Last year I interviewed international lawyer Philippe Sands about My Nazi Legacy, a provocative documentary about his encounters with the sons of high-ranking Nazis responsible for the murders of members of his family during the Holocaust. At the time, Sands was writing a book, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. This week, it won the 2016 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. The following is a transcript of my interview with Sands, part of which first appeared in an article for The Jewish Chronicle.
Is My Nazi Legacy part
of the “Lemberg Quartet”, and was that a fully conceived idea
from the get go?
“It
is now, yeah.”
Did it evolve over
time?
“It
started with a lecture. I was invited to give this lecture in Lviv,
five years ago, at the University of Lviv, on my work on crimes
against humanity and genocide, and I accepted because my grandfather
was born in the city. I knew nothing about it. I didn't know where it
was - he had never talked about it - and I went because I wanted to
see what it was like. And from that visit this whole project
commenced.
“The
centrepiece, the backbone, is a book, which comes out next May, that
is called East West
Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide,
and it tells the lives of four men: Hersch Lauterpacht, who invented
the concept of Crimes Against Humanity, or put it into the Nuremberg
statute; Rafael Lemkin, who invented the word genocide. Amazingly
the two of them studied at the same university in Lviv where I went
to give a lecture, and the university was not aware of it. The third
man was Hans Frank, who I really came across because the killings
that I heard about that took place in August 1942, and which in fact
involved Lauterpacht's family and Lemkin's family and my family, were
really at his instigation, in part. So I got interested in him. And
then the fourth man is my grandfather. So it tells the parallel lives
of the four men between 1914 and 1946.”
You
became fascinated by Hans frank.
“Yes,
he was highly intelligent, highly educated, so how could someone take
the direction he had taken? One of the things I read was a book by
his son, Niklas Frank, which was astonishing, and I wrote to him and
he invited me to come and visit with him. We sat together for many
hours, in Hamburg, and talked and talked and talked, and then he
said, 'You should meet my friend Horst [von Wachter, son of SS commander Otto von Wachter]. They're not all like me.'
That led to a piece commissioned for the FT Magazine, the first
piece, published in May 2013.
“Six
months later we were having dinner at home with [documentary-maker] David [Evans] and
Abigail [Morris], and David mentioned he had read the piece, didn't say
anything else to me, and the next morning my wife said, 'I think
David would like to make that FT piece into a documentary,' and I
said, 'No, he didn't say anything to me about it. He would have said
something.' She said, 'No, Abigail said he really wants to do it.' I
said, 'Okay, call Abigail. If he wants to do it, we can have a natter
about it.' And she called Abigail and Abigail said, 'Yeah, he really
does.' And so we took it from there.”
So
how does the documentary fit into the quartet?
“It
is a second wing, if you like. There is a performance piece called
Song
of Good and Evil,
which I wrote and perform as one of the narrators, with a fellow
narrator, and we have a range of different narrators, and an opera
singer.
“And
the fourth element is this much smaller book by a wonderful Polish
poet called Jozef Wittlin, who wrote a little book called My
Lemberg, My Lviv,
which was published in 1946, which was an idyll of how it used to be
in the inter-war years. That has never been published in English and
Pushkin Press is publishing the English translation of that, and I'm
doing a long introductory essay. So it's the four things
that come together.
How does this fit
together with your legal work?
“So
I wear two hats. I am Professor of International Law at University
College of London, and I teach and I have all my lovely students, and
very happy doing that. I then also work as a barrister and I sit as
an arbitrator, and a lot of my arbitration cases are human rights
cases, including cases on crimes against humanity and genocide. So
the subject area is obviously of great interest. The juggling is a
little difficult.
“But
I'd say this: I think that sometimes you can achieve more through
words and performance and music than you can in a courtroom. You can
reach something different and you get people to think about things in
different ways. I can stand up and give a lecture about crimes
against humanity and genocide to the audience that was at BAFTA last
night [to see My Nazi Legacy] and within 15 minutes they would be
nodding off, probably.”
You need the emotional
arc.
