Phoenix (2014)
What would you do when you look and feel different from the person you used to be? How do you maintain your sense of self when you have been altered either internally and externally to the point where you struggle to recognise ‘you’ in yourself?
The Story
Christian Petzold’s 7th feature film, Phoenix, is a cinema of terrible beauty. It tells the story of Nelly (Nina Hoss), a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. At the beginning of the film, she is unrecognisable to all: her face is completely concealed with blood-stained bandage. This, unfortunately, attracts the unwelcome attention of an American MP at a checkpoint: disregarding the protest from Lene (Nina Kurzendorf), a friend who is helping Nelly navigate the life through the chaos of occupied Germany, he barks at Nelly to reveal her face. This is neither the first nor the last occasion in which Nelly is subjected to the sadistic arrogance of self-serving cowards: the American is relishing an opportunity to impose his power upon a vulnerable Other in the pettiest possible way. When he realises the extent of her wound and pain, however, he cowers, abruptly cuts off the ‘inspection’ and hurriedly dismisses them from the spot. It turns out that Nelly had suffered a facial gun-shot wound by the hand of a SS prison guard before the liberation, and they were on their way to see a plastic surgeon who would conduct a facial reconstruction for Nelly. When they meet, the surgeon recommends Nelly to assume a new life with a ‘fresh’ face. Asked the reasons why, he replies: a reconstructed face is never going to look quite the same, and that could prove distressing for her. Then he asks: given the terrible trauma of the Holocaust, why not begin a new life with a new look elsewhere? Since there is nothing to stop her from going to the destination of her choosing, be it Palestine or the USA, he suggests that she might as well begin anew without the burden of the past. Yet, Nelly has none of it: she is not going to leave Berlin, and she wants to look exactly as she used to look.
It turned out that Nelly is not seeking to reclaim her appearance to reestablish her legal status. Whilst she does not yet know at this point of the story, the painful circumstances have ensured that there is no need for her to prove who she is, for her identity has been officially verified, and her status recognised: her name is Nelly Lenz, the sole survivor of a German-Jewish family, the heir to the considerable fortune left by the clan. The legal process was meticulously carried out by Lene, a longtime friend of Nelly, who returned from her exile in Switzerland to work for an agency which rules the matters related to the Holocaust: her job is to identify each and every survivor, and every victim, by matching the unique numerical sequence marked on the forearm of a prisoner with the records that escaped the attempted cover-up by the SS. Thanks to Lene’s extensive work, for the first time in her life, Nelly is ‘free’: she is financially secure; her legal status is firmly established; she is free to travel to the destination of her choosing; and she can even choose how she looks. Yet, she refuses to leave the past behind. She is not going to leave Berlin, and she wants to look exactly as she used to do. Given that she is a survivor of the notorious ‘Death Camp’, Nelly’s resistance begs a question: Why does she wish to remain in Germany, and what does she intend to achieve in occupied Berlin? The answer to these question has nothing to do with semantics, that is, the sameness of an entity in the world, and it has everything to do with her sense of individuality: she is seeking to restore the narrative that informs her understanding of who she is. Yet, whilst her sense of individuality is subjective, she cannot sustain the narrative by her subjectivity alone: she needs at last one willing person to vindicate her personal narrative, thereby preventing it from becoming a fantasy. The key to her story is Johannes, the man she calls ‘Johnny’ (Ronald Zehefeld). Nelly wants to find her beloved husband in Berlin and picks up where they were cruelly forced to abandon. Yet, Nelly’s wish is met with a stern forewarning: Lene, who has a clearance to access personnel files of Jews and Germans in the Allied occupied territory, seems to know terrible facts about her friend’s German husband.
