Filmmaker gets lost on German journey

It must have been a long painful train ride for Marian Marzynski. The Polish-born Holocaust survivor-turned-filmmaker made the trek from Warsaw to Berlin seeking insight into Germany past and present.

He presents his findings in a new Frontline documentary, "A Jew Among the Germans," due to air Tuesday, May 31, on PBS.

Unfortunately, given the overall incoherence of this documentary, Marzynski may have been the wrong Jew to send.

"A Jew Among the Germans" is, ostensibly, about the planning of the Holocaust memorial recently unveiled in Berlin. The filmmaker interviews several artists then competing for the final design, including eventual winner Peter Eisenman (whose recently unveiled vertical concrete slab design has received mostly rave reviews).

But Marzynski quickly moves beyond the topic of the memorial, exploring the German mind and the depth of German responsibility 60 years after the Holocaust.

Marzynski is a bear of a man. He takes your arm while strolling down the street. He bores into your personal space until you're nearly touching noses. He is clearly the kind of man who best deals with people as individuals, one on one.

Perhaps that's why he seems so perplexed by the behavior of the German people during the years of the Third Reich (most of his family perished during the Shoah; he survived thanks to Righteous Gentiles who hid him during the war).

Marzynski travels around the country, talking mostly with young Germans to assess their take on the Holocaust and what, if any, guilt they should assume for the crimes of their grandfathers.

For Gen-X and Gen-Y Germans, guilt is most uncool. Though German schoolchildren are taught the lessons of the Holocaust, students in one class Marzynski visits seem unnervingly detached from the event.

"The problem," says one memorial design candidate, "is we don't have any more Jews in Germany."

Not exactly. Marzynski points out the country's Jewish population stands now at about 250,000 and is growing. But that doesn't mean the German people click with Jewish culture. In one eerie scene, the filmmaker tours a Jewish museum at which non-Jewish guides show visitors ritual objects like prayer shawls and phylacteries.

In another scene, Marzynski seems to shake up a group of high schoolers by asking the boys which of them were circumcised. He then admits he himself is uncircumcised, a fact that, he asserts, saved his life. One of the sharper students retorts, "Why not get circumcised now, since the danger is over?"

The filmmaker lamely replies that he is not religious. Therefore, the foreskin stays.

Therein lies the problem with Marzynski and his film. "A Jew Among the Germans" tackles a fascinating subject in a disjointed manner. With so much at stake in Marzynski's inquiry, he has in the end made a film that barely scratches the historical and emotional surface. Moreover, he himself seems unclear about his own relationship with Judaism and the Jewry.

Admittedly, a one-hour documentary can only probe so much. But for as personal -- and personable -- a man as Marian Marzynski (who made many documentaries for PBS, including the three-hour-long "Shtetl" from 1996), this latest piece is surprisingly bloodless.

This is true even in scenes meant to show that latent neo-Nazism lurks below the surface of German society. In one scene, a cop accosts the filmmaker while he surveys the Berlin memorial site. In another, Marzynski traverses a poorly tended and desecrated Jewish cemetery. Neither packs any emotional wallop.

Marzynski ends his documentary voicing what he calls his "unreasonable wish: that Germans live in a permanent state of guilt -- good guilt." For Jewish viewers and all who take Holocaust remembrance seriously, Marzynski's wish may not be as unreasonable as he makes it out to be.

But if he is ever to press that case, he will need sterner stuff than this documentary. Unfortunately, "A Jew Among the Germans" fails to make more than a dent in a crucial subject.




"A Jew Among the Germans" airs 9 p.m. Tuesday, May 31, on KQED and other local PBS stations.