Childhood Revenge

Back in the 1970s, boys still played war games that re-enacted the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. Our block was transformed into an urban battle zone, in the imaginary sense only. Life in my working-class Jewish neighborhood was pretty safe. That's my most people had moved there from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan. So the battle zone was in our heads, but real enough.

As the only German kid around, I was always asked but never agreed to play the Nazi. There was nothing worse than being the target of a dozen machine gun totting kids who all wanted to make up for the horrors of the War and the Holocaust. Speaking German made me a Nazi anyway, and I got beaten up for it lots, but in war games I was always an American, and as such we all wanted to kill Hitler.

"What would you do if your saw Hitler?" Standard question in the back yards and play grounds. "I'd shoot a million rounds of ammo into him with my machine gun." "I'd blow his head off with a grenade." I had the same answers as all the other kids to this rather transparent loyalty test, the trick was coming up with another way to destroy the Führer. And in my day dreams I imagined running into Hitler and firing away at him with my machine gun. In the hail of bullets, I remember discovering a rage that went far beyond the normal play ground combativeness. I hated Hitler not just cause he was the number one evil guy in the world, but because he had ruined my life, made me the object of daily scorn, burdened me with a guilt I would never wear off. So as I fired clip after clip into his writhing body, I discovered the real reason I hated Hitler, he had fucked up my life.

All this came back to me as I watched Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, a movie my students recommended to me after a semester of showing them Emil Jannings, Leni Riefenstahl, and Bruno Ganz movies.

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Süss

I have to admit that I never have watched Jud Süss, despite that it is the most notorious anti-semitic film made in German. Of course, it was never on late night television when I was growing up in Queens, but ever since grad school it gets shown, discussed, footnoted enough so that I might have gotten around to seeing it. Certainly, I have gotten used to teaching Riefenstahl, even talking at length about her technique without worrying that I was getting sucked over to the dark side--Afterall what Super Bowl halftime show is not indebted to Frau Leni.

Jud Süss always seemed different because it did not seem to offer an intellectual side door from which to elude the melodramatic inevitability of a mob attacking a lone Jew. Felix Moeller's documentary film Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss provides just such an historical framework to analyze the movie. The documentary interviews the children and grandchildren of Jud Süss director, Harlan Veit. It quickly presents the political and legal consequences Veit faced after the war for having made the film, and then it intelligently walks through the different experiences and judgments of the Veit's offspring, from the eldest son whose entire career seems defined in opposition to his father to the nimble genealogical narrative of the youngest French grand daughter.

The different wings of the family have strikingly antithetical positions, from the daughters who married into and converted to Judaism after the war, which results in a generation of grand daughters who point out that their one grandfather was responsible for the murder of their other grandparents. The documentary is not only an Auseindandersetzung with the evil things you did during the war, daddy. By taking the view across three generations, the film shows how the post-sixties grandchildren inherited both their grandfather's guilt and their parents' confrontations with him.

The documentary takes a long view, in which the layers of reconciliation and antagonism produce children both wise and naive in the horrors of the genocidal campaigns. Tellingly it is the children living outside Germany who have the smartest things to say, whereas the German grandchildren are often wide-eyed and speechless. The interspersed shots from Jud Süss, and Harlan Veit's other 1930s films, made it clear to me that it is time to confront them from the security of my historical distance.