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.