L'Appartement de ma grand-mère

Having read multiple reviews before watching "The Flat" I knew that I would enjoy the film. It is a documentary of a family coming to terms with the death of matriarch and uncovering secrets about the Holocaust and relationships both within in the family and between cultures. Although slow at points, the film also has moments of deep emotional intensity as the protagonists asks simple questions of his family and newly discovered acquaintances/friends. The insights gained through the revelations are also highlighted by well-placed conversations with experts who try and decipher the nature of the relationships and how they influenced how the family tried to find their place in the world. Overall, a visceral film that should be seen by anyone who has interest in how their parents/grandparents deal with the aftermath of tragedy which in this movie revolves around the Holocaust.

The Flat (2011) is an Israeli movie, written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger. It's an unusual film, because I believe that the filmmaker truly didn't know how the movie would end when he started filming.

Arnon Goldfinger's grandmother died in Tel Aviv at age 98. He and his family had the task of cleaning out the apartment in which his grandparents had lived since the 1930's. The family members were shocked to learn of their grandparents' close friendship with a German family, the von Mildersteins. This friendship had begun before WW II, but had endured the war, and had been re-established after the war.

Goldfinger pursues the question of how his Jewish grandparents could have stayed in such close touch with a Nazi couple. Why did they do this? The director tracks down the daughter of the von Mildersteins, who welcomes them to her home in Germany. The daughter was well aware of the friendship, and apparently the friendship didn't strike her as strange.

The director then digs deeper into the facts related to von Milderstein. Was he "just a journalist," as his daughter believes, or was he much more? (The facts about von Milderstein are now available in the archives from the former East Germany.)

We can only speculate about the explanation for how the friendship could continue for so long. This is especially puzzling, because Goldfinger's maternal great-grandmother (his grandmother's mother) had been killed by the Nazis.

Goldfinger interviews an expert in post-Holocaust Jewry. The expert offers what I thought was a good explanation for the psychology of Jews who retained their ties to Germany and to Germans after the war. That answer is probably the best that the director--or we as viewers--are going to get. It explains behavior that would otherwise be inexplicable.

This is definitely a film you want to seek out if you are interested in post-Holocaust behavior. It's also informative to watch von Milderstein's daughter deal with the new information that Goldfinger has uncovered.

We saw this movie in the Rochester Jewish Community Center as part of the outstanding Rochester Jewish Film Festival. However, it should work very well on DVD. After you see it, you'll keep thinking about it. I recommend it.

I watched this documentary and was thankful to have found it! Sensibly was the past conjured and it was not pretentious, it didn't want to make the audience remember, it was just memories about a difficult past. It makes me respect the affected families even more for their bravery for they strength. I saw not only the level of their sophistication but also the sense of dignity and honesty with which all the Jewish people and this in every documentary, touch the painful memories. Thank you.

Arnon Goldfinger always felt that when he went to visit his grandmother in her flat in Tel Aviv that he was going to Berlin. She had emigrated with her husband to Palestine in the 1930s. Gerda Tuchler lived a long, rich life dying at 98. Death lives a void, and it's to the living to go through a flat cluttered with things that Oma Gerda collected through a long life time. And in sifting through Gerda's papers he comes across copies of the Nazi 'Der Angriff' (Attack), featuring articles by Baron Heinrich Mildstein untitled 'A Nazi travels to Palestine'. And accompanying him were the Tuchlers. This shock sent on a long journey to lift up the veil of his grandparents hidden life. For Mildstein, it turns out, was the man who hired Eichmann, and later served in a high post in Josef Goebbels' interior ministry. And more shocking still is that even after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Tuchlers renewed a friendship with the Mildsteins with whom they had exchanged letter until 1939 and then after the war. Not only that, they traveled to Europe, to visit them and even went on holidays in their company. And it is this mystery that Goldfinger tries to understand. His mother Hannah who was born in Germany, had forgotten the Mildsteinsl even though Gerda had kept photos of her youngest and only daughter with them. Arnon's mother turned her eyes on a new life in a new homeland, and she, too, never asked questions of her her mother life in Germany. And although 'The Flat' offers answer, and is a engrossing film, Goldfinger never really pierces the psyche of his grandparents attachment to Germany and to the Mildsteins. 'The Flat' is not an easy film, and it might make Jews in the Diaspora shrug shoulders and look down their noses at the 'Yeckers', the not so Yiddish term for German Jews whom they thought looked at the world from a superior regard.

What I never understood was how the holocaust could have happened in a country that had excelled in philosophic thoughts, music and literature. I have seen many films related to the holocaust. I have even visited Auschwitz. I never thought I would see a film like this on the subject. The film was very sensitively produced and seemed very honest to the content. What is fascinating is that the characters were all real. Like a documentary. Yet the film had a story that flowed. I would certainly see it again to fill the gaps that I may have missed. What I would also like to find out is the reaction to this film in Israel and Germany.