Holocaust and the Nazi Era

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      Hardy Kruger, German-Born Hollywood Star, Is Dead at 93

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      Escaping execution by the Nazis for “cowardice” as a soldier, he found success in films because he found ways to portray “the new, good German.”Hardy Kruger, the first German actor to become a Hollywood star after World War II, died on Wednesday in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 93.His agent, Peter Kaefferlein, confirmed the death.For much of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Kruger — tall, blond and ruddy-cheeked — was the most visible German-born actor on American screens. He appeared in dozens of movies, among them “Flight of the Phoenix” (1965), with James Stewart; “Barry Lyndon” (1975), with Ryan O’Neal; “The Wild Geese” (1978), with Richard Burton and Roger Moore; and “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), with an all-star cast that included Sean Connery, Robert Redford and Laurence Olivier. But his screen presence had significance beyond the box office.Mr. Kruger, who was nearly shot for cowardice as a teenage soldier in Nazi Germany’s army, had left his war-ravaged homeland to pursue an acting career in Britain, where he initially met hostility in a country whose own war wounds were still raw. But he went on to play an important role in soothing the anti-German feelings that had spread during the war.“Hardy Kruger was more than an actor,” said the citation accompanying his Legion of Honor, which the French government awarded him in 2001. “He was an ambassador for Germany.” The German film critic Herbert Spaich said Mr. Kruger had succeeded in American films because he found ways to portray “the new, good German.”Mr. Kruger in 2008 at the Bambi Awards ceremony in Offenburg, Germany, at which he received a lifetime achievement award.Patrik Stollarz/Getty Images“Against the background of the disastrous Third Reich, he helped Germany create a new image for itself in the world,” Mr. Spaich said. “It was because he also had something international about him. He wasn’t restricted to only playing a German. He also had some of the sporty young-guy style that was so in demand in the U.S.”After leaving Hollywood (his last American role was as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the 1988-89 mini-series “War and Remembrance”), Mr. Kruger became an adventurer and conservationist, wrote novels, bought a farm in Africa, hosted a popular television series and campaigned against neo-Nazi movements.Eberhard August Franz Ewald Krüger (his surname originally had an umlaut) was born on April 12, 1928, in Berlin, to which he felt deeply connected throughout his life. His parents, Max and Auguste (Meier) Krüger, enthusiastically supported the Hitler regime and sent him to a Nazi boarding school. There he developed a lifelong interest in flying, which led to his selection as an actor in a 1944 propaganda film, “Young Eagles.” During the shooting, Mr. Kruger met two young Jewish actors, whose stories about Nazi crimes moved him.Along with his schoolmates, he was forcibly inducted into the army in 1945, then failed his first combat test, a firefight with American soldiers in which half his unit was wiped out.“When brown dots far away shot at me, I shot back,” he explained later. “When the dots came closer, I couldn’t shoot anymore because I saw the faces of human beings.”After a summary court-martial, Mr. Kruger was convicted of “cowardice in the face of the enemy” and sentenced to be shot. Just before the sentence was to be carried out, an officer took pity on his youth — “I was 16 but looked like 12” — and pardoned him. Soon afterward he abandoned his unit and lived in a forest. He ended the war in an American prisoner-of-war camp.“My generation was robbed of its youth,” he later said.Amid the devastation of postwar Germany, Mr. Kruger found work in theaters, acting in productions of “Bus Stop” and “The Glass Menagerie.” After a few years, he decided to seek a film career abroad. He moved to London, dropped the umlaut in his last name and practiced his English.No German actor had sought a career in Britain since the end of the war, and Mr. Kruger at first found himself unwelcome. He recalled a British actress telling him, “You have to understand, there is hardly anyone here at Pinewood Studios who hasn’t lost a lover, a husband, a son, a brother at the front, in an air raid or at sea.”In 1957, Mr. Kruger landed a lead role as a pilot in the film “The One That Got Away.” The news of his selection set off an uproar, but the director, Roy Ward Baker, stood by him.Mr. Kruger in the British World War II film “The One That Got Away” (1957). No German actor had sought a career in Britain since the end of the war, and the news of his casting set off an uproar. The film’s director, Roy Ward Baker, stood by him. Photo by ITV/Shutterstock “I will always be