You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (October 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the German article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Professor Mamlock (1961)]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Professor Mamlock (1961)}} to the talk page.
Professor Mamlock, a respected Jewish surgeon, is certain that the Weimar Republic will survive the political crisis of the early 1930s. He disapproves of his son, Rolf, a communist activist who openly opposes the Nazis. When Hitler rises to power, Mamlock loses his work and his dignity. Realizing the mistake he made by being politically apathetic, Mamlock commits suicide. The film ends with his dead face blending away from the screen, on which appears the inscription: "there is no greater crime than not wanting to fight when fight one must." (Es gibt kein größeres Verbrechen, als nicht kämpfen zu wollen, wenn man kämpfen muss)
The film was adapted from the play Professor Mamlock, written by the director's father Friedrich Wolf during 1933, when he was in exile in France. It featured most of the cast that participated in the 1959 Kammerspiele staging of the play.[1]
When Wolf was asked why he decided to make another film adaptation of the play - the first was done in 1938 - he answered: "our objective was not the persecution of Jews... But the destiny of a liberal intellectual, who is forsaken by his class. This individual no longer believes in the middle class, and yet he does not find his way to the working class. His only escape becomes suicide".[2]
Daniela Berghahn considered the film as "paradigmatic" to DEFA's treatment of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis: by contrasting the apolitical, lethargic Mamlock to his son, Rolf, the passionate communist and resistance fighter, Wolf condemned the professor for failing to join the resistance and "utterly scandalously... Made him accountable for his own fate."[6] Anthony S. Coulson analyzed the picture as a belated metamorphosis of the title character, who ceases denying reality only when all is lost: "Mamlock's transformation is presented as a renunciation of his previous self... But that insight comes too late to save him and his kind... His fate is attributed to his failure to fight... Wolf's film reaffirms the political pathos of his father's play."[7]
