by Elizabeth Ward
In: Maximilian Schell edited by Hans-Peter Reichmann and Isabelle Louise Bastian
DFF—Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, 2019
ISBN 978-3-88799-110-4
At a time when the actors who enjoyed international careers were overwhelmingly American actors starring in films in Europe, Maximilian Schell—an Austrian-born, Swiss-educated actor who began his career in the Federal Republic—was one of the few actors of his generation able to achieve critical and popular success in both the United States and Europe. What is particularly striking about Schell’s career in the United States, however, is the fact that he was repeatedly cast in two types of role which, if not acting in contradiction, then certainly create a tension: in American film, Maximilian Schell almost exclusively played the roles of a National Socialist persecutor or of a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
The film that marked the emergence of Schell’s dual identity in American film was Arthur Hiller’s 1975 film, The Man in the Glass Booth, in which he played both a Jewish Holocaust survivor and a National Socialist persecutor. The trope of mistaken identity has been a recurring theme in Holocaust film. Il Generale della Rovere (IT/ FR 1959, dir. Roberto Rossellini), Mr. Klein (FR 1976, dir. Joseph Losey), Stielke, Heinz, Fünfzehn… (GDR 1987, dir. Michael Kann), Hitlerjunge Salomon (DE 1990, dir. Agnieszka Holland) all feature characters who conceal their ›true‹ identity . The nature of this deliberate or accidental case of mistaken identity overwhelmingly falls into one of two categories. On the one hand, films featuring characters who hide their Jewish identity are often comedies that seek to ridicule the concept of “racial science” through the trope of a blonde Jewish boy who is mistaken to be a member of the Hitler Youth. On the other hand, films in which non-Jewish characters assume Jewish identities are frequently underpinned by what Annette Insdorf has termed the »suicidal impulse« whereby a character undergoes a psychological transformation and comes to identify as a Jewish victim with fatal consequences. The Man in the Glass Booth subverts both of these models. The film’s first twist appears to signal that the protagonist has been hiding his National Socialist identity, only for the second plot twist to lead the audience to believe that this double subterfuge was a desire to draw punishment on himself—a “suicidal impulse”.
Visit the publisher’s website (deutsch / english) for more information.
This chapter is also available in German as “Leinwandidentitäten. The Man in the Glass Booth“.
In: Maximilian Schell Hg. von Hans-Peter Reichmann and Isabelle Louise Bastian
ISBN 978-3-88799-105-0
A summary of the content is also available on the Deutsches Filminstitut und Filmmuseum blog
Elizabeth Ward 