The fog of history

An adaptation of the graphic novel ‘Alois Nebel’ into a film deals with wartime Europe, but from a unique angle.

By DAVID STROMBERG
Alois Nebel film (photo credit: Courtesy)
Alois Nebel film
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Czech lands – the northern region of Bohemia, southern region of Moravia, and northeastern region of Silesia – are located at the heart of Central Europe, surrounded by more powerful and historically dominating nations. Like much of the region, the Czech lands saw the worst of the 20th century and were often a literal and figurative battleground, during both world wars as well as the ensuing Cold War.
“Central Europeans have more in common [with each other] than we sometimes realize,” says novelist and screenwriter Jaroslav Rudis, co-writer of a three-part graphic novel called Alois Nebel. “After all these centuries, we have to deal with the same problems from our past. And probably the same guilt, too.”
This sense of shared guilt is one of the underlying themes of the graphic novel Rudis, 40, created over the last decade together with musician and artist Jaromir Svejdik, 49, who goes by the pseudonym Jaromir 99. Last year, the work appeared as a film directed by Tomas Lunak. The film, appearing in this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival, centers on the character of Alois Nebel, a third-generation train dispatcher in the village of Bily Potok, located at the foot of the Jesenik mountains and bordering Poland.
Nebel is disturbed, either emotionally or mentally or both, by a past that is both vague and overpowering. He is haunted by memories of an exodus in which the young woman who took care of him after his mother’s death was forced to leave the village.
In these memories, she is accosted by a man who tells her she can stay with him, and when another man tries to free her, the first man shoots him. Nebel’s father takes his son back into the station house, and the memory fades. In a separate memory, we see her looking disheveled with a baby in her arms and parting from Nebel, reassuring him that everything will be all right.
The historical background of the title character’s traumatic childhood memories is the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia beginning in late 1945. The Jesenik region is part of the Sudeten Mountains, which Germans are believed to have settled as far back as the 13th century. The name Sudetenland eventually came to refer to those regions in the Czech lands with an ethnic German majority, and by the end of the 19th century it included areas beyond Silesia, including most of the north- and southwestern periphery of Bohemia. In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, there were approximately three million ethnic Germans in Sudetenland. By 1948, there were about a quarter of a million.
“Nebel was about four years old when he saw something happening,” says Rudis.
“This was revenge taken by the Czechs on the Germans. You had these kinds of exoduses happening all over the world during the war. Czechs who had to leave. Jews who had to leave. Polish people who had to move from eastern Poland when the Soviets arrived. Germans who had to leave from west Poland. Disappearing borders, disappearing Europe – this is a big Central European theme.”
THE ADAPTATION of the graphic novel into a film involved close cooperation between the book’s original creators and the film director, as well as an international team of animators.
“We spoke a lot about the question of why to adapt a graphic novel into a movie,” admits Lunak. “We looked at some technique, spoke about a fully animated movie, because the graphic novel is fully animated. We also talked about the possibility of a live-action feature film.”
In the end, they combined the two options using a rotoscoping technique in which live-action shots are used to create animation in the style of the original graphic novel.
“For the graphic style, it’s a kind of middle ground between animation and feature films,” says the 38-yearold director. “We shot it as a live-action movie – real locations for exteriors and studios for interiors. But we also prepared the background for animators, and with them in mind, shot everything in the daytime. Afterward, we edited the live-action cut and then drew over it. We had specific animators for certain characters – one for Nebel, for Kveta, for the Mute – and this made the movie a Czech/Slovak/German co-production.”
According to Lunak, the section of the German expulsion from Czechoslovakia was animated in a German studio. He says they spoke a lot about the postwar situation with the Germans – something the Czechs hadn’t done in their own country.
Rudis also mentions the lack of discussion about these events. “The theme of the Germans in Czechoslovakia was forgotten,” he says. “But it’s still part of the history. Everyone, including me, has German ancestors – sure, from 150 years ago, but still you have to deal with it.”
He understands this kind of historical tension as part of a larger phenomenon in a region filled with national and ethnic diversity – where peoples developed distinct cultures at the same time as they mixed with one another.
“It’s typical Central Europe – Austrians, Germans, Czechs,” he says. “For us, in making the movie, it wasn’t a big question – who exactly is Czech, German, Jewish.
It’s too complicated to tell who is who here. There’s all this nationalism that you can feel in Central Europe especially – in the Czech Republic, too, though not as strongly as in Hungary – but somehow Central Europe is like a kind of nation.”
THE HISTORY of a place is linked to the people who inhabit it and their connection to the land. When the nearly three million Germans were expelled from their historical homes – regardless of their guilt, either personal or by association – their land was left behind to a Czech population less connected to that landscape.
And it is the history of this countryside, no less than the history of Sudetenland, that interested the filmmakers.
“For me, it’s a story of nature, of woods, of a specific landscape,” says Lunak. “It’s a very rainy place, and it was 90 percent German-speaking until they were expelled. The German houses were in the countryside, and Czechs moved into these houses without thinking about the history of the land, without being familiar with it, without respect for the countryside.”
