Tomáš Fantl was born in Prague in 1928. Ten years later, the child was spared from the arson and murder organized by the Nazis in Germany and Austria; his family lived in the (still) safe Czech Republic at the time. However, at the age of 15 he was deported to Theresienstadt with his parents. Thanks to a chain of fortunate circumstances, he was able to survive this transit space of mass murder, as well as Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
He was one of the few in his family to return to the Czech capital in 1945; more than 60 relatives were murdered. The film-loving young man later began working at the Prague Film School and became an assistant to the legendary director Jiří Weiss. As a result of anti-Semitic tendencies in the CSSR state socialism, he emigrated to the Federal Republic in 1957. From 1964 onwards, under the name Thomas Fantl, he became a busy television director, working with authors such as Siegfried Lenz, Gabriele Wohmann, Wolfdietrich Schnurre and Marek Hłasko, among others. His material often revolved around exceptional situations and highlighted the absurdity of human striving in a Kafkaesque manner.
The ZDF production “The Full Life of Alexander Dubronski,” which is now being performed in his honor, is about a staid data processor in the city gasworks whose typos set off unexpected chain reactions. It is striking that Fantl, who died in 2001, never explicitly focused on the genocide in his TV films and held back from making any concrete political statements or details about his biography.
“Theresienstadt – Platform to Auschwitz”
In 1985, however, he seemed to have lost faith in the self-healing powers of democracy: he filed a complaint against a traditional SS club celebrating in his Bavarian neighborhood. The veterans had denied the Holocaust and described photos from concentration camps as fakes. Two years later he and his son Jan Fantl made the autobiographically intended, privately produced documentary film “Theresienstadt – Platform to Auschwitz”. This is still waiting to be rediscovered.
It is good and important that films about the Nazi excesses of 1938 and their consequences are being shown in several places in Berlin. With “The Trial by Fire – November Pogrom,” Erwin Leiser directly linked to the date, using historical photographs and memories of contemporary witnesses to make the phase shift from verbal demagoguery to physical will to annihilation understandable. Leiser had experienced the excesses himself in Berlin back then. Shortly afterwards, the teenager was brought to safety by his family in exile in Sweden.
With the program “Goethe in Buenos Aires,” the Jewish Museum is presenting video interviews for the first time that were conducted with German Jews who fled from Germany to Argentina just in time. The filmmaker Henriette Kaiser, who comes from West Berlin, creates very lively portraits of people fluctuating between uprooting and a new beginning, whose emotional center of life – despite the terror they experienced there – remained the German cultural area.
Finally, in its series “Films Against Forgetting,” Kino Toni brings together five examples of how the media deals with the Holocaust, with a focus on Defa productions. The outstanding film, filmed in 1948, before the founding of the GDR, was “Affaire Blum”, which was based on an authentic judicial scandal. Precisely staged by former Brecht collaborator Erich Engel, this is not about questions of criminal guilt. The thriller, set in Magdeburg in the 1920s, gets to the bottom of the structures of arbitrariness. His aim is to ask the extent to which something similar could happen again under similar circumstances. Can it do that?
Films against anti-Semitism. “The Full Life of Alexander Dubronski”: November 5th at 7 p.m., Deutsche Kinemathek. “Trial by Fire”: November 10th at 1 p.m., Arsenal cinema. “Goethe in Buenos Aires”: Jewish Museum, November 5th at 7 p.m. “Films Against Forgetting” series: Kino Toni, November 7th to 10th.
