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Not Reconciled
Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt herrscht
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first major film introduced their grippingly sparse, elliptical style to international audiences. Adapted from Heinrich Böll’s 1958 novel Billiards at Half-Past Nine, Not Reconciled brought an intense sense of the present to this narrative of three architects reckoning with their family’s traumatic wartime history.
As the directors hopscotch across chronologies, moving freely between the 1910s Kaiser autocracy and the 1950s Adenauer economic miracle, they chart the origins and legacy of Nazism, and the moral demands of obedience and sacrifice within the German bourgeois family.
Bio Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
Filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006. Their films are noted for their rigorous, intellectually stimulating style and radical, communist politics. Though both were French, they worked mostly in Germany and Italy. Straub and Huillet were inseparable partners from 1954 until Huillet’s death, working intimately on every aspect of film production. Straub-Huillet created highly personal film interpretations of profoundly ambitious art: stories by Böll, Kafka, Duras, and Pavese; poems by Dante, Mallarmé, and Hölderlin; a film by D. W. Griffith, a painting by Cézanne, an unfinished opera by Schö …
A close adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s 1959 novel Billard um Halb Zehn (Billiards at Half-Past Nine), Not Reconciled was Huillet and Straub’s second film—an idiosyncratic, yet rigorously intelligent, portrait of postwar West Germany, a society in which one-time Nazi functionaries lived among pacifists, the quietly disaffected side-by-side with those who had passively accepted atrocities. In many ways, the film serves as a companion piece to their first short, Machorka-Muff (1963), also a Böll adaptation. Both films serve as pointed critiques of the postwar order, the earlier work—structured around the inner monologue of a former Wehrmacht officer as he prepares to unveil a war monument—is particularly critical of a then-resurgent German militarism and quiet rehabilitation of Nazi war heroes.
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- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025