Rosenstrasse is a 2003 German historical drama film directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Maria Schrader and Katja Riemann.
It is an account of the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest
in Nazi Germany—as set within a framing device. A German-American Jewish woman named Hannah is sitting shiva for the death of her father. She is surprised by her mother, Ruth, organizing a strictly Orthodox shiva (mirrors covered, pictures covered up or turned down) even though the family wasn't particularly observant.
A chance encounter with a cousin at the shiva leads to a comment about how, some fifty-odd years ago, 8-year-old Ruth was saved from The Holocaust by a non-Jewish woman named Lena. Hannah, filled with a need to know, goes to Germany and tracks Lena down. Lena, now a 90-year-old woman, was back in 1943 married to a Jewish man named Fabian. By early 1943 most of the Jews of Berlin (and the rest of Germany) had been deported to the East and their deaths in Nazi concentration or extermination camps in Poland, but Jews married to non-Jews had been exempted from the deportations, although they had to suffer many other privations. However, at the end of January, Nazi authorities began mass arrests of all the remaining Berlin Jews, and confined them in a building on the Rosenstrasse ("Roses Street"). Among those arrested were Fabian and Ruth's mother. Lena, Ruth, and the other German women with husbands in the detention center began standing vigil outside, demanding their husbands' return.
Tropes:
- Age Cut: There's a cut from 8-year-old Ruth, staring into the apartment where Klara has killed herself, to Ruth some 50 years later, lighting a shiva candle.
- An Arm and a Leg: Ruth's cheerful brother Arthur is shown in 1943 much less cheerful, after he lost a leg at Stalingrad. Arthur says ruefully that it was a lucky break, as he got his wound and was sent to the hospital just three days before the Germans at Stalingrad were encircled.note
- Based on a True Story: An opening title card says that the Rosenstrasse protest of late January-early February 1943 was "historical fact."
- Bittersweet Ending: A little more towards the sweet. Ruth's mother Miriam was taken away, to her death in the concentration camps. Ruth's heart was then broken a second time when she was taken away from her substitute mother Lena later, to live with her aunt after the war. But Lena and most everyone else outside the Rosenstrasse got their men back, and in the present day Ruth has gotten some closure and blesses Hannah's marriage.
- Disappeared Dad: Ruth's father does not show up to protest his wife getting arrested—because unlike Lena, he caved to the pressure and divorced Miriam two years previously, abandoning both her and his Jewish daughter. He never appears onscreen.
- Due to the Dead: Ruth's children are surprised by how ultra-Orthodox she's going at her husband's shiva, since the family was mostly secular. She even tries to stop her children from using the telephone.
- Foregone Conclusion: The opening scenes make clear that young Ruth went to live with an American aunt after she was orphaned during the war, so the audience knows that nothing good will happen after her mother Miriam is arrested and taken to the Rosenstrasse.
- Framing Device: A shiva sometime around the year 2000 leads to Hannah learning some things about her mother's childhood in Germany, and wanting to find out more. She goes to Berlin and finds elderly Lena, and the 1943 story plays out in a series of flashbacks.
- Gray Rain of Depression: It is pouring rain and an air raid siren is going off, but Klara still sits on the curb outside the detention center, weeping, after finding out that her husband has already been sent to the East. The next morning Klara is found in her apartment, dead from an overdose of pills.
- Happy Flashback: Among all the other flashbacks from 1943 is another, seemingly from not long before the 1933 Nazi takeover, in which young Fabian and Lena are shown in love and deciding to get married.
- Headbutt of Love: Hannah does this to reassure Luis when he starts getting discouraged about Ruth's obvious unwillingness to accept him.
- Historical Domain Character: He isn't named, but the minister at the fancy party Lena attends is obviously Joseph Goebbels. Lena makes a tentative comment about the detentions at the Rosenstrasse but Goebbels isn't interested.
- Malicious Misnaming: An extremely ugly example taken from Real Life. All male Jews in Germany were assigned the middle name "Israel" by the Nazis, and female Jews were assigned the middle name "Sarah". Fabian Fischer is caught short a couple of times when he forgets and fails to identify himself as Fabian Israel Fischer.
- Maligned Mixed Marriage: Basically the whole plot.
- As maligned as it can be with Jews and non-Jews in Nazi Germany. While the law exempts Jews in mixed marriages from deportation, great pressure is brought to bear on Gentiles to divorce Jews. Lena has been forced to give up her musical career (she was a concert pianist, along with her husband who was a violinist) and live in grinding poverty due to her refusal to divorce Fabian.
- In the backstory, before Hitler even came to power, Lena's Old Money father disowned her for marrying a Jew.
- In the framing device, Ruth is strongly opposed to Hannah marrying a non-Jewish man, because of how her father abandoned the family back in the day.
- Noodle Incident: Nothing is mentioned of Fabian's fate after he was released from the detention center along with all the other prisoners. Presumably he survived the war and died of natural causes, as he is clearly deceased at the time of the Framing Device.
- The Place: The Rosenstrasse in Berlin, where almost all the few remaining Jews in the city were taken to after the mass arrests at the end of January 1943.
- Translation Convention: A German-American family, including all the children born and raised in the United States, still speaks only German at home. Justified In-Universe when Ruth says she insisted on her family speaking German at home because the language was the only thing she had left from her mother.
- Voiceover Letter: Voiceover e-mails, sent by Lena to Luis back in America and telling him about what she's doing in Germany.
