(courtesy IMDB)
There has likely never been an age in which humanity hasn’t had to battle against some form of tyranny or another, but in 2024, the pressing need to take a stand against the monstrous autocracy of fascism and its barbaric intent to shape life in its own twisted and cruel image, feels urgent and immediate.
You might wonder if a film set some 80 years earlier might have any relevancy to a desperately timely struggle such as this, but From Hilde, With Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde) feels like a deeply moving clarion call to those of good heart and mind in ours and any age to oppose tyranny and inhumanity with everything we have.
While there is an innate nobility and idealism to such an undertaking, what From Hilde, With Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde) makes graphically and affectingly clear is that taking such a stand will cost you and cost you dearly, but that despite that, it must be taken anyway.
The true story of Hilde Coppi (Liv Lisa Fries), who died in 1943 at the hands of the Gestappo for attempting, with a group of close friends known as the Red Orchestra, one of whom became her husband Hans (Johannes Hegemann), to make Germans aware of the many great evils of the Nazi regime.
That she and her friends, all of whom cemented their bonds during one glorious summer full of promise, hope and the impelling drive of a shared cause, largely failed in their attempts is not the issue; what matters is they didn’t stand by and let evil do its thing, impassive like so many people around them.
The two key things that emerge from From Hilde, With Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde) are the importance of elevating humanity no matter what comes against it and how debased it might become at the hands of fascist monsters, and how love, the kind that is muscular and which fights in the trenches and gutters for what it true, loved and important, outlasts even the most brazen attempts to snuff it out.
In the Germany of the late 1930s and early 1940s, there are many people prepared to simply go along with the prevailing orthodoxy of the day.
Just how pervasive this passive complicity was becomes searingly but quietly evident in one scene in From Hilde, With Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde) where Hilde, Hans, and their tight-knit group including Ina Lautenschläger (Emma Bading) and Libertas Schulze-Boysen (Sina Martens) are meeting in an ice cream cafe under the guise of a book club discussion.
A neighbour comes into the shop, does the obligatory salute to Hitler, and then, acting almost as an arm of the state, begins to quiz the young people about the book they are reading and what they like about it; it’s clear she knows the classic novel well and is attempting to gauge if the book club is legit or not.
Hilde, who knows the book intimately and is derided by some in the group for being altogether too school marmish and nerdy, saves the day, eloquently speaking to the book’s theme and messaging, and after the busybody collaborator leaves, becomes the hero of the group for saving them.
Not, it must be noted, from the police or military apparatus but from an ordinary German who took upon to comply unquestioningly with the regime and do its bidding.
It’s this complicity with evil that Hilde and her friends oppose, driven in part by wanting to do what’s right but also by an abiding need to help others – they secretly listening to Russian radio and pass on messages from POWs to their families in Germany, none of which is even remotely permitted; here humanity of any kind is essentially akin to treason – and by holding onto humanity in the face of a regime that is seeking to destroy, quash and obliterate it.
If there is one thing that From Hilde, With Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde) raises up, it’s the need for brave people to hold on to their humanity and to engender and keep it alive in others which Hilde manages to do after she’s arrested, encouraging by her example a range of people serving the regime to bend the rules and show acts of kindness and compassion where the rules do not permit them.
Watching Hilde inspire others to reclaim their humanity is a quiet joy in a beautifully nuanced film which moves, sometimes a little confusingly, between past and present, illustrating what led Hilde, Hans and the others to risk everything for a good cause, and why they persisted in their brave opposition right until the end.
In Hilde’s case, her oppositional activity in the women’s prison of Barnimstrasse, was impelled by the birth of her son, Hansy, and the need to support other imprisoned women who felt hopeless in the face of so much institutionalised inhumanity and cruelty.
Her willingness to take a stand makes a real difference, and not just in the lives of fellow prisoners; one of the main guards with whom she has to deal, Anneliese Kühn (Lisa Wagner) goes from an unthinking, dour servant of the regime to someone who exercises small acts of defiant compassion which, though they may not, and do not, change the world, make things better for Hilde and some others.
From Hilde, With Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde) is an instructional lesson that big is not always better.
You could argue that Hilde and her friends failed because the Nazis won and exterminated their group, and that they failed to shift the dial in Germany towards humanity and democracy in any appreciable way, but the fact is that these very real people opposing quite real evil did make a difference in a host of small and seismically important ways, and that by holding true to what they believed, even in the face of death, they won far more than they lost.
From Hilde, With Love (In Liebe, Eure Hilde) doesn’t once sugarcoat things and in its quietly deceptive way, all hushed but charged scenes and moments of impactful introspection, makes it clear that standing against evil is far from consequence-free but that it matters greatly as the final scene in the film, set in the present day, makes beautifully and abundantly clear.