The Possible Individuality
Whilst Phoenix is a complex cinematic art that subtly deals with a multitude of intertwined subjects such as the implicit anti-Semitism and the ambivalence of Jewish identity, in what follows I shall focus on one aspect of the story: personal identity, that is, a story of an individual told against the backdrop of a collective story of the Holocaust. Whilst a story everyone tells oneself has little chance of shaping the larger historic narrative that defines the Geist of a given Form of Life, these ‘little stories’ cannot, and should not, be subsumed by the official account of the time. As good historians know, the most possibly accurate picture of a period is held within the tension between the objective account based on archival record on concrete facts and the subjective account of individuals caught up in the given event. Official records of various administrations are indeed essential in studying a complex historic event such as the Holocaust; yet the testimonies of individuals caught up in the event, such as Victor Klemperer and Primo Levi, are just as important, if not more, in understanding the atrocities lived through by them. As I shall follow the lead of Petzold in examining the subjective experience of the history, that is, Nelly’s struggle to reclaim her individual sense of self, the inquiry is neither purely semantic nor historic: it is neither about the selfsameness of an entity nor about her Jewishness. Instead, this essay probes how the subjective perception of whom she/they/he thinks she/they/he is informing the sense of individuality of a person, and how such a narrative is situated within the tension between subjectivity and objectivity, that is, a subjective picture of the individuality and its objective assessment made possible by credible witnesses and/or concrete evidence. Nelly’s journey through the aftermath of the Holocaust is uniquely suited to studying this important subject: Phoenix masterfully demonstrates this tension. In order to establish the robust sense of who she is, she must come to terms with the sublime force of objective facts which irrevocably alters, yet not subsumes, the personal story of her life and her sense of who she is. Therefore, in what follows, we shall closely observe the dialectic between Nelly’s subjective perception of who she is, and the counter stories told by Lene and Johannes: this dialectic presents exemplarily the inherently unstable nature of the sense of individuality. To this end, I must analyse all relevant details of the story: and thus, for those who wish to enjoy the film unblemished, I suggest watching this beautifully poignant film before reading further.
Nelly
Nelly Lenz is a singer who once was a member of a choir in London and sang in various Berliner clubs accompanied by Johannes’ piano before the Nazi banned the duo from performing due to her Jewish heritage. As the result of an increasingly hostile environment wherein the neighbours not only shun them but refuse to do any business with them, Johannes decided to hide Nelly in his fallen military friend’s houseboat by a lake. Then, one day, Johannes was arrested by the Gestapo. Then two days after his release, Nelly was discovered, arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nelly endured the unimaginable violence and survived the hell with one and one thought only: She wanted to see Johannes again. He is the love of her life, and the memory of happy days together kept her going. And it still does: her love for ‘Johnny’ is the reason why she wants to look exactly the same as before receiving the facial gun-shot wound, and it is the reason why she is not going to leave Berlin, at least not until she finds him again.
Her quiet determination to be reunited with ‘Johnny’ might draw comparison with that of Varsovians who rebuilt the Old Town of Warszawa: despite the total annihilation of every structure by the Nazi in the wake of the Warsawa Uprising in 1944, Varsovians restored the former glory of the city centre despite the initial lack of government support. Poles’ determination to reclaim their collective identity was such that they meticulously restored ‘everything’ based on the photographs taken before the destruction: it is said that they even restored the cracks appeared on the walls of some buildings. For Varsovians, it was the act of national defiance: since the first partition of 1772, Poland endured a series of harsh foreign rules which culminated with the German occupation that began with the invasion in 1939. Therefore, restoring the face of Warszawa was not merely about rebuilding what was lost: it was a political and historical statement, an act of defiance against their powerful neighbours. For Nelly, on the other hand, her motivation is purely personal: she longs to be reunited with her beloved, for her love for him has been the only hope she holds dear in the world of absurd cruelty. Nelly is unwaveringly focused upon resuming her personal story, to the effect that she shows little historic and political awareness in making her decisions. In this sense, she is no Magneto who, brilliantly brought to life by Michael Fassbender, lives the life of vengeance as a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. For Nelly, restoring her face has nothing to do with her reclaiming what was taken from her and her people. She only wants to be recognised as Nelly by Johannes. Furthermore, unlike David Bermann (Moritz Bleibtreu) in Bye Bye Germany (2017), she is not staying in Germany to reclaim her place there: If she manages to find Johannes, in the light of the struggle that almost cost her life, the changes Berlin went through and the robustness of her inheritance, Nelly most certainly would leave Germany with her husband. Unlike her intellectual friend, Lene, who demonstrates a painfully acute historic awareness, Nelly is hopelessly apolitical, seemingly non-vengeful against the mistreatment she and her family suffered. Yet, the most astonishingly, despite the horror of the Holocaust, Nelly does not identify herself as a Jew at all. Whilst many German Jews continued to identify themselves as ‘German’, Nelly’s case represents an extreme form of subjectivity: it is as if the Nazism, the WWII and the Holocaust are a mere interruption to her love story with ‘Johnny’. Despite our sympathy toward her unimaginable pain and trauma of living through the hell, we sadly cannot see how her coping strategy could last. We fear that, sooner rather than later, Nelly will be forced to reconcile ‘her story’ with the stark historical reality of lasting significance.
