Cate Shortland's 'Lore': Germany, year zero

"Germany doesn't exist." That's the blunt observation of a character in the Australian director Cate Shortland's Lore, a film set in what Germans describe as their "Year Zero," 1945, when Hitler's Third Reich abruptly dissolved and what had been Germany suddenly became the four military zones of its occupying American, British, French and Russian armies.

Germans themselves have been reluctant to deal with this period, as they have with the whole Nazi and reconstruction period in general. Perhaps no society has ever faced a more wrenching reversal— world conquerors one moment, a subject population the next.

Of course, the Germans had ample opportunity to realize that their war wasn't going well, as their cities were pounded to rubble by Allied aerial bombardment, a fact that even the most assiduous government propaganda couldn't conceal. But the myth of ultimate victory remained intact for many if not most Germans until the last moment: the Master Race couldn't lose to its inferiors.

Two narratives, no questions

Postwar German amnesia assumed two different forms. In what became West Germany, the "economic miracle" of industrial recovery, sanitized by a symbolic denazification and a formally democratic government, enabled Germans to bury the immediate past with a minimum of fuss. In East Germany, Germans were rebaptized as proletarians rebuilding their homeland as part of international socialism. No questions asked there, either— even fewer than in the West.

Meanwhile, the functional reality was a superpower rivalry with both Germanys as the potential flashpoint of a thermonuclear showdown. History didn't pause for reflection.

A film about life in postwar Berlin— Germany Year Zero— actually was made in 1948, but by an Italian: the director Roberto Rossellini. Like Lore, it was the work of a foreign director (although partly produced with German financing). Both films concern teenaged protagonists who rebel against their parents: in Germany Year Zero, a 13-year-old boy who poisons his ailing father, and in Lore a 14-year-old girl— "Lore" being short for Hannelore—who must fend for herself with four younger siblings when her parents desert them.

Both films, then, examine members of the younger, post-Nazi generation— old enough to inherit the sins of their fathers, but too young to have participated in them.

Nazi royalty

The resemblance between the two films pretty much ends there, though. Rossellini's film, made in postwar Berlin itself, opens with a long tracking shot of the city's ruins that shows the war's utter devastation. Lore, in contrast, begins in the peaceful Black Forest countryside and ends in a no less idyllic-looking Baltic landscape, with the untouched and seemingly well-provendered mansion where Lore's grandmother lives.

Lore, in short, belongs to Nazi royalty— and also, on her mother's side at least, to the German nobility that cast its lot with Hitler. We have a hint of this affinity at the beginning. Lore's father, an SS officer, is seen burning piles of documents as he prepares to abandon the family residence under the scornful eye of his wife, who is left with the children. She, too, however, is forced to give herself up after being discovered— and, as it appears, raped. Lore is left with a little money, some jewelry, and an address 500 miles to the north.

The rest of Lore is essentially a survivalist road movie. Whether Lore knows it or not, the last possession she can barter is herself, and at the film's climactic moment she seems prepared to do so.

Aryan meets Jew

Along the way, she meets Thomas, a young refugee whose Jewish identity card is, ironically, a passport to safety in a world turned upside down. Thomas clearly desires Lore, but abstains from her for reasons that remain unclear. Perhaps she is the Aryan princess he fears to touch; perhaps he has been left maimed or impotent; perhaps he's simply a gentleman?

Lore's response to Thomas is straightforward: He is a Jew, and therefore to be despised. Her body, however, sends her different signals— a part of the general confusion in which she finds herself.

Adam Arkapaw's camera stays close to Lore, interpreting the world from her viewpoint. The long shots pan across the verdant, untouched countryside; only once, in a ruined bridge, does the landscape suggest the least perturbation. It's the human world that's come awry, but even the occasional corpse Lore encounters seems almost discreet.

What's lacking in this postwar world is purpose and order: The trains aren't running, the mail's undelivered, food's in short supply. Above all, there's no place to stay for long— only the road.

Hitler's ego ideal

Who, then, is Lore, and— equally to the point— what is she becoming?

On one level, she's a thoroughly indoctrinated Nazi, as far as her teenage years will hold what she's been taught. On the other, she's a child cast suddenly into an adult role with nothing but her instincts to guide her. What lies in wait for her is sin, the dividing line between childhood and maturity, and when she falls into it, she also learns her first adult lesson: that often sin goes unpunished.

The Lore we meet is still a daddy's girl, but as her sexuality evolves she moves away from her father's image and, thrust into a maternal role, identifies with her mother. At the same time, she is led by the loss of the supreme ego ideal, Hitler himself, to question the larger authority that has framed her life.

Whether her final, defining act of rebellion is dramatically justified must be left to the viewer to judge; what sort of person she will become remains unresolved. The one clear thing is that she will survive.

Forest of demons

Saskia Rosendahl, in only her second screen role, is extraordinary as Lore, and Shortland also elicits very good performances from the children. Kai Molina as the enigmatic Thomas is a study in passive aggression, and Ursina Lardi, in the abbreviated role of Lore's mother, suggests a character whose story would be no less interesting than her daughter's to explore. That, though, would have been another film.

Lore suffers from gaps in plot and motivation, some of them no doubt deliberate. It's something of a Grimm's fairy tale— the young girl making her way through a demon-haunted forest— and the witch who waits at the end makes for a tad too pat an ending. But it's a film that stays with you, and its loose ends are partly our own.

No 12-year period in German history has been more studied than that between 1933 and 1945; none still draws a bigger blank than the years that came immediately after. Lore is essentially a film about shattered and reconstituted identity. Modern Germany is a study in the very same thing.