“Yeah,
you need the emotional arc. As barristers and even as academics we
have to strip out the emotion and strip out the personal side of our
lives, and that's what I don't want to do any more. I want to
recognise the personal side of my life. It informs what I do and it's
part of what I do.”
That seems to be the
arc of My Nazi Legacy. In the first half you are very neutral and
objective. In the second half you go to the scene of the crime, as it
were, and you become less neutral and let your feelings inform your
approach to Horst in particular. You confront hi when he rejects the
documentary evidence of his father's involvement in the Final
Solution.
“That's
an absolutely acute observation. There's a turning point in the film
which takes place in that big room in the university, the former
parliament of the Austro-Hungarian empire,. Finally I've tracked down
this wretched document that I'm looking for, and confront Horst, and
his reaction, let's just say, irritates me, and I lose my rag. There
was a lot if internal discussion on the making of the film. I'm not
actually very comfortable with that scene because as barristers we're
trained don't show your emotion, stay cool, be balanced.”
Well it looks like you
have become the prosecutor but that is mixed up with the emotional
and the personal.
“Yes
the emotional and the personal. I'm very happy to put it in those
terms. Last night at BAFTA I think the way I put it was I'm a lawyer
and I'm a human being and there are points where one can no longer be
excluded with the other.
“Originally
when the film was conceived, I wasn't going to be in it at all; I was
just going to be a commentator. I wasn't keen to be in it. Wasn't
looking to be in it. David and the producer from BBC Storyville, Nick
Fraser, said: 'You have to be in it because it needs that input to
create a different dynamic,' and the moment that you identified is
the moment that a lot of people say it really takes off.
“As conceived
originally, we thought the Purcell Room would be the end point. We
thought there would be a huge explosion, they wouldn't be talking to
each other any more, and that would be the end of the film. And it
just went differently.”
Was
the Purcell Room event staged specifically for the documentary or was
it something else and you decided to include it?
“The
order was in November, David said, 'I'd like to make a documentary.
Let's go off and interview these characters.' Around the same time,
coincidentally, there had been a lot of interest around the FT piece
because I think it touches a universal theme, and I've stressed this
at every point: obviously it focuses on a Jewish story and a Nazi
story, but actually the son's relationship to the father cuts across
cultures, religions, identities, and it's universal.
“I
can't remember how it happened exactly, but with Niklas and with
Horst the idea came up: why don't we have a public exchange of views
and do it in London? They agreed to it and the FT sponsored that,
actually. It sold out in 31/2 minutes. It was incredible. And then
we decided to film it. So David, I think, had about eight cameras, it
was done from all different angles, but there was no sense of where
it would go next. And it was only really right at the end when Horst,
bless him, said, 'Why don't we all go off to the Ukraine where my
father is venerated?' that Dave and I thought, 'That's an idea.' It
hadn't occurred to us.”
Obviously the
Holocaust is where your families' paths cross. When did the Holocaust
first come into your consciousness?
“Day one of my
life. I grew up in a household in which we didn't have German things.
My mum was born in Vienna, in '38, and so she is herself not a
descendant but the youngest first generation. And so my brother and I
grew up in a household where we knew there were things that had
happened, but like many families we never talked about it. And I
think it was a protective instinct, I respect it completely. I've
never challenged it.
“My grandfather, he
just wouldn't talk about it. My mum, she says she remembers nothing
until 1945. She was a hidden child. She was hidden in France,
squirrelled away and then reunited with her mum and dad in, I think,
August '44, when Paris was liberated. So there was no talking about
it, but it's there.And it's a big issue. And it informs you and it
affects you, and I'm sure it affected the career choices that I
made.”
You think it informed
your decision to pursue the law?
“Must
have, must have, must have. I mean there's a long and honourable
tradition of Jews getting involved in Law, and particularly Jews who
feel themselves to be a minority and threatened group look to the law
as a way of providing protections, and I don't think there's anything
original in the path that I took. And it wasn't conscious. I started
off at university doing Economics, and didn't like it. So I changed
to Law, didn't really like it, and then did a course on International
Law and I think I must have really liked that because it connected
with family and stories and things. But it was an accidental thing.”
