Nazi

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss

mandy — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Harlan reworked brilliantly the Jew Suss film. This will be the anti-Semitic film. - From the diary of Joseph Goebbels, December 15, 1939.

You’re a talented, ambitious film director, lauded in your homeland and feted elsewhere for your movies. You can choose your projects. Producers throw money at you and don’t interfere with your work. You have final cut. You’re well paid. You lead a privileged life. You are married to a beautiful actress, who is your leading lady.

Suddenly: a political sea change. Ruthless men seize power. The Minister of Propaganda calls you in. He wants you to direct a film and use your wife and many another of your country’s famous actors in the cast so that the film will draw a large audience. He promises you a plentiful budget.

You read the script. It’s scurrilous propaganda that denigrates and villifies the government’s so-called enemies. Almost certainly, this film will inflame your countrymen against these perceived foes; many may die as a result. You can’t flee; you’re too famous, and they’d never willingly let you out. Don’t make the film and you might never work again; in fact, you might be killed and your family with you.

With some tweaks, this was the dilemma that faced Veit Harlan, a renowned German director of the 1930s. The Minister of Propaganda was Joseph Goebbels. The script he gave to Harlan in 1938 was anti-Semitic shit entitled Jew Suss (Suss the Jew). Harlan made the picture. It was a hit.

He would come to rue his decision, perhaps not so much for the film itself but for the repercussions that followed the Nazi defeat. He was twice tried, twice acquitted for contributing to the holocaust by directing Jew Suss. That wasn’t the end of it. The court of public opinion denounced him. After the war, he couldn’t find work; when he did, he had to direct under pseudonyms for a number of years.

This documentary about Harlan employs the customary mix of period photographs and movie footage, and talking heads, to examine Harlan’s case. Part of what makes the film unique is that the talking heads are mostly not pundits and historians proffering distanced or academic opinions. Harlan had five children by two wives. His kids, now elderly, and his grandchildren, mostly young women in their twenties, were filmed at length. Their responses manifest divided feelings about his actions and about being related to him by blood.

Harlan claimed he was forced to make Jew Suss and denied that he understood the possible deadly consequences. His apologists claim that he made the film well because he was a true artist and could not make a movie any other way. Some family members believe this. Some reject these avowals and say he knew what he was doing, he was responsible for the deaths of many Jews, and his crime was inflected by never confessing he had erred grievously in accepting Goebbels’s and Hitler’s commission. This division in the family—and some who speak are conflicted within themselves about Harlan’s guilt—lets us see how problematic, complex, and emotional the question of his culpability is.

So which way Harlan? Dupe under duress with no real clue about what he was doing? Skilled filmmaker who morphed into a stinking Nazi propagandist with buckets of blood on his hands? Somewhere in between? Have a look at this engrossing piece of work, a significant contribution to the cinema of fascism and the holocaust, and decide for yourself.

Written by: Neil Flowers, February 19th 2011

Silence Not, A Love Story

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:07:00 +0000

By Cynthia L. Cooper

Gihon River Press

Everyone loves a love story, especially one with a happy ending, and award-winning playwright and journalist Cynthia L. Cooper’s latest play, a forty-four-scene two-act, is a whopper. Silence Not, A Love Story tells the improbable tale—based on a true story—of Gisa Peiper, a young Jewish student stifled by religious Orthodoxy, and Paul Konopka, a Catholic craftsman, who met in late-1920s Germany while working with the anti-fascist International Socialist Combat League, known as the ISK. It was not love at first sight, but it was close, bolstered by each individual’s ironclad commitment to social justice and human rights.

Their organization, Cooper writes in the play’s Prologue, “was made up of pacifists and humanitarians. Politically, the group was strongly opposed to communism, but deeply committed to the labor movement… Members of the ISK studied political issues through group analyses and Socratic questioning, and they believed that action must follow understanding.” Members ran a school and published a newspaper; they were also encouraged to follow a vegetarian diet, avoid alcohol and spend time outdoors, hiking and enjoying the natural world. By all accounts the ISK was bold and members routinely put themselves in harm’s way. Peiper and Konopka were especially fearless and took incredible risks to publicize the danger posed by newly appointed German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

From his first utterances as a national leader, Peiper and Konopka attempted to activate German citizens to oppose him and his fascist Nazi Party and Peiper’s reporting for the ISK press acknowledged the threat. People, she wrote, knew what Hitler and the Nazis stood for before they came to power. “Their terror tactics showed in street fights, in writings, in threats…The demeaning and torturing of anyone resisting them started immediately after January 1933. Fear pervaded the country. Everybody knew about the terror. It was also known outside of Germany.”

But breaking through angst is no easy feat and Silence Not, A Love Story includes riveting depictions of the general public’s go-along-to-get-along capitulation to Hitler’s demands. Not surprisingly, Konopka ended up on Nazi radar and, in short order, was forced to flee Germany and continue his underground agitation from France. Peiper eventually joined him, but not before being jailed for her pro-democracy efforts.

After the war, the pair moved to the United States. They married in 1941, 12 years after meeting, and remained together until Konopka’s death in 1976. Peiper became a social worker, writer and professor at the University of Minnesota School of Social Work and her long career as a youth advocate was dedicated to fostering human dignity. Her message was constant. We must never forget the millions of people whose lives were cut short by the Nazis. What's more, she served as a living rebuttal to Holocaust deniers and fascist apologists until her death in 2003.

Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, in an introduction to Silence Not, puts Peiper and Konopka’s lives in context: “For Gisa Peiper, and for Rosa Parks and the civil rights activists, their very humanity lay in their acts of resisting evil. They could no more remain passive, removed, and quiescent than they could stop breathing… Without those who stand up for justice, where would the rest of us be?”

