"When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit": Escape as a Family Endurance Test

The Nazis - these are a few dull-cheeked boys from the so-called Hitler Youth. In the film "When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit", the girl Anna did not see any more of the Nazi horrors. It is February 1933, the 11-year-old Anna lives with her journalist father and her mother, who works as a composer, in a Berlin upper-class villa and, like her brother Max, is kindly looked after by a housekeeper, who is played by the ever-warming actress Ursula Werner.

The shock is great when the family (without a housekeeper) has to flee Berlin and Germany head over heels. The Reichstag election brought Hitler and the NSDAP to power, Anna's father is threatened with prison and death by the new rulers. And his daughter soon hears: "This is Anna from Germany. The refugee."

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The film "When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit" is the adaptation of a famous novel by Judith Kerr, published in 1971. The writer Kerr, who died in 2019 at the age of 95, was the daughter of the great theater critic Alfred Kerr and, in her book, tells in a slightly encrypted way about the displacement of her own family.

In the film you can see the young actress Riva Krymalowski in the role of Anna with her brother Max (Marinus Hohmann) and her mother (Carla Juri) trembling for a few minutes on the train trip to Switzerland before the German border guards. One observes Anna and Max in small quarrels with their strangely speaking classmates in a Swiss farming village in the middle of meadows and lakes. And later you hear the children joking about the grim concierge in an old Parisian apartment building after the old woman has once again tried their hatred of Jews.

Caroline Link is a director who makes no detours and no complicated family constellation circumstances. Most recently, in the very successful film version of Hape Kerkeling's 1960s teenage memory book "The boy has to be brought into the fresh air", she showed how to take the narrative viewpoint of a childish hero with a friendly determination.

With the same courage she now takes the side of her childish protagonists in "When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit". The parents' fears and material needs play only a marginal role. But the young heroes talk wonderfully old-fashioned about the fact that an exhausting childhood is the prerequisite for fame in later life. And Anna is making a calendar to fight her homesickness for Berlin.

"When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit"
Germany, Switzerland 2019
Directed by Caroline Link
Script: Anna Brüggemann, Caroline Link
Actors: Riva Krymalowski, Carla Juri, Oliver Masucci, Marinus Hohmann, Justus von Dohnányi
Production: Sommerhaus Filmproduktion et al.
Distribution: Warner Bros.
Length: 119 minutes
FSK: no age limit
Release date: December 25, 2019

In general, the desire to return has long been the most painful problem for young heroes. When dining in a splendid Swiss inn, Anna's father, played by actor Oliver Masucci, therefore gives a table speech for Anna and Max. "If you still only dream of Germany," he says, "you will miss a lot of wonderful things."

The sentence is a kind of attunement to the cheerful, melancholy tone in which "When Hitler stole the pink rabbit" tells of the most terrible things. The director Link, like the author Kerr, describes the flight of the girl Anna and her family not as a tragedy, but as an adventure story.

There are sad moments in that because the heroes at some point on their odyssey through Europe learn, for example, that their beloved uncle Julius did not survive long under the Nazis. There are stressful encounters with strangers and on some days hardly anything to eat. But there are also all kinds of funny incidents, new faces, new cities, new schools in foreign countries - in essence, the journey that the girl Anna experiences in "When Hitler stole the pink rabbit" turns out to be a happy endurance test for her family.

In the video: The trailer for "When Hitler stole the pink rabbit"

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Warner Bros.

In his clear, direct visual language, which doesn't seem to care much about art and yet creates great opportunities for the actors to develop, "When Hitler stole the pink rabbit" is a stroke of luck. "It was important to me not to artificially dramatize the story," said director Link about her film. "There is no scene where Nazis knock on the door claiming a life or death threat."

That is precisely why her film tells a moving, timelessly up-to-date way of a world in which many people are forced to flee through half the world for dark reasons.