So there was no sense
of mission?
“Definitely not
then. It's come since. But I can't say there was a burning desire for
justice that articulated itself. It may have been there in a
subconscious way but there was no lawyer in the family. I'm the first
person on that side of the family to have gone to university.”
I
wondered how you felt when you were making this film because I spoke
to the Hungarian director of Son
of Saul
and he said the film was made out of anger and it's okay for Jews to
still be angry. If I recall rightly he said don't forgive, don't
forget.
“I
saw the film and I've heard a lot about him and I know he comes from
a particular strand. I mean one of the wonders of the Jewish
community is the vast array of strands and how one deals with the
past and the present, and that's a good thing, actually. That's a
healthy thing. I don't have a problem with that. But I don't think
it's anger. I don't think you will have picked up in the film an
angry person. I was irritated and I wanted an acknowledgement from
Horst. I certainly didn't want an apology. It's not his
responsibility what his dad did, he was a kid. But there's a concern
that in failing to acknowledge you effectively take ownership of what
has happened and that really bothered me. So it's not that there's a
mission but I've tended in my cases to act for the underdog, so I've
acted for very small countries against big countries: for Georgia
against Russia, for Ireland against the UK . . . . I tend not to be
instructed by the great powers against littler powers, and that may
also be connected.”
Horst seems to say at
one point that talking to you is attractive because you're Jewish.
Does he have a need to be understood by Jews?
“I
think the question to put is why did he do this? I think he was
hoping to persuade me, as I was hoping to get an acknowledgement from
him, and he's obviously failed completely and totally. As have I, it
has to be said. He's very comfortable around me. He worked for this
painter, who's a very famous Jewish painter, and it seems to be a
very big thing in his life. I don't feel any hostility from him. But
nor, at any point, has he ever said in the years that I have known
him now, 'I'm really sorry what happened to your family.' Whereas
Niklas takes it too far. I keep saying to Niklas, 'Okay, I know your
views. You don't need to apologise on behalf of the German people,
your father, whatever.' With Horst I think it's not malign, I think
he's just completely occupying the space of love not only of his
father but his mother.”
You have mentioned
elsewhere that you think the men's attitudes are tied up with their
mothers, but not really expanded on it. Can you elaborate now?
“The
first thing I need to say about the film is we had a lot of footage
about the mothers and the wives and the daughters, and there was an
issue, and it's more a question for David because, ultimately, it's
his film. He decided on everything. An 85-minute film, you just
couldn't cover everything and so he focused on the father-son thing.
And I think that, probably, was the right call.
“But
the mothers are fascinating characters and I think the story with
Horst in particular is he didn't know his father at all but he knew
and loved his mother right till her last day. She died in 1986,
probably a pretty committed Nazi all the way through to the end, and
she loved his father. I interpret what's going on, in part, as the
desire to express the love of the mother through the respect of the
father. That's one explanation. I talked to a lot of psychoanalysts
who have seen the film and have helped us, because we've also had to
be very, very careful. In a certain sense I think Horst is a victim.
There's that moment early on in the film with his birthday, when he's
five or six, and he's weeping. That always gets me that bit, because
you can see it from a kid's perspective.”
Indeed
and he still seems to be trying to cling on to that innocent,
childhood memory of his father in the face of horrible reality, and
this appears to create inner turmoil.
“And
that's what is brilliant about David Evans, the filmmaker, because he
brings it back at the end to Niklas Frank, wanting to be that little
boy again. And a theme that runs all the way through it is that theme
of childhood and the child growing up. But I think for Horst, the
focus is as much the mother as the father.”
What was that first
meeting with Horst like when he's showing you his photograph albums
containing pictures of high-ranking Nazis, including Hitler, and did
he know your family history at that point?
