Nina Hoss (left) and Ronald Zehrfeld as a couple divided by the Nazis.
Watching the excellent German drama Phoenix, I thought of a phrase from The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s classic 1951 analysis of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Arendt wrote that the Holocaust was about “the destruction of the individuality” of the Nazis’ victims. We see just that in Phoenix when we first meet Holocaust survivor Nelly (Nina Hoss). The war has recently ended, and she has no face. She has been brutally disfigured. Her head is wrapped in bandages, and all we know about what she looks like under them is that an American GI cringes and apologizes when she shows him.
As the film begins, Nelly is being taken to Berlin by her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), who works with an agency to repatriate Jews. Nelly’s family is dead, and she is due a sizable inheritance. Lene thinks she should start over in Palestine. Working from photographs, a plastic surgeon restores Nelly’s face, and soon she is wandering Berlin’s rubble-strewn streets. She is searching for her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), and she finds him working at a nightclub called Phoenix. He believes she died in the Holocaust, and she doesn’t make her identity known to him. The plot of Phoenix centers on a mystery: During the war, did Johnny betray Nelly in order to buy his freedom?
The noirish scenes of bombed-out Berlin may remind you of The Third Man, in which Vienna is in ruins after World War II. Also reminiscent of The Third Man: a chaotic, semi-lawless environment that is ripe for scams. Johnny devises one when he meets Nelly, whom he takes to be her doppelgänger: She will pretend to be his wife, and they will split Nelly’s inheritance. Nelly plays along as Johnny gives her cinema’s most chilling makeover since Vertigo.
Shattering and intimate, Phoenix examines the aftermath of one of history’s most hideous crimes. Hoss and Zehrfeld do wonderful work, and Phoenix reunites them with director and co-writer Christian Petzold; they starred in his superb 2012 drama Barbara, set in 1980s East Germany. In particular, Hoss is unforgettable as Nelly, whose despair is painful to watch. This is a marvelously understated performance — Nelly tells only one story of her experience in the camps, and it is more than enough.