![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay analyzes the documentary Notre Nazi (1984), a German-French film produced by Thomas Harlan, the son of the notorious Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, who was best known for directing the propaganda film Jud Süss (1940). In Notre Nazi, Alfred Filbert, a former SS perpetrator, indirectly stands in for Thomas Harlan's father. Thomas Harlan aggressively antagonizes Filbert on screen, eliciting testimony about his participation in murderous crimes. The interactions filmed on the set provide viewers with new information, and the documentary foregrounds a range of filial affects including ambivalence, shame, and rage. This essay highlights the unique latitude nonfiction film has in critiquing legal and judicial arenas, and it shows how Notre Nazi serves as a critique of German courts in the decades after the Holocaust by availing itself of unconventional strategies and appealing to distinctly extra-legal discourses.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 According to Fuhs, ‘because non-fiction films – with their presumed indexical relationship to reality and their attendant claims to authenticity – are often seen as having a privileged relationship to truth, the ethical and epistemological stakes of these visual representations are heightened.’ See Fuhs, “The Legal Trial,” 783.
2 Fuhs examines Murder on Sunday Morning among other films; see Fuhs, “The Legal Trial,” 785–90.
3 Fuhs, “The Legal Trial,” 785.
4 Robinson, “The Specialist on the Eichmann Precedent,” 95.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 For historical background, including Goebbels's perspective on a British version of the film, see Tegel, “Veit Harlan's Jud Süss,” 78. Concerning the film's relationship to Wilhelm Hauff's story, see Noack, Veit Harlan, 158–60.
8 See Noack, Veit Harlan, 156–7.
9 Lohmeier claims that Jud Süss can be read in multiple ways. She distinguishes between viewers who were predisposed to anti-Semitism and ‘liberal’ ones, who would have recognized the film's more critical perspective owing to their familiarity with the classical structure of drama. Despite the fact that some viewers were sympathetic with Süss, the filmmakers’ intent was obviously to make an anti-Semitic film, and large numbers of viewers saw it that way. See Lohmeier, “Propaganda als Alibi,” 214. Lohmeier's attempt to salvage the film by giving interpretive responsibility to the informed spectator is rightly criticized by Thomas Henne (in “Der Umgang der Justiz mit Veit Harlans Jud Süß,” 269) and also in Aue's “Tagungsbericht,” n.p.
10 Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 154.
11 Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 150. See also Hollstein (Antisemitische Filmpropaganda, 76–108), who describes how the film inscribes itself in a National Socialist history of iconography of Jews in film.
12 The Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni famously praised Harlan's film in a positive review; see Rohdie, Antonioni, 29; as well as Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 153–4.
13 Leiser, Nazi Cinema, 84–5; Leiser reproduces a facsimile of Himmler's order (BArch VBS 159/2600007703) from 30 September 1940. On the film's use as propaganda for the military, see also Hollstein, Antisemitische Filmpropaganda, 105–6.
14 See “Brief des Regisseurs Veit Harlan an Bundeskanzler Adenauer,” 1–7.
15 “Veit Harlan nicht rehabilitiert,” n.p. My translation.
16 The quotation from Goebbels is reproduced in Harlan's own letter (“Brief des Regisseurs Veit Harlan an Bundeskanzler Adenauer vom 7. Mai 1952,” 2). On Harlan's claim that he made the film under duress, see the criticism by Hickethier (“Veit Harlans Film Jud Süß und der audiovisuell inszenierte Antisemitismus,” 224).
17 Harlan, “Brief des Regisseurs Veit Harlan an Bundeskanzler Adenauer,” 6.
18 For details on this aspect of the production see Tegel, “‘The Demonic Effect’,” 215–41. The case is also mentioned by Friedländer in The Years of Extermination (100).
19 As pointed out by Rentschler, who also notes the similarity with the dissolve in The Eternal Jew. Rentschler writes,
In the film's final sequence, a dissolve transmutes the court Jew's face back into his original ghetto visage […]. Similar dissolves in Hippler's The Eternal Jew take the viewer from images of “the Eastern Jew, with his caftan, beard, and sideburns,” to the camouflaged and grinning “clean-shaven, Western European Jew.” The dissolves dramatize the Jew's feats of duplicity;
20 Henne points out the irony that Süss's plea – that he was simply acting as a servant of higher authorities – did not save him, whereas Veit Harlan later relied on precisely the same arguments at trial; see Henne, “Der Umgang der Justiz,” 267.
21 This connection is also mentioned by Welch in Propaganda and the German Cinema (240).
22 Veit Harlan claims that in his version, the conclusion included Süss expressing a curse: the wrath of God will befall those who would judge a Jews differently from Christians. Goebbels, according to Harlan, changed Harlan's ending, and the German court's later judgment in Harlan's favor, which Harlan cited in his letter to Adenauer, agreed: ‘Harlan's version, in which the Old Testament curse is cast by Süss Oppenheimer in the cage as his last words against his executioners and the people, could have turned the anti-Semitic tendency of the film into its opposite.’ See “Brief des Regisseurs Veit Harlan an Bundeskanzler Adenauer,” 6. My translation. There is some evidence for the truth of this claim: if one looks closely at the movements of Ferdinand Marian's mouth immediately before he is hanged, he appears to have been filmed saying words that are different from the pleas we hear.
23 See Hollstein, Antisemitische Filmpropaganda, 84–5.
24 Marian received love letters from admirers; see Knilli and Zielinski, “Lion Feuchtwangers Jud Süß,” 118.
25 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 119.