“Yeah,
totally. I'm very upfront about it. I'm also very upfront that I feel
no antagonism towards him. I'm a generation later and the passage of
time, at least with some families, the generation gaps allow you to
begin to explore these things with some distance. He was very open. I
was very upfront about the story of my own family. He never asked any
more than what I said. His schloss is unbelievable. He is completely
impecunious. He has no money. Literally nothing. He and his wife live
in that huge place. He bought it when his mother died. She left a
small inheritance. So it's certainly not passed down through the
family generations, and he bought it in about '87-'88 for a pittance,
because it's completely run down. They live in three rooms on the
ground floor, unheated. It's bitterly cold. Every time I was there
I'm like wearing three jumpers. It's -2, -3 inside, and he's broke.
And he arranges things all over the house and right on the top floor
there's the library, which is his father's library.
“Well
we sat down and I'm completely fascinated by these albums. You open
them and there's Goering and Goebbels and Himmler and 'AH' – 'AH'!
– and incredible images. And then we go upstairs to the bookshelf,
and you pick a book out, and it's signed on his 44th
birthday, from July 1944, from Himmler, a personal gift sort of
thing. On another occasion I remember going, he was taking out a book
from a shelf, it was a black book, and it was Mein
Kampf and
it was inscribed by his mother. She bought it as an engagement
present and inside she wrote, 'For our struggle.' So he lives with it
and he'll say, 'That's interesting. I didn't know that I had that.'
He's never said to me, 'You can't see what I've got.'”
I thought it was
strange, however, the way he complained that the light was too dim
when you pointed out how your eyes were drawn to the face of a girl
in a photograph of children in the Krakow ghetto, and claimed not to
have realised that his father was promoted on Kristallnacht.
“He
offered to give me that picture and initially I said yes. And then I
thought about it and then I thought, 'I don't want it.' It's an
incredible picture. It's a truly astonishing picture. And it's one of
those pictures that stays with me. I sort of do want it but I don't
want it.”
The provenance?
“Provenance.
You know?”
I found it disturbing
when Horst took a photograph at the site of the memorial at the
killing field where your family among thousands of other Jews were
murdered because of the idea of it ending up among the images you
have described.
“That's
so astute. It's a brilliant moment because you don't actually see him
taking the picture, but you hear the click. It's an amazing bit of
editing. Another one is, I just love that moment where Niklas is
telling me that his mother went into the ghetto to buy furs, and I'm
like, 'Buy furs?' He said, 'Yeah, you know, she's the Governor's
wife.' And at that moment there's a scene of Brigitte Frank parading
in a huge fur coat. It's all home family archive, it's never been
seen before. And the girl in the red dress – Jesus Christ
(whispered). It's unbelievable.”
 |
| Left to right: Niklas Frank, Philippe Sands & Horst von Wachter |
The
way that the film is edited also gives the sense that the past is
always pressing up against the present, and there's the feeling that
the past never dies and you can never really escape it completely.
“That's
my message. My big theme in it is suppress stuff, and it will come
back. It doesn't go away. It's my own family story of my own
grandfather and mum not wanting to talk about these things – for
excellent reasons, for admirable, protective reasons – and
nevertheless it comes back. And I deal with that a lot in my book,
actually, the secrets that haunt us. And I think that you see that in
the fields in the Ukraine. And you see that in what's happened to
their two children, actually.”
Really?
“It's
another part of the story in that they each have one child, a
daughter, and in Niklas's case that daughter has turned out to be a
really very stable, well functioning person, apparently. She in fact
went to Cambridge, amazingly, and works and has three children. She
describes [Niklas] as her 'fortress'. She describes her dad as her
fortress and says, basically, 'He broke that link and allowed us to
deal with this properly.' Horst hasn't and the upshot is that if you
look at his daughter, she is in a much more difficult situation.
She's having trouble, I think, dealing with some of these things. And
I think the broader theme there is the past just doesn't go away. It
just doesn't go away.”
And we see that on a
more public scale in the Ukraine with the ceremony honouring dead
Nazi soldiers.
