narrog-24994

For this documentary, Ruth Beckermann entered an exhibition about war crimes in Vienna 1995 with her camera team. She recorded the opinions of the visitors, mostly former soldiers, some of them admitting that they had seen similar scenes themselves, and condemning them, others denying any connection, and still others even justifying the war. In this way an authentic picture emerges about how the former soldiers viewed their own involvement, and beyond that, how Austrian society at large viewed the Second World War in the late 1990s. The Austrian situation is interesting in that Austria, unlike Germany, was able to present themselves mainly as victims, and did not take responsibility or undergo the same kind of re-education as Germany. Now, in the early 2020s, mostly everyone interviewed in the film will already be dead. This makes one realize even more how precious the voices of real people experiencing that time, and how precious documentaries like this one are.

This is an interview movie with Franz Weintraub, a Jew who grew up in inter-war Vienna just before the Nazi time started and was able to get out early enough to save his life. His account of the years 1924 to 1934 is first hand and interspersed with otherwise rarely seen film material of the period. Weintraub was a social democrat, who under the pressure from the right moved increasingly towards communism. This kind of increasing polarization is especially scary in the light what is happening in the U. S. and some countries of Europe today. Of course, even more scary is what happened to the Jews in Middle and Eastern Europe thereafter. Towards the end of the movie, Weintraub gives a gripping account of it.