26 On the 2008 documentary, see Bathrick, “Felix Moeller's Harlan,” 214–25.
27 On Thomas Harlan's literary production see Kramer, “Nationalsozialismus und Shoah,” 313–34.
28 Brunner writes about Thomas Harlan's prosecutorial activities in Brunner, Der Frankreich-Komplex, 196–207.
29 The interviews are the subject of Stangneth's Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Stangneth discusses Polityka's involvement (387–90). The transcripts were stolen from Eichmann's stepbrother's office in Vienna and given to the survivor Hermann Langbein, who then entrusted them to Harlan, who was, at the time, cooperating with Fritz Bauer in his search for Eichmann and other criminals. On Harlan's role in this, see Dirks, “Eingriff auf höchster Ebene,” n.p.
30 Dirks, “Eingriff auf höchster Ebene.”
31 Several historians have studied Filbert's culpability: see Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman, 198; Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen, 126; and Arad, Ghetto in Flames, 78.
32 Alex Kay writes that on 29 July 1941, ‘Filbert gave a talk to the officers of his commando, during which he explained that – on the orders of higher authorities – Jewish women and children were to be included in future shooting operations.’ Kay continues:
Filbert announced he himself would lead the first shooting operations in Vileyka [in Belarus]. […] The following day, 30 July, at least 350 Jewish victims who had been arrested two days earlier during a combing of the town, including – for the first time – women, were driven out of the city and shot under Filbert's command.
33 The translation is Kay's; see The Making of an SS Killer, 37. See also Kay, “Ungleiche Brüder,” 50.
34 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 208.
35 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 213–14.
36 According to Kay, in 1961, ‘Harlan had corresponded with the Chief Public Prosecutor attached to the Regional Court in Berlin, regarding the trial against Filbert. The Public Prosecutor's Office had been at the time in the process of preparing the indictment against Filbert and his co-defendants.’ Kay, Making of an SS Killer, 111.
37 See Stephan, “‘Ein deutsches Leben’: Thomas Harlan,” 39. See also, Harlan, Hitler war meine Mitgift, 198.
38 Harlan, Hitler war meine Mitgift, 201–2.
39 According to Kay, Harlan also drew up a contract indicating that Notre Nazi should not be shown without also screening Wundkanal; see Kay, Making of an SS Killer, 119.
40 Baba, “Robert Kramer and the Jewish-German Question,” n.p.
41 On the use of the term ‘happening,’ see Bigsby, Critical Introduction, 45. In Germany, the term was closely associated with the painter and sculptor Wolf Vostell. See Weibel, Beuys, Brock, Vostell, 152–9.
42 This casting decision would also have been fraught with Oedipal implications. Hake observes that Erwin Geschonneck was the ‘uncanny double’ of the Nazi-era star Heinrich George, and that George was ‘the actor most closely tied to fascist fantasies of the autocratic or populist leader in the Veit Harlan films Jud Süß and Kolberg as well as numerous other Nazi propaganda films.’ Hake, Screen Nazis, 123.
43 See Harlan, Hitler war meine Mitgift, 205–6. Like Jud Süss, Notre Nazi premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It was screened out of competition in 1984. See ‘Mostra de Venise.’ The head of the jury that year was none other than the very same Michelangelo Antonioni who had praised Jud Süss decades earlier.
44 See Bathrick, “Felix Moeller's Harlan,” 220. Bathrick cites the interviews in Felix Moeller's Harlan: Im Schatten von Jud Süss.
45 Harlan, Hitler war meine Mitgift, 205.
46 According to the New York Times: ‘“You Jewish swine!” they shouted. “What do you want here? We do not want you in Germany.”’ See “Hamburg Mob Jeers ‘Jew’,” 5. In that article, the witness's name appears erroneously as ‘Tarina Niehoff.’ On the Niehoff incident, see also Hickethier, “Veit Harlans Film Jud Süß,” 241–2.
47 Henne describes the triumphal scene in ‘Der Umgang der Justiz’ (265–6). Harlan's biographer Frank Noack notes that outside the courtroom there were still a number of protests against Harlan. See Noack, Veit Harlan, 303. The courtroom scene is reproduced as the final image of Horst Königstein's 2001 film Jud Süß – Ein Film als Verbrechen? That film, a mixture of documentary interviews and dramatized re-enactments of the 1949 trial is highly problematic. Although it does include the Niehoff incident, it also takes pains to be sympathetic to Veit Harlan, and it makes no mention of the judge Walter Tyrolf's National Socialist past.
48 On Tyrolf's role, see Marek, “Der Veit Harlan-Prozess,” n.p. In Notre Nazi Harlan mentions not Walter Tyrolf, but Enno Budde, a Hamburg judge who faced accusations about his past complicity with the Nazis similar to those Tyrolf faced. Veit Harlan's acquittal is, in general, attributed to Tyrolf. See Harlan, Hitler war meine Mitgift, 43–4.
49 Citing a recent scholarly study, Steinke writes that by 1957 as many as 77 percent of the leading public servants in the West German judiciary were former Nazi party members. See Steinke, “Im Bonner Justizministerium arbeiteten besonders viele Nazis,” n.p.
50 See Harlan, Hitler war meine Mitgift, 199.
51 Kay, The Making of an SS Killer, 208 n56.
52 Harlan, Hitler war meine Mitgift, 206.
53 Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 131.
54 Payne, Unsettling Accounts, 3.
55 Ibid.
56 Torchin, Creating the Witness, 3.
57 Fuhs, “The Legal Trial,” 784.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Brad Prager
Brad Prager is Professor of Film Studies and German at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the Fact: The Holocaust in Twenty-First Century Documentary Film and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. He is the editor or co-editor of several books, including Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents – Aesthetics – Memory, The Companion to Werner Herzog, and, together with Erin McGlothlin, a forthcoming collection of scholarly essays about Claude Lanzmann's documentary film Shoah and its outtakes. His latest monograph, devoted entirely to Christian Petzold's Holocaust film Phoenix, will be available in Fall 2019.