User reviews

Anton Sittinger (Walter Sedlmayr) is as blue-collar as a they come: he's a postal-worker in Munich, lives happily with his wife Malwine (Veronika Fitz), care little to none about politics and would much rather read philosophical works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But the Weimar Republic is already in turmoil and slowly (but surely) the ideas of Hitler and his fascist party are creeping into the household and minds of the average citizens. Sittinger hopes that moving into the countryside will keep him and his wife out of the turmoil, but even there the "brown politics" are taking hold. Upon realizing that nothing will stop Hitler and his cronies, Malwina decides to enlist her husband as a member of the NSDAP.

Oskar Maria Grafs original novella, which he saw as satirical observation, was published rather late at the dawn of the Second World War. It was meant as a parable to the commoners and everyday-folk (as one would put it in Germany), who essentially didn't care or were naïve toward the political situation of the post WW1 Weimar-republic but soon would become obedient hanger-ons, mainly due to the fear of being left behind if they'd choose the 'wrong side'. Like Graf once said about his novel: "There are thousands of people like Sittinger in every country".

The late, tragic actor Walter Sedlmayr (he was murdered in 1990) not only plays the German Biedermann perfectly, but in many ways was for long also considered the archetypal representative of the (South)-German middle-class: conservative yet often critical of politics, down to earth, yet full of humour and, if necessary, full of what Bavarians call "Grant", which generally stands for a sense of contempt for anything that would disturb social-harmony. That was until shortly after his murder, when it came to light that Sedlmayr was a gay with a particular fondness for the kinky side of homosexuality.

7/10