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Why neo-Nazi thriller ‘In the Fade’ doesn’t deserve to win an Oscar

Diane Kruger gives an impressive performance as a bereaved mother in a new thriller tipped for award-season success. But the film is a wrong-headed tribute to the victims of neo-Nazi terrorism, argues editor of The Local, Jörg Luyken. SPOILER ALERT!

Published: 17 January 2018 16:20 CET
Why neo-Nazi thriller 'In the Fade' doesn’t deserve to win an Oscar
Diane Kruger in 'In the Fade.' Photo: DPA/Warner Bros

After winning the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film last week, In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts) is now being tipped for an Oscar. That would mean it joining a select band of just three German films to have ever won an Academy Award: The Tin Drum, Nowhere in Africa and The Lives of Others.

Let's hope the Academy has more sense than the Global Globe jury. Fatih Akin’s new release can’t hold a candle up against those films. The only thing that makes it halfway watchable is a convincing performance by Kruger.

It tells the story of Katja Sekerci (Diane Kruger), whose husband Nuri and young son Rocco are killed when a bomb explodes outside the family business in a Turkish neighbourhood in Hamburg.

When police initially suspect that the murder has something to do with Nuri’s past life as a drug dealer, Kruger slips into a drug-fuelled depression and almost kills herself. She has suspected from the very beginning that neo-Nazis were behind the bombing.

Before too long though, the police see the error in their ways and arrest a young couple who worship Hitler.

In the second part of the film, the couple are up in court and the viewer is left in no doubt that they are guilty of the crime. The judges see it differently though. They acquit the couple, citing among other things Kruger’s character unreliability as a witness due to her alleged drug habit.

Unable to find justice via the German court system, Kruger decides to seek vengeance herself. She tracks the couple down to a Greek seaside resort, where they have moved to escape the attention of the German media. We then see Kruger building a bomb and making one attempt to put it under the couple's caravan before seeing a little chirpy bird flying around the wing mirror and having a change of heart.

Does she realize that not playing god with other people's lives is what marks her out from the Nazis who robbed her of her family? No, she goes back the next day and ends it all in an al-Qaida style suicide mission.

As the camera pans out over the sea, a text appears on screen explaining to the viewer that the film was a tribute to the real life victims of a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Between the years 2000 and 2007, a trio of neo-Nazis who called themselves the NSU shot and killed nine people from immigrant backgrounds as well as a police woman. As far as is known, the victims were picked purely for the fact that they were immigrants.

And this is where In the Fade turns from a ropey revenge drama with little interesting to say into something much worse.

Anyone not acquainted with the real facts of the NSU story could be forgiven for sympathizing with a police force who were distracted by the victim's criminal past.

In real life none of the victims had any criminal associations. Nonetheless, police still assumed that the murders were carried out by an elusive Turkish mafia. Because detectives investigated according to their prejudices rather than the evidence, the neo-Nazis went on killing with impunity for years (they eventually got so frustrated that they sent a video to a TV channel taking credit for the killings).

In fact police only found the killers when they carried out a bank robbery. Even then, two of the three killed themselves before police could arrest them.

The one surviving member of the trio has still to be found guilty for the crimes. Her trial in Munich has plodded on for years – it is now the longest-running criminal case in German legal history.

Despite the fact that some of them have gone 17 years without justice, none of the victims' relatives have ever tried to take the law into their own hands. Nobody has sought retribution against the inept police forces or the extremist circles that the Nazis' extreme ideology was nurtured in. On the contrary, one of the victim's daughters become an award winning author for her book examining what the murders say about Germany.

In the Fade reminded me of a similarly dubious Hollywood movie (ironically the one that made Kruger famous) – Inglourious Basterds, a Tarantino film in which a brigade of Jewish soldiers seek brutal revenge on the Nazis.

Both films, masquerading as tributes to victims of oppression, are little more than revenge fantasies, where the baddies are cardboard cut outs, there to meet a worthy death at the hands of otherwise powerless victims.

This gross oversimplification leaves In the Fade with the basic message: the state is a failure so violence is the logical solution… something not so dissimilar to what you might hear in an underground meeting of the NSU.

SEE ALSO: The German spy services and their dubious ties to the neo-Nazi scene

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Why Germans’ famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

Germans are famous for their love of efficiency - and impatience that comes with it. But this desire for getting things done as quickly as possible can backfire, whether at the supermarket or in national politics, writes Brian Melican.

Published: 24 May 2023 10:38 CEST
OPINION: Why Germans' famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

A story about a new wave of “check-outs for chatting” caught my eye recently. In a country whose no-nonsense, “Move it or lose it, lady!” approach to supermarket till-staffing can reduce the uninitiated to tears, the idea of introducing a slow lane with a cashier who won’t sigh aggressively or bark at you for trying to strike up conversation is somewhere between quietly subversive and positively revolutionary – and got me thinking.

