"Idon’t think you can know who you are if you don’t know your past,” states veteran German director Margarethe von Trotta while discussing her new film “Rosenstrasse.” Centering on a little known demonstration in 1943 Nazi Germany carried out by the Aryan wives of Jewish men, von Trotta’s latest work has the distinction of being the first film about the Holocaust told from a German point of view.

First as an actress and then as a filmmaker, von Trotta is a key figure in the New German cinema movement -- spearheaded by legendary directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders -- that swept the nation in the 1970s. “I came from Germany before the New Wave, so we had all these silly movies,” she says. “Cinema for me was entertainment, but it was not art. When I came to Paris, I saw several films of Ingmar Bergman, and all of the sudden I understood what cinema could be. I saw the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the French Nouvelle Vague. I stood there and said, ‘that is what I’d like to do with my life.’ But that was 1962, and you couldn’t think that a woman could be a director. In a way, as an unconscious act, I started acting and when the New German films started, I tried to get in through acting.”

The one time wife of another noted German filmmaker, Volker Schlondorff, von Trotta wrote the scripts for several of her husband’s films, before receiving her first sole directing credit on 1977’s “The Second Awakening of Christa Klages.” She has maintained a busy career ever since, writing and directing films for both theatrical release and German television. Despite her prolific output, von Trotta is quick to point out that not all of her work has been well received by the German film community. “It is said that you’re not a prophet in your own country, and for me that is very true,” comments the director. In Germany, they try to criticize me. Sometimes I don’t understand, because I’m not an aggressive person.” She recalls the origins of the acrimony some feel for her films. “It started when I received the Golden Lion (at the Venice Film Festival) for “Marianne and Juliane,” which is already 20 years ago. Werner Herzog told me that because I won the award and am a woman, you will see that with your next film, Germans will drown you. And it happened exactly like that.”

True to form, German film critics have been reticent to embrace “Rosenstrasse,” largely because of its subject matter. “They don’t like it so much,” notes von Trotta when asked about the general German view of Holocaust films. “They think that it has to be finished now. In a way, I find that totally absurd, because we did not do so many films about it in the past. The real films you can count on two hands, and they say it’s enough. For me, it’s not acceptable.”

Further illustrating her point, she continues, “Do you remember the film “Europa Europa” by Agnieszka Holland? A marvelous film, but it was so rejected in Germany that she couldn’t even get the nomination. She would’ve had the chance in America to get an Oscar for a foreign film. But to get this chance, you have to be nominated by the land it was produced, and it was produced in Germany. She couldn’t get the nomination for this film. All of the film directors protested against this decision. We were all for Agnieszka. That was really a shame, so you can imagine that I’m not so well loved by this sort of people.”

Told largely in flashback, we learn of the Rosenstrasse incident when a contemporary New York resident named Hannah Weinstein (Maria Schrader) travels to Germany to locate the elderly Lena Fischer (Doris Schade), a woman who knows vital information about Hannah’s mother’s mysterious past. Lena tells Hannah about the weeklong events in 1943 in which several hundred “intermarried” Aryan women assembled outside of the Rosenstrasse prison to protest for the release of their Jewish husbands. It is during these peaceful demonstrations when Lena (Katja Riemann), whose husband Fabian (Martin Feifel) has been detained, develops a close bond with the then eight-year-old Ruth (Svea Lohde), as the orphaned child searches for her imprisoned mother.

So why did von Trotta choose to use this narrative framing device instead of setting the film exclusively in 1943?

“The first script I wrote was entirely in 1943, but I’m much more satisfied with this way of telling the story,” she offers. “We’re living today and as a spectator you’re looking to the past. If I had set the film only in ’43, I would’ve had the position of a historian, as if I would know everything, and I don’t know everything. Many of the testimonies that I gathered were not clear about how many people were outside -- memory is a very subjective process. I could use Lena as one person who is telling the story subjectively. I don’t have to make believe that I know more than she tells me.”

Given that the Rosenstrasse incident isn’t allotted much space in the annals of history -- 20th Century or otherwise -- one would imagine that doing the research necessary to write the script was a daunting process. Luckily, von Trotta was able to track down many first hand accounts of the extraordinary happenings.

“The research was mainly that I met people who were still alive in Berlin. I met ten or twelve people in ’93, ’94, and I met them with the help of a woman who did a documentary about this event. They told me much more than they could have told this other woman, because when you are making a documentary, you don’t have so much time. I stood with every person for a whole day; it was very emotional. I met two real wives, who are dead now, children who stood outside with their mothers and both women and men who were inside. I had the whole spectrum of different positions. Only after I met these people did I have the feeling that I had to do the film.”

Pigeonholed by some in her homeland as a feminist statement, “Rosenstrasse” is a humanist piece more than any sort of button pushing political work, an observation that the director is eager to confirm. “I’m not a preacher or a teacher or a messenger. I’m only doing film and the consequences of what you think about that is for you as a spectator to know. It’s like a child -- you want to know exactly what to do and how to live, and I don’t know myself, so I can’t give advice.“

Having played at film festivals the world over for more than a year, “Rosenstrasse” will finally see a U.S. theatrical release (after a few delays) through Samuel Goldwyn Films on August 20 in select cities. A sensitive and unique film, “Rosenstrasse” is an eye-opening history lesson steeped in an enormous well of emotion.

Warren Curry