When the acclaimed author and illustrator Judith Kerr died in London in May last year, aged 95, the German filmmaker Caroline Link was in a sound studio with a young actress called Riva Krymalowski, doing post-production on a film based on Kerr’s hugely popular semi-autobiographical novel, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.
“It was so sad,” recalls Link, on the phone from her home in Munich. “Riva had really wanted to meet the woman that she played and she was so excited about showing her the movie. Two weeks later, we could have done that. It was really a question of days.”
The handsomely-mounted coming-of-age drama ran in German cinemas last December and will next week be the opening night gala film of the UK Jewish Film Festival 2020. For Kerr, seeing the film completed would have been the fulfilment of a long-held dream. A version made for German TV in 1978 had been a disappointment, Link claims —“She was not happy with the results at all,” — and “she always wanted [a film] to happen, but she’d never understood why it hadn’t.”
The filmmaker says she told Kerr the issue was that — although the book detailed the story of Judith (Anna in the novel/film) and her family’s flight from Nazi Germany in 1933, after a tip-off that her father Alfred Kerr (fictionalised as Arthur Kemper), a theatre critic, essayist and anti-Hitler intellectual, was about to be arrested, and their subsequent travels through Switzerland and France to Britain, where they eventually settled — “nothing really happens”.
“Oh, a lot of things happen,” the writer demurred. Link agreed: “But for a movie it needs some kind of dramaturgy or some kind of threat,” she said. “You have to be suspenseful.” Since When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit had few of these things, “It wasn’t easy to make a good screenplay. Many people tried and it never worked out.”
At first, Link, who isn’t Jewish, wasn’t even sure she wanted to do the film. She had already written and directed an Oscar-winning adaptation of Stefanie Zwieg’s autobiographical novel about Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, Nowhere in Africa. Thus, when producers approached her the first time about When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, she told them: “I think I did a story like that.”
So it wasn’t a subject she’d wanted to explore further? “No, honestly,” Link admits, laughing. “I really never thought I would do another film about a Jewish family in exile.”
When they asked again, she re-read the novel and now thought, “Okay, if we can manage to make a movie that is so, in a very positive way, unspectacular, and if we can really manage to capture what is so special about the book, that it is not shocking but still deep, then I would like to do it.”
Link was born in 1964. By the time she turned 10 or 11, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit had become “mandatory” reading in German schools. She fell in love with it, in part because of the way it eased children comfortably into the darkest period of her country’s recent past. (Kerr herself believed this was one of the reasons for the book’s success.)
“I remember I was very grateful to Judith Kerr that I didn’t have to be afraid of the story,” explains Link. “It wasn’t cruel on the outside. It wasn’t one of those typical horrible stories about the brutality of the Nazis and about all the horrible things that happened to Jewish people at the time. For children that was almost too much to bear. So when we read the book, it went very deep without shocking.”
She had grown up surrounded by reminders of the war, including a “weird”, in fact traumatised, grandfather, who wore a bandage over one eye. (“As a child I always asked, ‘What is behind that bandage?’ and my grandmother always said, in a pretty tough way, ‘There is nothing behind it. A hole.’”) But while she became used to seeing the results of the war, and feeling them within her family, adults rarely discussed it. “I knew as a child that they had their stories that they didn’t want to share,” she says. “And I remember that did something to us as children.”
Later, aged 15/16, the relatively painless entry to events at the beginning of the Nazi era offered by Kerr was replaced by a tougher approach at her school in Munich.
“We saw all these horrible movies about the liberation of concentration camps that the Americans and Russians shot, with those piles of dead bodies. I remember we ran out of the classroom, throwing up. It was horrible what we saw. The idea then, at least in Bavaria, was to shock the young people and say it can never happen again. We talked about it in a shocking way, and those movies, those documentaries, they really burnt themselves into my mind.”
Link wanted her film of Kerr’s book to mirror the effect the book had had on her. However, she didn’t want to be slavishly faithful, and while the author “made it very clear that she didn’t want her father to be described in a critical way,” Link wanted to complicate the portrayal of him in the novel, using information she gleaned from sources such as Deborah Vietor-Englander’s biography. Alfred Kerr (played by Oliver Masucci in the film) was a formidable force, and could make or break a theatre production or actor’s career with his pen. Some of the writers he upset included Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Bertolt Brecht. Consequently, “he wasn’t only positively remembered here in Germany,” says Link. Indeed, Mann referred to him as “insolent and poisonous.”
In Kerr’s book, on the other hand, he is seen through the loving eyes of the daughter who was forever grateful to him for protecting her from the horror of their situation and from sinking into sadness over the loss of their life in Germany by telling her, says Link, to always “look into the future. Look at what lies ahead. Don’t always look back. That was her memory of her father, and she loved him for that.”
His letters, however, revealed a different picture. In contrast to the optimism his daughter saw, his writings, says Link, described “a time of fear. The biggest worries. A time of humiliation. He experienced the whole journey, the whole exile, as a very, very frustrating experience. I wanted some of that in the movie.”
I tell her that for me, one of the most poignant things in the film is Arthur explaining to his children that they must work hard and be well behaved in order to show the world that they are not like the degraded image of Jews being spread by the Nazis, only for the family to then be bitterly accused of “always having to be the best” by an antisemitic neighbour in Paris, as they happily celebrate some successes. It’s as if whatever Jews do, it will always be turned against them.
Hesitantly, Link reveals that Riva Krymalowski’s parents had to think hard about whether to tell the press in Germany that the brilliant young actress, who does wonders in the film despite never having acted in front of a camera before, was Jewish.
“Still today,” she says, “it is not something that you can just say and is just another piece of information.” They therefore had to consider “what it might do to her in her daily life, in her classroom, in Berlin; whether it’s dangerous or not; whether it’s something people would hold against her because she stands out in the crowd by being very talented and special.”
Although they talked to Link about their doubts over what to do in front of Riva, their daughter never asked why they were concerned. “She just knows,” says the filmmaker. “Maybe it’s better not to say it. Since the day she was born, she started thinking that being Jewish is sometimes wonderful and sometimes dangerous.”
This isn’t paranoia in a family that “has its history with National Socialism”. Link says that when they were making the film, it felt frighteningly like Germany’s past was starting to repeat itself. “The parallels are sometimes pretty breathtaking,” she suggests grimly. “The parallels to the Weimar Republic and the discontent and unhappiness with the present situation makes room for very authoritarian and very right-wing ideas... When we developed the screenplay and talked about the story, we were all aware that our situation is not so far from the atmosphere on the streets of the 30s.”
She was surprised, nonetheless, when Riva’s father informed her that he would never walk through Berlin wearing a kippah. “I think that’s very sad. Is that really something that we have to accept now, that it makes more sense not to wear a kippah when you go downtown?”
Given this backdrop, there couldn’t be a better time for Link’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Like Kerr’s novel, it is a beautiful, intelligent and moving entry to a difficult subject, and will hopefully play its own small part in helping children to understand the cost of hate but also the value of love and kindness. The story continued in two more books, Bombs on Aunt Dainty and A Small Person Far Away, but Link currently has no desire to film either of them.
“I really love to work with children and in those she’s a teenager and a young adult. Pink Rabbit really moved me the most, and was a book that was so personally important to me as a girl.”
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is the opening night gala film of the UK Jewish Film Festival. Festival passes are available from ukjewishfilm.org/festival-pass-2020