“Yeah,
I mean one thing I'm slightly concerned about with the link with the
Ukraine – and I know my friends in the Ukraine are a bit nervous
about it because there's some very fine people there who helped a lot
with this film and have seen it and like it a lot – because it's
never made clear that the bunch of characters [Nazi sympathisers] we
met with are a minority. They are not a tiny minority but they're a
minority group and they're the ones Putin focuses on. And I've been a
little concerned that quite a few people who have seen that film say,
'Oh well I'm changing my attitude on Ukraine-Russia.' I think that
would be an unfortunate direction to take (I mean everyone will take
their own direction) because those characters in the field are not
the dominant few, but they're a significant minority. And the fact is
they're allowed to proceed. They're allowed to do that. It's
tolerated. There's a major political party that supports them and
that's really problematic.”
In that scene there is
a guy in the film wearing a Swastika who says that it means different
things to different people. You have mentioned elsewhere how a piece
of music meant something different to Frank and Lauterpacht, who
faced each other at Nuremberg. This is almost a theme running through
the film: Horst's photos mean something to him and you, Horst and
Niklas see their fathers in different ways, they look at the
synagogue burned out by the Nazis in different ways. It is as if the
film is made up of mirror images. Was this deliberate?
“No
one's put it in those terms. You're the first to put it in those
terms. That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about it like
that. It may be in part that my own work as an academic and an
international lawyer is about the interpretation of text, and my time
in court is often spent on a single word or a single full-stop or a
single sentence, with two sides having diametrically opposed views
about what it means. So I am fascinated by that. I mean Law is like
religious study in a sense: you take the same text and different
people interpret it in different ways, and that's what causes the
misery and the happiness of the world. So that's a really interesting
point; I had not thought about that. I hadn't made that connection
and I don't think David had made that connection. I'm thinking about
that, that's really interesting. I will think that through.”
When you went to the
Ukraine, how did you find out about the commemoration ceremony?
“Horst. I had no
idea about that. Horst sends me regular emails and updates of his
father and the Ukraine, so about two years ago he sent me an email on
Waffen SS Veneration Day, and it's like a German or Austrian
newspaper article, and he said, 'Look, seeall the pretty ladies
honouring my father,' and there's a parade in the street. I didn't
really know what the Galicia Division was back then in 2012. I hadn't
focused on it, I had never really heard about it. Now I know a lot
more about it and I just thought, 'Oh, this is not nice,' and filed
it away. And then after the Purcell Room, Horst said, 'Well, if we're
going to go to the Ukraine, let's go on commemoration weekend and
I'll introduce you to all these lovely people.' I wanted to go. We
all wanted to go. Obviously they wouldn't know who we were. We just
said we were BBC Film.”
Did they know you were
Jewish?
“No.
And I certainly didn't mention it.”
How did it feel being
among those people?
“It
was as shocking a day as I have ever had. But you don't notice it.
I'm all in my barrister's mode of, 'Oh, how jolly. Oh, he's wearing a
Swastika.' Who knows how people are going to react and they're there
to venerate the Waffen SS Galicia Division, which was a sort of
German-Ukraine thing. By the time it was founded in 1943, the Jews
had basically been exterminated in the city. Incredible population.
Incredible city. I've just come back - I've just taken my brother for
four days – and I find it darker and darker, not easier and easier.
I mean you just feel that absence, you know, when somebody's passed
from the world. It's very powerful and it's very dark. But I wanted
to see these characters. You know, I'm curious. That's what I said at
the beginning of the film and it's true: I want to know. And better
the devil you know than the devil you just imagine.”
How
long were you with these people? I had an almost physical reaction to
the sight of these guys in SS regalia.
“We
had a wonderful cameraman, Sam Hardy, and a wonderful sound man,
neither of whom were Jewish, and they both said last night at BAFTA,
of all the things they had ever done, that period of days in the
Ukraine was as tough as anything. I mean what it tells you is that
everything is just below the surface. The idea that there have been
fundamental changes, that these things have gone away forever - no
way. No way.”
Did you film the
scenes in Ukraine chronologically and was it all during one trip?
“We
followed in real order. Nothing is staged in that film.”
Did
they always know where they were going or did you sometimes not want
to give them time to prepare themselves?