There is at least one aspect of the story about which Nelly was correct: Johannes is the final piece that holds the entire picture, that is, the story of her life. She believes that all will be revealed when she meets her ‘Johnny’ again, and she is right, although what she discovers betrays her expectations. Once recovered from surgery, Nelly begins to venture into the gloom of shady intents. Following the suggestion by a blind street violinist, Nelly wanders into the American Quarter, wherein nightlife is booming with drunk GIs and those who entertain them to extract the US dollars. It is an occupied territory reigned by lust, greed and intoxication. It is a place wherein all norms are suspended: since the Allies’ occupation is temporary, the night in the American Quarter is a place populated with characters with no future. Furthermore, it is a place everyone dreams, yet none of the fantasies survives the sobriety of the daylight. This is where Nelly seeks to reconstruct the broken thread of her story by discovering ‘Johnny’: when Nelly reunites with her beloved husband, everything will be alright. Naturally, when she spots Johannes as a dishwasher/custodian in a club named ‘Phoenix’, she is irresistibly drawn to him. Despite Nelly’s successful facial reconstruction, however, Johannes does not recognise her at all. Devastated, Nelly flees the spot in tears. However, after a few visits, Johannes eventually takes note of the presence of a strange woman and approaches her, stating that she reminds him of someone he knows. To Nelly’s chagrin, Johannes still does not recognise the woman he espoused: Johannes has merely found her physically similar to her ‘deceased’ wife. As if this revelation is not hard enough, Nelly discovers the reason why Johannes approached her: he is trying to access his ‘dead’ wife’s inheritance by means of deception. If Johannes can train her to be the dead linger of Nelly, then she can ‘return’ from the camp to claim his wife’s fortune, and he will reward her for the role she plays. Nelly agrees to ‘help’ Johannes, in a hope that he will soon recognise who she really is, and they live happily ever after. To this end, she would conceal her true identity and goes by a name, Esther, in memory of her closest relative.
Johannes or ‘Johnny’
Sadly, that is not how things are going to turn out. Johannes demonstrates a relentless focus upon his singular goal: stealing his ‘dead’ wife’s inheritance by misleading his ‘friends’ into believing the return of his ‘dead wife’. According to his plot, he and his German ‘friends’ will meet ‘Nelly’ at the train station. As they greet her, none should suspect her identity: she must appear the dead linger of his ‘deceased’ wife. By shoring up the witnesses to support his cause, Johannes is going to access Nelly’s inheritance as her legal spouse. Then he would take everything and reward the ‘imposter’ before vanishing. Yet, despite its seeming straightforwardness, his ‘story’ begs questions. Firstly, there is a problem with Johannes’ premise of the plot. Johannes repeatedly tells ‘Esther’ that Nelly is dead. This is one of the most painful aspects of this film: Johannes ‘kills’ Nelly off every time Nelly asks him whether he recognises her. He dismisses the possibility of Nelly’s survival by insisting: she is dead. When ‘Esther’ questions if his wife may be still alive, he rejects the scenario and repeats his ‘claim’ as an indisputable ‘fact’. Upon seeing their exchanges, one must ask: How could he be so sure of the death of his wife? There is a difference between having few chances of survival and having none at all. Did he get the confirmation from the agency? Has he ever looked for her? It is indeed very strange that Johannes stridently denies any possibility of Nelly’s survival. Given the chaos of occupied Germany, there is no way he could know Nelly’s status for certain unless the fact is established by the agency: until then, she must be considered ‘missing’. Whilst Johannes needs the presence of ‘Nelly’ to have access to her family fortune, the force with which Johannes refuses to give Nelly any chance of survival points to some complication on Johannes’ part. When he asserts the death of the woman he espoused, he is neither asserting a concrete fact nor expressing the steely resolve to accept the loss. The truth is: for Johannes, Nelly has to be dead. Just as Nelly has to believe in her love for ‘Johnny’ to survive, Johannes needs to believe in Nelly’s death in order to go on. This is a strange predicament. What sort of person would require one’s spouse to be dead as a prerequisite of one’s peace of mind? This question points to his secret: he is hiding from something he cannot face. Is Johannes afraid that Nelly might reappear? Is he trying to get the money by the help of a dead linger before Nelly returns and claims it? Was he, in fact, running away from his wife in the first place? If so, then why?
