Original subtitles

Can we tell the story of time?

Of time itself, in its essence?

No, we cannot. It would be futile...

A story with the words: "And so time passed.

"Time followed its course," and so on.

No one in his right mind would try a narrative.

It would be rather like attempting to hold...

a single note or a chord for an hour,

and trying to pass that off as music.

Is anyone here?

It's not easy, sir.

Now the cold war is over, being American is pointless.

He left over ten years ago.

Did you hear that?

See you later.

When philosophy paints a picture of grey on grey,

life fades.

Gray doesn't make it younger.

It's barely discernible.

See you later.

Happy non-birthday.

First variation: THE LAST SPY

Hey!

I had met Elten again,

on my return from the last Leipzig Festival.

He was writing on German cinema again,

and he asked me for my comments, because of...

our days together at the embassy.

I had some money left, so I agreed.

But when he mentioned the man I'd forgotten...

since the conference in Casablanca,

I didn't believe him.

The Last Spy. It sounded like a pulp novel.

BUT GERMANY OH DEAR! GERMANY

purchase TVs, purchase steel,

purchase cars, purchase wheels...

Mr Leibnitz...

Yes?

What for?

Destroy...

We're looking for Mr Witrovsky.

We were told he worked here.

He's no longer here.

He left three years ago.

I'm on my own.

Remember...

Solitude is one and one alone.

By its very nature, it's a great burden to bear.

Solitude is one.

By its very nature, it's a great burden to bear.

- Mr Witrovsky! - What do you want'?

Mr Graf! He's here. It's him.

- Madam needs you. - I need 20 marks.

Yes, I know.

Always paying, always suffering.

Not bad, Mr Caution.

Lemmy Caution.

Any good news?

Well, I have.

You've beaten Sleeping Beauty's record.

I beg your pardon. My name is Konrad Witrovsky.

Sure...

Count Sellen.

Count Sellen. Intelligence Service.

A thousand pardons.

Allied Headquarters lost your file.

I found your name among my father's papers.

Just think of it. Thirty years old.

The age of reason, my friend.

We've seen worse. It's long and it's short.

Poison Ivy Kid.

That's right.

The Berlin Wall is long and short.

You have to admit, Marx did triumph.

How's that?

When an idea is born among masses,

it becomes a material force.

That's one way of looking at it.

Anyway...

That's all over.

What now?

O, THE PAIN... HAS MY LIFE BEEN A DREAM?

- What now? - As you like it.

No one's thinking of you.

Stay with those ladies.

Who gives a damn about them?

Go back to the West.

What about you?

I'm back at the radio, doing translations.

May we never meet again.

What happened to her?

- What happened to her? - Enough!

Mimi...

Bring me lunch.

When a person falls in love his heart soars like a dove...

It doesn't really matter why, but the sun sparkles in the sky.

For philosophy to make its stamp on culture,

there must have first occurred a break with the real world.

Philosophy then reconciles the corruption...

created by thought.

This reconciliation takes place in an ideal world,

in the world of the spirit into which everyone flees...

when the earthly would no longer satisfy him.

So philosophy...

reconciles the corruption created by thought.

- Tea, Siegfried? - Yes. Not too strong.

Thanks.

This takes place within the realm of the mind...

when the real world no longer satisfies us.

Philosophy begins by destruction in the real world.

It's thus for all people, so to speak.

Philosophy only comes to the surface...

when life in society no longer satisfies us.

And it ceases to interest the masses...

when citizens can no longer take part...

in the running of the state.

"Men make history by pursuing their interests.

They are at the same time the tools and the means...

of achieving something higher and more vast...

that they are not aware of, but perceive unconsciously."

But... In French we would use "mais".

Something higher and more vast...

but which they perceive unconsciously.

Reasons trick...

is to use non-reason to get ahead in the world.

Reasons trick is to use non-reason...

I think "folly" would be better...

in order to manifest itself in the world.

History is beyond good and evil.

That's where I'm up to.

History is beyond good and evil,

and the things of everyday life.

Bliss is not to be found in world history.

Periods of happiness are only its blank pages.

Is not the narrator in an untenable situation,

even more difficult and lonely now,

than it was previously?

A STORY OF SOLITUDE I think he is.

Yet he must be there, absent and present,

oscillating between two uncertain truths,

that of the document and that of the fiction.

Your piece of history, only 10 pfennig.

Pieces of Berlin Wall, belts, books, flags,

1939 - 1945 Gestapo Prison

Antifascists were inhumanly tortured in this inferno.

That's from Oranienburg.

This is from Dachau,

and I found this in the Dora camp.

