POW camps hit the local screens, both rather surprising and quite special in their respective ways: Wolfgang Liebeneiner's curiously melancholic melodrama Taiga and Radványi Géza's ballsy, slightly noir'ish and certainly mighty claustrophobic Der Arzt von Stalingrad which takes the disappointed-going-disgusted perspective of a returnee as its starting point. A true gem, and a most worthy work of his auteurs, a modernist maverick if there was one in FRG cinema at that time – a genuine case for critical re-evaluation on an international scale. (OM) (Midnight Sun Film Festival)