Two Lives (Zwei Leben)
A Norwegian family unravels when a complex piece of German history surfaces in their midst in Two Lives (Zwei Leben), writer-director Georg Maas' well-acted and rather solemn drama that’s loosely based on the novel by Hannelore Hippe.
This year’s foreign-language Oscar submission from Germany casts Norwegian legend Liv Ullmann and German star Juliane Koehler (from 2002 foreign-language Oscar winner Nowhere in Africa) as a mother and daughter in Norway whose relationship and extended family are shaken to the core by revelations brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though indirectly a film that deals with WWII and its extended aftermath — which, in a terrible twist, provided fertile soil for the Stasi secret police of newly created East Germany — this is not a Holocaust film but rather a human drama about past secrets and identity that should appeal to an older and quite mainstream audience.
Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Nazi Lebensborn program to breed an Aryan “master race” produced thousands of children, many of them procreated by members of the German SS in casual encounters with blond, blue-eyed women deemed racially pure. Because Norwegians, with their Viking ancestors, were thought to be an especially hardy breed, they were considered ideal specimens. Once these women gave birth in occupied Norway, their children were often taken from them and reared in special orphanages in Germany. After World War II, the taint of Nazism caused the mothers and the Lebensborn children remaining in Norway to face harsh discrimination.
Starting in the 1960s, the Stasi, the East German secret police, recruited many of the grown-up progeny in East Germany as spies, sending them to Norway to be reunited with unsuspecting families. In some cases, the Stasi appropriated the identities of Lebensborn children and conferred them on East Germans trained in espionage before placing them with Norwegian families. Since many documents related to the program were destroyed, few records existed to attest to their identities as Lebensborn children.
“Two Lives” is an absorbing, well-acted, moderately suspenseful mystery, although its time line of events is fuzzy to the point of impenetrability. If she were played a different way, Katrine would be an unsympathetic, diabolical monster. But the film portrays her as a victim of history who is increasingly desperate at the prospect of losing a family to which she feels she belongs.
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