Jewish themes at German film festival

OF all of the countries in Europe, it is not surprising that Germany is the one whose filmmakers most consistently attempt to deal with Jewish concepts and themes.

This can be seen again in this year’s Audi Festival of German Films, which opens this week in Australia.

Three of this year’s films have significant Jewish themes and two more include key Jewish characters.

It is often said that truth is stranger than fiction, and the events that are dramatised in the film Berlin 36 serve to remind us that stories of Jewish survival are fantastically varied.

This film tells the true story of Gretel Bergmann (played by a very luminous Karoline Herfurth), a champion German-Jewish high jumper during the period of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Although Bergmann has already migrated to Britain and become a star athlete there, she is coerced by the Nazis to return to Germany to participate in the German Olympic team trials in the lead-up to the 1936 Games.

Under pressure from the International Olympic Committee and a threatened American team boycott, the Germans need to be seen to be including a Jewish athlete, so an extremely reluctant Bergmann participates in the team.

When her sympathetic coach is replaced by a bullying Nazi, her life  becomes almost unbearable.

The film also introduces a second fascinating (and true) complicating story: Bergmann ‘s roommate, fellow high jumper Dora Ratjen, turns out to be a man, recruited by the Nazis.

The film includes a short interview with the real Gretel Bergmann, who survived the war and moved to the US, revealing even a more astonishing sequence of events in the following years.

The Mein Kampf film appearing in this year’s festival is not the 1960 feature documentary with the same name, which was reportedly the first comprehensive documentary on the Nazi era to be widely shown in Germany at the time.

Instead, the film was made in 2009 and is a dark comedy based on a play written by the late Hungarian Jewish avant-garde playwright, George Tabori.

The bizarre plot of this film — which has had only a limited cinema release outside Europe — takes place in Vienna in 1910, when a young painter named Adolf Hitler rents a room at a homeless shelter, finding his roommate to be an older Jewish bookseller named Shlomo Herzl (surely an intentional reference to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism).

When the young Hitler fails at painting, it is the older Jewish man who recommends that he enters politics, and assists in the creation of his signature moustache and facial look.

Resonating Charlie Chaplin’s 1941 classic The Great Dictator (one of the few films that successfully satirised Hitler) and out of the tradition of Life is Beautiful and Train de Vie, this German-Swiss-Austrian co-production is recommended for those whose tastes run to European fabulism.

An interesting side note is that the “mein kampf” of the film refers not to Hitler’s notorious anti-Semitic tract, but to the book that Shlomo Herzl wants to write. The satire may be obvious, but no less cutting.

A retrospective screening of the award-winning 1999 Golden Globe-nominated Aimee & Jaguar is also included in the festival.

Again based on a true story, this film tells the story of a German housewife and mother who falls in love with a hidden Jewish woman during the war.

Two other festival entries feature key Jewish characters: the international Emmy Award-winning mini-series The Wolves of Berlin charts six key characters (one of them Jewish) living in Berlin from 1948 to reunification in 1989. This four-and-a-half hour production provides a great history lesson for those fascinated by the trials of that besieged city.

And John Rabe (based on a true story of an Oskar Schindler-like character in Nanking, China) slips in star actor Daniel Bruhl (Inglourious Basterds) as a German-Jewish diplomat.

There is a great irony in John Rabe as the main character — a nominal Nazi — becomes the saviour of many thousands of Chinese, at one point shielding them from Japanese warplanes under a large Nazi flag.

The Audi Festival Of German Films has grown in popularity since it was first launched in Australia in 2002, with more than 19,000 attending the festival last year.

It runs for two weeks in Melbourne and Sydney, with shorter programs in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.

The Festival Of German Films opens in Sydney on April 21 and in Melbourne on April 22. Enquiries: www.goethe.de/australia.

DON PERLGUT

PHOTO: High spirits during the 1936 Olympics in the film, Berlin 36.