Zu neuen Ufern

Douglas Sirk (original name Hans Detlef Sierck) is mostly remembered for his American films, and even these ones were long viewed as cheap commercial successes.

But he also made some (largely forgotten) films in Germany. I don't know why his German films are seldom seen. Is it because one suspects a Nazi flavour? This is not realy the case. Sierck left Nazi Germany relatively late (1937) but his second wife was Jewish and politically he was certainly no supporter of National Socialism. Is it because his German films are real melodrama's? Could be. In his American films beneath the melodrama there is a second layer with hidden criticism on bourgeois moralism. This second layer is absent in his German films if only because they do not play in bourgeois circles but more often in aristocratic circles with their own codes of honor.

This is not to say that his German films are not worth watching. His two films with the Swedish star Zarah Leander ("Habanera" and "Zu neuen Ufern", both of 1937) are certainly entertaining. Of this two films I prefer "Zu neuen Ufern", in which Zarah Leander plays a tragic woman who seems to fall for the wrong man. The film does have a touch of Brecht in it, and this is not by chance because a few years earlier Sierck directed "The threepenny opera" for stage.