User reviews

This program was presented as an "extraordinary real-life story that is more miraculous than any fiction" and I only happened to start to watch it on television. I still however expected the usual Nazi pogrom story, but this time the program offered something totally different. The main character of the film, Marcel, was a Polish Jew who grew in Germany during the inter-war era. Marcel loved German literature and culture but despite this he had to suffer from persecution. Still he believed that not every German is an evil Nazi and he never lost his faith in the more civilized Germany. The big problem in his life was that he never really seemed to find his place, for the Nazis he was a Jew, for the Poles he was an "admirer of Hitler's language" and for the Soviets he was an SS collaborator because he had worked as an interpreter. The movie ends when Marcel moves to the West Germany and eventually finds his place as a celebrated literature critic.

Description of an existence - page of cruel history. Facts and words. And a cultural myth. It is not only adaptation of biography. Marcel Ranicki may be everyone. A silhouette in the autumn of a century who fight for an ideal.So, no masterpiece, nothing spectacular. But a very important occasion to discover the world more that shadows collection. A film about roots of sense. Steps of exception, behind ordinary rules or soft lies. Good acting and sensitive solutions to describe the reality of politics and answers of a man for who culture is real religion. Sad and melancholic, delicate and precise, , base of a public image in German literary life, this movie must be good occasion to meditate at the soul of things.