Of Pure Blood

3,290 words

I forgot who said it, but it went like this: There is a difference between best movies and favorite movies. You might know objectively that Citizen Kane is the best movie of all time (I happen to disagree), but few people would name it as their favorite movie. A favorite has nothing to do with quality.

In that spirit, I will admit that I like Of Pure Blood (1986) quite a bit. Historically, it’s a mess. It features incredibly cringeworthy scenes. It’s full of the worst clichés. And yet, I like it. It’s a fine suspense movie to watch after a hard day’s work or on a rainy afternoon. In many ways, it is also – don’t let it turn you off, gentlemen! – a film about mothers and motherhood.

Of Pure Blood was first broadcast as a CBS Sunday Movie, and its plot was “suggested by the book” (I kid you not) of the same title, also known in its British incarnation as Children of the SS, by French – (((French)))? – authors Marc Hillel and Clarissa Henry. I already mentioned it in my review of the German film Lebensborn that dealt with the same topic, albeit in a more realistic way.

Hillel and Henry were the first to research the almost mythical Lebensborn organization, but their interpretations of the findings were rather fanciful. German author Dorothee Schmitz-Köster did a much better job with her book “Deutsche Mutter, bist du bereit…” that debunked many of the fables surrounding Lebensborn. However, in 1986 Mrs. Schmitz-Köster’s book had not been written yet, and the myth makes for much better entertainment than the reality anyway.

The teleplay was written by Michael Zagor, after a story by Zagor and Del Coleman, and was directed by Joseph Sargent.

An interesting aspect is that the film was partly shot in Hungary, which really surprised me. This was still the Cold War era, after all. However, it explains why there are supporting actors in the film who, when they are speaking German, have an accent, but not an American one.

The film starts – where else? – at the Octoberfest in Munich. American student Mark Browning (Robert Bowman) goes to confront a certain Dr. Bamberg (Richard Münch), who is having a good time in a private area with a bunch of important-looking men, including an American NATO officer. Young Mark is clearly upset and keeps rambling about what appears to be crazy stuff. He asks to “see her” and claims he has the right to do so. Dr. Bamberg attempts to calm down the situation, Mark pulls out a gun, and security moves in and fatally shoots the young man. The scene ends creepily with Dr. Bamberg holding the dying Mark in his arms and muttering “Schön” (“Beautiful”) while from far off, we hear two American guys discussing someone’s face as “perfect”.

We next find ourselves in the New York City office of Alicia Browning (Lee Remick) who casts actors for ads. There is a bit of back and forth between Alicia and her colleagues; we learn that her son Mark is studying economics in Germany; and of course, that is when the State Department shows up and informs her about Mark’s death.

The story continues with the wake at the Browning family home, that is, the house of Alicia’s mother and half-sister. Alicia’s husband as well as her adopted father have already passed away. (Warning: There is a high mortality rate of characters who might get in the way of the plot in this movie.) Mark’s professor Felix Neumann (Patrick McGoohan) shows up, all the way from Munich. He is warm and sympathetic and quickly becomes a fatherly friend to Alicia. She is still trying to come to grips with what has happened and refuses to accept that Mark would ever have used a gun, or might have been drinking, or might have radicalized himself in some way. The classic “My child would never do something like that” behavior. Alicia tells Felix that Mark had asked her to come to Germany in his last letter, but she had refused, and now the country that had taken her father had also taken her son. She had not been back in the country of her birth since she was five years old, she tells Felix. Her father had died in the Dachau concentration camp, something she had always been very proud of, since he was one of the few Germans to oppose Hitler. Realizing she might just have insulted the kindly old gentleman, she apologizes to Felix.

He then talks about his long family tradition of military service. He and his brother had both served, and his brother had died in the war.

After the guests have left, Alicia goes up to her mother, Erika (Edith Schneider), a bit of a hermit who spends her time building an elaborate doll’s house. She has just added a tree with a swing, a rocking horse, and a music box playing “Kommt ein Vogel geflogen” that Mark had found for her in Munich. Mother and daughter share a moment of grief for the young man.

Back in New York, Alicia and one of her colleagues enter her office late at night for some unexplained reason. There is a heap of unopened mail on the floor; Alicia thumbs through it and finds a last letter from Mark that has only just arrived. In it, there is a single sheet of paper simply saying “Congratulations!” and the birth certificate of a girl born in Munich to parents Ursula Schiller and Mark Browning.

Naturally, the surprised new grandmother boards a plane to Germany. During the flight, Alicia has a dream of herself as a child, searching for her mother in the ruins left by Allied bombing. Mark lies nearby, dead, wearing a German uniform. A nurse marches up to young Alicia and slaps her, and her adult self wakes with a start.