If Johannes is indeed fleeing from the prospect of seeing his wife again, then the irony of his predicament is inescapable: in order to run away from his ‘dead wife’, he needs to resurrect her first. Without Nelly’s money, he cannot escape her. Whilst that may be the case, whatever Johannes might come up with will be nothing but lies. Whilst he may not reconstruct his face, he would certainly forge a false documentation to become someone else. Yet, the succession of lies cannot liberate him. He may run fast and far, yet the truth remains: whatever has been done cannot be undone, and he will live with his deed to the bitter end for a simple reason: no one can outrun oneself. This understanding shapes who Johannes is now: he suppresses possible emotions and occupies himself with the scheme in order to keep the past at bay. He is no longer ‘Johnny’, the man with whom Nelly fell in love. Johannes strictly forbids Nelly from addressing him ‘Johnny’ and acts like a ringmaster scrutinising a new hire. In fact, he does not act like a man who grieves for his ‘deceased’ wife: he demonstrates the brutal and stubborn focus upon his goal, that is, ‘transforming’ the strange woman he discovered into a mirror image of Nelly in order to swindle her inheritance for himself. For Nelly, there can hardly more cruel and absurd irony: after having been systematically degraded by the Nazi and nearly killed by a facial gunshot wound by a SS guard, here she is, once again at the mercy of an abusive German male who is training her to look like her old self. Except for a few unguarded moments, Johannes makes it very difficult for us to see the reasons why he managed to find a woman to fall in love with him. What he demonstrates throughout is a hardened exterior of a sinner who does everything to avoid facing his wrongs: it is clear that he is trying to hide from something by putting up a bold face of an abusive lier.
Hence, the collision is inevitable: here is the fateful meeting of two personalities who need one another for very different reasons. Nelly is striving to reconstruct her identity by finding the man with whom she fell in love, thereby resurrecting her story from the ashes. Johannes is busy destroying the same story by asserting that it has been all illusions: he has never been ‘Johnny’ and his wife is dead to him. Whilst Nelly needs to restore her sense of who she is, Johannes is running away from his sense of who he is. He hopes to steal Nelly’s money and runs away from his past by becoming someone else. Nelly moves to the opposite direction: she wishes to be recognised for who she is by reuniting with her beloved ‘Johnny’ and find the continuum for ‘their story’. Nelly seeks Johannes’ company because her love for Johannes is central to her story. On the other hand, the only reason Johannes is willing to put up with this woman is: he needs to ‘resurrect his dead wife’ to grab her fortune and disappear. Phoenix is largely a story about two people who find themselves in this volatile juncture wherein two incompatible stories are played out as one to a devastating effect. The most obviously poignant aspect of the story is Nelly’s stubborn hopefulness. She wants to reclaim the past so much in that she fools herself in believing: everything will be alright once ‘Johnny’ recognises her and embraces her. Thus, Nelly goes along Johannes’ scheme by playing her part as a complete stranger, a woman named Esther, and agrees to assist his heist. She endures the brutally pragmatic nature of their ‘relationship’, silently receives Johannes’ disdain and verbal abuse. The dynamics created by the subservient female lead with the brute male brings us straight back to the best work of Reiner Werner Fassbinder: it should not difficult to see Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder in the claustrophobic scenes from this contemporary masterpiece. Yet, there is a critical difference between these two œuvres: Phoenix is not a German tragedy as in The Marriage of Maria Braun; like Fassbinder’s, this is a story of a woman who is subjected to the abuse of self-serving cowards in many guises, yet, the woman in question is a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. And thus, the shadow of history is far starker in this cinematic instant.
The Lament for Lene
The directness with which Petzold faces history cannot be better represented by the deep and unflinching eyes of Lene. Despite her ample display of tenderness and patient cheer in the presence of Nelly, her eyes always express profound wariness as a wise witness of history. Her understated gentleness does not betray her clear-sightedness: correctly anticipating what would come to pass, Lene exiled herself in Switzerland, from which she returned to assist the Allies’ effort to account for the victims of the Holocaust and unearthing the enormity of the Nazi atrocity. By dedicating herself for the service, Lene puts herself on the razor’s edge: she has seen too much and clearly suffering from survivor’s guilt.
