Personal History Becomes International Mystery in ‘The Flat’

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – “Why do only third-generation Germans ask questions? The second generation didn’t ask what happened. You don’t understand and I’m glad you don’t understand.” These very insightful words are spoken by an old friend of Arnon Goldfinger’s grandmother as the filmmaker is deep into a fascinating investigation about his own past in the fascinating “The Flat,” a film that turns a personal story into a commentary on international denial and healing after World War II.

We often don’t know people until after they’re gone. As we clean out their belongings, we see pictures of friends that may have been mentioned in passing. We find a book that clearly had meaning. And we start to ask questions we never asked about their younger days. Such is the case as Arnon Goldfinger begins to clean out his grandmother’s flat after her death at 98.

The Flat
Photo credit: IFC Films

Grandma happened to be a pack rat and he stumbles across a box that contains Nazi propaganda including a newspaper about Palestine and how the Jews should go there that originally gave purchasers a medallion with the Star of David on one side and a Swastika on the other. It turns out that Arnon’s grandfather was a German Jew and a Zionist. The Germans wanted Jews gone. The Zionists wanted them in Palestine. There was a mutual interest that’s historically fascinating.

And it gets deeper. Grandma and grandpa toured Palestine with a Nazi named von Mildenstein to enhance the propaganda that their own people should leave. Years later, von Mildenstein recruited Eichmann and the latter saw the former as his superior because he knew more about Judaism, a knowledge he got from the filmmaker’s grandparents. Interestingly, Arnon’s mother seems unfazed by this information. She becomes more fascinated when she learns that her parents and the Von Middlesteins became friends again after the war. After everything that happened. And yet Arnon and his mother didn’t know about them and so there clearly was a degree of secrecy. Why? Did his grandparents regret the role they may have played?

The Flat
Photo credit: IFC Films

There are chilling discoveries and stunning revelations in “The Flat” that I’m only barely hinting at here. If this were pure fiction, some might say it wasn’t believable. How could people be in such denial? How could they become friends again with those who were at least partly in league with the Nazis? And how could the entire next generation know nothing about what really happened? The film has a fascinating undercurrent of how much we really don’t know about not only the people in our family tree but those we call friends.

To be fair, Goldfinger is a better investigator and interviewer than filmmaker. Some of the movie is frustratingly structured and composed but it’s a minor complaint. It’s a better true story than it is a great film and there is a small difference.

At one point, Goldfinger and his mother question whether to use the word Nazi in an interview with a relative of the von Mildensteins seven decades later. When do these wounds heal? Do they ever? The conversations between son and mother about how even to approach history are ones that are still going on around the world. Perhaps they will never have an answer.

By BRIAN TALLERICO Content Director HollywoodChicago.com brian@hollywoodchicago.com