Why is it that German supermarket check-outs are so hectic in the first place?

READ ALSO: German supermarkets fight loneliness with slower check outs for chatting

If you talk to people here about it – other Germans, long-term foreign residents, and keen observers on shorter visits – you’ll hear a few theories.

One is that Germans tend to shop daily on the way home from work, and so place a higher premium on brisk service than countries where a weekly shop is more common; and it is indeed a well-researched fact that German supermarket shopping patterns are higher-frequency than in many comparable countries.

Bavarian supermarket

A sign at a now-famous supermarket in Bavaria advertises a special counter saying “Here you can have a chat”. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Karl-Josef Hildenbrand

Another theory is that, in many parts of the country (such as Bavaria), supermarket opening hours are so short that there is no other way for everyone to get their shopping done than to keep things ticking along at a good old clip.

The most simple (and immediately plausible) explanation, of course, is that supermarkets like to keep both staffing and queuing to a minimum: short-staffing means lower costs, while shorter queues make for fewer abandoned trolleys.

German love of efficiency

Those in the know say that most store chains do indeed set average numbers of articles per minute which their cashiers are required to scan – and that this number is higher at certain discounters notorious for their hard-nosed attitude.

Beyond businesses’ penny-pinching, fast-lane tills are a demonstration of the broader German love of efficiency: after all, customers wouldn’t put up with being given the bum’s rush if there weren’t a cultural premium placed on smooth and speedy operations.

Then again, as many observers not yet blind to the oddness of Germany’s daily ‘Supermarket Sweep’ immediately notice, the race to get purchases over the till at the highest possible rate is wholly counter-productive: once scanned, the items pile up faster than even the best-organised couple can stow away, leaving an embarrassing, sweat-inducing lull – and then, while people in the queue roll their eyes and huff, a race to pay (usually in cash, natch’).

In a way, it’s similar to Germany’s famed autobahns, on which there is theoretically no speed limit and on which some drivers do indeed race ahead – into traffic jams often caused by excessive velocity.

Yes, it is a classic case of more haste, less speed. We think we’re doing something faster, but actually our impatience is proving counterproductive.

German impatience

This is, in my view, the crux of the issue: Germans are a hasty bunch. Indeed, research shows that we have less patience than comparable European populations – especially in retail situations. Yes, impatience is one of our defining national characteristics – and, as I pointed out during last summer’s rail meltdown, it is one of our enduring national tragedies that we are at once impatient and badly organised.

As well as at the tills and on the roads, you can observe German impatience in any queue (which we try to jump) and generally any other situation in which we are expected to wait.

Think back to early 2021, for instance, when the three-month UK-EU vaccine gap caused something approaching a national breakdown here, and the Health Minister was pressured into buying extra doses outside of the European framework.

This infuriated our neighbours and deprived developing countries of much-needed jabs – which, predictably, ended up arriving after the scheduled ones, leaving us with a glut of vaccines which, that very autumn, had to be destroyed.

A health worker prepares a syringe with the Comirnaty Covid-19 vaccine by Biontech-Pfizer. Photo: John MACDOUGALL / AFP

Now, you can see the same phenomenon with heating legislation: frustrated by the slow pace of change, Minister for Energy and the Economy Robert Habeck intended to force property owners to switch their heating systems to low-carbon alternatives within the next few years.

The fact that the supply of said alternatives is nowhere near sufficient – and that there are too few heating engineers to fit them – got lost in the haste…

The positive side of impatience

This example does, however, reveal one strongly positive side of our national impatience: if well- directed, it can create a sense of urgency about tackling thorny issues. Habeck is wrong to force the switch on an arbitrary timescale – but he is right to try and get things moving.

In most advanced economies, buildings are responsible for anything up to 40 percent of carbon emissions and, while major industrials have actually been cutting their CO2 output for decades now, the built environment has hardly seen any real improvements.

Ideally, a sensible compromise will be reached which sets out an ambitious direction of travel – and gets companies to start expanding capacity accordingly, upping output and increasing the number of systems which can be replaced later down the line. Less haste now, more speed later.

The same is true of our defence policy, which – after several directionless decades – is now being remodelled with impressive single-mindedness by a visibly impatient Boris Pistorius.

As for the check-outs for chatting, I’m not sure they’ll catch on. However counterproductive speed at the till may be, I just don’t see a large number of us being happy to sacrifice the illusion of rapidity so that a lonely old biddy can have a chinwag. Not that we are the heartless automatons that makes us sound like: Germany is actually a very chatty country.

It’s just that there’s a time and a place for it: at the weekly farmer’s markets, for instance, or at the bus stop. The latter is the ideal place to get Germans talking, by the way: just start with “About bloody time the bus got here, eh?” So langsam könnte der Bus ja kommen, wie ich finde…

READ ALSO: 7 places where you can actually make small talk with Germans

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