In
a small town like Wels, Austria, everybody knows everyone’s business. That
makes life terribly uncomfortable for Johanna Berger’s family, but frankly they
are about the only ones with nothing to be embarrassed about in Andreas Gruber’s
Hanna’s Sleeping Dogs (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 KINO! Festival of German Cinema in New York.
Even
though she was blinded by a bomb blast, Ruth Eberth still survived the war
through sheer determination. Her conveniently corrupt gentile second husband also
helped. Unfortunately, persistence would have a price. Her roguish first
husband was indeed deported to a concentration camp, but her daughter Katharina
was able to pass for an Aryan Christian thanks to the sponsorship of Öllinger,
the president of the local Wels bank. Of course, he extracted compensation in
ways we can immediately guess, but the film treats like a deep, dark secret.
Naturally,
Johanna is blissfully ignorant of her family history and her clueless father
Franz hardly knows little more than she does. Neither recognizes the ill-concealed
aggression in Herr Öllinger close-talking pleasantries. Nor does Johanna
understand why the Catholic school’s lay catechism teacher is so openly hostile
towards her. However, Eberth gets it only too well. She also knows exactly who
their ogre-like building superintendent is and what he did in Linz during the
war. She might be blind, but she sees better than anyone.
It
seems like Gruber’s one fear in adapting Elisabeth Escher’s partly
autobiographical novel was that someone might miss her point, so she just
drives it into the ground. Granted, the events of Sleeping Dogs most likely take place in the early 1960s, a few years
before Fritz Bauer’s Frankfort Auschwitz Trials, but it is hard to fathom how
this small town would be so overtly anti-Semitic and unrepentantly nostalgic
for the National Socialists. The kind of boorish, emotionally abusive behavior
directed at young Johanna boggles the mind to the point of stretching
credibility, which has rather frightening implications for a film like this.
As
Johana, young Nike Seitz truly looks and sound like a Heavenly angel, which
further exemplifies Gruber’s manipulative aesthetic. However, Hannelore Elsner provides
invaluable support as Eberth, a truly wise a forceful presence, in a
sharp-tongued kind of way.
