Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Felix Moeller
Thomas Harlan
Alice Harlan
August Zirner
Caspar Harlan
Lotte Harlan
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
The infamous 1940 propaganda film JEW SÜSS, directed by Veit Harlan, and produced under Joseph G bbels's Ministry of Propaganda, was the Nazis' most vicious anti-Semitic film-required viewing for all SS members. A drama set in 18th century Germany, it purports to tell the true story of a Jew who dresses incognito as a Christian, corrupts a local Duke, restructures the government to bleed the people through punitive taxes, and forces himself upon a beautiful, married Christian woman. At the war's end, the filmmaker was prosecuted for crimes against humanity, but acquitted. Today, his children and grandchildren consider his legacy and the hard questions it continues to pose. Some have changed their name and left Germany. Others claim he was forced to direct the film and deride it as loathsome, crudely made propaganda. HARLAN is a exploration into the murky waters of a family's unique, disturbing relationship to one of history's worst crimes.
Director
Felix Moeller
Cast
Thomas Harlan
Alice Harlan
August Zirner
Caspar Harlan
Lotte Harlan
Nele Harlan
Chester Harlan
Jan Harlan
Lena Harlan
Jessica Jacoby
Christiane Kubrick
Stefan Droessler
Maria Koerber
Kristian Harlan
Crew
Anette Fleming
Christian Gollwitzer
Alice Harlan
Caspar Harlan
Chester Harlan
Jan Harlan
Kristian Harlan
Nele Harlan
Thomas Harlan
Marco Hertenstein
Jessica Jacoby
Maria Koerber
Christiane Kubrick
Amelie Latscha
Felix Moeller
Felix Moeller
Martin Noweck
Ludolph Weyer
Ludolph Weyer
Film Details
Technical Specs
Articles
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss - HARLAN: IN THE SHADOW OF JEW SUSS - Felix Moeller's 2008 Documentary on DVD
It's a fascinating freak, especially given its real historical foundation (Joseph Suss Oppenheimer was a real moneylender mixed up with aristocratic finances, until he was ultimately railroaded by embittered business rivals and executed on trumped-up charges in 1738), and an earlier, "British" version of the story (released in 1934), in which Oppenheimer was a victimized hero. For Harlan, Joseph Goebbels & Co., Oppenheimer was an public-opinion opportunity, and so in this notorious version he is depicted as a slavering, felonious, hook-nosed sex criminal-archvillain who must be stopped at all costs, and who is a scourge sufficient to galvanize the film's post-Reformation society against Jewry in general. Taking a methodological page out of the Soviet agitprop hornbook, the film is as clear and outright as propaganda films ever get, but it's exactly its persuasiveness - its success at its own ambitions - that marks the film as a blight.
Which Moeller's film takes as a given, properly, although the question lingers as to how much you can logically blame a film, and therefore a filmmaker, for having an influence there is no possible way to measure. In any case, Moeller's documentary skims over the fascinating Oppenheimer legacy in favor of Veit Harlan himself, an energetic go-getter and would-be actor who was clearly larger than life, living large (often in Capri, where he is buried), netting several movie star wives (his last, Kristina Soderbaum, was the most popular German movie star from the mid-'30s to the '50s), and lording it over ambitious German productions like a Teutonic Cecil B. deMille. Harlan's life pivoted on Jew Suss - after the war, he became something of a pariah in German society, still making films but also proclaiming publicly that he'd been forced to make the film, a claim few Germans, in their own long fog of incomprehensible guilt, could believe. What Harlan meant to the culture he thrived in and then was reviled by is densely illustrated by Moeller's web of interviews, predominantly with Harlan's four surviving children (one daughter committed suicide in 1989) and six grandchildren, whose entire lives have been marked in large and small ways by Harlan's public profile and by the shadow of Jew Suss. One aging son comes close to defending his father and the film, while another, influential war crime researcher Thomas Harlan, has devoted his life to criminalizing him. (The two old brothers apparently do not speak.) The younger generation have wrestled with merely being Harlans in a country that will not forget the name, but a fringe benefit Moeller's film offers up is the realization that Jan Harlan, for decades Stanley Kubrick's producer, was Veit Harlan's nephew. He met the young Jewish Bronx-native filmmaker during the shooting of Paths of Glory, as did Jan's sister Christiane, who acted in the film and later married Kubrick. Christiane is here, looking lovely, telling of her introducing Kubrick to Harlan at her home, a meeting for which Kubrick was nervous but which you'd imagine had a degree of frisson for Harlan as well.
Of course, a documentary about movies has the extra good fortune to have their historic subject ready to be sampled in vast chunks, and Moeller ladles in swatches of Jew Suss as well as home movies and Harlan's other, swoony-crazy melodramas, in addition to Kolberg (1945), an epic war film helmed by Harlan that has the distinction of having helped the Third Reich inadvertently lose the war because the production required tens of thousands of infantry to be pulled from the front and used as extras. There are other ironies aplenty - as in the scene from Jew Suss in which Oppenheimer pleads for his life (cravenly) by claiming that he was only acting under the orders of the Duke of Wurttemberg, a virtual prophesy (or a template?) of the "Nuremberg defense" used by Nazis at the war crimes trials after the war.
In the end, Moeller and his subjects don't have answers for the questions that still plague them, stirred as they are by latent guilt in having merely been related to the man who made such a film, and with undeniable zest. It's an issue Germany is, and should be, still wrestling with.
For more information about Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss, visit Zeitgeist Films. To order Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss, go to TCM Shopping.
by Michael Atkinson
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss - HARLAN: IN THE SHADOW OF JEW SUSS - Felix Moeller's 2008 Documentary on DVD
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Miscellaneous Notes
Released in United States Spring March 3, 2010
Released in United States Spring March 3, 2010 (NYC)