That's where they made the V1 's.

That book belongs to me.

I'm Dora,

WOE IS ME

but that was yesterday.

WHERE HAVE THE YEARS GONE?

Yesterday my name was Dora.

Today I'm already Lotte Kestner.

And I have to work with Mr. Goethe.

Well, are you coming?

Second variation CHARLOTTE IN WEIMAR

Come, ladies and gentlemen.

Take your pick.

This is where Friedrich Schiller wrote "The Robbers".

"The Robbers."

It's always been part of my life.

Liszt tried teaching Lola Montez to play the piano here.

Without much success, however.

It's Martine Carole's fault.

DO NOT HARM YOURSELF WE ARE STILL HERE

Lucas Cranach the Elder lived here from 1552 to 1553.

It was a great day for Weimar when the Red Army...

took over the city.

Come now.

Let's go.

I'M A POET AND CAN'T HELP IT The soldiers salute the artists.

Endless dreams in the silence,

to which we poets submit as we do to superstitions...

EVERYTHING TO ME IS RAPTURE AND TORTURE

in accordance with our souls.

One thing was clear for Goethe.

Different shades of darkness can never produce light.

ALAS, TWO SOULS LIVE WITHIN MY BREAST

One thing was clear for Goethe.

White is not an intermediate colour...

between other colours.

Eternal silence...

and these countless volumes terrify me.

A frightening image.

Where are you, Faust? I heard your voice.

It came to me with all its force.

Yes.

It's me.

I am Faust.

We are alike.

We are alike.

Regardez, Monsieur Kafka est dams la jardin avec une amie

Look, Franz has come to see us.

Everyone says it's Marianne Kirchner. That isn't so.

It too is me. The day before yesterday.

Tomorrow I shall be...

Greta, Frieada, Anna, Lola,

Claudia, Marushka, Alexandra, Vivette,

Gisele... Enough.

GIRLS WITHOUT UNIFORMS

Anna, Magdalena.

What about you, Delphine...

Do you hold anything against Germany?

I accuse the East's leaders...

of having spent their life in Dachau.

And the West's leaders of saying Mass as if...

they were at the market.

The Mass...

I also accuse Germany...

of accusing everyone else of failure.

It is difficult to blame a people...

for deviating in the ways...

that God has set out for them.

The ways God set out for them.

Beneath these sad appearances I feel nothing.

Like artificial four-leaf clovers...

TOWARDS SPEECH

which you place on hotel breakfast tables.

Germany during the war...

TOWARDS SPEECH

There is only one Germany.

Hate the work for five years...

and you will reign over souls...

fecundated by poetry and music.

Oh, Germany!

Rosy down, I hear it sing,

My early death you shall bring.

Soon the trumpets will resound,

and I'll be buried in the ground.

DEATHS DEATH

Between German peace and German war...

- Which one's better, love or money? - Both.

There is not...

as between French peace and French war,

a difference of essence but only of degree.

War changes neither our souls nor our customs.

From 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945,

German wives were not that much more unfaithful.

He said not to see or love you any more.

- Easily said... - The emperor...

And stamp collectors kept at it during air raids.

Passion is an integral part of the German psyche,

MORE SO than reason.

DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION

Grimmelshausen Adventurons Simplicissimus

This God of Nature speaks with us,

educates us and gives himself to us.

And if we make our beloved into such a divinity,

DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION

then this is putting religion into practice.

THE END OF GERMANY

THE DRAGONS

IN OUR LIVES

Third Variation ALL DRAGONS IN OUR LIVES

The dragons in our lives...

are only princesses who are waiting...

to see us become handsome and brave.

- Hello, baby. Here I am. - It's you!

- I dropped by for a drink. - You'll regret your prank.

- Why are you here? - I followed your perfume.

Do you think I'm stupid?

Are you sure you came to tell me that?

Ask him.

Maybe all the dragons in our lives are princesses,

who are waiting to see us become handsome and brave.

All the terrifying things...

are perhaps things we can't change,

that are waiting to be changed.

FROM THE DEPTHS I CALLED

Suddenly I thought it was Mozart's birthday.

ROADS

THAT LEAD...

NOWHERE

TOPOGRAPHY OF TERROR

Senses or feelings?

I don't know. Feelings of anger.

Despair, I think.

In the eyes of the West...

The senses...

Those faithful servants of the passions.

Winter was on its way.

My research on the effect of Fascism on young English...

writers was coming to an end.

Like my friend Christopher Isherwood,

I also decided to say goodbye to Berlin.

But Elten asked me to stay on.

His work wasn't progressing.