grateful to him, first for giving me a role in the film in the first place and second for the way he dealt with a problem during filming,” Mr. Kruger recalled years later. “I was having a war of words with the British press, and the producers wanted to abandon the film. But Roy Baker threatened to terminate his seven-year contract if they did.”The film’s success made Mr. Kruger famous and allowed him to begin fulfilling his American dream. He refused to play Nazi war criminals, he said, and “cliché figures like what you see in Otto Preminger’s ‘Stalag 17.’” Yet war is the background in many of his films. Several times he played a German troubled by conscience — for example, a monk living in occupied France in the 1968 French film “Franciscan of Bourges.”“I only played six or seven Germans in uniform, and none was a Hollywood cliché,” he said. “Why should I not try to show the world that there were also Germans who were good people?”Mr. Kruger was married three times. Survivors include his wife of 46 years, the American writer and photographer Anita Park, and three children from his previous marriages, Christiane, Malaika and Hardy Jr. Both Christiane and Hardy Jr. have acted in films. Mr. Kruger won three lifetime achievement awards in Germany: at the 1983 German Film Awards, the 2008 Bambi Awards and the 2011 Jupiter Awards. “Sundays and Cybèle,” a 1962 French drama in which he starred as an emotionally wounded war veteran, won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.In 2013, shortly before his 85th birthday, Mr. Kruger joined with several friends and colleagues to launch a project that uses sports and recreation to lure young Germans away from right-wing extremism.“I decided I had to do something,” he said. “We can’t forget that the seed is there.”In the 1980s and ’90s, he hosted a series of television documentaries in which he introduced Germans to faraway places like Chile, Macao, Tanzania, the Marquesas Islands and Utah. He described the episodes as “short stories written with a camera.”He also enjoyed telling stories from his Hollywood years.Mr. Kruger, right, was second-billed to John Wayne, third from left, in the 1962 film “Hatari!”LMPC via Getty ImagesDuring the filming of the 1962 adventure film “Hatari,” Mr. Kruger famously defeated his co-star, John Wayne, in a drinking bout. Years later, he admitted that he had prepared himself beforehand.“I knew he could hold a lot, so I stopped in the kitchen and drank several spoonfuls of cooking oil,” he recalled. “That helped. At the end I had to carry him to his room.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Review: In ‘Witness,’ Seeking a Haven for Jewish Refugees

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      The experience of Jews who fled Germany in 1939 aboard the St. Louis luxury liner is the subject of a new production from the Arlekin Players Theater.Aboard the luxury liner St. Louis, more than 900 passengers waited helplessly at sea. In May 1939, on the eve of World War II, they were Jewish refugees fleeing post-Kristallnacht Germany. Despite having papers meant to let them into Cuba, they were barred from disembarking once they got there.Hoping for a haven, the boat lingered for a while off the Florida coast, while news stories chronicled the passengers’ increasing desperation. Yet the United States also refused the refugees. As the St. Louis carried them back to Hamburg in early June, The New York Times called it “the saddest ship afloat.”That ship is the setting for “Witness,” a livestreaming documentary theater piece from Arlekin Players Theater in Needham, Mass., where the cast performs in front of green screens. Conceived and directed by Igor Golyak, Arlekin’s artistic director, the production bears witness to stories from wave after wave of Jewish refugees over many decades, and to what it sees as the eternal outsider experience of Jews in the United States.But before its ghostly shipboard vaudeville begins, we watch the Emcee (Gene Ravvin) take a smoke break, venting about the wisdom of presenting this piece in this moment.“The Holocaust, the St. Louis,” he says. “I don’t know if this is my thing. I don’t know if we need to talk about it now. I don’t.”When I watched “Witness” on my laptop Friday night, that bit of fretful grousing had a very different feel than it surely would the next day, when a man in Texas took four hostages during a service at a synagogue, and a nearly 11-hour standoff with state and federal law enforcement officers ensued. Suddenly, once again, the urgency of discussing antisemitism was palpable, and not just to people who feel the menace of that bigotry all the time.Written by Nana Grinstein, with Blair Cadden and Golyak, “Witness” is part variety show, pitting passengers against one another for an unnamed “fabulous prize.” The contest results are decided by the audience members, who vote on their screens after each act. The winner, the night I saw it, was the remarkably