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Spring of Life (Pramen zivota) 2000
On of the facets of Nazi racial policy which remains shrouded in mystery is the phenomenon of the lebensborn or ‘spring of life’ maternity homes. Here, SS officers and racially-pure young women could boost the future ranks of the Nazi Party by having secret, and of course Aryan, children. After initially low birth rates Heinrich Himmler, mastermind of the lebensborn programme, decided to expand the programme in order to encompass non-German women. In these cases Aryan aesthetics took precedence over pure bloodlines and many girls found themselves ‘Germanised’, given false papers, so that they too could participate in Himmler’s programme. And so we come to Spring of Life (Pramen zivota), a Czech film in which the implications of the lebensborn scheme are explored through a powerfully personal story.
Grétka, a young woman living in the annexed Sudetenland of 1939, is of a poor farming background and, with her family, strives to continue with a normal life in the face of Nazi occupation. However, her life changes dramatically when, due to her Aryan appearance, she is selected to travel to the Isolde Spa to be ‘educated’. In fact, she is about to be enrolled on the lebensborn programme. We get a glimpse of the defiance in her character when, just prior to leaving the Sudetenland, she accepts a baby offered to her by a woman fleeing the Nazis and takes the child to her family - this defiance sets her squarely in opposition to the Nazi ideology and values espoused by the inmates of her new home and, although aesthetically suitable, Grétka is far from a pliant example of Nazi womanhood, preferring the company of an untermensch Polish Jew to the SS officer ‘selected’ for her.
Many cinematic treatments of Nazi sexual practices and attitudes have tended towards the bawdy or exploitative, but Spring of Life differs radically from these in style and tone. It is a rather beautiful film, well-shot, rich with symbolism and has more in common with Bergman than with Ilsa et al. Although the film inevitably looks at politics, the focus is far more upon how human relationships almost invariably compromise political absolutes. For instance, the Nazi occupiers are keen to overlook Grétka’s racial inferiority because she is aesthetically suitable. At the spa she is thus elevated above her former station, and yet reduced to something lower than it when she exchanges her name for a number. The Nazi staff at the spa praise virginity and purity, yet bizarrely they medically deflower the girls in order to make the visiting SS men feel less pressured. Throughout, Spring of Life retains its focus on people trying to survive in an increasingly problematic and fraught world. The film sustains a great deal of this impact through the powerful use of symbolic imagery. Great opposites such as birth and death are brought together - a baby is hidden in a coffin, a sanatorium becomes a lebensborn home - and we are provided with powerful parallels: a female doctor espousing the lebensborn scheme despite her own ‘aberrant’ sexuality; the two men involved in Grétka’s life both departing in the same vehicle, one bound for the concentration camp and one for military glory.
Spring of Life is one of few films which touch upon this secretive area of Nazi history: it has a unique focus and achieves this with skill, conflating beautiful cinematography with sympathetic characterisation. Monika Hilmerová as Grétka is excellent as a naïve but rapidly-disillusioned young woman who is frequently overwhelmed by the world around her. This is a bleak, if beautifully-formed and compelling film.
Review by MISS K