Never Look Away

As a small child during the Nazi era, protagonist Kurt Barnert (inspired by Gerhard Richter) visits the traveling exhibition "Entartete Kunst" ("Degenerate Art") in Dresden with his beautiful and eccentric young aunt Elisabeth. Kurt is especially mesmerized by the Girl with Blue Hair, a sculpture by Eugen Hoffmann. Later Kurt walks in on Elisabeth playing the piano in the nude. She suddenly appears mesmerized by playing the note A on the piano and begins to ramble in a euphoric way. Her mother then comes home and walks in as she is hitting herself on the head with a glass plate and begins bleeding, smiling, and saying she is "playing a concert for Hitler." It is unclear if she has suffered a breakdown of sorts or is mentally ill in general. She also tells Kurt to "never look away" because "everything that is true holds beauty in it". He will keep this advice close to his heart for the rest of his life.

Later his aunt is sterilized and eventually "euthanized" by the Nazis because she is suspected to be schizophrenic. The doctor who orders her forced sterilization and sends her to her death is gynaecology professor Carl Seeband, the director of the Dresden women's clinic and a high-ranking member of the SS medical corps.

After the war, Seeband is arrested by the Russians and placed in a prison camp. While there, he volunteers to assist a Russian officer's wife during a complicated birth and saves the child's life. The grateful Russian officer protects Seeband and releases him, destroying the records of his crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, Kurt begins to study painting at the Dresden art school where he falls in love with a young fashion design student Elisabeth (Ellie) Seeband, partly because she reminds him of his aunt. To preserve her reputation after sleeping with her, he escapes through her bedroom window and is caught by her mother, who does not disclose their activity to Ellie's father. What Kurt does not know is that Ellie is the daughter of the very Nazi doctor responsible for his aunt's murder.

Kurt successfully continues his studies, but is forced to complete paintings that reflect socialist realism, an ideology and field of art with which he cannot come to terms. Although he is very good at it, he knows that he can never find his own voice through this kind of art.

Eventually, Kurt meets Elisabeth's father, who has left his Nazi past behind and now follows the socialist ideology of East Germany. Kurt still does not know that Carl Seeband is responsible for his aunt's death. Seeband does not approve of his daughter's relationship with Kurt, whom he sees as genetically inferior. He goes to great lengths in his attempts to destroy the relationship, even sabotaging his daughter's womb to keep her 'pure'. However, Kurt and Elizabeth's love grows even stronger and eventually the two get married.

Fearing prosecution after the Russian officer who protected him is transferred to Moscow, Seeband flees East Germany for West Germany. Shortly afterwards, Kurt and Elisabeth also flee to West Germany. Kurt does not know what kind of art he wants to make, but he knows that socialist realism is not it.

Since Kurt is already 30 years old, he has to lie about his age to be admitted to the famous Düsseldorf Art Academy. Here he can study and practice art more freely than in socialist Eastern Germany. His teacher (based on Joseph Beuys) recognizes Kurt's deep personal experience, but also sees that he is struggling to find his own voice, having been trained only in figurative painting, a medium considered outdated and "bourgeois" by the standards of the school. Kurt shares adjoining studio space with fellow student and confidant Günther Preusser (in a depiction of artist Günther Uecker), who was starting to experiment with hammering nails into boards to produce large artworks.

Only when Kurt finds a newspaper article about a captured Nazi doctor, Seeband's boss, does he have his artistic breakthrough. He starts using his figurative painting skills to copy black-and-white photographs onto the canvas, adding a mysterious sfumato blur. He also paints Seeband's passport photographs and photographs of his aunt from his own family album. When Seeband sees a collage painting of Kurt's aunt, the Nazi doctor, and himself, he flees, destroyed, not understanding how his despised son-in-law of all people was able to uncover his greatest secret. However, Kurt may not have understood what he was doing, at least not on a conscious level. He realizes that when you are true to your artistic instinct, you can reach a truth your intellect could never hope to attain.