In fact he forgot to tell me...

WOE IS ME MY LIFE HAS BEEN BUT A DREAM

he was in love with the woman I'd met at the paper, by chance.

And again, by chance, three days later...

on Tiergarten Bridge...

where they disposed of Rosa Luxemburgs body.

She muttered something...

To lose oneself or to become detached.

I kept listening. It's my job.

Losing yourself literally means to become detached.

Se perdre, sich verlieren...

A LONELY STORY

means to become detached. Become detached...

And quietly escape.

I saw them three weeks later,

in the underground.

We speak, and speak about language.

That we're speaking about language is self-evident.

Is it right to translate "Sprache" by "word"?

No.

Why say music only exists in lifts and supermarkets?

Because music has been murdered.

Yes, the Americans.

It was a drunken American soldier who killed Webern.

I didn't know that.

The US never understood the war, or took part in it.

At best, their fight was not the state's fight,

THE END OF GERMANY

nor on the same battleground.

The US can only imagine a civil war.

It's always themselves and their own defects,

personified by the enemy, that they combat in all wars.

For them, war is a moral dilemma.

When they were English, they fought the English.

When they became Americans, they fought Americans.

Once sufficiently influenced by the Germans,

morally and culturally,

they attacked the Germans.

Look, a factory church.

The first American to take a prisoner in 1917 was Meyer.

The prisoner's name was also Meyer.

A sombre, serious current, flowing not from life...

but from mere existence.

To think of their reality as they saw it...

made your heart sink.

But of all who passed by,

none seemed so pitiful in her unthinking patience...

as the girl standing in front of me.

None was harder to understand.

Who am I?

LONG GOODBYE

The lucky ones...

That's what I call anyone who's not over 25...

because they don't know they're lucky.

At border crossings,

they don't hear people multiply the contents...

of their wallet by hundreds or thousands,

as if they were children.

When they see someone from a famine-stricken area,

they don't think,

"This person has fought a child for food."

"This person has fought a child for food."

THE SOLITUDE OF HISTORY

So the day I see a world with its strength restored...

links the words "Russia" and "Joy",

like fastening a belt, I will gladly die.

THE PERFECT

UNION

Don't forget, there's a difference between narrative and music.

OF SEVERAL VOICES

A piece entitled "Five Minute Waltz" lasts five minutes.

PR EVENTS

This is its sole relationship to time.

IN THE LONG RUN

But the story of a five-minute event...

could be stretched a thousand times...

if those five minutes were filled with exceptional awareness.

Or it may seem very short...

although it's much longer than the imaginary duration.

THE MOVEMENT OF ONE

The East has understood this, but not the West.

TOWARDS THE OTHER

Hello, Mr. Courbet.

Comrade... Which way is the West, please?

ART OF THE FUGUE During this fugue...

where the name of Bach appears contrapuntally,

is when the composer died.

But Dimitri, I'm working.

She said, "Tomorrow my angel,"

"over there, beyond the horizon..."

He said, "Tomorrow my angel,"

"over there, beyond the horizon,"

"under the tree laden with oranges,"

"our lips will meet..."

He's saying goodbye, Miss.

Say something, Miss.

Do something.

Dimity’s last sonata.

Opus 147.

O WOE IS ME! WHERE HAVE THE YEARS GONE?

Comrade, which way is the West, please?

I don't understand, comrade.

Farewell, space of all spaces.

For the last time, my gaze contemplates...

Fourth Variation A RUSSIAN SMILE

the reflection of your lively grace and your splendid pride.

A TIME FOR CONTEMPT

There is a whisper from every continent...

rising up against the Soviet Union.

I didn't feel comfortable in that atmosphere.

The Komintern had changed since 1923.

As for me, I was no longer the young man...

who had charged at police blockages...

and fought behind the barricades...

with a rifle at the ready.

For me, the little Fuhrer was more important...

than Josef Stalin and the revolution.

But Kurt is still alive.

I only had a little work to do.

He rummages in garbage bins looking for bottles.

"Three times a week..."

"I used to meet a courier from the Hamburg Gestapo."

German Navy ships, currently near Crete,

will help search for mines in the Persian Gulf.

"He gave me small doses of false information..."

about European industry and defence...

under surveillance by the Soviet secret police.

Jan Valtin, Without Fatherland or Frontier

"His information was to satisfy the Gestapo..."

"without compromising Soviet interests."

"In pursuing their own interests, men make history."

"At the same time, they are the tools and the means..."

"for something higher and greater without realising it."

"But they sense it subconsciously."

A LONELY STORY

What's amazing is that in the German language...

you find, more than any other,

phrases to express deception.