graceful “Skating on Glass,” set to voice-over memories of Kristallnacht.With scenography and costumes by Anna Fedorova, virtual design by Daniel Cormino and excellent sound by Viktor Semenov, “Witness” often has the digitally buffed surreality of a video game, which might sound like an insult but is not. Like a lot of online theater, it also has a slight trying-too-hard feel.Before the show starts, audience members are urged repeatedly to allow their computer’s camera to show them onscreen with the rest of the crowd during the performance. (There is no hint that acquiescing is optional, but it is.) When the wall of viewers periodically appeared, though, it often looked like people were reading something on their screens — which they might have been, since “Witness” offers chances to click for more historical context. As a visual, it didn’t exactly foster a feeling of connection.“Witness” is an experimental production, with different energy to each of its three acts, the second of which is all audio, like a radio play. Where this multilayered show loses dramatic potency is in the last act, when contemporary characters take over. They talk about antisemitism in the 21st-century United States, but without depth, and only barely connect it to the hatred against other marginalized groups.Even so, this piece does indeed bear witness to what happens when danger threatens Jews for being Jewish, and the culture shrugs.“It was supposed to be different in America,” the Emcee says. “And now look.”WitnessLivestreaming through Jan. 23; zerogravity.art. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ Looks at Jewish Life Before Nazi Invasion

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      A documentary based on a home movie shot by an American in 1938 provides a look at the vibrancy of a Jewish community in Europe just before the Holocaust.AMSTERDAM — Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.Fewer than 100 would survive it.Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.“It’s a short piece of footage, but it’s amazing how much it yields,” Stigter said in an interview in Amsterdam recently. “Every time I see it, I see something I haven’t really seen before. I must have seen it thousands and thousands of times, but still, I can always see a detail that has escaped my attention before.”Almost as unusual as the footage is the journey it took before gaining wider exposure. All but forgotten within his family, the videotape was transferred to DVD and sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009.“We knew it was unique,” said Leslie Swift, chief of the film, oral history and recorded sound branch of the museum. “I immediately communicated with him and said, ‘If you have the original film, that’s what we want.’”The Holocaust museum was able to restore and digitize the film, and it posted the footage on its website. At the time, Kurtz didn’t know where it had been shot, nor did he know the names of any of the people in the town square. His grandfather had emigrated from Poland to the United States as a child and had died before he was born.Thus began a four-year process of detective work, which led Kurtz to write an acclaimed book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.Glenn Kurtz, who found the original footage shot by his grandfather in his parents’ closet in Florida, later wrote a book about the significance of the film.Stigter relied on the book in completing the film, which is co-produced by her husband, Steve McQueen, the British artist and Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave,” and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It has garnered attention in documentary circles and has been screened at Giornate degli Autori, an independent film festival held in parallel with the Venice film fest; the Toronto International Film Festival; Telluride Film Festival; the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; and DOC NYC. It was recently selected for this month’s Sundance Film Festival.Nasielsk, which had been home to Jews for centuries, was overtaken on Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the German invasion of Poland. Three months later, on Dec. 3, the entire Jewish population was rounded up and expelled. People were forced into cattle cars, and traveled for days without food and water, to the towns of Lukow and Miedzyrzec, in the Lublin region of Nazi-occupied Poland. From there, they were mostly deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.