DER DRITTE BRUDER

Wondering about her father’s lack of sense of family, the filmmaker searches for her father’s mother, who disappeared in the Holocaust. In the process, she discovers a family story from the Third Reich to divided Germany, in which three brothers were torn apart by political ideologies: Walther emi­grated in time, Hermann made a career under the Nazis and even defended a war criminal in Nuremberg, whereas Otto, “the third brother” and the grandfather of the filmmaker, stayed in Dresden, suffering under the Nazis and later under the Communist regime. Why did he tell his sons their mother had died in a sanatorium? And how could he have denounced people himself in the GDR, after his Jewish wife had been denounced by neighbors for having visited a movie theater? In confronting her father, the filmmaker tries to overcome decades of silence and, in the process, to understand at what point in the past her father’s sense of family fell by the wayside.

Kathrin Jahrreiss © privat photos © Ester Reglin Film