In Munich, Alicia visits the police to get some answers and Mark’s personal belongings. Upon learning that he had used a replica, not a real gun, she goes full liberal mother: “You shoot people for that?” But the officer in charge will have none of it. First of all, he makes it clear, it was private security, not police, who shot Mark. Second, her son had waved a gun in front of a high-ranking NATO officer. She’d better believe security did their job. Since Alicia can’t argue with that, she asks about Ursula Schiller and the baby. While the officer knows nothing about a baby, he tells Alicia that the police is also looking for Ursula.

Next, Alicia visits the apartment Mark lived in, and meets two of his friends, Eric (or Erich, as actor Pascal Breuer pronounces the name) and Marta. They take Alicia to a café and tell her what they know. About five months ago, Mark had made a terrible discovery: There had been Nazis in Germany! Suddenly, Eric/Erich explains, Mark had the whole 20th century on his back. Most German kids went through the same thing when they were about 15 years old.

This scene, like the one at the police station before, really belong to my favorites in the film, not because anything special is happening, but because they are so well written and acted. And what Eric says is true, or at least was in the 80s and early 90s.

Mark got obsessed with Lebensborn, his friends continue, a program Heinrich Himmler started to create the master race: blonde and blue-eyed Aryans. Mark did a lot of research and even visited some of the Lebensborn homes, stud farms for the SS.

Well, this is mostly bunkum. Lebensborn was an organization that supported unmarried mothers or those married ones who needed assistance, usually because their husbands were fighting in the war. The Lebensborn homes provided a safe place to give birth. Quite a number of the unmarried mothers stayed on and worked at those homes in order to stay close to their children, if they had no support from their families and faced social ostracism. What is true is that mothers and children had to qualify as “Aryan” in order to be admitted. And yes, Lebensborn was an SS organization. All members of the SS had a percentage of their salary deducted to fund Lebensborn, whether they had children there or not; and all fathers who had children there, whether married or unmarried, SS or Wehrmacht, had to pay child support. Yes, there exist certain statements by Himmler that Aryan girls and women who wanted to have a child but were unable to find a husband for whatever reasons should not be deprived of the opportunity. So I guess he would have fully supported any – ahem – volunteer willing to do the job. But that is a far cry from “creating the master race” in “stud farms”. It would also have been very expensive for the sperm donor if that had been going on on a grand scale.

Anyway, after Alicia finds out Ursula’s new address, she pays her a visit and meets her granddaughter Maria. Ursula (Katharina Böhm) is living in a mansion, with a nurse to boot, so there is obviously no lack of money. But Alicia probes a bit. Why hadn’t Ursula and Mark, being modern young people, used birth control? Enigmatically, Ursula states that she had to have the baby. For her, there was no other possibility. Alicia invites Ursula to come live in New York, but the young woman declines.

Next stop for Alicia is the bank to close Mark’s account. To her bewilderment, there exists another Browning account: Her own. It was opened on October 7, 1940 – her birthday – in the branch office at Steinheim (or Steinham – I can’t make out the name from how the actors are pronouncing it). Steinheim, as Alicia has already learned from Eric and Marta, was the location of a Lebensborn home. Oh, dear.

So Alicia takes the train to Steinheim. And what do you know – of course, there are some British skinheads on board for whatever reason, singing the Horst Wessel song. An elderly man, obviously a Jew, asks them to stop; there is a bit of a tussle; and a guy (Gottfried John) reading Der Spiegel (of course!) steps in and saves the day.

At the bank’s branch office, Alicia learns that the account was first opened for her under the name Alicia Müller – her mother’s maiden name – and was changed to Alicia Larking in 1945, after her mother had married an American GI. In 1963, after Alicia’s wedding, it was changed to Alicia Browning. Obviously, somebody had kept track of her life.

The account had been co-signed by a Dr. Gregor Bamberg. The bank clerk leaves to ask an older colleague if the good doctor might still be around. While waiting for him to return, Alicia notices some old photographs on the wall. One shows a mansion that eerily resembles her mother’s doll’s house.

Herr Gasthoff, the old bank clerk, shows up and admires her “Aryan type” beauty, “reinrassig”, purebred – just what any bank clerk in 1980s Germany would say.

Alicia flees.

The Steinheim mansion looks indeed just like the doll’s house Erika is building. Alicia notices the big tree with the swing and has a flashback to her childhood when her mother pushed the swing and Alicia wanted to “fly like a bird”.

The present reasserts itself, and there is now another girl sitting on the swing, asking Alicia to push her. She does so, imitating her mother’s words. The guy from the train joins them, addressing Alicia in German. Confused, she tells him that she doesn’t speak the language.

