ABSTRACT
The career of Jesus began belatedly in the German cinema of the sound era and never reached the heights that it did in other national cinemas. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1981 that Jesus arrived in a German production in a starring role in Das Gespenst , a satirical-although not quite sacrilegious-fi lm by the Bavarian director and writer Herbert Achternbusch. Ten years earlier, Andrzej Wajda’s Pilatus und andere (1972)—an adaption of Michail Bulgakow’s well-known novel The Master and Margarita —was produced for German television and also shown exclusively there, but in this production the Jesus character plays only a supporting role. The Nineties saw Jesus return in a starring role in lesser-known German productions: in the intimate fi lm Das Geheimnis (1995) by Rudolf Thome, and in Es wäre gut, dass ein Mensch wird umbracht für das Volk (1991) by Hugo Niebeling, a fi lming of J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion . Only more recently has a German production of Jesus found a wider audience in Jesus liebt mich (dir. Florian David Fitz, 2012), a comedy about the second coming of Christ set in a small town in northern Germany, based on a novel by David Safi er of the same name.
