Karlovy Vary Dispatch. 3.

Karlovy Vary's documentary competition is a relatively new category at this festival. It wasn't until near the end of the festival that I had a chance to sample it, with an Austrian film by Elisabeth Scharang. My Dear Republic (Meine Liebe Republik) considers the experiences of an ordinary man who transcends extraordinary circumstances, Friedrich Zawrel, now 76, whose life is a reflection of some of the century's horrors that the little republic of Austria would like to forget, and if not to forget, to push aside.

KVIFF has a good record in showing what we might call "what did you do in the war, daddy?" films. My favorites included Fighter, by Amir Bar-Lev, who returned here this year with My Kid Could Paint That, and Mit Bubi Heim ins Reich, by Stanislaw Mucha, here this year with his feature debut, Hope. There have been many others, including some chilling Czech documentaries on the Theresienstadt concentration camp, the "model" camp that was shown to the Red Cross - before it was emptied out and its prisoners were shipped to Auschwitz. It's a short ride from Prague.

Friedrich Zawrel is the odd persistent reminder who makes forgetting difficult. As a young child of an alcoholic, he was adopted along with his brother by a proper Viennese family. This foster parenthood was a common practice. Their adoptive mother took Fritz along as part of the deal, despite her protests that he was "ugly." The young boy misbehaved, and eventually ended up in Spiegelgrund, a children's prison and research institution where Nazi doctors carried out experiments on children and practiced euthanasia. Zawrel doesn't have the exact number of children who died there - the official count is around 500 - but he does have vivid memories of the man who killed them, a Dr Heinrich Gross, who reappears after the war as a witness in the trials of war criminals. Forcing some accountability on Dr Gross is a plot that runs parallel to Zawrel's biography in this documentary, which tells much of its story with Zawrel today looking straight into the camera and discussing events that he must have spent years thinking about behind bars. There are similarities with the straight-ahead interview style in which another Austrian film dealing with the same period, Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, was shot. In My Dear Republic, there's a lot more context with the testimony. The print that I saw was in 35 mm, but a bit muddy. I'm not sure it was the print or the projection. Once you're a few minutes into it, Zawrel's story takes over.

As a "problem child," he was locked up in a large room, much larger than a prison cell, with frosted windows and a chamber pot. Zawrel was a relatively lucky one. He wasn't Jewish, which would have led to his deportation (he reflects on discussions about Jews among Nazis in the hospital), and he wasn't physically or mentally handicapped, which would have made him a prime guinea pig for Nazi experimentation. (Spending most of those childhood years in solitary confinement still doesn't seem privileged.) After the war, when the young man brings up Dr Gross's Nazi past to Gross himself (who had become a distinguished psychiatrist), Gross uses his position to denounce Zawrel as a degenerate, extending his incarceration. Zawrel's letters to prominent Austrians, including the Justice Minister, known for their humanitarian works, are ignored. On the national level, as part of a general official tendency to see Austria as a victim of the Nazis, and not the willful accomplice shown by the facts, the Social Democratic government sweeps much of what it knows under the rug. Sound familiar? This is where Jews and other prisoners from the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp were "made available" to work in local houses and farms. Somehow I knew that out-sourcing had a prehistory.

The film has footage of flag-waving crowds (waving Austrian flags rather than the Nazi flag this time) who rally to welcome American politicians and join the Cold War. Zawrel tells us that he couldn't get inspired to cheer for the new republic.

Some truth does come out, thanks to a tiny circle of journalists, lawyers and doctors who take up Zawrel's case. The little man who refuses to be quiet unnerves those in power, but only to a point. Toward the end of the film, Scharang shows us television footage of an interview with Dr Gross, after his acquittal on murder charges. When asked about his Nazi party membership and a range of other documented activities, including his tenure at Spiegelgrund, Gross acknowledges that these have been asserted as facts, but he can't remember. After the crowded screening, when the diminutive Zawrel appeared to answer questions, speaking barely audibly in the fetid unventilated hall where the film had shown, Scharang explained that Gross had avoided her many efforts to talk to him before he died in 2005. Based on what he said to television reporters about not remembering more than a decade of his life, Scharang thought what Gross might have said to her would have been just as unenlightening.

This reminds those of us who practice journalism how difficult it is to get the prominent to speak truthfully about delicate subjects. Truth tends to deflate institutional arrogance. There's a great quote from Russell Baker about his days as a reporter, when (I'm paraphrasing him) he says he sat in marble-lined hallways and waited for prominent people to come out and lie to him. Consider the behavior of the Museum of Modern Art when it was found in late 1997 to have borrowed a painting by Egon Schiele from an Austrian foundation and it was later shown that the picture was looted (aryanized) from a Jewish art dealer in Vienna in 1939. (For years, Austria contended that everything looted from Austria Jews under the Nazis was returned, provided there were living heirs to whom the art could be returned. That's proven to be as true as the myth of Austrian victim-hood under the Nazis.)

First MoMA just tried to send the painting out of the country, and almost succeeded. Then the museum skirted the near-certainty that this painting, Portrait of Wally by Schiele, was looted by the Nazis, and argued that it had to comply with its loan contract, or else the international network of art loans that draw crowds to museums would be endangered. The entire museum community in the US agreed (even the Jewish Museum in New York), and still does. Now, in a lawsuit against the US government, MoMA (along with a foundation funded by the Austrian government) is arguing, among other things, that its officials did not know that the painting was stolen, and that the real tragedy here is that the painting hasn't been seen for almost ten years because of all these annoying legal problems created by a Jewish family that MoMA says was never entitled legally to the painting.

The real victims are not the victims of the Nazis, but museum-goers and well-meaning institutions like MoMA that just want to show them art borrowed in good faith from Austria. (MoMA was never prevented from showing Portrait of Wally. To the contrary - the painting was in storage at MoMA during most of the current lawsuit.) There's a point here. If not showing the painting was a loss to world culture, what about the loss of the truth (still not acknowledged by MoMA) about how and why the painting was looted, and why it has never been returned. Remember the work of art as that fusion of beauty and truth? The Austrians have resisted telling that story, as they resisted telling the story of Fritz Zawrel. Why has MoMA made common cause with them over this picture stolen by the Nazis, in a city like New York where Nazi crimes are deplored as the worst crimes of human history? (Google D'Arcy MoMA NPR Schiele for more on the Schiele case, which could come trial in federal court next year.)

Back to Zawrel, a remarkable character - modest, open, gentle and judicious as he recounts unspeakable abuses. The audience filled with young people at Karlovy Vary was incredulous as the film moved from one story of horror to another of bureaucratic indifference. Zawrel was the only one there who seemed unsurprised. He knows his subject.

Posted by dwhudson at July 6, 2007 6:24 AM