Although Nazi law exempted Jewish spouses from liquidation if they married "Aryan" Germans, in February 1943 the Gestapo rounded them up anyway. When Rosenstrasse begins, sixty-year-old Ruth Weinstein (played by Jutta Lampe) is mourning the recent death of her Jewish husband; her daughter, thirtysomething Hannah (played by Maria Schrader), is not only baffled at Ruth's considerable grief but also her opposition to her impending marriage to Nicaraguan Luis (played by Fedja van Huét) because he is not Jewish. Although Hannah asks her mother to explain why she has such deep-seated memories as well as prejudice against Gentiles, Ruth refuses to do so. However, information supplied by a cousin (played by Carola Regnier) attending the wake prompts Hannah to fly to Berlin in order to discover the circumstances of Ruth's adoption at the age of eight (then played by Svea Lohde) by thirty-three-year-old Lena (played by Katja Riemann), who in turn had been disowned by her aristocratic father for marrying Jewish violinist Fabian Fischer (played by Martin Feifel). The film flashes back and forth between the 1943 roundup of Fabian and other Jewish spouses and Hannah's search for the truth in about 2000 through Hannah's interview of ninetysomething Lena (played by Doris Schade). Directed by Margarethe von Trotta, Rosenstrasse shows how some Germans turned their backs on Jewish friends out of fear, while other Germans were sympathetic to the Jews, especially those who were intensely loyal to their Jewish spouses. The film focuses most attention on the confrontation in the Berlin street named Rosenstrasse, an actual episode where for seven days German women stood outside a building where their husbands were being detained prior to their deportation to concentration camps, demanding their release. The suspense about the fate of the husbands builds gradually, with a surprise outcome that is a partial answer to the continuing debate about how much ordinary Germans cooperated with the Nazis. Because the film brings to light a little known episode in the Nazi era, the Political Film Society has nominated Rosenstrasse for an award as best film exposé of 2004. MH
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