Fleeing Hitler’s Reich, more than 20,000 German and Austrian Jews settled in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York in the 1930s.
One of those refugees, a boy from Saarbrucken, Germany, named Manfred Kirchheimer, grew up to be a filmmaker. In the mid-’80s, after wrestling for some portion of his adult life with the meaning and responsibility of being a survivor, he was impelled to turn his camera on his parents and relatives, their neighbors and his own childhood friends.
Maybe Kirchheimer sensed that sufficient time had passed that his parents’ generation could talk about the war years. And perhaps he realized that they should open up, because they wouldn’t be around forever to provide oral histories.
His 1986 documentary, “We Were So Beloved: The German Jews of Washington Heights,” is a calmly probing inquiry, peppered with moments of stunning candor. Just released on DVD, the two-and-a-half-hour film is as loving as it is incisive, and — with the inevitable passing of some of the subjects in the ensuing years — has only gained warmth and poignancy.
“We Were So Beloved” is not particularly unique or revelatory, given all the Holocaust-related films that have been made since. But in allowing its subjects to speak at length, rather than in snippets, it displays a patience and kindness that most contemporary documentaries sacrifice in their pursuit of suspense or raw emotion.
“We Were So Beloved” emphasizes personal history — the only kind there is, some might say. Instead of archival footage of the Third Reich, Kirchheimer uses the precious family photographs that his interviewees have cherished for years.
In that way, the film memorializes the mothers and brothers and cousins who did not survive the camps. However, this isn’t a Holocaust film per se, but a reflection on the pre- and postwar years.
Some of what we hear is familiar, like the fact that many Jews identified as German, not Jewish, and couldn’t fathom that Hitler’s anti-Semitic words and protocols were aimed at them.
Likewise the disdain that urbane German Jews felt toward Polish Jews isn’t news. It is a bit shocking, though, to be reminded that persecuted Germans blamed Eastern European Jews for provoking the Fuhrer’s enmity, rather than the Nazis themselves.
Perhaps the most startling admission that Kirchheimer obtains is from his father, who allows that if the situation had been reversed, he would not have hidden Jews. “I’m a coward,” he declares, which speaks not only to his own humility but the incredible risk that gentiles took to conceal their Jewish friends and neighbors.
Surprisingly, there aren’t a lot of tears, nor bouts of guilt or bursts of anger. One might attribute this to the reticence that marked many German-Jewish survivors, except that Kirchheimer has no problem gaining his subjects’ trust and getting them to speak freely.
One gathers that the older generation made its peace long ago — not with the loss of loved ones, but with displacement and relocation. They established a solid community and built pretty good lives in America.
“We Were So Beloved” flows back and forth between Germany and New York as reminiscences dictate. Kirchheimer’s conversations with his boyhood friends — notably Max Frankel, then-editor of the New York Times editorial page and something of a time capsule with his pipe and manual typewriter — are especially fascinating.
Opportunities and freedom were the norm for these bright young men. At the same time, they were raised with a social conscience that not all of their American-born peers shared. This was the legacy their parents handed them: Starting a new life did not mean forgetting the previous one.
“We Were So Beloved” is now out on DVD. For purchase information, visit www.firstrunfeatures.com.