Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast had a few surprises (Marion Cotillard? Really?) but the triumph of The Counterfeiters in the Best Foreign-Language Film category was not one of them. Austrian writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s adaptation of Adolf Burger’s memoir The Devil’s Workshop — a first-person account of a Nazi counterfeiting operation in which appropriately skilled concentration-camp inmates were put to work forging British and American currency — had been in the pole position since it screened last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, where more than one critic dubbed it “this year’s The Lives of Others.”

Depending on your point of view, it’s either high praise or a backhanded compliment to say that Ruzowitzky’s film earns the comparisons to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar champ. Like The Lives of Others, The Counterfeiters is a serious, technically accomplished and very well-acted piece of work probing issues of guilt and complicity; also like The Lives of Others, it’s altogether too neat in its structure and the organization of its themes. It gains relevance, however, by virtue of its rarity as an Austrian film addressing the Holocaust. “Most of the people [in Austria] appreciate that a film like this was made by an Austrian,” says Ruzowitzky over the phone from Los Angeles. “Not just by an Austrian, but by somebody like me, with my family background.”

Ruzowitzky is referring to the fact that his grandparents were Nazi sympathizers — an admission that he’s made freely (and frequently) in interviews. But it wasn’t a personal connection that inspired him to make The Counterfeiters — it was coincidence. “Two producers came to me with the same book within two weeks,” he recalls. “They did it independently of one another, of course. For me, it was great to find a story that wasn’t widely known.” He suspects that the relative obscurity of the source material may have to do with its atypicality as a Holocaust narrative. “I think that if you wanted to teach people about the Holocaust, [the book] would not be the best place to start,” he admits. “You wouldn’t want to begin with these counterfeiters, who enjoyed so many privileges.”
The privileges in question were at once modest and monumental; in addition to livable surroundings and decent food, the prisoners employed in the Nazi counterfeiting scheme (dubbed “Operation Bernhard”) were kept alive — so long as they continued to produce convincing forgeries. The drama in the film stems not only from the difficulty of the task, but from the guilt that comes with aiding and abetting one’s captors.

The pragmatist argument — better to be complicit than to be dead — is made by the film’s (slightly fictionalized) main character, Salomon “Sally” Sorowitch (Karl Markovics), an ace art forger of Russian extraction whose pre-internment existence was flamboyantly scruple-free. Taking a more idealistic tack is collotype specialist Burger (August Diehl), a rabid socialist whose talk of resistance and sabotage alienates him from his colleagues even as it sharply prods their consciences.

The pair’s ideological tête-à-têtes have a schematic feeling, but the actors do well to convey a shifting range of emotions, particularly Markovics, whose understated work suggests real depth — or perhaps a stunning hollowness.

“Sally is not a typical, likeable hero,” notes Ruzowitzky, “but we’re sort of forced to identify with him.” Indeed, Sally figures in nearly every shot of the film, and when you consider that The Devil’s Workshop was actually written from the opposing point of view — that Diehl’s character is the stand-in for the man who wrote the book — the choice becomes almost radical. “The idea was to see the whole thing through [Sally’s] eyes,” the director continues. “We’re always with him, and there’s never any sense of safety or distance. We never know more than he does.”

Ruzowitzky hopes that his film’s well-wrought sense of claustrophobia won’t preclude it from connecting with audiences — especially at home. (Some German critics have ironically claimed that the film, which isn’t shy about depicting violence and never strains for uplift, is “too accessible.”)
“There was a time when German and Austrian societies were still partially composed of people who had been involved in the Third Reich or had supported it,” Ruzowitzky says. “My generation is made up of the grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren, people who don’t have any personal memories of events. This film is an invitation to them.”