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The Week in Germany: Culture January 26, 2007 Interview: A "Typically German" Saga of One Family Distilled Into "Cinematic Empathy"
Some family recollections are more challenging than others. Hanns Ludin, the Third Reich's minister in charge of Slovakia, was executed as a war criminal in 1947, leaving behind a grieving widow and six young children. One was a five-year-old boy named Malte, who went on to become a filmmaker. His 85-minute documentary 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2 or 3 Things I Know About Him) tries to dismantle, as the film's website states, "the unquestioned oath of silence built up around this dark spot". The film underscores, through intimate interviews juxtaposed with sobering documentary evidence, that easy answers always eluded his mother, four sisters, brother, and even the third generation of his nieces and nephews. As Heiner, the former husband of Ludin's late sister, Eri, puts it: "She never was really able to deal with it her entire life. It was like a black hole (at the core of her being), filled with rage and self-destruction." In this stark family portrait set to eerily evocative and minimalist music piercing the narrative like shards of glass, Ludin seeks to shed light on his mother's "lifelong lie" and the denial of his older sister Barbel, whom he paradoxically confronts in her peaceful artist's studio - "Why did he do what he did? Was he crazy?" He also meets in distinctly uncomfortable yet deeply moving moments with individuals whose own families were wiped out on his father's orders. First screened in Berlin two years ago, "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him" premiered in the United States on January 24 at New York's Film Forum, where it is showing daily through February 6. A major public screening is also in the works for Washington, although a date and venue have yet to be set (TWIG will keep you posted!).
The following is an interview conducted after a recent private screening in DC by TWIG with the Berlin-based Ludin and his Czech-born wife, Iva Švarcová, the film's producer. TWIG: You open the film with a blunt statement: "This is the story of my father, a war criminal; my mother; my brother and sisters; my nieces and nephews. A typical German story." This film has been described as an emotional family portrait, as opposed to a universal historic docudrama. But is it not also a historical document in the wider sense that it represents what many German families have gone through, and are still going through, more than 60 years after the war?
Malte Ludin (nodding in agreement): Yes, that was precisely my intention - it is the personal drama of one family, but it is also a historical account that could apply to many other German families. TWIG: What kind of responses have you received in Germany since the film was first shown at the 2005 Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival? Iva Švarcová: This film was shown every day for nine months in Germany, and every time we were there during a screening there was always at least one person who stood up and said it had helped them to think about their own family - to search for the "white spots" (the unmentioned or suppressed) in their own family. One particularly moving moment came right after the first screening at the Berlinale. We had hired a translator for the discussion with the audience after the film was shown. After she had translated the final comments into English, she turned to us with tears streaming down her face and said "Thank you Mr. Ludin, my father was also a Nazi". I knew then that this damned silence, this damned suppression, had finally somehow been breached. It had become the Tischgespräch (dinner table conversation) for an entire nation.
TWIG: The German daily Die Welt called your film herausragend (outstanding) and part of a trend - is there a trend of increasing Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with one's past, in Germany? Why is this trend developing now? Ludin: The reason why my generation is looking so sharply at the past now - and there is the same movement in German literature - is clear: We are coming to the end of playing our role in society and this is a final attempt to define what we are. The role of my generation has not always been very clear - we had the student movement of 1968 in which we questioned our parents' generation, but what kind of mark did we make after that? Now we feel that we really have to deal with the past to settle things for ourselves in the present. And Vergangenheitsbewältigung is really an Unwort (an "un-word"). It's an expression I don't care for very much. TWIG: What does the film's title mean to you? Why did you choose it? Is it because you hardly have any memories of your own father? Ludin (laughs): I have been asked this question over and over again in America, and I have only been asked this in America - the title is a clear reference to Jean-Luc Godard, who is one of my idols and whose work as part of the Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) of the 1960s has greatly influenced and informed my own work as a filmmaker. And I also thought it sounded cool. There were many suggestions from others for other titles, but none were as good, so this one stuck. It really defines what I wanted to bring across - that there may be one or two things I know about him, but I can never know everything about him. This "heavy" film needs this "light" title.
