More on Jew Süss

Rico says some things won't stay dead, and this story is one of them. Manohla Dargis (another great name) has an article in The New York Times:

The sins of the father weigh heavily and sometimes scarcely at all in the documentary Harlan — In the Shadow of ‘Jew Süss'. The Harlan of the title is Veit Harlan, a filmmaker who thrived under National Socialism and directed Jew Süss (Jud Süss, 1940), one of the Nazis’ most notorious anti-Semitic works. He was the only director of the Nazi era to be tried after the war for crimes against humanity. Twice found not guilty, he directed nine more movies in the 1950s before dying in 1964 in a Capri villa with his wife and children by his side. He’s buried in a lovely cemetery with a smashing view of the Mediterranean.
Harlan: In the Shadow of ‘Jew Süss’— the title alludes to his memoir, In the Shadow of My Films— is an exploration of the filmmaker, his career under National Socialism and the children and other relatives who bear his name and, with varying difficulty, his legacy. Directed by Felix Moeller, it weaves together generous archival material— home movies, photographs and clips from Jew Süss— and original talking-head interviews with assorted Harlan family members, including his son Thomas, a fascinating figure who could easily be the subject of his own documentary.
(Cinephiles might be especially interested in Christiane Kubrick, a niece of Harlan’s and the widow of Stanley Kubrick. Her brother, Jan Harlan, produced several of Stanley Kubrick’s films and was an executive producer for Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.)
Veit Harlan started directing just as Hitler assumed power. According to the historian Erwin Leiser, in 1933 Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for Enlightenment and Propaganda, used his first address to representatives of the German film industry to enthuse about Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, the 1925 tour de force that features the oft-copied Odessa steps sequence with its runaway baby carriage. After admirably noting the film’s aesthetic quality, Goebbels said that it proved that “a work of art can very well accommodate a political alignment, and that even the most obnoxious attitude can be communicated if it is expressed through the medium of an outstanding work of art.”
Harlan became an effective instrument for Goebbels’s beliefs in the power of cinema. A film enthusiast, Goebbels is said to have watched at least one movie a day and once gave Hitler 18 Mickey Mouse films as a Christmas present, along with 30 other titles. (The Führer, Goebbels wrote in his diaries, was “very pleased.”) In his valuable history The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, Eric Rentschler argues that Goebbels, who saw Hollywood as his leading competition, envisioned himself as a German David O. Selznick. To that end, Mr. Rentschler explains, under the Reich, “film was to be artful and accessible, not intellectual or esoteric.” Directors would function as facilitators rather than auteurs.
More historical background of this type would have been useful for Harlan — In the Shadow of ‘Jew Süss', which, as it toggles between the political and the personal in a brief 99 minutes, only ends up skimming the surface. But even the skimming is largely interesting and thought-provoking, and of course very bleak— no more so than with the clips from the original Jew Süss, which was conceived as a hate film and exploited as a weapon of murder. Opening in 1733, it tells the story of a Jewish money lender from the ghetto, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (Ferdinand Marian), who rises to power in Württemberg (in what is southwestern Germany), where he gains control of the court, taxes the population, rapes a young married woman (who then drowns herself) and is finally executed.
The film was shown at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, where it was excitedly received, including by— in a dagger to the heart— the young reviewer and later director Michelangelo Antonioni. (“If this is propaganda, then we welcome propaganda.”) It was a hit with both Goebbels (“exactly what I had hoped for,” he wrote) and German audiences. According to Mr. Leiser, it was also repeatedly shown to SS units before they went on missions against Jews, and concentration camp guards also watched it. In his documentary Mr. Moeller partly lays out how “Jew Süss” was exploited as propaganda in an awkward sequence in which some Harlan relatives visit a museum exhibit in Stuttgart dedicated to the Harlan film, which gives the documentary a new location, but also brings to mind an elementary school field trip, lecture included.
Although his focus remains on Veit Harlan, Mr. Moeller directly engages, if again not deeply, questions about German mass guilt and the responsibility of succeeding generations. Unfortunately, he also badly botches a section that addresses Harlan’s postwar insistence on his innocence by inserting a clip from “Jew Süss” in which the caged Süss declares his own virtue. The juxtaposition of Harlan with his most notorious character can be intellectually justified, but Mr. Moeller needs more than a shock cut: he needs an argument.
This perverse connection has been asserted by others, like Mr. Leiser: “The death of the Jew Süss in Veit Harlan’s film is uncannily prophetic. His last words— ‘I was only an obedient servant of my master’— anticipate the position adopted by innumerable Nazi criminals, big and small, in the postwar trials.”