Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen

On the night of January 30th 1945, the Soviet submarine S-13 sunk the Wilhelm Gustloff, a former KdF (= Kraft durch Freude) cruise ship turned refugee transporter in the last stage of WWII. S-13's Master and Commander, Alexandr Marinesko, can't be blamed for ordering the attack, for by the laws of naval warfare, he had done absolutely nothing wrong: The Wilhelm Gustloff had the markings of a navy vessel, been fitted with anti-aircraft guns, and was convoyed by a torpedo boat, the Löwe – nothing in the scene's appearance suggested that this was a rescue undertaking. More than 9300 people, mainly civilians, died that night in the Baltic Sea; so far, it is considered the biggest maritime disaster ever. The Wilhelm Gustloff-victims were among the very few war dead on the German side whose demise citizens of the FRG (as well as the GDR, theoretically) could mourn publicly, as there was nobody really to blame for had happened (except that the evacuation operation Hannibal was launched far too late ...). And yet, Frank Wisbar, the commercially most successful of all remigrant auteurs (and one of the most urgent cases for serious film cultural re-evaluation!), refuses to play it easy: Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen is a sober, sombre, and sometimes unrelentingly grim work genre-wise difficult to place – sometimes it plays like a realist melodrama, at other times like a combat picture where the action never seems to happen – till it turns into all-out Armageddon. (OM) (Midnight Sun Film Festival)