The house is a home for handicapped children, and Paul Bergmann runs the place. Yes, Mark had come to see him. Inside the house, Alicia has more flashbacks from her childhood. The nurse is there again, Erika, men in SS uniforms, even the rocking horse her mother had recreated for the doll’s house.

As it turns out, the mansion had been a Lebensborn home, which explains Mark’s visit. To her horror, Alicia learns that the man himself, Heinrich Himmler, had been godfather to all Lebensborn children who had been born on his birthday, October 7 (true fact), and had opened saving accounts for them.

Stunned, Alicia visits the local church to find her baptism record. And there it is, a girl, Alicia, born to Erika Müller und Major Karl von Lübeck. No, she protests; her father had been Hans Walter Grauden who died at Dachau in 1944. The pastor and deacon snicker. Not likely, they tell Alicia; Hans Walter Grauden, whose statue stands in the town square, died in the 1790s.

Before leaving Germany, Alicia tries to see Ursula again, but the nurse tells her she is not at home. Alicia leaves her address and numbers with her.

Felix sees her off. No, he claims, unfortunately he had only met her mother after she had already married Alicia’s stepfather, GI Fred Larking. To his knowledge, her real father’s name had been Grauden.

But that had been a lie, as Alicia now knows. She questions everything now. She is not who she thought she was. She is a product of Lebensborn. Mark must have died hating her for lying to him like that. And what is she to even think of her mother?

Felix, however, is the voice of reason. Is Alicia any different now than she was before knowing all these things? he asks. She still has the same values and still is the same extraordinary woman as before.

Back in America, Alicia has a visit to pay to her mother. From the Institute for Holocaust Studies (which is, of course, the first place to check when doing research into your ancestry), she has gotten the file of Karl von Lübeck, major of the Waffen-SS division “Das Reich”. Before being killed in January 1945, he was responsible for the logistics of putting Jews into Auschwitz. Naturally. What else?

By the way, for all I know there never was a noble house of “von Lübeck”. And what is the deal with giving all the bad guys place names?

Confronting her mother gets as ugly as can be. Why had she done it? “I did it for Germany. I gave a child to the Führer,” Erika explains with quiet dignity, to Alicia’s horror. “You asked for the truth.” She pleads with Alicia to try to understand the times, the circumstances. The feeling of pride they had. All her friends had done it. (I doubt that.) “We were actually given medals for motherhood.” Yes and no. One child wasn’t enough to get you a medal, but there was indeed the Cross of Honour of the German Mother.

As for Karl, he was a fine man, Erika claims. Because of him, they were allowed to stay at Steinheim, and Erika began working for the director of the home, Dr. Bamberg.

Well, Alicia dispels any illusion about Karl von Lübeck with the help of his file; Erika breaks down and tells her the rest of the story. After the war, they had returned to Munich. Erika’s parents were dead, there was nothing to eat, so when Erika met Fred Larking, she seized the opportunity. “He was just a boy.” This, of course, is the old trope of those evil, conniving German women taking advantage of naive US soldiers immortalized in The Big Lift. Erika had wanted Alicia to have a name, so she invented the Grauden character. So many had died in Dachau, she reasoned; nobody would check.

All those lies, Alicia tells her, destroyed Mark when he found out. In pain and rage, Erika smashes the doll’s house.

Alicia tries to pick up her life, but has a breakdown when she finds herself choosing children for a commercial and disregarding some as “too dark” or “a little too ethnic”.

She then gets a desperate phone call from Ursula. They are going to take her baby, she claims. She has run away and is in hiding.

So Alicia immediately travels back to Germany. Ursula confesses that she had been paid to get pregnant by Mark. She was to leave him as soon as she knew she had conceived, but by that time she had fallen in love with him. So she told him everything. The man behind the dastardly plan was her doctor, Gregor Bamberg.

Let me insert here something that pertains both to Of Pure Blood and the film Lebensborn, and to other potential products of their kind: Why would those evil guys in charge be so hell–bent on separating our young lovers? It makes no sense. On the contrary, they would do their level best to keep them together, so they could go on having a whole bunch of Aryan kids. Somebody clearly did not think this through.

Mama bear Alicia goes to confront Bamberg. The adoption papers have already been signed, he explains to her. The baby is about to be given into the care of an “extremely prominent” couple; the husband is the publisher of Die neue Front (The New Front). Ah yes, those prominent Nazis in influential positions who form public opinion with their right-wing papers… I cannot help but think that somebody is projecting something here.

Ursula is wanted by the police for kidnapping, Bamberg reveals, and since she and Mark were not married, she has no position in court according to German law. Alicia still promises to fight for her granddaughter. She leaves, Bamberg has someone follow her, and the police gets notified of Ursula’s hideout.