And they mostly have triumphant overtones.

Maybe because the language is considered difficult.

This time it really was Dora.

The first dream indicated her detachment from her beloved,

and her return to her father,

WHERE IT WAS THERE I SHALL BE

that is, her flight from life, into illness.

This second dream actually announced...

that she would break away from her father,

and be won over again to life.

HOPE

How degenerate a people's tastes must be,

bowing to dignitaries with their pompous display.

DECLINE

ON THE MARCH

They confuse plain and bad.

They confuse plain and bad.

- Nietzsche. - No, Madame de Stael.

All these painters only served the state.

GERMANY YEAR ZERO

They were hypocrites. They only painted...

what they were told to.

Consider Velasquez. Nothing but official art.

Giotto. Purely official art.

- Always. - What about this?

IF I CAN'T MOVE HEAVEN I WILL SHAKE HELL

Like the awesome Durer",

precursor and predecessor of Nazism,

who put nature on his canvas...

and killed it.

And this?

I'd like to give history back to those who have none.

A LONELY STORY

- Germany can never go under. - Another way of seeing Germany.

MAGIC LANTERN

Remember Ernst von Salomon?

Come at midnight. Come at one.

The old man and old woman are asleep. I sleep alone.

There's a knock at the door. Answer it.

The old man and the old woman think it's the wind.

A DEFA DOCUMENTARY

- I have to be off. - And your spy?

He rang to ask me to help him across the Wall.

I don't understand.

There's not a single bit left.

Is the West this way or that way?

I don't understand.

THE LAST DEFA DOCO

...of the buildings, the stage sets, the team...

- Hey, it's Marie-Louise! - of the photographers...

Go home!

What's this about?

Don't speak thus of Napoleon's drummer boy...

when they carried their country on the soles of their shoes.

The West, for God's sake!

I still feel today a nostalgia for Babelsberg.

I just hope...

that you'll have the success that you deserve.

May we meet again. I'll be thinking of you.

THE VERY LAST DEFA DOCO

I always wondered whether, in the afterlife,

there is still music.

Yes, Mr Caution. There's afterlife music.

WHERE IT WAS I SHALL BE

They will say...

When the Democratic Republic crushed the poor...

Fifth Variation THE NON-WAILING WALL

They won't say it.

They'll say...

"Just before the great wars broke out..."

They won't say, "When women went into the bedroom."

They'll say, "When great powers united against the poor."

In my opinion, sir,

Brecht cannot be staged like that.

Yes, I'm afraid it's over that way,

the West.

Goodbye, Mr Caution.

Woe is me.

Where can...

flowers be found...

in winter?

THE DECLINE OF THE WESTERN WORLD

As soon as I crossed the border,

I met the ghosts.

O my country, is it really true?

This is how I imagined you for so long.

A happy land. Magical, stunning...

O beloved country, where can you be?

THE SOLITUDE OF HISTORY

Sixth Variation DECLINE OF THE WEST

THE END OF GERMANY

The shops are full of incredible rubbish.

But what you really need can't be found any more.

ON WEEPING AND LAMENTING

Something the girl said...

about the light that is always turned on...

made me think of another girl in '43...

What's it, Sophie?

- What's it, Sophie? - This way the light stays on.

She was decapitated with an axe.

She and her brother,

because they'd put up posters all over Munich,

all saying the same thing.

"Hans and Sophie Scholl."

"The dream of the state is to be alone."

"The dream of individuals is to be together."

CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

The ghosts had vanished...

and I hadn't found the Poison Ivy Kid,

nor Letitia de Malreich,

nor the heiress of the Begum millions.

Even Philips globes...

could no longer light the sweets of Karl Grune...

with the brilliance of the lights of Karlheim.

With the brilliance of the lights of Karlheim.

A STORY OF SOLITUDE

And yet the humblest of men was still doing his duty.

No less titanic is the assault of money...

against spiritual power.

A desperate struggle is now underway...

on the soil of the cities of the world,

where money can arise victorious.

A STATE AND ITS VARIATIONS

But, since money is a way of thinking, it destroys...

itself once it has thought economics through to the end.

Then it invents Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

BLEED THEM DRY

And so begins the final struggle.

The struggle between money and blood.

My suitcase, please.

Miss!

Miss!

Put this under the mattress. It's for my feet.

Miss!

THE ORIGIN AND PLACE OF THE GERMANS

So you've chosen freedom too.

Work makes you free.

You don't need to do the room.

Somebody forgot this.

No, sir. It's the Bible. There's one in every room.

Goodbye.

Bastards!