Švarcová: Once when we went to a screening of the film in Cologne the cinema in question must have printed the title of the Godard film by mistake instead of ours - 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her). Afterwards we were in a café and heard a young couple discussing our film. We asked them what they thought about it and it turns out they thought they were actually going to see the Godard film, but ended up in our film instead! They said they were glad they saw it, in the end, which was a real affirmation for us that we were getting our message across. TWIG: Michael Verhoeven's Der Unbekannte Soldat (The Unknown Soldier) - a disturbing documentary about the role of the German Wehrmacht armed forces during World War II - was screened at last autumn's Kino!2006 German film festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Verhoeven said that he had made this film first and foremost for Germans, to help them confront their own past. Did you make your film primarily for Germans, or with a more universal audience in mind? Ludin: I would not say that my film is only for Germans. Of course I was initially making it for Germans, with a more specific audience in mind even than Verhoeven - Germans of my generation. But it has a universal application, too, in the sense that it is about a structure that could exist in any family in the world. All families have secrets - maybe not of the magnitude and monstrosity of ours in Germany - but there are many other instances where such an uncomfortable process of questioning what really went on would be commendable. People who committed war crimes under Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia are still celebrated by some as "heroes", for instance. As long as societies are not able to see their own victims, and not as perpetrators, but from a different vantage point that may be painful, but necessary, as long as that is the case then there can be no real dialogue. Neither perpetrators nor victims should walk through life with a monolithic awareness, a one-sided and singular perception of what really happened. Such an approach, based on dialogue, could even be useful for conflict management strategies. It is worth investing time and effort into this kind of dialogue. Švarcová: By arousing feelings you produce compassion - compassion for any society's victims. This is not only about the Nazis, but about us all. One of my favorite reviews of the film was written by a very young journalist who totally got it, who summed it up in very few but accurate words. Writing in thelmagazine, he described the film as producing "cinematic empathy". I love that. Ludin: Just think about Japan and Germany. It seems that in Japan they have taken quite a different approach to dealing with past atrocities they have been held accountable for. It has been a very different process of confronting the past.
TWIG: How has your family reacted to the film? How has the film affected your relationship with them? Ludin: We have not really discussed it yet. Maybe we will have a real
discussion someday, even if it takes a few years to really get to the
bottom of things. Now the film is here, it has been made and the parents
(Ludin's siblings) are angry about it. Although their children are more
distanced and objective about it all, they are often at first arguing
(in the film) what their parents told them - even that he (grandfather
Ludin) was a Nazi resistance fighter. It is like that book Opa war
kein Nazi (Grandpa wasn't a Nazi), for which 2,000 German families
were interviewed. In almost every family it was always the same story
- the third generation, the grandchildren, were told by their parents
that their grandfathers were not real Nazis, even if they were, and they
believed it. The film does not contradict this phenomenon, but is more
of an offer on how to deal with issues like that within your own family.
I'm sure that in one or two years my nephews and nieces will come to me,
and we will have a really in-depth discussion about it.
The National Center for Jewish Film is the exclusive North American distributor of "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him". The film is available for public performance rentals - theatrical, non-theatrical, film festival, and educational venues - in 35mm film, Beta, or DVD. Sales of DVDs (including extras) to the home and institutional market will be forthcoming. Anyone interested in arranging a public performance rental of the film should contact The National Center for Jewish Film: phone 781-736-8600, fax 781-736-2070, jewishfilm@brandeis.edu. The Center is also the distributor of many contemporary German-produced
and German-related feature films and documentaries, including Michael
Verhoeven's films "The White Rose" and "My Mother's Courage"
and Iva Švarcová's feature film "When Grandpa Loved Rita
Hayworth". Links: |
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