II didn’t know before what fear is and what it does to you,” says a voice. “Before, I thought you would be there anyway and take care of me.” The voice in Hans-Christian Schmid’s new film “We are then probably the relatives” belongs to a 13-year-old boy. In this story of a kidnapping, his name is Johann and he lives in Hamburg-Blankenese on a peculiar double property: the boy lives in the house on the first property with his mother and father, she is a psychoanalyst and he is a professor of German studies.
The house on the other lot, on the other hand, is solely the father’s workhouse, a place full of books; an educational institution where the son learns Latin with his father, at most, which is no fun for either of them, but especially not for the boy, because he cannot bear the knowledge of his father, whereas the father thinks he can share his own enthusiasm for culture with his son through exuberant lectures and compulsory reading (Virgil!) over the Easter holidays.
Doors slam, the boy runs out. At dinner in the other house it is correspondingly quiet. The boy asks if he can get up. The father goes over to his workhouse again – but does not return.
The father-mother-son triangle
Hans-Christian Schmid tells a true story. It is that of Johann Scheerer, son of Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the founder of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. He was thirteen when his father was kidnapped from his property on March 25, 1996 and held in a basement for 33 days. In 1997 Reemtsma published the well-known book “Im Keller” about the kidnapping and his imprisonment. He called the cellar a “destructive burglary”, “rape” and “exterritoriality”, which will remain in his life and yet cannot be made part of life.
Then, four years ago, his son, who bears his mother’s surname, wrote a novel that chronicled the 33 days from his perspective, a time of unbearable waiting during which the apartment building was transformed into an operations center, a permanent conference room. Friends, relatives, the lawyer and the police were always there, as a community of destiny that depended on one another and was almost completely cut off from the outside world. Each day of waiting changed the boy.
And now comes this film, which is based on Johann Scheerer’s autobiographical book, which also bears the same title – but expands the perspective again. Because in addition to the perception of the son, the film now also focuses on that of the mother, with whom the director was able to have long conversations, which completes the triangle father-mother-son. He tells an exciting story in several respects: He stretches time through silence and only very sparingly used TheNotwist music, which is typical for Hans-Christian Schmid.
He gives space to the unbearable wait, during which nothing seems to be progressing and contact with the kidnappers initially fails. He evokes the desire that something must finally happen with long shots of the almost expressionless faces of Claude Heinrich, who plays the boy, and the superbly cast Adina Vetter as Ann Kathrin Scheerer.
