Never Look Away

“Don’t look away, Kurt,” Elisabeth implores her young nephew. “Never look away — everything that’s true is beautiful.” (from Never Look Away) 

Never Look Away, an historical drama, takes us through three decades of German life, from the 1930s into the 1960s and focuses on the artist, KURT BARNERT (Tom Schilling). The film, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, was inspired by the real-life story of Gerhard Richter, one of the 20th century's most respected visual artists.

In the opening scene, set in Dresden in 1937, six-year-old Kurt is taken by his beautiful, free-spirited aunt ELISABETH (Saskia Rosendahl) to a Nazi-organized exhibition of “degenerate art," intended to be jeered at for their decadence and moral deformity ― a propaganda blast against "impurities" in German culture. We watch Kurt stare at a small abstract Kandinsky as a tour guide sneers with contempt at the piece: "How does this elevate the soul?" (This question of soul reverberates throughout the movie). Elisabeth whispers to Kurt, “Don’t tell anybody, but I like it.” Kurt is bonded with Elizabeth, who introduces him to art, music, and sensuality, and teaches him to trust his gut. From their bond Kurt is first awakened to the spiritual, to a sense of oneness with the universe. We observe Elizabeth orchestrate a group of Dresden bus drivers to shine their headlights on her then honk their horns simultaneously as she holds up her arms and experiences a state of transcendent oneness. While for Kurt, visual imagery becomes his connection to beauty and truth, sound acts as a metaphor for Elizabeth’s sense of oneness with the universe.

Elisabeth, tall and fair, is given the honor of handing the Fuhrer a bouquet of flowers as his car goes by, but it soon becomes clear that she is not mentally stable. Kurt finds her sitting at the piano in the nude, then she stands up, hits herself on the head, drawing blood, and says, “I’m playing a concert for the Führer.” Tragically, Nazi Germany does not tolerate such mental defects and impurities, and Kurt tries to cover his eyes as his final sight of his beloved aunt is being ripped away from her family and taken by ambulance to an institution where she will later be “relieved of her meaningless existence.” She is part of a brutal eugenic genocide perpetrated under the Third Reich by the famed gynecologist, PROFESSOR CARL SEEBAND (Sebastian Kock). Like a camera with the shutter left open, Kurt observes and stores to memory many such horrific experiences. These images burn into his brain and mark him for life. Later, as an artist, he transfers them from memory to his canvases which mark him as a respected visual artist.

Kurt has taken his Aunt Elisabeth’s words “never look away” to heart, enabling him to stumble upon a spiritual solution to coping with his pain. One day, while sitting in a branch of a tree observing the lush green landscapes of his father’s farm, Kurt views life from another perspective. He sees more than the landscape, beyond what the eye views, and he is moved by a feeling of being as one with the landscape. He runs home to tell mother that she no longer has to worry about him because, “he gets it” ― he understands the oneness and the interconnectedness of the universe. Kurt’s father, who is more practical, tells him that it’s all right, but one can’t live as a dreamer.

We follow Kurt as he survives the war and the Nazis, then enrolls in an elite art school in divided post-war Germany. Here he meets and falls in love with fashion student ELLIE SEEBAND (Paula Beer). She sews him a new suit, which indicates a new sense of identity. Unbeknownst to either of them, Ellie’s father is the same Professor Seeband who sentenced Kurt’s aunt Elisabeth to sterilization and death. The Professor also has not yet made the connection but opposes his daughter’s relationship saying Kurt is from a poor gene pool. Thus, he terminates his own daughter’s pregnancy and makes her sterile. Kurt does not know that he is marrying the daughter of the man who euthanized his aunt Elizabeth.

In art school, the post-war Communist regime turns out to be just as unforgiving as the Nazis were in their attacks on artistic expression. Kurt is forced to paint murals of noble workers as his teacher exclaims (decrying the modernist obscurities of the West) that to serve one’s personal needs, in paint, is to yield to the “Me, me, me!” Kurt, conflicted between what he feels and what he is forced to paint, flees to West Germany with Ellie just before the Berlin Wall goes up.

