THE SECOND TRACK (Joachim Kunert, 1962)

A young Jewish man, escaped from a transport train, hides in the cellar of a residential complex. A soldier, in transit, discovers and ignores him but is impressed by a Nazi to participate in his murder: the soldier, conflicted and weakened from war’s moral ambiguity; the Nazi, perhaps overcompensating for dodging the draft. The murder hides behind a series of mysterious circumstances involving four characters at a train station: Brock, a dispatcher; Vera, his daughter (Annekathrin Bürger, superb); Vera’s boyfriend, Frank, who is a trackman; and another railway worker, Runge, with whom Frank has been thieving from railway cars, impressed into crime, ironically, by the same man who once impressed Brock into their far worse crime, which in Brock’s case also included denouncing his wife, who had helped feed, clothe and hide the Jewish runaway. All these past revelations the mature generation must face afresh, while the younger generation must uncover and face them for the first time.
     Written by Joachim and Günter Kunert—cousins, I am guessing, who were teenagers during the war—Das zweite Gleis is reputed to be the only East German film to address directly Germany’s Nazi skeletons in the closet. Its style, borrowed from Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), is very film noirish, at times strenuously so, with a versatility of jarring camera angles that even portrays the action at one point upside-down. Regardless, director Joachim Kunert and cinematographer Rolf Sohre have conjured a remarkable series of stark, unsettling black-and-white images—many of them pitch-dark, with sparse, fierce light suffocated by the darkness of familial/historical secrets.
     Kunert’s principal (pardon) train of imagery involves stripes of light and darkness—from window blinds, for example, but also invoked by the bars of the rail yard fence. These are images of imprisonment: the past imprisoning the present, endangering the future.
     A heart-jumping thriller—and more: Kunert invests such moral weight in the death of one Jew that his film succeeds in evoking the Holocaust.