The Count and the Comrade

Film
Monday, March 9th 2009, 7:00pm
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 100, Los Angeles, CA 90036
German with english subtitles
Info: +1 323 5253388

Documentary by Ilona Ziok, 72 min., D 2009, Music: Manuel Göttsching, Workers’ songs: Hans Eisler, Bertold Brecht, Paul Dessau...
United in their resistance to Hitler, two seemingly incompatible men illuminate a turbulent era of German history: Count Carl-Hans von Hardenberg, one of the rebellious officers behind “Operation Valkyrie”, and the fervent communist Fritz Perlitz.

With the release of “Valkyrie”, a worldwide audience is learning more about the failed July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. But the German army officers around Stauffenberg were not the only group of Germans to offer up resistance.

“The Count and the Comrade” portrays two men from two opposed groups: The Prussian monarchist Count Carl-Hans von Hardenberg and the anti-fascist Fritz Perlitz.
Two men separated by class and wealth but united in their stance against the evil of Nazism, the aristocratic landowner and the proletarian worker are both fighting for a better Germany, albeit with contrary visions of its future.
When both find themselves imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, they encounter each other as human beings, two minds from diametrically opposed ends of the social spectrum meet, resulting in an extraordinary dialogue and an unlikely friendship.

Liberated in 1945, Perlitz and Hardenberg re-emerge on opposite sides of the new political divide.
Whereas Perlitz is appointed a First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), with the mandate to build a socialist system in his district of the GDR—which happens to include the Hardenberg estate—, and is involved in the (spectacular) renaming of Neuhardenberg into Marxwalde, Hardenberg is expropriated and forced to emigrate to West Germany.
While Hardenberg is in the West, dreaming of his home, it seems as though Perlitz is the winner in this ideological altercation. In 1989, the tables turn once again.

The filmmaker Ilona Ziok will be present and available for a Q&A after the screening.