Documentaries about the Holocaust have long been an industry unto themselves, as morally and historically conscious filmmakers scramble to round up testimonies from remaining survivors and examine the period from every conceivable angle. Until recently, however, fiction films have been much more sheepish, because the restrictions on how or even whether the Holocaust should be depicted tended to shackle the creative impulse. But now that movies like Schindler's List, The Grey Zone, and The Pianist have treated the reality of it with uncompromising horror, narrative filmmakers are faced with a more familiar, though no less daunting, dilemma: What stories haven't been told? What images haven't yet been seen?
It takes Rosenstrasse director Margarethe von Trotta, once a major figure in the New German Cinema of the '60s and '70s, nearly half of an inexcusable 136 minutes to find that sliver of novelty, which is especially strange considering that the title refers to it. Located in the heart of Berlin, the Rosenstrasse neighborhood housed a Jewish community center that the Nazis turned into a temporary detention site near the end of the war. What made the situation unique were the pockets of resistance: As their Jewish husbands were rounded up and held prisoner, awaiting shipment to a concentration camp, Aryan wives gathered out in the cold for a weeklong vigil, defiantly pleading for their spouses' release. This story possesses inherent emotional urgency, because anyone can imagine how far the wives would go to achieve their objective, even if it means standing down machine-gun positions or, in one laughable scene, flirting with an oily, leering Joseph Goebbels.
Only that's not really the movie von Trotta has made. Instead, Rosenstrasse follows the daughter of a war orphan who was adopted by one of these Aryan wives. Maria Schrader, a force in 1999's Aimée & Jaguar, gets saddled with the thankless role of an educated, New York City-raised Jew who sets off to Berlin to learn more about the history of her reticent mother. Posing as a graduate student, Schrader convinces Doris Schade, the now-90-year-old widow who sheltered Schrader's orphaned mother during the war, to go back to the Titanic (wait, wrong movie) and unearth painful memories.
Played in flashback by Katja Riemann, Schade reminisces about her courtship with a handsome Jewish singer and the simultaneous upheaval of mothering a resourceful young stranger while having her husband detained without notice. Von Trotta lingers for so long on the backstory and framing story that the movie's heart never comes to the fore. Considering the feminist themes in von Trotta's other work, she might have been inclined to explore the unique comradeship among the women of Rosenstrasse, whose collective will produced a stunning glimmer of salvation. Instead, the film lacks precious distinction.