Review: Two Or Three Things I Know About Him

The two or three things that German director Malte Ludin knows about his father -- that he was a career Nazi who was executed following the war -- are disturbing enough. These facts are not the entire story, though. Two Or Three Things I Know About Him follows the 60-something documentarian as he sets out to re-trace his father's upward path through the Nazi ranks, while all the while sitting down for tearful, confrontational interviews with his family members, some of whom still hold to the belief that their father, Hanns Ludin, did nothing that any other soldier wouldn't have done for his country, and deserves no special castigation. One of Hanns Ludin's daughters is particularly defiant. After a long and bitter argument with her filmmaker-brother that runs in snippets throughout the film, in which she tries to justify her father's various crimes, she finally lays her cards on the table and reveals her true position: "I see myself as the child of a victim. I think he was better than me, and maybe better than you."

Two Or Three Things, arriving on the scene in the wake of the revelation that Gunter Grass, literary giant and self-styled conscience of the post-war German nation, was actually a member of the Waffen SS. seeks to deliberately open the old wounds of a nation and confront hypocrisy with a steely eye. The journey that director Ludin goes on, beginning in a cold, antiseptic-looking records room, will eventually lead him to the conclusion that the man who left behind romantic doggerel like "You will not break a heart that beats so warm" was also a monster. The uncovered documents reveal that Hanns Ludin, as ambassador to Slovakia, a vassal state of the Third Reich, was an instrumental and a very willing middle-man in project to deport huge numbers of Jews from their Slovak homes to the concentration camps. This is the kind of film where Ludin present us with facts like these and then follows it with "I would never have dared to make this film while my mother was alive."

The director, for his part, is uninterested in an easy condemnation. It's his father we're talking about, after all. He does enough research to piece together a picture of a man who came of age in the debris of the first World War, was taken with Adolf Hitler's promises of revenge on those who had brought Germany to her knees, and adopted a flatly 'political' embrace of National Socialism. His youth, spent in and out of jails not for street crimes but for being an early supporter of a political movement that would ultimately sweep into power, shows him to be anything but an idiot. It shows him to be at least a canny young man with his finger in the wind of political change and the ability to move in fast political company. As we glimpse various images of the the young, bright-eyed Hans Ludin, we hear, overlaid on the soundtrack, the treacherous romanticism of Hitler. "When German workers, farmers and soldiers stand together, no power on Earth can render our slavery eternal!"

As Ludin's research begins to unveil documentation of his father's complicity in the Holocaust, some of his siblings begin to dredge up memories that, while fragmentary and seemingly insignificant, speak volumes. One of them has a strong memory of asking their father, as a small child, if he was a Jew. How much 'Jew-talk' would have to be going on in a house for a small child to formulate such a question? Ludin's most defiant sister also becomes more belligerent in her interviews as time goes on, and treats Ludin like an idiot who has unknowingly swallowed propaganda. Were Jews deported East? Of course they were, she says. Jewish partisans, operating against Germany in a time of war. Were there mass shootings and slaughter? Of course, she says. "The reality of war is shooting and murder, little Malte," she sneers at one point. She also uses the rehearsed-sounding line: "He didn't have a key to the gas chamber." Although this sister's feelings are dragged out into the sunlight, the question of the filmmaker's mother's complicity is barely explored.

You can hardly expect a filmmaker to dredge up a moral indictment of his own mother, but his decision to include old video clips of her from the 1970s, discussing what little she supposedly knew of her husband's crimes without any kind of cross-examination, is curious. She relates an alarming anecdote about about an acquaintance telling her that Jews were being gassed at Auschwitz. Returning home, she naively brings up the topic in the presence of her husband and one of his Nazi compatriots, both of whom feign no knowledge at all. Life goes on. Perhaps the most compelling parts of this bristling, gripping documentary comes when director Ludin goes to visit Slovakian Jews who, his research tells him, must have his father to thank for many of the misfortunes they suffered during the war. One of them, a sanguine man of about 60, tells Ludin of the conclusion he's come to about life: "Evil is stronger than good. Good is passive and content with itself. Evil is active, and will never be satisfied."