A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE

A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958). John Gavin is on leave in Berlin from the Eastern Front in 1945. His parents' house has been bombed. He runs into Liselotte Pulver whom he had known when they were children. And as they are both desperate and alone they begin to fall in love. The film is rightly called A Time to Love and a Time to Die. The time is wartime. Quite clearly a time to die. And in Douglas Sirk where death is, and bombs and cold and tears, there love can grow. Liselotte Pulver has planted some parsley outside her window, the only living thing among the rubble. It's clear from the start that John Gavin will be killed in the end. And somehow it really all has nothing to do with war. A film about war would have to look different. It's about a state of being. War as a condition and breeding ground for love. If the same people, Liselotte Pulver and John Gavin met, say, in 1971, they would smile at each other, say how are you, what a coincidence and that would be it. In 1945 it could become a great love. It's quite true. Love isn't where the problem's at. The problems are all happening on the outside. Inside two people can be tender to each other.

An ordinary love and unexceptional people for the first time in Douglas Sirk. They watch what's happening around them with wide startled eyes. Everything is incomprehensible to them, the bombs, the Gestapo, the lunacy. In a situation like that love is the least complicated thing of all, the only thing you can understand. And you cling to it. But I wouldn't like to think about what would have happened to them if John had survived the war. The war and its horrors are only the décor. No one can make a film about war, as such. About how wars come about, what they do to people, what they leave behind, could well be important. The film is not pacifist, as there is not a second which lets us think: if it were not for this lousy war everything would be so wonderful or something. Remarque's novel A Time to Love and a Time to Die is pacifist. Remarque is saying that if it weren't for the war this would be eternal love. Sirk is saying if it weren't for the war this would not be love at all.