Hitler without the histrionics, From Hilde, with Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde in German) sets out to do something unusual for a film set during the Nazi era – to lay it all out for us, the everyday normality of it all, the “banality of evil”, to misuse Hannah Arendt’s phrase. But can you make a film about the commonplace without it becoming just a bit commonplace itself?
It’s the true story of a resistance group, a handful of young people who spend their nights sticking up bill posters denouncing the regime, and focuses on a young woman, Hilde, who joins it almost by accident – she has typing skills and understands carbon paper – and then falls for and marries one of its leading lights, Hans Coppi.
In a two-pronged attack director Andreas Dresen and writer Laila Stieler follow heavily pregnant Hilde as she is picked up, interrogated by the Gestapo and then thrown into prison where she will eventually give birth while awaiting her fate. Meanwhile, in flashback, the heady days of early love as Hilde and Hans get to know each other, go swimming, laugh and make love in between working in their own small way to bring down the Nazis.
How beautiful Dresen makes Berlin in the 1930s look, semi-impressionistic, warm and dappled. How normal too. Life carries on largely as it did before the Nazis came. The trams run. There is order. In the here and now segments, things don’t look as cosy – it’s a prison after all – but everything still runs on rails. In the maternity ward attached to the jail there is a briskly efficient nurse, and a terse obstetrician in a white coat who stands about while the nurse does all the work.
The doctor warms to Hilde when he learns that she was a dental assistant for while. Would she have a look at a troublesome tooth? And Hilde becomes useful in prison, just as she had been outside, and again almost by accident.
Liv Lisa Fries plays Hilde as a version of her usual spunky, smart modern woman about town. Hilde is quieter than Fries’s character in Babylon Berlin but both are brave women prepared to take the consequences of their actions.
Johannes Hegemann is a loose-limbed Hans, but this film is more interested in the women than the men – see Dresen’s film from 20 years ago, Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon) for more of the same. He has time for the characters of the prison nurse (the endlessly watchable Fritzi Haberlandt) and prison guard Kühn (Lisa Wagner), a brute-faced dragon charmed by Hilde’s lack of pretension.
There have not been that many films from Germany about Germans who did not support Hitler, and what happened to them. Compare that with France and its output of films about the same era – so many movies about the Resistance, so few French people who were actually in it.
From Hilde, with Love probably could not have been made a generation ago. It’s notable that both the director and writer were born in the German Democratic Republic, where the Communist authorities’ official line on the war was that the general German populace had also been victims of a cruel regime. Nazi guilt was left for the West Germans to shoulder.
This is a subdued film, the heroism of this small band of refuseniks just laid out for us as if it was the most normal thing in the world, when historical fact tells us it wasn’t. Over the closing credits we hear the voice of Hans Coppi Jr, the little boy Hilde gave birth to in Barnimstraße women’s prison in Berlin in 1942. The Second World War was a long time ago, but the consequences are still with us.
From Hilde, with Love aka In Liebe, Eure Hilde – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2025