Once Kurt and Ellie have settled down in West Germany, Kurt starts to probe the wounds of the past in his paintings, evoking not only his own buried traumatic memories, but also Germany's. His memories and his artistic talent, bring Kurt’s “truth” to life. While Kurt is in a restaurant, dining with his father-in-law (who has also fled East Germany), a newsboy bursts in to hawk a newspaper, crying out that a prominent Nazi doctor, Professor Seeband’s former boss, is under arrest. Kurt, still not making any connection, is inspired by the newspaper article about the captured Nazi doctor and starts copying black-and-white news photos into his paintings. His studio overflows with paintings ― portraits of inquiry bearing witness to Kurt’s “truth.” They line the walls and sit stacked on the floor leaning against the wall. When Professor Seeband first sees them, and sees the incorporated photographs, he freezes, confronted by the undeniable “truth” of his cruelty, and his history. As the Professor sees a collage of Kurt’s aunt and the Nazi-doctor, he skulks away from Kurt’s studio like a beaten animal. As Kurt’s paintings become known, and as Professor Seeband’s role in the Nazi eugenics program is revealed, the outcome is inevitable. The truth, once seen, cannot be unseen.

The film closes as Kurt, now a respected artist, is interviewed at a gallery showing his art. When he is questioned about the identities of the people in the photos in his paintings, he denies knowing them stating that he prefers not to know them. The interviewers miss the point ― Kurt knows “their truth” and his paintings reveal these truths – and he has an uncanny ability to see inside them and bring out the truth in them, and all that is true makes them beautiful.

Psychological Implications:
A child’s truth cannot be denied although he may hide it behind invisible walls to save his tortured soul. To understand NEVER LOOK AWAY from a depth perspective, we have to question what childhood trauma, fears, and unmet need drove Kurt to hide away the truth of his outer world, Nazi Germany. Kurt’s heart was broken by trauma. “In terms of the psyche, trauma is any experience that causes the child unbearable psychic pain or anxiety. Pain is unbearable when it cannot be metabolized” (Kalshed, The Inner World of Trauma). When a child’s sense of self is repeatedly threatened, and the child has no way to process the perceived threat, the child enters the domain of trauma. Compounded trauma threatens the personal spirit, so a line of defense is created. Kurt’s miraculous life-saving emotional defense to witnessing the recurrent extremely traumatic events was to go “inside”. Though conflicted, he needed to make sense of his world, learn what is “truth,” and cope with the pain, which in the era of his Nazi upbringing was understood as a defect. What saved him emotionally from going mad like aunt Elizabeth was his ability to “mask” his internal conflict, express his pain in his art, and what he intuitively stumbled upon in childhood – the ability to transcend pain by tapping into a felt sense of “oneness” with the universe, no matter what the world was inflicting upon his psyche.

“Oneness” is defined as ‘being at one with the universe,’ or the evaporation of any sense of separation from others, a subjective sense of ‘connectedness’ with all. Meditators and mystics describe it as gaining access to internal states of knowing by tuning out the noise and flow of incoming sensory information so that subject and object become as one, “a single entity, physically, mentally and spiritually inseparable.” (from judo expert Juchi Watanabe in The Secrets of Judo). In the film’s closing scene, Kurt instructs the Dresden bus drivers to orchestrate a sounding their horns. Again, we experience a felt sense of oneness.

Outside, Kurt presented as a self-confident artist; Kurt’s inner world was another story. There, embedded in his unconscious, were scenes he couldn’t forget. Yet, unlike Elisabeth, he did not split, did not have to “go mad” to cope. Because he had embraced a spiritual “oneness,” the chaos of his past did not define him or derail him. “Oneness” is what defined him and kept him on track. Loving Ellie as she lies atop him, leads him to find peace and heals his pain. He “sees” her beauty, and not only do their bodies mesh, Kurt is again awakened to his sense of oneness with the universe. He understood that both his traumatic experiences and his love for Ellie would someday enrich his art. His artist’s eye, like a camera lens, bears witness to and would ultimately tell the “truth.” Only the artist can give the people a sense of freedom and by freeing yourselves you are liberating the world.

Each horror witnessed, each injury to his developing psyche, was but one thread of his story but woven together, experienced as a whole, formed a tapestry of “truth.” He received a silent message from aunt Elizabeth, and from that day sitting in a tree feeling a spiritual moment of connection with the universe: stay vigilant, eyes open, so nothing about life’s truth is missed.

“Never look away — everything that’s true is beautiful.”

Charlyne Gelt, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who practices in Encino. She leads Women’s Empowerment Groups that help women learn the tools to move beyond self-destructive relationship patterns. She may be reached at 818.501.4123 or cgelt@earthlink.net. Her website is www.drgelt.com.