Nachlass

«The past only exists in human beings, and

cannot be recreated in the outside world.»

LEGACY

a film by CHRISTOPH HÜBNER, GABRIELE VOSS

Maybe we can just start with you holding up

both pictures of your father into the camera.

Just like that.

Just like that, without giving any kind of back story? Well...

Okay, let's start with the back story.

What back story would you like to tell?

Well, then I would tell that my father was very important to me

in my childhood, in my youth.

I think the emotions attached make these pictures all the more moving.

One picture, the one that I saw much later,

that I only came across a few years ago, shows a young man.

This is from 1939, around the time he volunteered for the Waffen-SS.

He looks...

...a bit foreign to me, a bit prideful.

He certainly has a bullish, confident gaze on him,

with which he looks out into the world.

And this one from 1948

shows a man, who has felt the effects

of all those years and of everything that he experienced during that time.

I think that those were ten years in his life,

in which a massive amount of change took place for him and his emotional evolution

and I think there is also a great deal of pain.

This one is from 1939.

And this one is from 1948.

Quite heavy.

Can you tell me briefly what's inside?

Papers that my father kept in the safe or had in his desk.

They are subpoenas to hearings from different district attorneys,

notes that my father made during the hearings,

rulings by the district court of Kiel from 1961,

where he was charged with murder.

That's it.

Did that take you completely by surprise?

Yes and no.

It was a complete surprise that he appeared in court on trial for murder.

His denazification notice stated that...

...in February 1931 or 32...

I'm not sure, 1931 or 32, so really quite early,

he joined the NSDAP and the paramilitary SA.

That also surprised me.

I had suspected already

that during the war in Russia

he had been involved in killings.

To which extent, I did not know.

He always told us that he fought bandits and that nothing happened.

There came a point where I no longer believed him.

This was painted in 2013, ten years after the death of my father.

But two years after the death of my mother.

I received all of his stuff, these orders and medals

and for the longest time I didn't know what I should do with it.

Nachlass. (Legacy)

Knight's Cross, oak leaf cluster, Front Flying Clasp of the Luftwaffe,

Iron Cross, a medal of being wounded in service,

just about everything that could be awarded during the war,

that my father had achieved.

There was a lot to process.

Everything that happened and everything I was emotionally connected to.

Like I said, it came about two years after

that I made this painting "Nachlass". (Legacy)

It literally means "leave behind."

That's how the painting started.

The title was more or less already there and I just put it on canvas.

"Nachlass, lass nach!" I had to let it all go.

I placed the Knight's Cross and the oak leaf cluster on there

but it felt so hideous that I had to put something else over it

and then everything began melding together and morphing

into something else for me.

It's a painting representing how I dealt with my father's legacy,

his "Nachlass," that I had no clue what to do with.

Yes, I was born in Israel,

studied in Israel, and am a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I speak Hebrew, German and English,

sometimes it is a bit...

...confusing.

But it's okay.

How did you end up in the Topography of Terror Documentation Center?

WAFFEN-SS UNITS BY WEAPON TYPE

SPECIAL ACTIVITIES AND OPERATIONS OF THE SECURITY POLICE

EINSATZGRUPPE IN GREATER EUROPE

In front of me I have a series of photos

that I took 13 years ago to submit to the film academy.

I just saw that was in 2003.

I was supposed to take 12 pictures on a topic of my own choosing

that should be cinematic.

I recently remembered that I should have this series of photos somewhere.

So I dug them out and the interesting thing is,

that my mother can been seen in them how she is dealing with her father.

This one up here shows her fetching a suitcase from the closet,

which contains all the papers.

And this one here shows her examining the documents.

And it goes on from there.

The intention is to show her, like I just mentioned,

how she started, that she relatively naively began

looking through the pictures and documents in the suitcase.

That's why this photo up here shows her looking

at an old picture of her parents, I think, or of her entire family...

It's hard to tell now, but I think it's a picture of her family.

Below there is a close up of her father and mother,

so we are getting closer to the actual topic.

Now we are going for the real thing.

Here is a shot from above her head of all the documents and pictures.

