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ASTRA 2022

Review: Family Love - My Grandpa, National Socialism and Me

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- Eric Esser’s documentary explores the topic of accountability, starting with a grandfather who might have been a Nazi

Review: Family Love - My Grandpa, National Socialism and Me
Eric Esser in Family Love - My Grandpa, National Socialism and Me

After having had its world premiere at the 43rd Max Ophüls Preis Film Festival in January, Eric Esser’s first feature, Family Love - My Grandpa, National Socialism and Me [+see also:
trailer
film profile
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, competed in the Docschool Competition of the Astra Film Festival, winning the Best Directing Award (see the news). A very personal investigation into the history of the director’s own family, the documentary doesn’t shy away from tackling difficult questions, also exploring how approximate accountability and guilt can be.

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As is so often the case with films made by students, Family Love digs into a reality that is very close to the director. Everything begins with a family film, where we see Esser’s grandfather, Albrecht, at a funfair. Suddenly, on the lapel of his jacket, we spot a big, black swastika. For the director, this shocking image is in such stark contrast with the chain-smoking, loving grandfather he knew from his childhood that he just has to investigate: was his grandfather a Nazi? Interviews with his immediate relatives will reveal the hardships faced by the family during and after World War II, while archive findings will complicate matters further.

Aided by his relatives, but also by historians and archivists, Esser starts establishing an updated stance regarding the past and the history of his family. His film has a good vantage point for exploring how one may relate to the past, and it soon becomes obvious that the younger that person is, the greater his or her eagerness to judge in black and white. Wanting an absolute, irrevocable answer, the director soon learns that the difficult past can only be seen in nuances of grey.

It is obvious that World War II and the Holocaust are extremely difficult topics to talk about in Germany, and it is understandable that one might want to stay as far removed from these subjects as possible, but sometimes this is not possible. Family Love comes with an endearing struggle between rejecting the unsavoury aspects of a grandfather’s biography and understanding that there is so much more to us than an obscure, perhaps opportunistic, affiliation. Esser’s investigation might start with an unavoidable question, but he will soon discover a man who did everything in his power to provide for his family.

Accountability is a difficult topic in this documentary, which suggests, with that lack of ambiguity that can only come from a lack of experience, that anyone who didn’t unequivocally fight the Nazis was actually what is called a “fellow traveller”, although the term “sympathiser” might be better. The questions raised by Family Love are not specific only to 1940s Germany, but also to former communist countries, or actually to any nation that faced totalitarian challenges at some point in their history, forcing average people keep their heads down so that they could tread the difficult waters. There are so many people who didn’t flee those countries in those times, and perhaps even stooped to questionable deeds to survive, but were they true supporters of those regimes?

Of course, there are some details in the grandfather’s biography that make the discussion even more difficult and nuanced (for example, he was on the board of a knitting-machine factory that switched to producing various items for the army during the war), but the questions regarding his convictions and whether these convictions turned him into a Nazi are indeed compelling.

And Family Love also broaches a topic that is incredibly timely: the enormous difference between what can be proven and what can be suspected. At a time when the court of public opinion is so eager to judge (let’s not forget the recent case of director Ulrich Seidl, whose latest feature Sparta [+see also:
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trailer
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was removed from the selection of the Toronto Film Festival following accusations of bad practice around underage actors during the film’s shoot in Romania), this discussion is more important than ever.

Family Love was produced by Germany’s Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.

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