No one had timed it this way, of course, but Berlin’s annual Jewish film festival, which ran this year from April 29 to May 12, took place just as Germany’s biggest neo-Nazi trial in decades was getting underway. Talk about chutzpah-charged kismet.
The opening night gala was in Potsdam, a 20-minute train ride from the German capital, at a venue named for a German actor who was tortured to death for his communist views in the first year of Nazi rule.
Overlooking a placid stretch of the river Havel, the Hans Otto Theater provided an elegant setting for the festive evening, complete with red carpet and a swarm of press photographers.
This time the shutters were snapping the friendly, gap-toothed smile of Israeli director Eran Riklis (“Lemon Tree,” “The Syrian Bride”), whose latest film, “Zaytoun,” was the festival opener. Set during the Lebanese war in 1982, this tense drama about a friendship that evolves between an imprisoned Israeli pilot and a Palestinian boy proved a daring choice by festival director Nicola Galliner, who has delivered a broad spectrum of Jewish films to Berlin audiences for 19 years.
The void in Germany’s cinematic landscape in the wake of the Holocaust is slowly being filled with a fresh Jewish presence — a point emphasized in opening remarks by German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann and Israeli Ambassador Yakov Hadas-Handelsman. But there’s still a sense of something missing. This was brought home by another speaker’s attempt to explain the very definition of a Jewish film (after all, most of the people at this event were not Jewish). The event’s awkward formality lacked the easy humor and simpatico typical of such events in the United States, especially San Francisco, home of the first-ever Jewish film festival.
Beyond the gala celebrations, the Berlin Jewish film festival is also an act of resistance, a defiant statement that despite everything that happened here 70 years ago, Jewish life continues, even thrives.
But a disturbing side effect has emerged from Germany’s Errinerungskultur, or culture of memory, that has broken decades of relative silence after the Holocaust. With few exceptions, the long shadow of the Nazi past continues to shape public perceptions of Jews in Germany. Most Germans have little knowledge of present-day Judaism, limited contact with Jews living here, and considerable misconceptions about the state of Israel.
So it’s an unsettling irony that while the festival itself receives generous press coverage, the German media’s portrayal of Jewish people is surprisingly narrow. When they’re not mentioned in reference to persecution, they’re often depicted as soldiers or fanatic settlers. It’s as if the impact of the Holocaust and its inextricable link to the birth of the Jewish state has tethered part of the German national psyche to a victim/perpetrator dynamic where Jews are concerned, leaving little room for plurality and inclusion in public discourse.
That’s why this film festival is such a vital part of Germany’s cultural scene: It offers a vibrant palette of Jewish diversity, and like Jewish film festivals around the world, it broadens the platform for dialogue, debate and connection.
Among this year’s screening of 33 films from eight countries were 13 German premieres, including “Regina — Work in Progress.” The Hungarian documentary by Diana Groó explores the life of Regina Jonas, the world’s first woman ordained as a rabbi, who served in Berlin’s Oranienburger Strasse synagogue before she was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. (The synagogue’s organist, Ludwig Altmann, emigrated to the United States and served at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El.)
The vigorous efforts of Galliner, who has staged the festival since 1994 against daunting financial odds, have at last been rewarded. To a lengthy round of applause, the German Culture Minister announced that annual federal funding has been granted to the festival to the tune of $131,000.
What many in the audience didn’t know is that funding had once been denied because the festival “wasn’t German enough.”
Alexa Dvorson is a public radio correspondent based in Germany since 1986.