In a critical scene, she is seen investigating a picture of corpses, matching the names of victims from the unique numerical sequences on their forearms. Then, to her horror, she identifies one of her dear friends, Esther, a Nelly’s cousin. The grainy picture does not show any resemblance to the lovely woman she knows. Esther now lies on the bare ground, stripped off her individuality and left as one of the indistinguishable bodies. This is the kind of pain and horror which cuts so deep that the ones who have not had the first-hand experience cannot begin to imagine how it feels to be in their position. Yet, thanks to the superb efforts from the director and the actors, Phoenix delivers at least the glimpse of a profound emotional devastation experienced by the survivors. Crushed by the discovery that dashed all hopes for the survival of her dear friend, Lene walks out of the room.
This is when she sees Johannes: he is caught attempting to walk away with his personal documentations recorded by the Third Reich. This is when Lene’s suspicion turns into a conviction: she finds something in the paper that proves Johannes’ betrayal of Nelly. She has long suspected that it was Johannes who gave up Nelly to the Gestapo, and now she knows the evidence that vindicates her suspicion. Yet, Lene does not have a heart to reveal the damning fact to the recovering friend: she patiently listens to Nelly’s fantasy and limits herself to the occasional protest by indirectly suggesting her husband’s betrayal so that she may save her friend from the heartbreak that could shatter her will to live. Yet, as the story goes on, Lene becomes increasingly exasperated by Nelly’s glib insistence to chase the mirage. Her friend is mistakenly believing that she can pick where she was forced to abandon and live happily ever after with her beloved husband. Nelly is so single-minded in her pursuit in that she has no ear for Lene’s increasingly stern warning. The efforts Lene makes to steer Nelly away from the catastrophic involvement with Johannes, the ’traitor’, appears wasted. To her chagrin, Nelly is not only willing to forgive Germans; she does not see herself as a Jew, despite the pains and the horror she went through.
Lene’s story is thus an isolating one. Foreseeing the hazard, one tries everything to keep loved ones from it, only to be greeted with casual disregards. Like a cursed prophet of Troy, her foresight finds no audience. It is terrible to witness the world unravelling; yet it is worse to feel helpless in the wake of a practically preventable catastrophe involving the loved ones. It is, as it were, seeing the world crumbling in a slow motion: one tries to reach out to save a loved one only to discover one’s paralysis; one shouts in silence, helplessly witnessing the total destruction of everything one loves. As intelligent and strong as she is, no one can bear this level of pain indefinitely: upon returning from the official trip to Poland to an empty flat which she shares with Nelly, Lene composes a few letters and shoots herself.
In the end, she respected herself enough not to fool herself. She unflinchingly confronted the horror of history and never allowed herself to look away. In her final moment, she wrote: she felt closer to the dead than the living. Yet, Lene never abandoned her dear friend. With her letter to Nelly, she enclosed the proof of Johannes’ betrayal of Nelly. Lene wanted her friend to know the truth and in that she was a loyal friend to the end.
The Ethics of Melancholia
The revelation on the eve of the staged return of ‘Nelly’ from Poland shatters her world. It reveals Johannes’ betrayal in the most damning terms, that is: Johannes divorced Nelly when he was released from the custody without a charge. Suspiciously, he was even allowed to perform again. Two days after his release, Nelly’s hideaway was raided by the Gestapo, and she was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Suddenly, Nelly must feel the crushing Gewalt that obliterates the story of her life: and now she must place everything under the unforgiving scrutiny. To her astonishment, each moment from the past bears a different meaning now, and she belatedly realises that Lene has been right all along: Johannes is a ‘traitor’ who has given his own wife up to the Nazi with full knowledge of what would befall upon her. And now that the war has ended, the German is going to steal the fortune left by his dead wife’s family who were denied humanity, stripped off dignity, murdered in cold blood and disposed as indistinguishable bodies. Thanks to Lene, Nelly learns the truth about Johannes just in time, that is, the night before Johannes’ plot goes ahead. Pretending to follow through Johannes’ orders as a subservient woman, Nelly is ready to take the matters in her own hand and puts an end to this story by her own terms.