Alicia and Ursula are packing and plan to go to Felix Neumann for help when the police shows up. While Alicia hides with baby Maria, Ursula makes a run for it in order to draw the police away. She gets hit by a car and dies on the spot.

Safe at Felix’s, Alicia plans her next move. The police is certainly looking for her, Felix says; so why not leave Maria with him and go back to New York alone, to get her lawyer involved? Alicia, however, declines. She will not be parted from her granddaughter whom those evil Nazis are trying to turn into a breeding machine. Otherwise known as a mother, I guess. Ursula’s parents are conveniently dead, so Maria has nobody now but Alicia. Perhaps Paul Bergmann could help with getting them out of the country?

However, things are about to get from bad to worse. In the guest room, Alicia notices some old photos, showing a familiar face: Karl von Lübeck. Yes, Felix confirms, this is his brother who died in 1945. After the war, the Americans had suggested Felix take another name, they let him go, and in return he helped to rebuild the German economy. This makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s a movie.

When Alicia gets morally outraged, Felix shoots back. Is it so wonderful in America, in New York? He asks. The crime? The immigrant filth? “I am not a monster nor a Nazi,” he tells Alicia. “I am considered a liberal. But even a liberal must be alarmed at what is happening.” Hear, hear, Felix! “Do you know how many foreign workers are in Germany now? Their numbers are frightening. They threaten our culture, our institutions…”

“Our blood!” Alicia bitches.

“I wished to preserve something precious,” Felix tries to reason with her. “What is so wrong with it?”

In America, women go to sperm banks, he tells her. They wish to have children by Nobel Prize winners. Scientists are obsessed with genetic engineering. Why would Alicia consider Lebensborn any different?

Totally reasonable, Alicia argues, “In America, if a woman goes to a sperm bank, she does so because she wishes to, not because some crazy old man wants to preserve the master race.” Yes, a little bit of feminist flavor here. What about those women wanting to preserve the master race, though?

At Steinheim, Alicia and Paul make plans to get Alicia and Maria across the Swiss border. Paul then reveals that he had been born in Poland but taken from his parents when he was less than one year old, to be raised in Germany, because he was blond and blue-eyed. (Yes, this did happen.) However, soon his hair and eyes darkened to brown, so he was sent to “one of the camps”. The camps? Really? For having brown hair?

Alerted by Felix, Bamberg shows up with his goons. They beat up Paul and are about to kidnap Alicia along with the baby when for some reason Felix arrives and orders them to let Alicia and Maria go. (Why did he rat them out in the first place, then?) He claims blood ties, which I actually think is very cool, and tells Bamberg that others can continue the program. After threatening him a bit, he gets Bamberg to relent, and Alicia, Paul and Maria head off into the night, bound for Zurich.

All in all a solid film, in spite of the many inaccuracies. Both Lee Remick and Patrick McGoohan are excellent in their roles. I like the characters. Felix, of course, is the most interesting and complex one. But what stands out to me, like I said at the beginning, is the dynamics of the mothers in the story. These women go to great lengths for their children. Erika lies, forges documents, and ultimately marries a man she does not love in order to protect her daughter. Yes, she also wants to be safe herself; she is rather introverted and perhaps even cowardly that way. (Apparently, Alicia takes after her father.) Alicia, after losing her only son, does everything for her not quite daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Ursula even sacrifices herself to protect Maria. In contrast, the fathers are not present at all. Mark dies right at the beginning of the film. His own father has already passed away, as have both Alicia’s father and stepfather. Ursula’s parents are dead, as well. Of Pure Blood is in many ways a film about women. Yet, it lacks the hallmarks of a feminist movie, and that is, I think, because the theme of motherhood is so strong. Heck, even the song that Erika’s music box is playing refers to the love of a mother for her child. The film also features a strong male protector in Paul and a father figure in Felix.

Ironically, in a weird way, Of Pure Blood might be the closest thing to a chick flick for White Nationalists there is out there.

As for Lebensborn, its most realistic fictional portrayal is the novel Das Haus der verlorenen Kinder (The House of Lost Children) by Linda Winterberg. The story has its own improbabilities, but concerning Lebensborn, it mostly sticks to the facts. A young Norwegian woman falls in love with a German soldier, gets pregnant, finds a place in a Lebensborn home. Her boyfriend learns of her pregnancy by being billed for it, after he had been sent to the Eastern front. There is no breeding program, no stud farm, not even SS. Not as exciting or titillating as the Hillel/Henry interpretation or the films, I’ll admit, but let’s have a bit of realism here for a change, please.