“When you see it, you want to scream to these people run away, go, go, go,” Stigter said. “We know what happens and they obviously don’t know what starts to happen, just a year later. That puts a tremendous pressure on those images. It is inescapable.”Stigter stumbled across the footage on Facebook in 2014 and found it instantly mesmerizing, especially because much of it was shot in color. “My first idea was just to prolong the experience of seeing these people,” she said. “For me, it was very clear, especially with the children, that they wanted to be seen. They really look at you; they try to stay in the camera’s frame.”A historian, author and film critic for a Dutch national newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, Stigter worked on this film, her directorial debut, for five years. She started it after the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to produce a short video essay for its Critic’s Choice program. Instead of choosing a feature film, she decided to explore this found footage. After making a 25-minute “filmic essay,” shown at the Rotterdam festival in 2015, she received support to expand it into a feature film.“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” never steps out of the footage. Viewers never see the town of Nasielsk as it is today, or the faces of the interviewees as talking heads. Stigter tracks out, zooms in, stops, rewinds; she homes in on the cobblestones of a square, on the types of caps worn by the boys, and on the buttons of jackets and shirts, which were made in a nearby factory owned by Jews. She creates still portraits of each of the 150 faces — no matter how vague or blurry — and puts names to some of them.An image from the home movie showing Moszek Tuchendler, 13, on the left, who survived the Holocaust and became Maurice Chandler. He was able to identify many other people in the footage of the town where he grew up.United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumMaurice Chandler, a Nasielsk survivor who is in his 90s, is one of the smiling teenage boys in the footage. He was identified after a granddaughter in Detroit recognized him in a digitized clip on the Holocaust museum’s website.Chandler, who was born Moszek Tuchendler, lost his entire family in the Holocaust; he said the footage helped him recall a lost childhood. He joked that he could finally prove to his children and grandchildren “that I’m not from Mars.” He was also able to help identify seven other people in the film.Kurtz, an author and journalist, had discovered a tremendous amount through his own research, but Stigter helped solve some additional mysteries. He couldn’t decipher the name on a grocery store sign, because it was too blurry to read. Stigter found a Polish researcher who figured out the name, one possible clue to the identity of the woman standing in the doorway.Leslie Swift said that the David Kurtz footage is one of the “more often requested films” from the Holocaust Museum’s moving picture archives, but most often it is used by documentary filmmakers as stock footage, or background imagery, to indicate prewar Jewish life in Poland “in a generic way,” she said.What Kurtz’s book, and Stigter’s documentary do, by contrast, is to explore the material itself to answer the question “What am I seeing?” over and over again, she said. By identifying people and details of the life of this community, they manage to restore humanity and individuality.“We had to work as archaeologists to extract as much information out of this movie as possible,” Stigter said. “What’s interesting is that, at a certain moment you say, ‘we can’t go any further; this is where it stops.’ But then you discover something else.” More

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      ‘Speer Goes to Hollywood’ Review: Expert Rebranding

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      A high-ranking Nazi leader attempts to whitewash his legacy in this disturbing, if single-note, documentary by Vanessa Lapa.Albert Speer — one of Hitler’s closest advisers and his minister of Armaments and War Production — doesn’t actually go to Hollywood, but he does get bafflingly close. After serving 20 years in prison (he was the highest-ranking Nazi to avoid a death sentence at the Nuremberg Trials) Speer wrote “Inside the Third Reich,” a best-selling memoir that perked up the ears of the movie industry. In 1971, Paramount Pictures nearly took the bait and hired the screenwriter Andrew Birkin to hash out a script.Based on audio recordings of conversations between Speer and Birkin, rendered in voice-over narration by Anno Köhler and Jeremy Portnoi, “Speer Goes to Hollywood,” directed by Vanessa Lapa, relies on this chilling disparity: the grisly reality of the war and the guiltless, even cavalier attitude of one of its central architects.Speer repeatedly denies knowing that concentration camps existed, blaming his involvement with the Nazi party on his careerist objectives and his devotion to his work. His words stand in disturbing contrast to the onslaught of the visuals — a parade of striking (if haphazard) World War II archival images, material drawn from the Nuremberg Trials and footage from Speer’s European publicity tours for his book.Despite the power of this setup, the film is pockmarked with unanswered questions: Why did Birkin sign on to the project? How exactly did the production fall through? “Speer” is an intriguing document, highlighting the ease with which the most reprehensible figures are able to whitewash their legacies. But once you settle into its wavelength, the documentary begins to feel simplistic, like a one-track excuse to roll out rare film clips and testimony.Speer Goes to HollywoodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Visconti’s Operatic Autopsy of German History, Restored Anew

