To prepare for her role in From Hilde, With Love, a Nazi-era period drama that premieres at the Berlin film festival on Saturday, actor Liv Lisa Fries met the person she would have to cradle in her arms as a baby.
In the film, by veteran German director Andreas Dresen, Fries plays Hilde Coppi, an anti-fascist resistance fighter who was arrested for treason by the Gestapo and sentenced to death along with her husband Hans.
The real-life Hilde received a month-long stay of execution in order that she could continue breast-feeding their infant son, Hans Coppi Jr. Her plea for clemency, submitted with the help of her prison guard Anneliese Kühn, was nevertheless turned down. The rejection was signed off by Adolf Hitler, and the baby handed to his grandmother at the prison gates wrapped in a pillow aged eight months, just before Hilde was sent to her death.
Fries, 33, a star in Germany since her role as a flapper-girl-turned-police-stenographer-turned-criminal-investigator in Babylon Berlin, says meeting Hans Coppi Jr, now 81, before filming began was an “intense and important” encounter, which helped her to feel a closeness to Hilde she might not otherwise have had.
“It was immense, the sense of responsibility I felt towards Hans, who’s dedicated his life to remembering his parents, at the same time as being traumatised by never knowing them,” she says. It gave her “goosebumps” to realise she would be creating perhaps the most realistic depiction of his parents’ life he had ever seen.
She calls the quietly spoken, bespectacled Coppi “an unlikely heroine”, and one she feared she would struggle to play because Hilde’s reticence, what Fries refers to as “that quiet air of hers”, might mean there would “be too little acting involved”.
“I studied the pictures of her to look for subtle gestures, like how she held her hands, I visited where she worked, in an attempt to get a sense of her, hoping that the walls would talk – and in a way, they did,” she says.
Fries, who was born in Berlin in the month of German reunification, has become the face of the Golden Twenties on screen, not just in Germany but worldwide. Even though she had her first screen experience aged 15, she was not a big name before she was cast in Babylon Berlin, the most expensive non-English language series produced to date. Her performance as the garrulous, gutsy, impoverished Charlotte Ritter, stylishly cloche-hatted by day, feverishly dancing on the volcano of pre-war Berlin at night, was key to the show’s global success, with screenings in more than 100 countries.
Its fifth and final season, after nearly seven years, is due to shoot this summer, and will end in 1933, the year the Weimar Republic ended and the Nazis fully seized power. By coincidence rather than design, Babylon will end around the time that From Hilde begins.
The series and the films have a number of commonalities – both are filled with scenes of young people living in the moment, dancing, bathing, having sex. But From Hilde is undeniably darker. It is sparse, gentle and stark compared with the fast-paced adrenaline rush of Babylon Berlin. “The characters I play in each could hardly be more different,” Fries says.
Her performance is merciless. It spares nothing of the agony of her having to give up her baby, packing a basket with his belongings and a letter for him to read when he’s old enough. As she waits in line for the guillotine, the milk from her lactating breasts soaks through the grey gown she has to put on ahead of her beheading.
The Coppis were arrested because of their membership of the so-called “Red Orchestra”, a group that the Reich war prosecutor’s office described as a Soviet-directed espionage network.
In fact, the group was a much looser, less formal and less effective set-up than it was made out to be by both the Gestapo and later socialist East Germany, which exploited their “heroic” status as it sought to distance itself from the Nazi era. In West Germany, too, the group was long denigrated for being directed by the Soviet communists.
In recent years, historical research has proved that very few of the 400 or so radio operators across Europe were actually in contact with each other. The estimated 150-strong Berlin “cell”, including the Coppis, consisted of a socially diverse network ranging from artists and students to housewives and military personnel, determined to do what they could to rid the world of Adolf Hitler.
The Coppis were involved in helping to intercept radio messages, writing letters to soldiers’ relatives whose addresses they had obtained from the German programme of Radio Moscow, and distributing anti-war slogans in the form of leaflets and posters – the paper for which Hilde smuggled out of her office – typically leaving them in public spaces, on park benches or trams.
The Berlin cell was pinpointed by the Gestapo after a Soviet radio message was intercepted and decoded, with the first arrests, including those of the Coppis, taking place in September 1942, a little over a year after their marriage, when Hilde’s pregnancy was advanced.
Dresen has called the film an answer in itself to the current rise of the far-right in the form of the AfD, now second in the polls, which for over a month has been triggering mass protests, after revelations of plans to mass deport foreigners.
But Fries is reluctant to be drawn on the apparent timeliness of the production. “Of course I see the parallels, and I don’t support the AfD in any form whatsoever, but I don’t feel the need to refer to current affairs or call people to action. Rather through my role in the film, I hope that I stimulate as much emotion as possible simply to make people think.”
“After all, simply by being who she was, full of heart and consideration, out of love for her husband as well as the wider world, Hilde Coppi is political without setting out to be. Her strength is in her direct actions rather than in her spoken intentions. This in itself is incredibly powerful. And she grows with the task.”
Watching the film, it’s hard to avoid the eternal question: “what would I have done if I had lived through 1930s Germany?” Fries says: “I believe I have the values in me that are necessary to resist when something’s not right, to stand up for my ideals. Above all I desire honesty. I think that’s maybe why I attract these film roles, even if that all sounds a little grandiose.”
Does she believe Charlotte Ritter, whose story ends before the Nazis come to power, would also have become a resistance fighter? “Definitely, 100%!”
