Vielleicht in einem anderen Leben (2010)

The film is set against the historical backdrop of the final days of the Second World War, in April 1945. During one of the death marches of those days, when the SS and the Volkssturm drove thousands of Jews through the collapsing German Reich from the occupied territories in the east toward the concentration camps, SS-Oberscharführer Schöndorf leads a group of initially 20 Jews from Hungary through eastern Austria. Their destination is Mauthausen concentration camp. At the very beginning, he shoots one of the prisoners, pointing his pistol at several of them in turn and firing, in a kind of Russian roulette. In a small village in Lower Austria, the remaining 19 are locked inside a hay barn belonging to the farmers Traudl and Stefan Fasching. Schöndorf takes up quarters at the von Hammersfeld estate while waiting for further orders. The prisoners are guarded by the village gendarme, Hochgatterer. Poldi, the Faschings’ maid, is the first person from the village to go to the shed. She is waiting for her fiancé, an SS man, to return or at least send word, and shows people a photograph, hoping someone might have seen him. There, she witnesses one of the women collapse from hunger and exhaustion. She tells the farmer’s wife, and together they bring bread to the shed, where they watch in horror as the emaciated prisoners pounce on it hungrily. Lou Gandolf, an opera singer who was arrested in Budapest right off the stage, thanks her on behalf of the group. He also comes up with the idea of putting on an operetta, Wiener Blut, for her with the others as a gesture of gratitude—and also to persuade the farmer’s wife to keep providing them with something to eat. She accepts the offer. Gandolf manages to convince most of the group to rehearse with him, though not everyone wants to sing for the “German Nazi woman.” But when Traudl, who feels compassion for them, brings them bread and potato soup, a kind of familiarity gradually develops between the farmer’s wife and the prisoners. Her husband Stefan, however, is firmly against her helping the “damned Jews,” even if it is only with a bowl of soup. He himself returned from military service with a stiff leg and has since been active in the Volkssturm. But above all, he is deeply embittered because their son was killed in the war, a loss that weighs heavily on the farmers’ marriage as well. His hatred of the people locked in his barn thus seems to stem less from Nazi ideology than from bitterness over the war and what it has done to his family. Slowly, though, and amid repeated arguments with Traudl and the group’s fear of his anger, he too begins to see the prisoners as people, not as dehumanized enemies. Eventually, he agrees to let them use the piano hidden under the hay for their performance, and even brings out his accordion, which he had put away after his son’s death because there was no longer room in his house for amusements such as music. Meanwhile, at the village inn, the local Nazi Party leader, Springenschmied, a committed National Socialist, is trying to persuade the other men that they must do something against the “enemies of the people,” with “courage and bullets,” to do their part for “final victory.” Armed with rifles he has given them, they go together to the Faschings’ barn and shoot at it from some distance away. Traudl, who has just brought over a pot of soup, rushes outside and drives the men away with angry scolding. But the group’s oldest member, the pianist, who had already been at the end of his strength, dies. In the following days, news of the end of the war finally reaches the people in the village. They learn that a new provisional Austrian state government has convened in Vienna (April 29, 1945; see History of Austria), and the next day, just as the prisoners are singing Wiener Blut, accompanied by Traudl on the zither and Stefan on the accordion, they hear that Adolf Hitler is dead. Their joy—that the persecution and the imminent threat of being murdered in the concentration camp are over for the Jews, and that the war has ended and they may have a chance to start over for the Faschings—lasts only briefly. Although SS-Oberscharführer Schöndorf has by now shot himself and the state killing machine has consequently collapsed locally, the villagers, led by Springenschmied, barricade the shed’s entrance, pour gasoline around the wooden building, and set it on fire. No one inside manages to escape the flames. The Fasching couple, who were in the barn, also perish (in this detail the film differs from its literary source, in which only the Jews are in the barn). In the film’s final scene, the former maid, now old herself, is seen living on the Faschings’ farm; nothing in the living room has changed since the Faschings’ deaths.