Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss

The criminality of propaganda was the theme of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novel, Mother Night, because it involves extreme moral ambiguity. And while this documentary seeks to explore that question it ends up dissolving into a large number of vignettes involving the filmmaker's immediate and extended family. These range from the amusing but detached observations of one of his nieces who became the wife of Stanley Kubrick to sons and daughters whose lives were ruined by it. One committed suicide. In the end we're left with no clarity whatsoever. Nor was any intended.The root of the word, propaganda, is to propagate. And Harlan's film, Jew Suss, certainly intensified antisemitism, even if it didn't propagate it. As popular in France as it was in Germany one could argue that it added anger and urgency to an already antisemitic Europe. But did it kill people? The Final Solution would, without doubt, have taken place if the film hadn't been made. But that's not really the point. Propagating hate inflicts a harm all its own by dehumanizing the very people who seek to dehumanize others. Our lens here is personal; one family. The film ruined its filmmaker as an artist, and its effects resonate through subsequent generations.Sadly this tool is still with us. We saw it in Lee Atwater's Willie Horton ad in the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign. We saw it again, this time by Karl Rove, in the 2000 presidential primaries when fliers were affixed to the windshields of churchgoers in South Carolina claiming that Senator John McCain had fathered "a black baby." We see it it over 24 hour cable news which too often seeks to engage us emotionally rather than intellectually. When we see Jew Suss today it seems so transparent that we have trouble believing that it could have influenced anyone. Yet a man walked into a pizza joint and began firing a weapon because he believed a presidential candidate was operating a child sex slavery ring there.Clearly the effects of hate propaganda have never left us. In fact it's only gotten worse.

The story of Veit Harlan shares some frontiers with other highly driven, young men who actively participated in the fortunes of Nazi Germany, men such as Albert Speer and Wernherr von Braun. Indeed, several historians have argued persuasively that the "driving engines", the "executors" of the Third Reich were a group of men (like Harlan) from the generation born in roughly the first decade of the 20th century. There is some truth in this. It would have been interesting to place Harlan's life in this broader historical context partly because this addresses the compelling question of how people who were not rabid Nazis and were ostensibly "normal" politically could become willing participants in the regime.But this is not the conventional documentary about a high-profile figure in Nazi Germany. Indeed, this documentary is only indirectly about Veit Harlan. Really, it is much more about how Harlan's children, grandchildren, and niece (Stanley Kubrick's wife) have come to terms with his active participation in and contributions to the Third Reich. I will admit that at first I was somewhat disappointed about this focus, but by the time the documentary ended, I had found it a captivating and provocative story. The story of the son Thomas Harlan is particularly fascinating and inspiring, and his comments during the documentary are without question the most compelling, the most insightful, but also the most profoundly MULTIFACETED. There is a tension in this story, for his half siblings, though renouncing Veit Harlan's work, clearly condemn Thomas for filial disloyalty to the father. His siblings do Thomas wrong in this sense (for his opinions are not simple, black-and-white), but perhaps somewhat understandably so, given how families work (which is a set of interesting questions in this story too!). And true, a fair number of the grandchildren don't offer anything really meaningful, but the comments and stories of Jessica Jacoby and Alice Harlan are well worth listening to.The extra features are not noteworthy except in one way. German filmmaker Alexander Kluge becomes extremely tiresome in his interview. The most disappointing feature of that interview was the missed opportunity. Kluge protests frequently (!) that he is providing his opinions solely "as a filmmaker," which he detaches from (elevates above, really) other considerations, and his opinions about Harlan and Jud Süss in this vein are decidedly less condemnatory, indeed rather favorable. Neither he nor the interviewer seems to grasp that Kluge is revealing the likely mechanism whereby Harlan became the willing participant in the cultural grounding of the Third Reich's murderous anti-semitism. It seems likely that when he approached his work for Goebbels and the Propaganda Ministry, Harlan, too, wrapped himself in Kluge's perspective of "the artist," "the filmmaker" detached from the "parochial" worlds of "politics" and public concerns. Kluge insists that if Jud Süss is taken out of the context of Nazi Germany it is an entirely "harmless" movie with some redeeming qualities, in fact. True perhaps, but it is rather shocking that Kluge does not then say the obvious, that no film can be removed from the context in which it is created. That's the point. He misses it. The interviewer misses it. And, indeed, Harlan did.

Great focus on Harlan's family coping with the aftermath of their patriarch's Nazi film legacy. Also very good on the production and reception history of Jud Suss and some of Harlan's other films as well, specifically those featuring Kristina Soderbaum. Not an extensive investigation of Harlan's full involvement in the Nazi film industry, but I am an academic, so I probably want more from a documentary on Harlan than most viewers would. If you have even just a passing interest in Third Reich cinema, this is very much worth watching.