The Return of History

The Berlinale is a natural fit for documentaries and fiction films dealing with German history and politics. And every year the festival presents intriguing or polemical works shedding light on a still painful 20th century. Two documentaries in the Panorama section brought to the forefront aspects of that perennial staple, the Third Reich: German filmmaker Ilona Ziok’s Fritz Bauer – Death by Instalments, and young Israeli director Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished.

The remarkable historical documentaries of Ms. Ziok deserve wider circulation and are certainly inspirational to those interested in the craft of writing history with visual materials: Kurt Gerrons Karusell, The Sounds of Silents, The Count and the Comrade. German art and politics are interwoven in a complex tapestry where the individuals at the heart of these stories become emblematic of their times – a German Jewish actor of the Weimar cinema era, a pianist of silent cinema in Berlin, an aristocrat and a communist whose paths cross in a concentration camp and symbolize post-war Germany. In her brand-new documentary, the director examines the career of Fritz Bauer, a no-nonsense German Jewish lawyer who became the chief prosecutor of Nazi crimes. A finely tuned piece of non-chronological editing, the documentary has as its linchpin an extended interview with Bauer made for German television of the 1960s. In the guise of a conversation with young people, Bauer summarizes the legal and moral implications of these crimes, less than a generation away, and urges the country to proceed with the prosecution of those responsible. Interspersed with interviews to family members, friends and colleagues, the documentary recurs to archival materials, including newsreel footage of my hometown of Buenos Aires at the time of the capture of Eichmann by Israeli intelligence forces, acting on information provided by Bauer. By the 1960s the prosecutor had despaired that the German legal system would bring this and other criminals to justice.

Today, Fritz Bauer seems to be largely under the historical radar, as the questions from the all-German audience at the screening I attended seemed to reflect. I remembered that the prosecutor in The Reader is patterned after Bauer; the film, like this documentary, ends up being not only about the responsibility of individual Germans in the commission of crimes during the war, but also about the price paid by a society as a whole. Without being didactic or preachy, the documentary succeeds in making this courageous tough-as-nails prosecutor embody the voice of moral clarity in post-war Germany. The fateful end of Bauer (quickly ruled as a ‘suicide’, in spite of evidence to the contrary at the times) brings an element of suspense to the biography. The choice of music by composer Manuel Göttsching combines Gorecki’s Third Symphony, a work of mourning for the victims of the he Holocaust, with Frank Sinatra singing ‘I did it my way’ when the credits roll. These are one of several bold choices.

The profound impact of A Film Unfinished lies in the intelligent handling of the subject matter: footage of the Warsaw Ghetto taken in 1942 for use in a German propaganda film surfaced in a GDR archive in the late 1980s. A Film Unfinished is the historical investigation of how this roughly edited hour-long material was shot. What emerges is a detective’s account of an unfinished propaganda project, with its emotional punch provided by survivors of this horrific episode of WWII, who watch the footage unfold and provide an eye witness account of how it got made. The use of diaries, German reports and even the words of one of the cameramen (in a reenactment) create a polyphonic if disturbing effect. The unadulterated use of the footage – as found in four cans, without soundtrack, listed as “Ghetto, 1942” – would have made this descent into the horror unbearable, as the filmmaker wisely noted after the screening. What the documentary brings, however, is another dimension to the horror: by uncovering the ‘staged’ the reality of the images themselves (hunger and death don’t even begin to paint the picture of the physical and spiritual indignities), A Film Unfinished gives this very ‘staginess’ a ‘documentary’ reality. In this sense, when the director decides to stage the interview with the cameraman who died a few years before (and whose words come verbatim from a legal document, she pointed out), she is doing the exact same thing the original material did, the ‘manipulation’ of reality. Hersonki is, in fact, not only showing the footage as shot but also commenting on its nature. Not quite a first person narrative – even though the director is the voiceover narrator – the documentary begins and ends in a deeply symbolic manner: the camera tracks slowly through a corridor to find the shelf where the cans are kept – it is the filmmaker’s journey into a heart of darkness.

The screening of the German competition entry Jud Süss, the Rise and Fall could have provided an interesting complement to these two documentaries, as a biopic-style account of how the historical novel by the German Jewish writer Feuchtwanger became an anti-Semitic Nazi film. Barely rising above the level of a TV movie, melodramatic and shallow, it makes one fondly recall Tarantino’s witty take on German propaganda films in Inglorious Basterds …

These notes are far from light and conversational in tone, as would befit the Blog Café … Perhaps next time I should dwell on two lovely Bollywood films, that use of the genre’s conventions to explore serious social and political issues … singing and dancing: My Name is Khan and Peepli Live … But now it’s off to the movies again …