8 - History Runs through the Family: Framing the Nazi Past in Recent Autobiographical Documentary

Summary

Jens schanze’s winterkinder (Children of Winter, 2005) opens with a long shot filmed from a moving car gazing onto the snow-capped landscape along a German freeway. This movement initiates us into the film’s bleak atmosphere as we travel on a road to the dark side of history. The disembodied voice of Adolf Hitler on the soundtrack orients us as to the direction of this journey into the past, excerpting a speech from 1938 in which the führer exhorts German youth to become a lifelong part of the Nazi system, amid frenetic applause and collective shouting of the phrase “Sieg heil.” This opening sequence establishes the dominant mood for the ensuing narrative: bleakness, silence, and an inhospitable atmosphere permeate the (inner) landscape of the filmmaker’s familial past.

By contrast, Malte Ludin’s autobiographical film 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (Two or Three Things I Know about Him, 2005), which also examines the ways his family attends to its own history, opens by inserting the viewer into the midst of a heated argument taking place in a tightly framed domestic interior. In this footage, captured with a handheld camera, the filmmaker’s sister is obviously upset as she argues nervously with her brother, located just beyond the frame. “It’s my right to see my father the way I want to see him… . You can’t take that from me.” From its very opening, this film is structured like a rhetorical argument about conflicting memories of the familial past. Just prior to the appearance of the opening credits on a black screen, his sister, Barbel, defiantly states that if her brother thought he could change her views on her father with his film he won’t be successful. Her assertion foregrounds the manner in which Ludin’s use of autobiographical filmmaking undertakes a form of individual memory work on his own family that also intervenes in a wider political discourse about personal and public opinions about the past. In the process of revealing repressed truths about the family and its past, the film constantly oscillates between therapeutic process and moral indictment.

The contrasting openings to each of these films clearly demarcate distinct personal and cinematic approaches to reviewing family history, and more specifically, the history of the two families whose ancestors were publicly and actively implicated in national socialism.