"The Nasty Girl" - Anna Rosmus

    
The fourth of our events is a screening of the film The Nasty Girl by the German director Michael Verhoeven. The film tells the story of a young woman by the name of Anna Rosmus who uncovered the secret Nazi past of her small home town of Passau. Her story begins as she wins a regional award for a history essay she has written in school and is entered into a national competition. She decides to write an essay on how the people in her town resisted the Nazis. The problem is that they did not and as a result her research is a direct threat to the silence that many of the prominent leaders in the town have been able to shroud their own pasts in.
Undaunted by opposition, eventually escalating to death threats, Anna Rosmus continues to uncover a past many, if not most, in her town would prefer to remain buried. 		The film (95 minutes) along with a CBC interview with the real Anna Rosmus (25 minutes) will be screened in the week after Reading Week. Anna Rosmus' story is different from that Deborah Lipstadt and Anne Levy and so raises somewhat different issues. Many of those opposing her in Passau did not deny the Nazi past of the town; rather, they simply preferred to ignore it. Here the question becomes not whether the historian should confront historical lies, but should the historian break historical silences?
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What does the story of "The Nasty Girl" have to say about the study of history?

Would you have done what Anna Rosmus did?

Do you think she risked too much in her pursuit of the truth?
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Department of History / University of Toronto, CANADA / Last updated 10-APR-2001
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