Teenage Wasteland

There is no place like high school where adults pretzel acts of teenage disobedience into disciplinary offenses with serious consequences.

Erik Babinsky (Jonas Dassler), Theo Lemke (Leonard Scheicher), Lena (Lena Klenke), Paul (Isaiah Michalski), Kurt Wächter (Tom Gramenz), and twins Klara and Regina Winkler (Nele and Nora Labisch) in class.

The high schoolers in Lars Kraumer’s The Silent Revolution (Das schweigende Klassenzimmer-2018) are not unlike their roughly contemporary peers in Peter Weir’s The Dead Poet’s Society (1989), only the stakes are much higher. Kraumer’s narrative, based on an actual story, is set in Stalinstadt, a postwar socialist showplace (now Eisenhüttenstadt) in Cold War East Germany. 

 

The action opens in November of 1956, five years before The Wall went up in Berlin. Kurt Wächter (Tom Gramenz) and Theo Lemke (Leonard Scheicher) are high school seniors and best friends. They lark over to the American Sector in Berlin on the pretext of visiting Kurt’s grandfather’s grave to see Liane, das Mädchen aus dem Urwald [Liana, Jungle Goddess] (1956) a movie notorious in its day for featuring a titillatingy topless teengirl Tarzan. They also see a newsreel reporting the uprising in Budapest, Hungary, against the Soviet occupation.  

In Berlin’s former American sector in November 1956, the boys saw “Liane, Jungle Goddess” along with a newsreel report of Hungarian students and civilians opposing Russian occupation.

Kurt and Theo share the Hungary news with their classmates. A group of them go with their classmate Paul (Isaiah Michalski) to visit Paul’s great uncle. Uncle Edgar (Michael Gwisdek), an elderly freethinker, lives in a tumbledown riverside farm and purportedly listens to RIAS (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, the US radio station in Berlin during the Cold War). The kids follow Western reports of the Hungarian uprising several nights on RIAS at Uncle Edgar’s. They hear that Hungarian superstar footballer Ferenc Puskás was killed in the fighting. But as teenagers they also dance to Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and other current Western hits. 

Kurt Wächter (Tom Gramenz) tuning in the latest report on the Hungarian Revoluion on RIAS at Uncle Edgar’s in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

Right before Mr. Mosel’s (Rainer Reiners) first-period class the next morning, the kids vote on and agree to an opening two-minute “moment of silence” in sympathy with the Hungarians. These typical high school seniors at first feel strength in their solidarity. There is no question from one to the next that they are “good socialists”. They shoot amused, nervous glances at each other as they sustain their silent protest while Mr. Mosel blows his top in classic German style.  

The class in its moment of silence viewed from the blackboard in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

School principal Schwarz (Florian Lukas) wrestles with how to deal with the incident. He knows and likes these kids and recognizes that kids get up to things. But he is concerned about the political light the incident will put on him when his higher-ups find out. The school’s political officer (Daniel Krauss) reports the incident behind the principal’s back to District School Board Chair Frau Kessler (Jördis Treibel) and then to German Democratic Republic (GDR) Minister of Education Fritz Lange (Burghart Klaussner). Kessler comes first, and then she and Lange appear at the school in a ministerial black limousine to investigate and root out “counterrevolutionary activity”. 

Minister of Education Fritz Lange (Burghart Klaussner) tries to ferret out the "counter-revolutionary activity" from Eric Babinsky (Jonas Dassler) a presumed weak link, with FDJ-Sekretär Lange (Daniel Krause) and District School Board Chair Frau Kessler (Jördis Treibel).

Remember, this is high school girls and boys. This proto-Breakfast Club had parents to deal with. But unlike John Hughes’s Midwestern US suburban 1980s, these parents are raising families in a harshly unforgiving political climate. Stalin died in 1953 but de-Stalinization had yet to get underway. Kurt’s father Hans Wächter (Max Hopp) is chairman of the city council; Kurt’s maternal grandfather killed in the war had served in the Waffen SS. Theo’s father Hermann Lemke (Ronald Zehrfeld) is a steelworker who had an active role in the 1953 East German uprising against the Russians. Paul’s Uncle Edgar is gay and listens to RIAS. Theo’s girlfriend Lena (Lena Klenke) lives with her grandmother (Carmen-Maja Antoni) because her mother emigrated to Denmark. Erik (Jonas Dassler) reveres the beau idéal of his German communist father killed fighting Nazis during the war but lives with his mother (Bettina Hoppe) and stepfather (Götz Schubert), a parish priest. Kurt and Theo’s other dozen classmates have similar backgrounds. 

Hermann Lemke (Ronald Zehrfeld) and Theo (Leonard Scheicher) talk about life as they walk to the steel mill in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

The farther one gets from having been a self-dramatizing teenager can make it easy to forget how serious and self-absorbed we were, our relationships with friends and parents, and the bullies that school authorities can be. This drama rides on the quiver of threats authorities wield to turn or break the kids, and whether they—and their parents—stick up for one another together. In the Stasi conception of Marxist-Leninist “criticism and self-criticism”, everyone is compromised and there is zero incentive for a principled individual act. Kraume and his cast make this piece visceral, particularly in the person of Treibel’s Frau Kessler.  

District School Board Chair Frau Kessler (Jördis Treibel) turns up the volume to find answers in Lars Kraume’s (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

The outcome is worth waiting for. However, apart from the class, Kraume does not disclose how this affected the parents and other adults. 

 

The film was shot on location in Eisenhüttenstadt and Berlin and the sets are superb. The original story is told by Dietrich Garstka, one of the participants, in his book “The Silent Classroom”.  

Author Dietrich Garstka and his classmates, the original class in story behind  Lars Kraume’s 2018 film Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution).

Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Revolution) 2018 Germany (111 minutes) Akzente Film/StudioCanal. Adapted for the screen and directed by Lars Kraume, based on the book by Dietrich Garstka; cinematography by Jens Harant; edited by Barbara Gies; production design by Olaf Schiefner; casting by Nessie Nesslauer; music by Christophe Kaser and Julian Maas.