And here is her father in an SS uniform.

It's interesting: these things are actual documents and props at the same time,

props in my cinematic telling.

This is the climax, if you will, of the series of photographs.

The close up: she is completely shocked

and the light causes the picture to shine through the paper.

And we see why she is shocked:

she realizes that her father was a high-ranking Nazi.

My mother's family is often the topic of discussion.

We spend a lot of time discussing the concept of guilt

and how much it still affects our family today and Germany as a whole.

It was only recently, a couple of years ago,

that I first thought to search Wikipedia for my grandfather's name.

It made me queasy when I did.

Not because of the terse account of what he did and what he was responsible for,

but more so because it was now...

...so official and a part of our collective perception.

Nowadays, Wikipedia represents the state of current public knowledge.

The fact that it was there for all to see and registered as fact,

was incredibly eerie.

And the numbers published there. I don't remember them exactly.

But I know that at the time it was puzzling to me,

although I knew who he was and what he had done.

We were bombed out of Dresden

on February 13, 1945. I was 11 months old at the time.

My childhood was shaped by the fact

that I thought we, as a family, were victims.

We had a refugee identity certificate, we fled from somewhere.

We ended up staying with my grandparents, who had taken us in again.

It was something very...

...difficult, where we lost a great deal.

That was a very dominant feeling in my childhood.

And also that in the years prior to my enrollment in school

I would see my father occasionally on weekends.

I was always so happy when I did. He was so nice, very loving towards me.

The other children of my age either had lost their fathers,

or they were sick, or they only had one arm or one leg.

I must say it was a very sorry sight.

In that regard, it was all relatively normal.

I continue to ask myself to this day

why it wasn't until much later, not until I was a teenager,

that I found out through just a couple of basic informations,

that my father was a high-ranking Nazi.

It was towards the end of high school, or a couple years before that

I became engaged politically and began asking questions.

Began asking my eldest brother.

The father of a friend of mine, who knew more than me, asked me,

"do you know who your father was?"

That's when my ears perked up...

...and I got scared too, of course...

...and I recalled what a colleague once said and I felt the same way:

I wanted to know and I was afraid of knowing.

There was something ambivalent in me.

Suddenly, everything was turned on its head.

This notion of being a victim, us as a poor family.

It all changed entirely.

I had a hard time processing of what he really had done.

My parents survived the Holocaust in Hungary, in Budapest.

They were both very young.

My father was born in 1926, my mother in 1931.

In Hungary it was so that until 1944, when the Germans arrived,

that Jews were relatively safe.

At the time, my father had just graduated from high school, he was 18.

As soon as he graduated, he was sent to a work camp.

When he returned in late 1944, early 1945,

his parents were no longer alive.

When he came back, only his grandmother had survived.

They had all lived together previously, his grandmother, his parents and him.

His parents were now deceased

and he basically didn't know how they had died.

The most likely scenario is that they were shot on the Danube like most Jews.

They were herded onto the bank and shot.

Show the picture of your grandparents, it's such a wonderful picture.

It is probably their wedding photo, but I am not sure.

Those are my grandparents, who were murdered.

EXHIBITS FROM THE BUCHENWALD MEMORIAL 1995 "ARRIVAL"

"DESK"

"T-4 SUPERVISOR MENNECKE"

"ACTIVITIES OF SS-DOCTORS"

"THE DUTIES OF ADMINISTRATORS"

"COMMANDO AND BLOCK COMMANDER KESTEL"

These are the traumatized, obviously.

My generation, the postwar children, we are the children of the traumatized.

They all emerged from that shit heavily damaged.

If you really think about it,

it was the same burden as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

My grandfather was a communist. He didn't want anything to do with the Nazis.

My father didn't join the Hitler Youth. It was taboo:

"I won't allow it!"

If you weren't in the Hitler Youth, you didn't get any apprenticeships,

you could work underground or work as a farmer.

Then he was picked up after school when he was 14

and put in a train with another boy from the neighborhood.

They were sent to Pommern where they had to slave away on the fields

for food and a roof over their heads.