What was the starting point, the main motivation for making
these films?
I was born 1964 in France, so 20 years after the war. I have
a German, protestant mother, who was raised in Kassel and a French, jewish
father, whose family was severely affected by the Holocaust. As a young woman,
about 1990, I had the opportunity to work in Dusseldorf for a few months.
Whenever I met older people in the street, I would ask them how they
experienced the Second World War. Of course, I couldn’t just go up to them and
ask. During that period, I saw my German grandmother again after a lengthy family
dispute. There I learned that she participates in annual class reunions. So my
grandmother, who graduated in 1933, still met her schoolmates in Kassel. It was
then that I got the idea to visit precisely those schoolmates to ask them how
they experienced the war. I had no preconceived opinion and whatever they would
answer me, would interest me. During the shoot of the film I discovered a lot –
this school class appeared to be a microcosm of German society then.
Where were you at this point in your own cinematic work?
In the nineties, I was about 30 years old. I was the
assistant to movie directors and shot short film movies and commercials in
Germany on the side (e.g. for Clausthaler – the expression “nicht immer aber
immer öfter” was mine). I knew much about movies but nothing about documentary
films. Then a producer suggested I make a documentary about whatever I wanted.
And so it came that I suggested to him to travel to Germany and shoot the first
film, OMA. Then, the idea for the second film came: about the seven Jewish
girls from grandma’s class and eventually about the next generation, my
grandma’s class, who were children during the war, since they were all born
1937. After that, the trilogy documentary films enabled me to shoot films for
Arte and the French state television, especially historic documentaries about
nazism. Among other things, I made a documentary about Operation T4, the Nazi
euthanasia program, and also about the public prosecutor Fritz Bauer.
Is there a history of the reception of this trilogy in
Kassel / Germany? And if not, why?
These films were made with very little funding – only with
the support of a small French television station. Without the help of my aunt
Barbara, who still lives in Kassel, I wouldn't have been able to make these
films. She accommodated the cameraman and me, and my cousin Claudius made the
sound recordings for the first film. Mr. Wegner also gave me access to the film
archive that you see in the film Oma. That was also a very valuable help. The
French producer didn't approach German television stations at the time. And I
don't know whether the form and subject of this documentary would have
interested German television then or now. We will never know. Since then, books
like “Grandpa wasn't a Nazi” have been published. But back then, grandchildren
questioning the memories of contemporary witnesses was not yet common practice.
Apart from one-off private screenings with the eyewitnesses and their families,
the films had never been shown in Kassel or anywhere else in Germany.
How were the three films received, critically?
When I was lucky enough to shoot the first film, I had no
experience with documentaries. So I let myself be guided by my gut feeling; but
without ignoring the fact that a film based mainly on interviews and
constructed through editing ran the risk of not being very convincing
aesthetically.
I was surprised that the film was immediately selected for
important festivals in France. The director of one festival told me that she
had never seen a documentary in this style before, but that she had received
two other similar films from Canada and Russia that very year. Always about
school classes. At the first screening, an audience member asked me if I was a
far-right person and where my uniform was. Fortunately, the rest of the
audience defended me. This film came after the impressive film “Shoah”, in
which Claude Lanzmann confronts his interviewees. I had given the floor to
former Nazis, among others, and let them speak freely without making my
position behind the camera clear. I thought that my staging was sufficiently
explicit. Fortunately, such a situation never happened again and the film was
not only awarded, but also passed on and shown to combat racism and
anti-Semitism.
Then I made SAURE TRAUBEN (THE GREEN GRAPES), which also won an important
prize in France, namely the prize of the Society of Documentary Film Directors.
Finally, LES ABSENTES (THE ABSENT ONES) was also selected for festivals in
France. The trilogy was then released on DVD, which was a rarity for
documentaries. This trilogy, with its simple stylistic devices, was quite
unusually well received in the small world of documentary film in France. The
film about my mother's generation made many older Jewish people want to visit
Germany. As if these films would give hope. Writer friends and theater
directors seemed to be inspired by them. It's really great that these little
documentaries have had such an impact in France. I am therefore delighted that
these three films are now finally being shown in Germany, in Kassel, possibly
as a kind of restitution.
Were there any conflicts of sorts?
For the first movie, all my grandmother's classmates opened
their doors to me. At the screening at my aunt's house, my grandmother only
said that the movie was “tendentious”. It turned out that she was right. I
regret very much that I had tricked her into making the movie. As a filmmaker,
you are constantly dealing with ethical issues. In the first film, I made every
effort to give a voice to those who had quietly resisted National Socialism, or
to those who were afraid of it. Because the words of those who were close to
National Socialism were literally overused. Later, for the film about my
mother's class, half of the people refused to take part in the film and made
this clear by writing me letters with unusually harsh language. I was in no way
trying to tarnish the memory of her parents. I just wanted to show what it was
like to grow up after the war. My mother's classmates who were willing to be
filmed were those who had dealt with history in one way or another: They had
become historians or French teachers or had married Jewish men. Unfortunately,
the fact that I made this movie also split the school class in half somewhere.
Even though my most personal films are still difficult to make, I have become
an accomplished documentary filmmaker. But of all my films, my favorite will
forever remain THE GREEN GRAPES. It uses these moving women to show the great
challenge of being German in the post-war period: an impossible legacy to bear.