After years of infertility, Elisabeth becomes pregnant, and Kurt celebrates the moment she told him by painting her nude. Kurt gets his first art show where his art impresses the critics even though they completely misunderstand and misinterpret it. But he can look his past in the eye without fear and has finally found his voice. And that is all that matters to him.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck explained extensively that Never Look Away is a work of fiction but that the point of inspiration had been an article by famed German investigative reporter Jürgen Schreiber about the German painter Gerhard Richter. Richter's aunt Marianne Schönfelder had been murdered by the Nazis because she developed schizophrenia. Richter immortalized her in a painting titled Aunt Marianne in which the aunt is holding Gerhard Richter as a baby. This painting was originally released under the title Mother and Child because it was Richter's habit to obfuscate the connections his paintings had to his personal life. This led art historians to refer to his body of work as being "without author", as it purportedly had no connection to its author's life.[4]

What Jürgen Schreiber's investigative research uncovered in 2002 was that Gerhard Richter's father-in-law, Heinrich Eufinger (de), had been a high-ranking SS-doctor and fervent Nazi who himself performed over 900 forced sterilisations on women whom the Nazis considered unfit to reproduce. While he did not perform the operation on Marianne Schönfelder personally, he was the director of the hospital where it was performed.

Even though Gerhard Richter only found out about this connection between the families through the article at age 70, his body of work shows that – at least on a subconscious level – he must have known. One of his earliest paintings is of the arrest of Eufinger's SS boss, Werner Heyde, from a newspaper photograph. Another one from the same series, Family at the Seaside, is a snapshot from his wife's photo album showing her father, Professor Eufinger, horse-playing with his family, a photograph that is unremarkable except for the fact that it was taken around the exact time professor Eufinger sent Richter's aunt to her death.

Finally, the largest photo painting that Gerhard Richter produced before turning to abstract art was Ema, Nude on a Staircase (#134 in his official catalogue raisoné). Ema, short for "Marianne", was Gerhard Richter's wife and also shared her first name with Richter's aunt. Unusually for Gerhard Richter, this painting is dated very precisely to May 1966. Richter's first child was born on 30 December 1966, and Richter explained that this photograph was staged by him when he had found out that she was three months pregnant.[4] In a New Yorker profile of writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who spent many weeks with Gerhard Richter during his research for the film but never revealed anything about the content of these conversations, Gerhard Richter revealed surprisingly that "Ema’s father had been her gynecologist, and that there were mysteries and rumors around the treatment that he provided her".[5]

Richter claimed that he told Donnersmarck that he did not want the movie character to bear his name. He also claims he suggested to Donnersmarck the film's protagonist might have another profession.[5] Donnersmarck read Richter the full screenplay when he was finished, so that Richter could see for himself how much was fiction and where facts from his life were used. But when the film was finished and Donnersmarck offered to arrange a screening, Richter said that he did not feel up to it and did not feel he had the strength to see the film. Donnersmarck stated that he understood this reaction, as few people would want to relive some version of the most traumatic chapters of their life on screen. He said that it would probably be hurtful if it was too close to the facts and perhaps even more hurtful if it was not close enough. "Maybe the film is for everybody except him".[5]

When asked for a comment by the German press, Richter said he had not seen the film but he found the trailer too "reißerisch", or thriller-like.[5] Commenting on the material he had supplied to Donnersmarck in interviews, Richter told The New Yorker: "I gave him something in writing stating that he was explicitly not allowed to use or publish either my name or any of my paintings. He reassured me to respect my wishes. But in reality, he has done everything to link my name to his movie, and the press was helping him to the best of its ability. Fortunately, the most important newspapers here reviewed his concoction very skeptically and critically. Nevertheless, he managed to abuse and grossly distort my biography!"[5]

• List of submissions to the 91st Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of German submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

• Official website
• Never Look Away on IMDb
• Never Look Away at Metacritic
• Never Look Away at Rotten Tomatoes