“We
told them in advance. We felt we had to. Niklas is rather more
careful: 'Where exactly am I going?' And that was relevant. See,
David and I didn't know when we arrived in the the big room in the
university that he would suddenly take this piece of paper out of his
pocket. Looking back now I realise he'd planned the whole thing,
because he kept saying, 'Are you sure we're going to that room where
my father made the speech?' and I said, 'Yeah, I researched it and
that's the big room where he made the speech.' Then he just does
that. And, of course, the cameraman then has to follow the whole
thing. It's not like, 'Oh, I'll do it again for you if you want in a
different way.' Everything was just one off. It was a road trip and
it was pretty heavy, actually.”
In the scene at the
synagogue you talk to Niklas and Horst separately. Was that because
you wanted something different from them or because of logistics?
“No,
that was just Horst was standing at the place. There was no master
plan of we'll do this and then we'll do that. Horst was standing
alone, I wandered over to him, then the camera followed. They were
both there. Niklas could hear everything. And as Niklas was being
interviewed, Horst could hear everything. The policy adopted by
David, which was the right policy, was to be completely transparent
with both. So that when we said something to one of them, we said
something to the other, and then neither would feel that we had taken
a particular position. And one of the techniques of the film that I
think is very important is that David made it very clear that if
Horst had something to say to give an explanation, David would record
it and use it. And that's what creates the discomfort in the cinema,
which is that most reasonable people will feel uncomfortable with
what Horst is saying. But they have a certain sense of understanding
that to honour and to love your father is a good thing, and they're
made uncomfortable by the extreme position taken by Niklas.
“What
I've observed, it's been really fascinating getting reactions, is
that for people who are very directly affected by the story in the
sense that they've had members of their family murdered in the
Holocaust, they've got very little time for Horst for the views that
he expresses. But for the younger generations, when 15 or 16 year
olds come in, they're much more sympathetic – not to what he's
saying, but for recognising the child's perspective. And that's even
for Jewish kids. And for people who are not involved, whether Jews or
non-Jews, it becomes more ambiguous. And it's not a Left/Right thing.
It's really interesting.”
The further we get
from the Holocaust the blurrier things become, and that worries me.
“Yes,
and that's actually why, probably, the film won the prize it did at
the Jerusalem Film Festival and why we've got requests for screenings
up the wazoo from all over the world. Because it is, someone put it
like this, the first film that makes that connection from the past to
the future and shows this is a live issue today. So we've had so many
requests for Holocaust Memorial Day screenings because it's alive. It
shows it's not a dead issue. Really not a dead issue.”
Jews
are feeling unsafe again. Is there a message or warning here, in your
mind?
“Yeah
there's a warning in the film, and the film is an expression of my
own greater consciousness of the seriousness of issues that are out
there, for the Jewish community but also for other communities, that
xenophobia and racism is on the rise, and anti-Semitism is part of
that. Anti-Semitism is not the only thing, but obviously for the
Jewish community that's a particularly serious thing. And,
absolutely, I think David and I felt very strongly that those scenes
in the Ukraine were incredibly important. But I think the heart of it
is this sense that you just touched on, that it's showing that what
happened then is very alive today. Very alive. That's a big message.”
Does it tell us, too,
and I wonder if this is something that comes across in your work as a
barrister, that we could all be perpetrators?
“I
did a really long piece with the Jewish Quarterly, and I'm often
asked this, I talk a lot at schools, would I do torture, would I do
this, would I do that, and I'm always very careful about what I say.
I can't know for a fact. I hope there are things I wouldn't do but do
we know in extremis the limits of what we would do? No, we don't
know. To protect those we love most, we don't know what we would do
and how far we would go. And I think it's inherent, as a possibility
in many of us, to do very bad things. I don't think it's a dominant
feeling but I think that if things go belly up, seriously bad things
can happen again. The film is a reminder of that.”
How do we guard
against these things in ourselves if the potential is there?
“Gosh,
that's a big question. I mean if we were back in the '30s, I've been
thinking a lot about the '30s, what would my position have been in
the '30s? I read Lauterpacht and Lemkin, these extraordinary
individuals who could see what was coming, and they felt helpless.
