jazzeum
Four Star General
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- Apr 23, 2005
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I thought this movie, reviewed in today's New York Times might be of interest.
*****
The Nazis ruled Germany for 12 years and inflicted their cruelty on other European nations for around 7. Coming to terms with what Hitler and his followers did has been a much longer project — involving Jews, Germans, other Europeans and just about everyone else in the world — and it is unlikely to end anytime soon. Like many other films and books, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him,” a new documentary directed by Malte Ludin, examines the impact of Nazism on a single family, in this case the family of a high-ranking member of Hitler’s government. But if it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, “a typical German story,” the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.
The filmmaker’s father, Hanns Ludin, who served as the Third Reich’s ambassador to the Nazi vassal state of Slovakia, and who in that capacity signed deportation orders sending thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, was executed for war crimes in 1947. He left behind a wife, Erla, and six children.
Malte, the youngest (born in 1942), waited until his mother died before embarking on this film, though it includes earlier interviews he did with her. The title, apart from its distracting and irrelevant nod in the direction of Jean-Luc Godard, suggests that Hanns Ludin remains, in his son’s eyes, a mysterious, unknowable figure, and the younger Mr. Ludin’s interviews with other family members contribute to the blurriness of the picture.
Archival photographs and film clips of the father show a stout, smiling fellow, in and out of uniform, and Malte Ludin’s surviving sisters recall him with some fondness. One sister, Barbel, emerges as her father’s staunch defender, and the most wrenching scenes in the film show her and Malte Ludin on screen together, arguing doggedly about the nuances of guilt, responsibility and shame.
Barbel insists that she feels none herself, and furthermore tries to mitigate the portrait of her father as a heartless monster. She resorts to some familiar rationalizations — that he couldn’t have known the full truth about Auschwitz; that he tried to resist or subvert the most inhumane Nazi policies; that many slaughtered by the Nazis should be thought of as casualties of war who got what was coming to them — which all bolster her conviction that Hanns Ludin was, in the end, a victim.
This startling conclusion is not altogether unheard of in postwar Germany. The idea that the German people were the victims of Hitler’s madness rather than its sponsors has proven durable and convenient in that nation’s postwar culture. Mr. Ludin’s anxious, questioning, self-lacerating inquiry represents a powerful countertendency toward full acknowledgment of shared culpability, and his quarrel with Barbel is part of what makes this “a typical German story.”
Barbel’s loyalty to her father’s memory is both touching and appalling, but her refusal to admit the truth about his actions is something worse. Hanns Ludin joined the SA paramilitary organization in 1931; survived the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler’s potential political rivals were massacred; and openly celebrated his Führer’s birthday in April 1945, at a time when more than a few die-hard Nazis, glimpsing the Allies’ armies over the horizon, underwent an expedient change of heart.
All the evidence presented in “2 or 3 Things” suggests that Hanns Ludin served the National Socialist cause zealously, and the testimony of survivors — including a member of the Jewish family whose house in Slovakia the Ludins expropriated — leave no doubt regarding his central role in organized mass murder. To call him a victim is to strip all meaning from the word.
What is it like to have such a man as a father or a grandfather? Even those whose parents and grandparents died because of his actions approach this question, in Mr. Ludin’s presence, with something resembling pity. And while it is no real comfort, the victims and their descendants are able to regard the past with a moral clarity that eludes Mr. Ludin’s siblings.
His wife, Iva Svarcova, also the film’s producer, was born in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s, and the influence of her perspective on 20th-century European history, necessarily distinct from her husband’s, is evident through much of the film.
Mr. Ludin’s nieces and nephews — Hanns Ludin’s grandchildren — were all born after the war, and are the products of a sane, democratic and affluent society (apart from the ones who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa). They are thus less anguished by the family history, and their sensitive, sensible voices give “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him” a measure of earned and authentic optimism. It is possible for a nation to descend into evil, but over time, recovery is also possible.
*****
The Nazis ruled Germany for 12 years and inflicted their cruelty on other European nations for around 7. Coming to terms with what Hitler and his followers did has been a much longer project — involving Jews, Germans, other Europeans and just about everyone else in the world — and it is unlikely to end anytime soon. Like many other films and books, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him,” a new documentary directed by Malte Ludin, examines the impact of Nazism on a single family, in this case the family of a high-ranking member of Hitler’s government. But if it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, “a typical German story,” the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.
The filmmaker’s father, Hanns Ludin, who served as the Third Reich’s ambassador to the Nazi vassal state of Slovakia, and who in that capacity signed deportation orders sending thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, was executed for war crimes in 1947. He left behind a wife, Erla, and six children.
Malte, the youngest (born in 1942), waited until his mother died before embarking on this film, though it includes earlier interviews he did with her. The title, apart from its distracting and irrelevant nod in the direction of Jean-Luc Godard, suggests that Hanns Ludin remains, in his son’s eyes, a mysterious, unknowable figure, and the younger Mr. Ludin’s interviews with other family members contribute to the blurriness of the picture.
Archival photographs and film clips of the father show a stout, smiling fellow, in and out of uniform, and Malte Ludin’s surviving sisters recall him with some fondness. One sister, Barbel, emerges as her father’s staunch defender, and the most wrenching scenes in the film show her and Malte Ludin on screen together, arguing doggedly about the nuances of guilt, responsibility and shame.
Barbel insists that she feels none herself, and furthermore tries to mitigate the portrait of her father as a heartless monster. She resorts to some familiar rationalizations — that he couldn’t have known the full truth about Auschwitz; that he tried to resist or subvert the most inhumane Nazi policies; that many slaughtered by the Nazis should be thought of as casualties of war who got what was coming to them — which all bolster her conviction that Hanns Ludin was, in the end, a victim.
This startling conclusion is not altogether unheard of in postwar Germany. The idea that the German people were the victims of Hitler’s madness rather than its sponsors has proven durable and convenient in that nation’s postwar culture. Mr. Ludin’s anxious, questioning, self-lacerating inquiry represents a powerful countertendency toward full acknowledgment of shared culpability, and his quarrel with Barbel is part of what makes this “a typical German story.”
Barbel’s loyalty to her father’s memory is both touching and appalling, but her refusal to admit the truth about his actions is something worse. Hanns Ludin joined the SA paramilitary organization in 1931; survived the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, in which Hitler’s potential political rivals were massacred; and openly celebrated his Führer’s birthday in April 1945, at a time when more than a few die-hard Nazis, glimpsing the Allies’ armies over the horizon, underwent an expedient change of heart.
All the evidence presented in “2 or 3 Things” suggests that Hanns Ludin served the National Socialist cause zealously, and the testimony of survivors — including a member of the Jewish family whose house in Slovakia the Ludins expropriated — leave no doubt regarding his central role in organized mass murder. To call him a victim is to strip all meaning from the word.
What is it like to have such a man as a father or a grandfather? Even those whose parents and grandparents died because of his actions approach this question, in Mr. Ludin’s presence, with something resembling pity. And while it is no real comfort, the victims and their descendants are able to regard the past with a moral clarity that eludes Mr. Ludin’s siblings.
His wife, Iva Svarcova, also the film’s producer, was born in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s, and the influence of her perspective on 20th-century European history, necessarily distinct from her husband’s, is evident through much of the film.
Mr. Ludin’s nieces and nephews — Hanns Ludin’s grandchildren — were all born after the war, and are the products of a sane, democratic and affluent society (apart from the ones who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa). They are thus less anguished by the family history, and their sensitive, sensible voices give “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him” a measure of earned and authentic optimism. It is possible for a nation to descend into evil, but over time, recovery is also possible.