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      The trilogy of “The Damned,” “Death in Venice” and “Ludwig” is whole again, in editions that freshly reveal their conflicted queerness.The revered Italian director Luchino Visconti was openly gay yet devoutly Catholic, ostensibly Communist yet unyieldingly aristocratic. In short, he embodied contradictions that haunt many of his films, in which criticism can sometimes be confused with reverence, or obsessive detail with tasteless excess.Nowhere is this more evident, to sometimes frustrating and other times awe-inspiring effect, than in his so-called German trilogy of “The Damned” (1969), “Death in Venice” (1971) and “Ludwig” (1973). These films are hard to love and not as widely adored as his earlier masterpieces, like “Rocco and His Brothers” and “The Leopard,” but they are a culmination of his preoccupations and paradoxes: Visconti at his most operatic, confessionally queer and questioning of the present through meticulous reconstructions of the past.In this triptych, that past is the history of Germany, recounted in what amounts to an autopsy that traces the apocalyptic 1930s back to the Romantic 19th century. And now, with the Criterion Collection’s recent release of “The Damned,” the three films are all available again, in new restorations that not only improve picture and sound quality, but also hew more closely to Visconti’s controversial intent.His earlier films — even his first, “Ossessione,” from 1943 — hint at a queer sensibility; and he had already begun to develop ever-lavish, operatic set pieces with historical sweep, such as in “Senso” and “The Leopard.” But with “The Damned,” Visconti embarked on a series of films that quietly wrestled with his own conflicted feelings about sexuality and class, and at the same time illustrated the twilight of the monarchy, of the aristocracy and, eventually, of Germany itself.But in reverse: He begins at the end, as if the trilogy were a whodunit, influenced throughout by Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner. (Not for nothing is the Italian title of “The Damned” “La Caduta degli Dei” — “Twilight of the Gods,” the same name given to the finale of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.) The gods here are the members of the von Essenbeck family, industrialists whose decline simultaneously paves the way for World War II.They are introduced — after a credits sequence of brassy melodrama and imagery reminiscent of Wagner’s fiery Nibelheim, where the ruinous gold ring is forged — in 1933 during a birthday party for the patriarch at their ornate and expansive family home, first shown through the eyes of the lower-class people who make it run.Berger as Martin von Essenbeck, a villainously ambitious young man scheming to rule his family’s business in “The Damned.”The Criterion CollectionBetween the scenery and the sounds of Bach wafting from a distant room, an older way of German life is established, then followed by a drag performance in which a grandson, the young Martin (Helmut Berger, Visconti’s lover), channels Marlene Dietrich in “The Blue Angel,” much to the family’s disgust. But he is interrupted by the announcement that the Reichstag is burning. Selfishly and obliviously, he continues until he is again cut off. “They could have chosen a better day to burn the Reichstag, right, Grandfather?” he responds.That grandfather is murdered the same evening, and what follows is a “Macbeth”-like melodrama of opportunism, murderous scheming and sexual deviancy; Martin, though coded as gay, also molests young girls and, in the film’s appalling climax, rapes his mother into a catatonic state. By the end, the von Essenbeck company’s leadership falls to Martin, who is all too ready to cooperate with the Nazi regime, while his mother and her lover marry then take cyanide together — a scene that recalls the deaths of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.But among those horrors is a sequence that ended up censored and is presented in its original form in the Criterion release: a dreamy and homoerotic recounting of the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s purge of the paramilitary brownshirts. At a Bavarian lake hotel, they pass an orgiastic evening of folk songs, beer and increasing nudity before retreating to rooms for gay sex, but only deep into the night — as if they were Wagner’s lovers Tristan and Isolde. Indeed, the camera cuts to one of the von Essenbecks, Konstantin, barking through that opera’s “Liebestod” (“love-death”) at a piano. When