By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — When you think of Holocaust movies, you conjure up the black and white images of corpses and and skeletal survivors preserved on film by military camera crews as they followed Allied troops liberating concentration and death camps. Feature films like The Pawnbroker or Schindler’s List employ the same dark palette to reflect the bleakness of their subjects or replicate a documentary look. Films like The Pianist typically mute the brightness of colors with dark blue, gray, or red filters when scenes depict desolation, death, and despair.
Similarly, the range of characters usually falls on a limited spectrum of innocent Jewish victims and guilty German perpetrators. Sometimes Gentiles who begin as morally compromised like Tono in The Shop on Main Street, Oskar in Schindler’s List, and Leopold in In Darkness evolve into saintly figures bathed in bright lighting by the end of these films.
Lore, directed by Cate Shortland (Australia, Germany, United Kingdom: 2012), confounds these cinematic conventions. Its protagonists are German siblings whose father was an SS officer implicated in mass executions and whose mother shared his beliefs. Their adolescent daughter Hannelore, performed austerely by first-time actress Saskia Rosendahl, is similarly indoctrinated. Donning red and blue dresses, she immaturely plays with Hummel figurines, but reflexively delivers the Hitler salute and salutation. Her parents frantically burn incriminating evidence, evacuate their home, and shoot the pet dog. The father disappears, perhaps to be tried as a war criminal or summarily shot. After being raped while scrounging for Food, the mother awaits interment in a camp. She admonishes Lore to never forget who she is and to shepherd her twin brothers, baby Peter, and younger sister Liesel from their Bavarian village to their grandmother’s house in Hamburg.
The ensuing road trip through defeated Germany does not lead through the rubble of bombed out cities, but rather through the verdant paths of pristine forests. Cinematographer Adam Arkapaw focuses on the picturesque in nature reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Shortland conceived Lore as a “tainted fairytale.” The allure and danger of the forest are straight out of the Brothers Grimm, but the decomposing bodies, ransacked dwellings, and starving refugees are the grim realities the Führer has bequeathed to the “master race.” At encampments of displaced persons, Lore stares in disbelief at photographs of the atrocities the Third Reich inflicted on the Jews and its other enemies and initially cannot fathom the connection between them and her father. She encounters other Germans who believe it is merely Allied and Jewish propaganda.
On the verge of being apprehended by an American soldier, Lore and her siblings are rescued by an enigmatic young man named Thomas (Kai Malina). After displaying his Jewish star badge, documents that identify him as a survivor of Buchenwald, and snapshots of his deceased parents, he claims that Lore and the children are the only remaining members of his family. While the Americans believe him because he is Jewish, Lore instinctively distrusts him for the same reason. She witnesses that he can be both benevolent and brutal. She is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by him physically. Protected by someone she was taught to despise, Lore traverses psychological terrain that is every bit as treacherous as crossing occupation zones and the Lüneburg Heath. Her political enlightenment and sexual coming-of-age coincide.
Rather than spoil the ending, I want to conclude by praising Shortland’s nuanced treatment of controversial material. Several recent German films have portrayed German civilians as victims of World War Two reenacting the firebombing of Dresden, the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the mass rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers. Recognizing these egregious violations of human rights as traumatic chapters in German history is not necessarily tantamount to morally equating them with the Holocaust.
Some critics have charged that the literary source of Lore, Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room, encouraged this kind of collective exoneration because it drew on the experiences of her beloved German grandmother. Shortland assiduously avoided conveying this message. After she Married a descendent of German Jewish immigrants, Shortland converted to Judaism. The pictures Thomas carries are photos of her husband’s ancestors who fled Nazi Germany. According to Short, Lore explores “what it means when your parents have lied to you and your government is completely corrupt. How do you become a good person, and, how do you find empathy again?” Shortland’s film sensitively addresses this tortuous process of overcoming betrayal, denial, and indoctrination.
The films opens March 29th at the Hillcrest Cinemas.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com