Although the story takes place in Germany a few months after the Third Reich’s surrender, it can serve as an allegory for the tumultuous period when it was made, right after the Eastern Bloc had imploded.
Challenging the perception that Germany made a clean break with Hitler’s regime, Europa – which was originally called Zentropa in North America – focuses on the “werewolves”, partisans in a resistance movement trying to keep the fascist flame burning.
The protagonist is Leopold Kessler, a young American man who has come to his father’s homeland to work after refusing to fight in the war.
His paternal uncle finds him a good job as a sleeping car conductor with Zentropa Railways.
During his first trip, he meets Katharina Hartmann, whose family owns the railway. While getting her room ready for the night, she asks him why he has come to Germany at such a sad time.
He solemnly replies that he regards his presence in Germany as “a small contribution to making the world a better place”.
Soon Leo becomes entangled with the whole Hartmann family, which is trying to retain control of Zentropa, despite apparent ties to the Nazi Party.
The Americans want Leo to be an informer, reporting anything he hears of the werewolves and, implicitly, the Hartmann family.
But once Leo learns that Katharina worked for the werewolves, he finds himself torn between competing demands, on top of the already arduous duties of his position.
The remainder of the story documents the increasingly absurd lengths to which he must go to serve these masters.
Ironically, although Zentropa would give its name to the production company responsible for many of the films released with the Dogme 95 seal of approval, it takes a sharply different aesthetic approach.
Whereas Dogme 95 films such as Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration and Susanne Bier’s Open Hearts featured handheld camerawork, diegetic sound, and low-tech lighting, Europa constantly reminds us of its artificiality.
It periodically shifts from high-contrast black-and-white to colour, has both a voice-over narrator and a prominent non-diegetic soundtrack, and keeps changing the scale of the train where most of the action takes place.
Not only that, the story is structured around different moments of hypnosis, which compels us to take the protagonist’s perspective instead of letting identification happen more naturally.
Europa frequently feels like a stage play, producing an alienation effect similar to the one Bertolt Brecht strove to achieve.
The result is that we find ourselves simultaneously immersed in the protagonist’s struggles and standing outside of them, contemplating them with cool dispassion. This plays a crucial role in making the film easier to apply to a range of historical contexts.
When Leo is first invited to dine at the Hartmann’s bomb-damaged villa, he gets into a conversation with the family’s priest, who is also a guest there, about whether God takes sides during wartime.
The priest replies that God blesses those devoted to a cause rather than the “lukewarm” people who resist commitment.
Towards the end of the story, the conversation’s implications return with a vengeance when Leo talks with Katharina, now his wife, about her work as a werewolf.
Her organisation wants him to plant a bomb on his train, but he is reluctant.
‘Kate, you’re talking about an awful crime,” he says.
“But the way I see it is you are the only criminal,” Katharina tells him.
This baffles Leo.
“I haven’t done anything. I’m not working for either side.”
“Exactly,” she hisses.
It’s not hard to imagine that Leo’s dilemma is similar to that of Americans in Europe more generally. They want to believe that they are helping everyone, but their refusal to pick a side and stick with it inevitably inspires scorn.
Early in the film, after Leo’s first shift as a sleeping car conductor, we see him riding away from the station with his uncle.
The uncle expresses embarrassment at falling asleep, explaining that the sound of the wheels on the tracks is to blame.
“And then there’s the feeling that I don’t know in which the train is moving,” he adds. “I don’t know if we’re going forwards or backwards. Or what I thought was forward has suddenly become backwards. Know what I mean?”
Kessler tries to console his uncle, telling him that he just happened to be asleep when the train changed directions: “You see, it’s easily explained.”
But his uncle is having none of it.
“Young Kessler,” he snarls, “you are a fool!”
Americans want to believe that problems can easily be explained away. And they want to believe in progress.
Never was that more true than in the immediate wake of the Berlin Wall’s destruction, when a truly continent-wide society seemed possible.
Lars von Trier uses Europa to expose the naïveté of that conviction.
Progress only retains its qualitative value so long as it keeps marching into the future. Once you’ve lost your bearings, it becomes detached from direction.
At the end of the narrative, after one of the most harrowing death scenes in cinema, the voice-over hypnotist condenses the American dilemma to a needle-sharp point:
“You want to wake up, to free yourself of the image of Europa. But it is impossible.”
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Screenshot courtesy of Lars von Trier. All rights reserved.