All three of the film’s creators were born in Czech cities outside the major population centers of Prague, Brno and Pilsen – Svejdik in Jesenik, not far from the Sudeten Mountains, Rudis in Turnov, not far from where the graphic novel is set, and Lunak in Zlin, in the southeast of the country. As such, they can relate to characters witnessing history on the fringes, where it sometimes seems to pass almost too intimately. The town of Bily Potok, where Nebel works as train dispatcher, is one such example. Bordering Poland, it was a transportation conduit for countless atrocities.
“There is mute symbolism in the train tracks,” says Rudis. “This railway, these trains, everything was connected to them, the whole history of Central Europe.
The First World War, the Second World War, trains with Jews to Auschwitz, trains with Germans to Germany and the USSR, trains with the Soviet Army after the occupation of 1968, trains with Russians retreating after the Velvet Revolution of 1989.”
Nebel attaches himself to trains as the only constant he can count on in a world that gives no priority to individual dreams or desires. His entire existence – from the first memory of the German expulsion to the moment the story begins with the communist Czech state deep in waking sleep – has been dominated by the station house where he works and lives.
“Nebel collects railway timetables,” says Rudis, “and if you read these carefully, then you see that on some lines – for example the Prague-Pilsen line – the trains run at the same times as they did 60 or 70 years ago.
And so Nebel thinks, people change, but these numbers, these tracks, these threads – they remain. People do wrong things, but the trains don’t. It’s a kind of substitution for real life.”
Circling around Nebel and the station house, however, are those who are neither paralyzed nor outraged by history, but rather exploit it – the corrupt members of any society who are ready and willing to say or do whatever is necessary for material gain. In the story, these are an old bartender, who we later understand was the shooter in Alois’s childhood memory, and his son, a smuggler and collaborator with the Soviet army.
“For us, the figures of Wachek and his father are typical opportunists,” explains Rudis. “Typical people that are still everywhere. They can deal perfectly with Nazis, communists, oligarchs. There were all these different regimes, and to survive them, lots of people turned to corruption.”
In a sense, these exploiters are always on the bad guys’ good side, and their material corruption either leads to or is reflective of an already-present moral disregard.
Wachek uses his corrupt power to get Nebel institutionalized in an insane asylum. The time there actually does him good. He becomes part of a system other than the railway. He also meets a kind of friend – a man who crossed the border from Poland into Czechoslovakia and refuses to speak despite repeated treatments of electroshock therapy.
AT SOME point, the doctor flatly tells Wachek he can’t keep Nebel institutionalized any longer, but by then, Wachek has taken over Nebel’s job. Wachek tells Nebel to go seek new work at the offices of the Main Train Station in Prague – and Nebel, in his characteristic literalness, does precisely that.
“For Nebel, the Main Train Station is like a cathedral,” says Lunak. “Nebel goes there and never goes out. Like in Bily Potok, it’s his house, but a much bigger house.”
For all three creators of the film, coming to Prague meant first and foremost coming to the Main Train Station – the monolithic symbol of modernity.
“The architecture of the Prague main station is amazing,” says Rudis. “After Nebel loses his job, he takes the first trip in his life outside of Bily Potok – and automatically he follows the train lines to the center of the giant iron spider web. Because all these tracks have a middle, and in the Czech Republic it is definitely the Main Train Station.”
The Main Train Station is located not far from the central Wenceslas Square, where mass anti-communist demonstrations took place in November 1989 – and it is in the station that Nebel experiences the Velvet Revolution.
It is also at the station that, after meeting a stern but kind toilet custodian named Kveta, he falls in love.
“We have two lines in the movie,” explains Lunak.
“The history of the Second World War and future after the Velvet Revolution. This new future for Nebel is Kveta.”
Rudis expands on this sense of a future for Nebel, saying he goes to the Main Train Station because he needs to find a way out after losing everything. Through his experience with Kveta, the writer adds, he might change. “First he falls in love with her, then he fights for her by sending her letters and inviting her to come live with him in Bily Potok – to the end of the world.”
One of the main themes of the novel and film is how to deal with the fog of the past. Rudis recollects that when he was a teenager, his communist education taught him about Czech history, but mentioned nothing about the Austrians and Jews. Today he understands how these three influences, which he admits were likely divided by lots of fights, nonetheless made the beautiful city of Prague.
“‘Nebel’ is German for fog,” explains Rudis, “and Nebel backward is leben – German for life. That’s what the story is about. About life that’s hidden in fog. Memories and trauma are activated and we have to deal with them. But the fog is not only metaphoric – it’s also part of the countryside: rain, fog, snow. It’s a metaphor of forgotten history, but also part of the region.”
Dealing with history and building a new future, however, also mean confronting the crimes of the past – and while Nebel is not the man for that job, the film suggests that those who participated in moral and mortal crimes live in constant knowledge of the vendetta they have called upon themselves.
Alois Nebel will be screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival today at 1:20 p.m. and tomorrow at 2 p.m.