Documentary explores how Germans are dealing with their Nazi past and why so many Jews are moving to the country
GERMANS AND JEWS (Janina Quint, 2015)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, June 10
212-529-6799
germansandjews.com
www.cinemavillage.com
Janina Quint’s debut feature documentary, Germans & Jews, explores an intriguing premise: why so many Jews are moving to Germany, either returning to their homeland or living there for the first time. However, director and producer Quint, a non-Jewish German, and producer and executive producer Tal Recanati, an American-born Jew raised in the U.S. and Israel, reduce the film to random cocktail-party chatter; in fact, far too much of Germans & Jews takes place at a dinner party as second-generation Germans and Jews ramble on about guilt, responsibility, education, forgiveness, and how Germany has changed since WWII. The film would have benefited from more speakers like German-born American historian Dr. Fritz Stern and Thorsten Wagner, a Danish-German historian and grandson of a Nazi sympathizer, who are able to put the situation into fascinating perspective with a sincere intelligence. “I think it is true that most Germans now understand their past and the horror that they visited upon the world, but it’s a very hard thing,” Dr. Stern says. “And to find ways around to explain it is a natural human response.”
The film does offer insight into the effect of the 1978 Holocaust miniseries, which was shown in West Germany but not in East Germany, and takes viewers to various public art installations that serve as memorials to what happened under the Nazis. Quint does touch upon the issue of whether ordinary Germans in the 1930s turned a blind eye to what was building or really didn’t know the truth. But in the end, the work doesn’t dig deep enough, delivering little more than interesting conversations and comments from a relatively arbitrary gathering of experts and regular people. Germans & Jews opens June 10 at Cinema Village, with Quint, Recanati, and producer Maria Giacchino participating in Q&As at all 7:00 shows.