ZGram - 2/7/2002 - "Film Probes Ignored World of East German Dissent "

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

=46ebruary 7, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I herewith coin a new descriptive phrase:  Every time a Jew does something
right, among Gentiles he or she shall be known as a Righteous Jew.  Who
knows - I might even start planting trees in their honor.  I predict that
we will see a lot more Righteous Jews in the coming months and years -
which can only be a good thing for both sides.

Anyway, yesterday I told you that the Germans are clawing their way out
being cast as Evil Incarnate, and one of the Jewish artists who helps them
shed guilt is a filmmaker named Hava Kohav Beller.

Didn't I pose a rhetorical question:  How long would it take until we'd see
films depicting the decades of wrong that were done to Germany and the
German people?

The barriers are tumbling faster than the pins in a busy bowling alley.
And please don't be too critical - this is, after all, a beginning.  Just
overlook the reference to cyanide - it's a Pavlovian reflex.  Not even
Righteous Jews can help displaying it.

[START]

Wednesday February 6 5:08 PM ET

 Film Probes Ignored World of East German Dissent

 By Adam Tanner

 BERLIN (Reuters) - International filmmakers and writers have long mined
Germany's Nazi past for gripping stories, but relatively few have turned
their attention to the often brutal Communist East German era that
followed.

 In a documentary premiering at the Berlinale film festival on Thursday,
New York filmmaker Hava Kohav Beller takes on that challenge in a detailed
look inside the country on the frontline of the Cold War.

 Her two-hour "The Burning Wall" chronicles dissent within the
authoritarian state that rose from the ruins of the Third Reich to become
the most loyal of Soviet clients.

 "It is a preoccupation and a quest to understand why people who could be
otherwise very comfortable choose to stand up with moral choices that
endanger their lives and the lives of their families, friends," the
director said in an interview.

 "They basically were the forgotten people. They had done something
extraordinary."

 The film mixes historic footage and contemporary interviews with former
East German dissidents and officers of the Stasi secret police and others
in the repressive state apparatus.

 "I also...wanted to understand those who decided to become part of the
regime as the Stasi officers or the border guards or Politburo member,"
Beller said.

 In East Germany, a vast network of official Stasi secret police and
informants tattled on friends, lovers and neighbors.

 The film includes an interview with a Stasi agent and the dissident he
long trailed, and tells how he called her after German reunification in
1990 to apologize.

 "I cannot think of them as evil when I sit next to them and talk, but what
they have done? They destroyed people, they destroyed life, some of them
physically, most of them emotionally," Beller said before the film's world
premiere.

 SYMBOL OF OPPRESSION

 The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, became the symbol of East German
oppression. It fell in 1989.

 Born in Frankfurt and raised in Israel before moving to New York, Beller
focused on resistance in Nazi Germany in her first film, the 1991 "Restless
Conscience." The much-praised debut was nominated for an Academy Award.

 "The Burning Wall" picks up with anti-Nazi resisters building a new
socialist society in divided Germany after 1945.

 "There was a split," she said. "Those who became the leaders of the new
dictatorship and became the victimizers and those who decided to fight
again for social justice and a just society and became the dissidents again
and the victims."

 "The Burning Wall" took eight years to make, partly because of the time it
took to arrange funding and because of Beller's meticulous research. She
said she completed it just 10 days ago.

 She said the East German government differed from the Nazis, but had its
own harsh methods.

 "With the Nazis it was black and white: you either lived or you were
killed. In the GDR they didn't have to do that, the instrument was
psychological destruction," Beller said.

 "The methods were intangible. You couldn't really feel it or see it," she
said. "It's like cyanide. You don't see it, you don't smell it, but it has
an effect."

 "It's elusive. That's partially why it took so long to make the film."

[END]

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Zundelsite comment:

What's fair is fair.  It would take an in-your-face Jewish film maker from
New York, raised in Israel, to see the light and tackle this emotional
taboo topic, which will show lots of high-ranking Jewish Communists as
victimizers.

What will be next?  A German-born Jewish film maker who will make a film
about the Bonn regime's repressive measures against its European dissenters
- Revisionists like Guenter Deckert, Ernst Zundel, Dr. Robert Faurisson,
=46redrick T=F6ben, Judge Staeglich, Juergen Graf and David Irving?

Its title might well be:  "The Auschwitz Lie:  Enforcing a Modern Myth
through Judicial Coercion."

The film maker could mix historic footage of Fred Leuchter in Poland, of
Irving's arrest in Munich, of Ernst Zundel being beseeched by hordes of
screaming demonstrators, being punched, kicked and spat at on the
courthouse steps.  It could show scenes of Dr. Faurisson being attacked and
nearly beaten to death as he was walking his dog.

The Righteous Jew film maker could also conduct interviews with West German
cops who have been kicking in doors in their pursuit of dissidents.  State
prosecutors and judges could be asked pointed questions about how they
could reconcile Germany's constitutional Free Speech provisions with their
repressive, one-sided political prosecutions.  After all, there are now
over 100,000 victims of the Bonn regime to be interviewed for this
potential epic!  That is the number of people Bonn has mercilessly hounded,
deprived of their livelihood, bankrupted and publicly vilified and
demonized in the process of upholding the victors' version of "German
History".  Newspaper scribblers could then say:  "These Holocaust
Revisionists were basically a forgotten people.  They had done something
extraordinary.  They had dared to tell the truth in an age of officially
and judicially enforced lies."

This courageous film maker of tomorrow will do some interesting things -
like probing the psyche of the modern Torquemadas of the German judiciary -
people like busybody/anti-Nazi State Prosecutor Klein of Mannheim who still
hounds Revisionists with a vengeance.

I guarantee in time this film will win an Oscar - or whatever they call
such awards in the country we still love.

We will be there to cheer.

Don't tell me I am dreaming.  Stranger things than that have happened
lately - have they not?

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Thought for the Day:

"It is charming to totter into vogue."

(Horace Walpole)