Phoenix stands alone in the long list of Holocaust movies for a few outstanding reasons. Firstly, Petzold discreetly demonstrates a profound understanding of the violence of the Holocaust: it has destroyed the essence of every victim. Be they alive or dead, they were denied their humanity, dignity, and the sense of who they were. The film follows Nelly’s human struggle to make sense of the world and her own place in it in the wake of the Holocaust, until when she must face a simple yet unforgiving fact: ‘I’ is only recognisable within a certain context made up by the recognised historic contingencies. No one can decide who she/they/he is by the force of her/their/his will alone. Yet, the ‘self’ is not an entirely objective entity: rather, it emerges and will be sustained, however precariously, within a volatile tension between one’s subjective sense of whom she/they/he is and the objective criteria of historic contingencies that determine the bound within which the possible agency might emerge and define the margin wherein the sustained corrections of one’s self-image should occur. Yet, the most remarkable quality of Phoenix is not the level of philosophical understanding Petzold demonstrates: rather, it is the way in which the film dramatises it. It is a film of devastating nobility, which is not to be found in the characters of the film except for Lene: the stark blend of unflinching objectivity and compassion to human failings is rather found in the manner in which the film is directed. Through it all, the German guides us toward what one might call ‘melancholic stoicism’. It is an attitude summarised by Kafka’s famous statement: In the battle between the world and the self, let the world win. By recognising the limit of human will, one becomes an agent ‘without qualities’, a disinterested subject who commits to objectively observing the chaos and the confusions existing within the state of affairs: we strive to see the picture of the world and its distortion brought about by our Wille with humanly possible impartiality.
Critically, this does not mean that such individuals are unaffected: as examined in the essay on Richter, this philosophical position expresses itself as a lament by which melancholic stoicism distinguishes itself from its more abstractly serene sibling championed by the likes of Spinoza. It forces us to unflinchingly observe the banality of evil, unbelievably daft contradictions, furiously deplorable confusions, and ultimately the insurmountable paradox of human existence, yet such an acknowledgement of the impossibility of life is accompanied by the willingness to listen to individual voices. As in Kafka and Richter, Petzold’s stoicism is elevated to a certain poetic nobility precisely because of this protest against ubiquitous egomania that prevents us from accepting one’s place in the world that shapes one’s self. It is important to note that, due to the intelligent understanding of our place in history, Phoenix demonstrates the very impossibility of tragedy unforeseen by the likes of Hegel, who defined a tragedy as an unresolvable conflict between right causes that ends in a catastrophe. In Phoenix, there is no soaring affections caused by the unresolvable paradox played out by moral agents who commit themselves to principled actions. Rather, the film is played out by individuals who display a commonplace flaw, that is, the inability to listen to one another with mutual disinterestedness. And thus, Phoenix is a lament on the death of tragedy: the world corrupted by the banality of evil cannot give rise to an ethical thought in the first place, for the very possibility of ethics hinges upon one’s ability to be genuinely receptive to the voices of others. Yet, remarkably, Phoenix achieves a poetic loftiness because of, not despite, the corruption of the Weltgeist and the depth of melancholia it expresses, for the affective vortex expressed is matched by the depth of compassion to the human sufferings. By unwaveringly focusing on making the silenced heard and giving a face to the faceless, Christian Petzold has produced a singular film not only about the Holocaust, but about the impossible difficulty of living as a human.
Speak Low
After all is said and done, Nelly has to reconstruct the story of her life, again. She leaves Johannes for good. She knows the truth now, and that should give her certain freedom to see clearly, that is, who she is and what happened to her people. Despite her life-story remaining her own, it is no longer a fantasy divorced from history: she sees herself properly situated within a historic narrative of an unprecedented cruelty. Whilst we have no idea what awaits Nelly after leaving Johannes, this could not have done without a closure. And what a closure it is. Nelly asks Johannes to play ‘Speak Low’, one of their old favourites. Whilst Nelly may not look exactly like her old self, her voice betrays who she is. Instead of committing to one act of vengeance or another, Nelly let the song speak itself: it tells us the true extent of the wrongs she suffered by her fellow German citizens, her ‘friends’ and, above all, by her husband. There is no need for melodramas and violence. Instead, one simply needs to see and listen. When Johannes no longer bears to play on and sits in silence, there is only a song that speaks her truth. Never has been so powerful a voice in a film that is sorrowful, righteous yet tender at the same time. This is an exceptional moment: Christian Petzold has created a space and time wherein the audience is simply allowed to listen to the truth. For this reason, Phoenix must be viewed regularly to remind oneself the fundamental importance of respectful silence, which allows the voice of the silenced to fill our heart.