they are all massacred in the morning, a member of the SS remarks “Alles tot,” or “all dead,” a line that also appears in the final scene of “Tristan.”A kind of liebestod ends “Death in Venice” (also available from Criterion), an adaptation of Mann’s novella that makes more literal its forbidden desire. Visconti changed the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), from a writer to a composer resembling Mahler. That composer’s Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony is the film’s musical soul: “Death in Venice” is virtually a silent movie, an opera of facial expressions by Aschenbach and coy returned looks from the boy he obsesses over as beauty personified, Tadzio. (He’s played by Bjorn Andresen, a Swedish teenager handpicked by Visconti in a disturbing audition shown in the recent documentary “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World”).Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice,” an opera in facial expressions set to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.The Criterion Collection“Death in Venice” both satirizes and relishes upper-class Venetian tourism of the early 20th century, with a patient camera that settles, uncomfortably if nauseatingly, on an overdecorated hotel and its overdressed guests. Yet sequences there also carry a trace of elegy for a world soon to be erased by World War I, the kind of nostalgia of Wes Anderson’s “Grand Budapest Hotel.”Aschenbach’s desire, like all homosexuality in the German trilogy, is doomed. In something of an operatic mad scene, he visits a barber who dyes his hair, powders him with ghost-white makeup and rouges his cheeks. His unrestrained passion compels him to follow Tadzio to his death, of cholera, as he watches the boy from his lounge chair on the beach, black dye streaming down his cheek in the heat. But it’s an ecstatic death, that of Isolde, unconsummated yet transfigured.Wagner’s influence on “Ludwig” is even more explicit. He is a character in this sprawling psychodrama-as-biography about King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Helmut Berger again) — a movie presented in various cuts over the years, and in the restoration released a few years ago by Arrow Academy more complete than ever, running over four hours. The imagery of night versus day in “Tristan” also runs through the reign of Ludwig, who made that opera possible while also bankrolling Wagner’s spendthrift habits and extravagant ambition.Ludwig appears to behave with childish petulance — hiding, after Wagner is expelled from Munich, in a dark room with a toy that projects rotating stars on the ceiling to a music-box rendition of the “Song to the Evening Star” from “Tannhäuser.” But he is more like Tristan, hiding in the world of night from what is expected of him in reality: monarchical duties, the expectation to marry.Visconti’s film is primarily nocturnal, or shot in rooms with closed curtains and, in one case, an artificial grotto inspired by the “Tannhäuser” Venusberg. Instrumental arrangements from that opera follow Ludwig, like Mahler with Aschenbach, until the music fades, tellingly, after the death of his beloved Wagner.The king becomes increasingly isolated, eating from a table in his bedroom that is raised and lowered through the floor so he doesn’t have to see his staff members, even though they are also the outlet for his gay longing. In a scene that echoes “The Damned,” Ludwig’s men gather for folk-fueled debauchery inside a hut modeled on the “Ring.”Again, the sequence is long: elegiac, immersive and ultimately tragic. It is in scenes like this that Visconti is at his most brazenly queer. But he also relegates gay desire to that realm of night, and inextricably links it to Romanticism and decadence — the same kind that, the three films’ autopsy shows, put Germany on its inevitable path to destruction. More

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      Inge Ginsberg, Holocaust Survivor With a Heavy Metal Coda, Dies at 99

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      Her rich life, spanning three continents and 11 decades, entailed wartime espionage, volumes of poetry, songwriting and a late-career turn as a rock band’s frontwoman.Inge Ginsberg, who fled the Holocaust, helped American spies in Switzerland during World War II, wrote songs in Hollywood and, in a final assertion of her presence on earth, made a foray into heavy metal music as a nonagenarian, died on July 20 in a care home in Zurich. She was 99.The cause was heart failure, said Pedro da Silva, a friend and bandmate.In a picaresque life, Ms. Ginsberg lived in New York City, Switzerland, Israel and Ecuador. She wrote songs and poetry, worked as a journalist and refused to fade into the background as she aged, launching herself, improbably, into her heavy metal career.She was the frontwoman for the band Inge and the Tritone Kings, which competed on television in “Switzerland’s Got Talent,” entered the Eurovision Song Contest and made music videos. Whatever the venue, Ms. Ginsberg would typically appear in long gowns and pearls and flash the two-fingered hand signal for “rock on” as she sang about the Holocaust, climate change, mental health and other issues.In the 2017 music video for the band’s song “I’m Still Here,” Ms. Ginsberg stands in front of a screen showing filmed images of refugees. She sings — in a manner reminiscent of spoken-word poetry — about her grandmother and four young cousins, all of whom were killed in German camps. At the end, she slices the screen and walks through it, singing as she joins the other band members amid a roar of electric guitars, drums and a pounded piano.