The full title is Not Reconciled, Or Only Violence Helps, Where Violence Rules.
“One German generation explaining to the other the losses it suffered and the mistakes it committed in a seventy years' span, going right through the Nazi era, is one way of stating the subject of this unique film experience.... But...how was Straub able to take Heinrich Böll's effective novel, Billiards at Half Past Nine, a family saga with a large, leisurely cast of characters spanning three generations, and condense it into a severe film of only 51 minutes' length which is, if anything, better than the book? Straub's solution was daring and original: not by trying to cram as much dramatic incident into it as possible...but by concentrating on just those undramatic, static, mundane moments that criss-cross decades.... Yet the turmoils that are never shown onscreen are always spoken of and explained, explained compulsively, until you are made to understand the permanent uneasiness which Junkerism and Nazism have left on this fragmented family.... A film whose political outrage, from the understated title onwards, is understood without having to be shouted. It is also a rare aesthetic joy of the highest order.” Phillip Lopate