What I'm Watching: 'The Flat'

Recently I signed up to Netflix, eight hundred years after everyone else as usual, to expand my treasure trove of foreign films. I'm glad I did because one of the first films I watched was this brilliant documentary from Israel "The Flat". The director, Arnon Goldfinger, uncovers the secrets of his grandmother's life as he and his family clear out her Tel Aviv flat after her death. 

As his grandmother was a Jewish woman who had lived in Berlin in the 1920s and 30s, her life inevitably turns out to be rather interesting. Goldfinger deftly traces back through his grandparents' early lives in Germany and in particular a trip they took around Palestine in the 1930s with the distinctly  Prussian-sounding Leopold von Mildenstein and his wife.

It turns out - spoiler alert - that his grandparents were in fact very good friends with the von Mildensteins and even remained in touch with them after the war. Even after his grandmother's own mother was murdered at Auschwitz. 

Their friendship seems impossible to fathom to our modern sensibilities. Goldfinger goes in search of the von Mildenstein family in Germany, near Wuppertal, and tracks down their daughter, now elderly, and her husband. She is well aware of the friendship between their two sets of parents and is very welcoming towards him. He is a little hesitant, however, given what he knows about his great-grandmother's fate and the uncertainty about von Mildenstein's activities during the war.

There follows an excruciatingly awkward scene where Arnon Goldfinger and his mother try to make small talk over some 'Sekt' in Frau von Mildenstein's back garden and at the same point bring up the inevitably dreaded question of 'what did your (grand)father do during the war?' Toe-curling prevarication ensued from the von Mildenstein side.

It was an amusing scene for me to watch because most Germans I know are refreshingly blunt, happy to be very frank when discussing any issue. They do not stand on ceremony. It was unusual to see Germans pussy-footing around an issue, speaking in platitudes and allusions. 

This spoke to the awkwardness of the topic of course. It turned out that no-one could give Goldfinger the straight answer he wanted and so he turned to the Bundesarchiv, the German national archive to dig deeper on von Mildenstein's background. There he found out that, contrary to what his daughter knew (or claimed to know?), von Mildenstein had in fact been employed with Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry throughout the war. To what extent he was a devoted Nazi remained unclear but the discovery was an emotional one for the director.

Why had his grandparents remained friends with an employee of Goebbels? Why had they continued to take trips to Germany and Austria from Israel even after the war? Goldfinger's grandparents had clearly been very well integrated into the German bourgeoisie. They also left Germany relatively early, around 1935, as voluntary emigrants to Palestine. Given that background, they would not have witnessed the extremes of anti-Semitism unleashed by the Nazis, only the earlier years of insidious prejudice and ill-feeling. Germany would have been their home as much as it was the home of Leopold von Mildenstein.

At the end of the film, I felt sorry for the director's grandparents. They cut a sad figure in their desperation to retain some link to Germany. It also was a reminder of the sad reality that many Jewish people in Germany before the Nazi era were as German as their Christian and secular neighbors, speaking only German and following German cultural practices. Kurt Tuchler, Goldfinger's grandfather, had served his country in World War One, like many Jewish men of his generation.

The director's family seemed to have entirely suppressed any personal experience of the Holocaust, never even mentioning that his great-grandmother had died in the gas chambers, for example. This seems to be a common experience with populations that suffer trauma. There is a complex psychology attached to suffering. It becomes a source of shame to have been a victim and so suffering is repressed and not talked about.

Typically only the third or fourth generations are ready to confront the suffering in the family's history   and find out the family secrets. Unfortunately, by then the generation that has the most secrets to tell has passed on.