Douglas Sirk is today considered one of the greatest authors of classic melodrama in American film, and this war melodrama is probably his most personal film. Sirk was born in 1897 as Hans Detlef Sierck in Hamburg, and he started directing in Germany. In the 1930s, he was one of the leading German theater directors, and soon switched to film, but like many of his colleagues, when the Nazis seized power, he realized that it was time to move. But his situation was even more complicated since his first wife joined the Nazi party, and since his second wife was Jewish, he was forbidden to see his son Klaus Detlef, who became a child actor in the mid-thirties.
Sirk escaped from Germany in 1937 and soon arrived in the USA via Switzerland and the Netherlands, and after his son was drafted into the German Wermacht, he died on the Eastern Front at the age of barely 19. Exactly at that time, sometime in the spring of 1944, on the eastern front in the Soviet Union, “A Time to Love and Time to Die” begins. The Germans are retreating, and among them is the young soldier Ernst Graeber (John Gavin), who finally got leave after two years and was allowed to return home for three weeks. And it is quite obvious that it is clear to the Germans that they will lose the war, morale is getting lower and lower, the soldiers are cold and hungry, and Ernst and the rest of his platoon have had enough of everything. Many are sick of the atrocities they have committed over the years, and Ernst is fed up with desolation and death, but only when he gets home will he realize what kind of disaster is coming to Germany.
His town was literally razed to the ground, he cannot find his parents because no one knows where they are, whether they are alive or died in the bombings. Germany is in complete disarray, until yesterday completely deluded people realize that they were fooled and that they believed in a complete madman. Ernst understands, and while he and countless of his colleagues perished in the east, west, north and south, Germany is full of profiteers who continue to thrive in all the horror and misery that has already occurred. In order to find out what happened to his parents, Ernst will contact a family friend and a doctor, but some unknown people have moved into his house.
However, his daughter Elizabeth (Liselotte Pulver) is still there, from whom he will learn that the doctor ended up in the camp, and that the same fate befell many other Germans who disobeyed the authorities in any way. Soon, in all this chaos, love will be born between the two of them, and the situation will become more and more dangerous for both of them, not only because of the constant Allied bombing, but also because Ernst will realize that all thinking people are targeted by the Gestapo. Sirk made an emotional and poignant war melodrama, and the disaster that befell Germany in the moments when they began to lose the war is brilliantly portrayed. When they realized that they could not come out of it as winners, and that collapsed Germany, both in the physical and spiritual sense, is shown here in a truly extraordinary way.
This was one of the first American films that dealt with World War II, without showing the situation in black and white. If the Allies are heroes and liberators, and the Nazis are murderers, they are real movie villains, the story is already extremely complex. Sirk managed to bring that different picture by shooting the film from the perspective of the Germans, who become clear that they are on the wrong side. Although the novel of the same name by the famous German writer Erich Marie Remarque was not nearly as successful as his classic “Nothing New in the West”, it is a worthy and quality film in which the writer himself not only wrote the script, but Remarque also played a supporting role. The role of Ernst’s professor, a thinking man who has to hide because of his criticism of the regime, from whom the young soldier will also try to seek help.