| Frisians in Peril | |
| Director: | Peter Hagen |
| Producer: | Alfred Bittins Hermann Schmidt |
| Starring: | Friedrich Kayßler Jessie Vihrog Valéry Inkijinoff |
| Music: | Walter Gronostay |
| Cinematography: | Sepp Allgeier |
| Editing: | Wolfgang Becker |
| Studio: | Delta-Film |
| Runtime: | 97 minutes |
| Country: | Nazi Germany |
| Language: | German |
Frisians in Peril (German: Friesennot) is a 1935 German drama film directed by Peter Hagen and starring Friedrich Kayßler, Jessie Vihrog and Valéry Inkijinoff.[1] Made for Nazi propaganda purposes, it concerns a village of ethnic Frisians in Russia.
It was shot at the Grunewald Studios in Berlin. The film's sets were designed by the art directors Robert A. Dietrich and Bernhard Schwidewski. Location shooting took place around the Lüneburg Heath near Bispingen. It premiered at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in the German capital.
Soviet authorities are making life as difficult as possible for a village of Volga Germans, most of whose ancestors originated in the Frisian Islands, with taxes and other oppression.[2]
After Mette, a half-Russian, half-Frisian woman, becomes the girlfriend of Kommissar Tschernoff, the Frisians murder her and throw her body in a swamp.[3]
Open violence breaks out and all of the Red Army soldiers stationed nearby are killed by the villagers. They then set fire to their village and flee.[3]
Willi Krause, under the name Peter Hagen, directed a film adapting the novel by Werner Kartwig.
The film was one of the few to be directly distributed by the Nazi Party. It was approved by the censors on 15 November 1935, and premiered in Berlin on 19 November. It was banned in 1939 shortly before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact due to its strong anti-Soviet message. It was unbanned after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.[4]
A cynical piece of anti-Communist propaganda depicts the Communists as posting obscene anti-religious posters, and the Frisians as piously declaring that all authority comes from God.[5]
The portrayal of Kommissar Tschernoff does not conform to the heavy-handed depiction of Communists as brutal and murderous in such films as Flüchtlinge; he is truly and passionately in love with Mette, and only with her death does he unleash his soldiers.[3] A villager objects to the affair on the grounds that even though her mother was Russian, her father's Frisian blood "outweighs" foreign blood, and therefore she must not throw herself at a foreigner.[3] Her murder is presented as in accordance with the Nazi principle of "race defilement."[6]