After this summer’s murder of Dr. George Tiller and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns, this question seems particularly resonant.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, September 24th 2009

Leroy

admin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Directed by Armin Völckers

Dreamer Joint

Leroy is a romantic comedy about a boy born in Germany to one white parent and one black parent. The front of the DVD says it all, depicting a picture of Leroy on top of an orange background; his afro, the size of a planet, surrounded by hearts, Nazis, and his friends and family. Leroy tackles an interesting perspective on modern neo-Nazism and what it looks like in today's Germany.

Leroy's father is an offbeat inventor, while his mother is involved in city politics. Leroy's best friend and comic relief is a blonde half-Greek boy named Dimitri. Hilarity ensues when Leroy falls in love with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl whose parents are part of the far-right German party which aligns itself with Nazism. She also has five skinhead brothers. Leroy, being faced with the peril of love with a Nazi's daughter, is forced to confront his black identity, something he had never thought about until then. Delving conveniently into a store that specializes in “black power” and black literature and film, Leroy begins to research black history, with an emphasis on the American civil rights movement. Leroy even takes on fashionable accessories in a slapstick sequence as part of his mission to find his black identity, such as a long brown coat similar to the one from the movie Shaft and glasses in the style of Malcolm X.

This film is a particularly interesting look at "black consciousness" from a black German's perspective. Although some of the jokes are done in an over-the-top, slapstick fashion, Leroy is a smart look at what it means to be different in our modern society, where racism isn't as prevalent on the surface, but instead is more subversive.

At times, when the film does address heavy questions of racial identity, it tends to fall back on silly jokes and the exchanging of zany one-liners between Leroy and the Nazi brothers, when it could have pushed through these motifs in a little more conclusive fashion. The end even seems a bit forced as they try to wrap up everything into a perfectly happy ending. (No kidding!) Despite these few flaws, Leroy does have some genuinely funny moments, such as when Dimitri tries a "hair removal product for Greeks and half-Greeks" or the fun little dance number involving Leroy and his girlfriend's five Nazi brothers, which plays during the credits. Overall, I would recommend this film for it's lightheartedness and unabashed look at racial identity in a non-American society.

Written by: Chrissie Thornburg, March 30th 2009

Un Amour à Taire (A Love to Hide)

admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 23:02:00 +0000

Directed by Christian Faure

Picture This! Entertainment

Christian Faure’s A Love to Hide is a deeply powerful film. Set in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France, the film depicts the violent effects the Nazi criminalization of gayness. The story begins with Sara’s (Louise Monot) escape from her home, after Nazi’s have murdered her entire family. Out of desperation she contacts an old friend (and potential love interest), Jean, played with startling effect by Jérémie Renier. Jean convinces his lover, Philippe (Bruno Todeschini), to hide Sara, placing the three characters in an awkward love triangle that eventually leads to a deep friendship. Family politics between Jean and his brother Jacques (Nicolas Gob) lead to Jean’s arrest by Nazis on charges of sexual deviance. The remainder of the film deals with Sarah and Jacques’ attempts to get Jean released.

The narrative itself is dense with emotionally charged with issues of love, jealousy and violence, however, Faure ultimately fails to deliver on the promise of his powerful storyline. The first half of the film is a wonderful depiction of Jean and Philippe’s relationship, the challenges of integrating Sara into their secret world, and the underground queer culture thriving in Paris. With the introduction of Jacques, the film fizzles into little more than soap opera. The film is further strayed after Jean is arrested, shifting its focus onto the blossoming relationship between Sara and Jacques.

Regardless of the narrative flaws, the film retains its effectiveness in the performances of all the lead players. Renier, in particular, depicts with equal sensitivity Jean’s vulnerability and the strength he receives from his love with Philippe. A flawed effort, but noble nonetheless.

Written by: Ashvin Kini, July 20th 2007

The Films of Su Friedrich, Vol. 1: The Ties That Bind

admin — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:22:00 +0000

Directed by Su Friedrich

Microcinema / Outcast Films

When I read what The Ties That Bind was about, I knew I had to see it. Su Friedrich interviews her mother, Lore, about what it was like living in Germany during World War II. It is a brilliantly woven film tapestry - a mixture of story-telling, historical film footage, current newspaper articles/titles, current war protests and dozens of modern “political mailings.” I recommend it to everyone. It is a story of a mother and daughter trying to connect; it is also a horror story that today’s shock-loving generation should see… because it really happened.

Lore was not a Nazi sympathizer, nor a freedom fighter. She resisted, but did not overtly fight against the evil that had taken over her country. She, like many other Germans from that time, were vilified, for not fighting against it. It is heart rendering to hear the agony in this woman’s voice as she talks about what her family had to endure, just to survive.

Su Friedrich shot this film in black and white, enhancing the emotional intent of this film. One of the photographic threads in this film storytelling is the construction of a miniature plastic German house. We see this house first removed from its package, then carefully laid out on the floor, piece by piece, and assembled. Finally, the person who built the house puts on Army Gestapo boots and stomps on the home, destroying it. Then the house is burned (this happens while Lore talks about the bombing of Stuttgart, and how she ended up wandering outside the city, hands out, in shock, not able to speak when the Red Cross picked her up). Finally, what remains of the small plastic house is picked up from the floor.

Since the late 1970s, New York-based Su Friedrich has articulated the slogan “the personal is political.” I think she makes this obvious in The Ties That Bind. She was the films' director, editor, writer and cinematographer. She currently teaches film and video production at Princeton University. There was a Bonus film on this DVD – The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too. It is inspiring, a documentary on a courageous modern political movement that is effecting change. Check it out, as well.

Written by: Patricia Ethelwyn Lang, May 31st 2007