Last fall, when my colleague Petra Sertic and I put together the GRST film series for this spring, I didn’t know how frighteningly timely and relevant Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl from 1990, would be. Currently, one might say that we are “ruled” by a government whose need to erase or rewrite history is one of its defining traits.
The film is loosely based on the true story of Anja Rosmus in Passau, Germany, but is—according to Verhoeven—applicable to any German town. After entering a high school students’ writing contest, the protagonist Sonja (Lena Stolze) ends up researching her town’s involvement with the Third Reich. While the town has always praised itself for having resisted Nazi influence, Sonja discovers that many locals had collaborated with the Gestapo and were active members in the Nazi Party. Sonja’s effort to uncover the truth is met with strong resistance from townspeople who did not want their shameful past as Nazi collaborators or enablers to come to light, and it takes all her courage to overcome the many obstacles.