“
What parts of this story are autobiographical? It is well known that many German Nazis fled to South America after the war. It is also known that many German Jews emigrated there before or during the war to safeguard their lives.
What has rarely been dealt with is how these two groups of people, who emigrated to Argentina within a few years of each other, and who came from the same German cultural circles, were able to get on with each other.
It is an irony of history that the German Jews and the German Nazis in Argentina favoured similar places to live, had similar tastes in architecture, and chose similar places to holiday. Much of the narrative in the film is based on real events.
The autobiographical element is that I grew up the daughter of German-Jewish emigrants in the 1950s in a suburb of Buenos Aires similar to the one in the screenplay, and a German family lived in the house opposite. I got to know lots of young Germans at that time. Some of them, as I later found out, were the children of prominent Nazis. Also autobiographical are the anti-Semitic attacks of my student days in Argentina, and the incredulity of young German interlocutors that I myself encountered in Germany when I informed them that I was of Jewish
descent.
In the ‘68-era I was a student in Ulm and Berlin. During this period I met German men of my age who were almost fanatical in their attempts to destroy the image of their fathers. Young men who were so ashamed of the atrocities of the Nazi period that they hid their German passports when they went abroad and blindly and recklessly committed themselves to extremist left-wing groups. Young men who had a long road ahead before they were capable of loving themselves – and then of loving others.
I followed the period of military dictatorship in Argentina while I was in Germany. Cases of young Germans being abducted in Argentina at that time are well known (Klaus Zieschank, being one). I know the details of the horrors at that time from friends who were abducted, then taken to prison but who survived. The love story between Sulamit and Friedrich is invented but, as we know, the invented and the unconscious are also autobiographical.
This film is my declaration of love to Argentina, the country that welcomed my family into safety, but also to the Germans of my generation who dragged themselves out of the morass of guilt and self-hate, and in so doing have helped to give today’s society a humane face.
The love between Sulamit and Friedrich could equally be the love between a Palestinian and an Israeli, or a Catholic and a Muslim: a love which is fortunately stronger than the differences of our origins and heritage.”
Berlin, January 2011
Jeanine Meerapfel was born in Argentina in 1943, worked as an editor and journalist. From 1964 to 1968 she studied under Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz at the Institute for Film at the Ulm Academy of Design, having been one of the first women to be enrolled there. Until the end of the 1970s she gave film seminars in Ulm and at the Goethe-Institut in various countries. Her first feature film, "Malou" (1980), won the international film critics award FIPRESCI in Cannes and received top awards at the San Sebástian and Chicago film festivals. In 1988 Jeanine Meerapfel completed "La Amiga" with Liv Ullmann in the leading role. A wealth of awards and nominations followed: The German Film Award, Best Actress at the San Sebastián, the OCIC award in Havana. La Amiga was nominated as the Argentinean submission for the Oscars.
In 1990 Jeanine Meerapfel became professor in Film/Television at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Her filmmaking was recognised with the North-Rhine Westphalian Female Artists Award in 2000. In 2001 came "Annas Sommer" ("Anna’s Summer") with Angela Molina. She received the honorary award for the body of her work at the International Film´Festival Innsbruck in 2012.
The Toronto Jewish Film Festivaland the Goethe-Institut Toronto are co-presenting the Canadian premiere of
Jeanine Meerapfel: MY GERMAN FRIEND
April 21, 2013, 3pm
ROM Signy and Cléopheé Eaton Theatre, 100 Queen’s Park, Toronto, ON
with English subtitles
