Abstract
Directed by Josef von Baky, Der Ruf (1948) was based on a screenplay written by Fritz Kortner, a German-Jewish actor, who had always struggled with the identity designators of Germanness and Jewishness. The film, which was released in America as The Last Illusion, is driven by the psychological tension inherent in the discourse of German-Jewish coexistence. It underscores the pull between a Jewish heritage that had, before Hitler, been in danger of fading into the wash of modernity and a German process of identification that had simultaneously become stronger. The Shoah changed this discourse irrevocably. Thus, more than anything else, The Last Illusion presents a story of a man’s attempt to create an image of himself as a German and a Jew in post-Holocaust (West) Germany. As the first cinematic intervention in the new and volatile postwar German-Jewish interaction, The Last Illusion set up the terms of discussion with which subsequent German filmmaking will necessarily have to contend.
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Notes
For information about Kortner’s life, see his autobiography, Aller Tage Abend (Munich: Kindler, 1959) and the two biographies, Klaus Völker, Fritz Kortnen Schauspieler und Regisseur (Berlin: Hentrich, 1993);
and Peter Schütze, Fritz Kortner (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1994).
Quoted in Matthias Brand, Fritz Kortner in der Weimarer Republik: Annäherungsversuche und die Entwicklung eines jüdischen Schauspielers in Deutschland (Rheinfelden: Schäuble, 1981), 187.
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© 2002 Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes
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Shandley, R. (2002). Fritz Kortner’s Last Illusion. In: Morris, L., Zipes, J. (eds) Unlikely History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10928-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10928-5_12
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