“All my life, I fought for freedom and peace,” she sings. In the last chorus, Ms. Ginsberg, who was in her 90s at the time, screams, “I’m still here!”The band grew out of a friendship between Ms. Ginsberg and Lucia Caruso; they had met in the audience of a concert in 2003 at the Manhattan School of Music. Ms. Caruso, a student there, was watching the performance of a doctoral composition by her boyfriend, Mr. da Silva. The couple married, went on to performing and teaching careers in classical music and stayed close to Ms. Ginsberg.One day in 2014, Ms. Ginsberg read out loud to Mr. da Silva the words of a children’s song she was writing. “She wrote these lyrics about worms eating your flesh after you die,” Mr. da Silva said. That had the ring of heavy metal to him, and he suggested building a band around her.The band began rehearsing and filming music videos later that year, the productions paid for by Ms. Ginsberg. She wrote the lyrics to their songs and performed them, with Mr. da Silva and Ms. Caruso and others accompanying her on various instruments, including the guitar, piano, drums, organ and oud.A short documentary video in 2018 for The New York Times Opinion section by the filmmaker Leah Galant recounted Ms. Ginsberg’s story. It shows scenes of her performing on “Switzerland’s Got Talent” and auditioning to appear on the NBC show “America’s Got Talent.” Speaking on camera, she said she wanted to prove through her performing that elderly people could still contribute to society.“In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the Op-Doc. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”A 96-year-old who fled the Holocaust finds a new way to be heard.Leah GalantMs. Galant said in an interview, “We felt energized by her as much she felt energized by us.”Ingeborg Neufeld was born in Vienna on Jan. 27, 1922, to Fritz and Hildegard (Zwicker) Neufeld. Her father ran a freight company, and her mother was a homemaker.Ms. Ginsberg described herself as a “Jewish princess” in her youth; she and her brother, Hans, had been afforded every luxury. But that changed with the rise of the Nazi Party.Ms. Ginsberg would tell Ms. Caruso and Mr. da Silva stories of the persecution of Jews in pre-World War II Vienna. In one instance, she said, she hid all night behind a grandfather clock in a building in town to evade Nazi paramilitary forces targeting Jews. Her mother assumed the worst, but Inge returned the next morning to a tearful reunion.After the war had begun her father was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp but was freed, Ms. Ginsberg said, after he bribed Nazi officials. Her mother, meanwhile, using money from the sale of her jewelry, fled to Switzerland in 1942 with Inge, Hans and Inge’s boyfriend, Otto Kollman, who would become Inge’s husband.The family lived in refugee camps in Switzerland, and Ms. Ginsberg managed a villa in Lugano, which was used as a safe house for Italian resistance members; there, she said, she and Mr. Kollman would pass messages from the resistance to the American O.S.S., the precursor of the C.I.A.After the war, she and Mr. Kollman made their way to Hollywood, where they worked as a songwriting duo. The couple divorced in 1956.Ms. Ginsberg in an undated photo. “In American and even European culture, the old people are excluded from life,” she said. “You have to have the chance to be heard.”Inge GinsbergMs. Ginsberg said in the Times documentary that she eventually found Hollywood “all fake” and returned to Europe the year of her divorce. She worked as a journalist in Zurich, wrote a German-language memoir of her time at the villa and published several books of poetry. She had invested successfully in the stock market, which kept her wealthy throughout her life and allowed her to pursue writing.In 1960, she married Hans Kruger, who ran a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv, where the couple lived. They divorced in 1972. That same year, she married Kurt Ginsberg, and they mainly lived in Quito, Ecuador.Ms. Ginsberg is survived by her daughter with Mr. Kollman, Marion Niemi, and a granddaughter.After Mr. Ginsberg’s death, Ms. Ginsberg split her time among homes in New York, Tel Aviv and Zurich. By the spring of 2020, she was living in the Zurich care facility when she contracted the coronavirus. Pandemic restrictions often kept residents from seeing one another or from entertaining visitors, and the isolation took its toll.“We have no doubt whatsoever that she died because of boredom, loneliness and depression,” Mr. da Silva said.He and Ms. Caruso kept in touch with her over the phone, and the three began writing another song for the band called “Never Again,” also drawing on Ms. Ginsberg’s experience during the Holocaust.“Each one of my songs has a message,” Ms. Ginsberg said in the documentary. “Don’t destroy what you can’t replace.” She added a second message: “You can’t avoid death, so laugh about it.” More