Helpless. So one option is you just disappear into your hole and do
nothing and the other is that you militate strongly. I do that in
relation to the things that I know about, which is International
Law.”
What would you say
that you have learnt on this journey, perhaps about yourself?
“I have learnt that
my family's past is deeply important to me. I've learnt that things
that are deeply buried don't disappear, on all sides. And I've learnt
that we have to be constantly vigilant. I've also learnt, actually,
about the importance of honesty in dealing with people. That both
Niklas and Horst have their particular characters, they've both been
incredibly generous and open, and I feel like I have to record that
in relation to Horst. I don't like some of the things that he says.
But there is not a single document that I have asked to see that he
has said, 'No, you can't see that.' I've even managed to persuade
him – this is remarkable, truly remarkable – to give his entire
family archive to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I think that is
a mark of someone who is not out to do malign and terrible things.
And the openness is something that I respect.”
What do they both
think of the film?
“They both have
questions with it. I think probably Niklas is more comfortable than
Horst.”
There's an odd bit at
the end of the film where Horst is back in his schloss and talking
about his father in terms of the long view of his family history and
at one point identifies his behaviour with that of Jews. What the
heck was going on there?
“Good
question. David put it in because he wanted to be respectful of
Horst, that Horst actually really believes that. But of course just
five minutes earlier in the film, he said, 'If my father were to go
to a Nuremberg trial I'm sure he would be acquitted. Who'd speak
against him? Only the Jews.' You know, not a happy line. Let's just
say it's not an entirely consistent position that he's taking. But
it's good that he's out there and it's good that he has spoken and
participated, and the reactions have been really encouraging. We've
been pretty amazed, actually. And NIklas's father is one of the great
criminals of all time and he is willing to talk about it.”
You ask at the
beginning about how one lives with the burden of knowing ones father
was a mass murderer. Is that something that has fascinated you from
your own work and was this a practical way to explore it?
“My
mum has long been involved in I think it's called The Second
Generation Trust, and she has regularly attended meetings with the
children of perpetrators and that must have had an influence on me in
a subliminal way. I always really admired the fact that my mum did
that. I know it was very difficult for her at times, and she met some
pretty extraordinary characters. That must have had an impact on me.
So yes, it's been part of our thing. I think Niklas and Horst are
victims. They have been through a terrible trauma, of a different
sort.”
There is talk about
epigenetic inheritance in the offspring of survivors and I wonder
whether there is a trauma in people like Horst and Niklas because
they fear inheriting whatever it was that made the parent act the way
they did. It's a feeling of guilt, perhaps, that they are grappling
with.
“It's
interesting you say that because one of the quotes that I used on the
beginning part of my book, and I start with a quote by Nicholas
Abraham, 'What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us
by the secrets of others.' That to me is the casebook. And Abraham's
thesis, which is incredibly interesting, is that when somebody
experiences something terrible, they bury it in a part of their mind
and their soul which he refers to as a 'crypt'. It does not emerge
immediately, it skips a generation, and emerges in the grandchildren.
And that resonates with me. That totally resonates with me. I think
there is definitely something there. Definitely, definitely,
definitely something there.”
It seemed to me that
both Horst and Niklas are finding different ways to deal with
feelings of guilt or fears that they could be like their fathers:
Horst by effectively absolving his father of moral responsibility for
his crimes and putting the blame on the system, Niklas by completely
cutting himself off emotionally and psychologically from his father.
“We
had an incredibly powerful experience after the Song
of Good and Evil
at the Purcell Room where someone in the audience was the child of a
mass murderer in the UK and came up to me afterwards and just said,
'Look, this is really difficult for me because I've always asked
myself the question: am I my father?' And Niklas and I talked about
that a lot. I didn't talk about it with Horst because Horst denies
his dad's a mass murderer. It's another way of dealing with that.”
It's denial.
“It
is denial. And it's definitely apology. And Niklas thinks it goes to
the next stage of being an actual Nazi. I'm pretty careful of who I
throw that label at and I think in the film I say I don't think he's
a Nazi. I really don't think he's a Nazi but he's an apologist, and
that's really bad.”
