“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. Continue reading "Director Jeanine Meerapfel on My German Friend" »
Buenos Aires in the late 1950s. "Warst du bei den Deutschen?" ("Where you over at the Germans' place?") Sulamit's Jewish-German father asks his teenage daughter. "Friedrich es Argentino como yo!" is her defiant reply. This is the irony and dilemma of displacement, exile and loss of identity in a nutshell, delicately portrayed in Jeanine Meerapfel's MY GERMAN FRIEND, which has played BFI London as well as the Sao Paulo Film Festival.