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      ‘The Meaning of Hitler’ Review: Understanding Fascism

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      This docu-essay inspired by Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same title argues that Hitler was disturbingly ordinary.The docu-essay “The Meaning of Hitler” proceeds with caution. The film, inspired by the historian and journalist Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same title, seeks to understand the combination of personal pathology, political shrewdness and mass complicity that allowed Hitler to create the Nazi regime. It also finds disturbing 21st-century echoes.But the filmmakers, the wife-husband directorial team of Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (“Gunner Palace”), are wary of contributing to any mystique that surrounds Hitler, not least because they find little in Hitler’s background that makes him unique. Early on, a narrator expresses concern about the project: “Is it possible to make a film like this without contributing to the expansion of the Nazi cinematic universe?”Although the film features Holocaust historians like Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer and Deborah Lipstadt and the authors Martin Amis and Francine Prose, it approaches Hitler from a variety of disciplines. The psychiatrist Peter Theiss-Abendroth says that Hitler has been assigned almost any diagnosis available, but he suggests that such speculation invariably creates excuses for culpability. Bauer notes that Hitler’s psychological problems were no different from those of millions of others. The movie delves into technology to explain how advances in microphones enabled Hitler’s theatrical style of oration. An archaeologist discusses the excavation of the Sobibor death camp.So is “The Meaning of Hitler” really playing with fire? It is when it trails the Holocaust denier David Irving on a visit to Treblinka. Irving makes offhand anti-Semitic remarks so flagrantly offensive it’s difficult to see what’s edifying about including him.But that misstep aside, “The Meaning of Hitler” takes a multifaceted, often counterintuitive approach to examining the underpinnings of fascism.The Meaning of HitlerNot rated. In English and German with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Apple TV and other streaming services. More

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      ‘Misha and the Wolves’ Review: Fuzzy Memories

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      Did an ostensible Holocaust memoirist really spend her childhood running with wolves? This documentary has answers.The documentary “Misha and the Wolves” revisits a semi-infamous episode in Holocaust appropriation. In a 1997 book, an author named Misha Defonseca claimed that, as a child during World War II, she had trekked through the woods living with a pack of wolves.The spoiler-averse will want to stop reading. But about a decade later, her story was exposed as a fraud. The film, directed by Sam Hobkinson and streaming on Netflix, recounts how various people — a publisher, Jane Daniel; a genealogist, Sharon Sergeant; and a Holocaust survivor, Evelyne Haendel, who tirelessly researched the case in Belgium — uncovered information about Defonseca’s real wartime experiences.The movie also tries to illustrate the nature of deception, to the point of lying to the viewer. A person labeled by name as an ordinary talking head turns out to be a performer on a set; at a critical moment, we see her wig removed. But “Misha and the Wolves” is most absorbing when it deals with the search for truth. Haendel, who spent her own childhood during the Holocaust hiding as a Catholic, recalls how she pored over old phone books and other records.“Misha and the Wolves” plays best on first viewing, with its surprises intact. The current documentary “Enemies of the State” deals more provocatively with verification issues in a less publicly settled case. Still, “Misha and the Wolves” shows how, in certain situations, people too polite to demand evidence can be hoodwinked. The film’s late efforts to portray Defonseca as at least some sort of victim don’t wash.Misha and the WolvesRated PG-13 for lies. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More