This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 7, 2012 - "The Flat" is a fascinating documentary about a man's difficult search for the truth about his family, a real-life mystery story that touches on truths about all of us. But it began as something much simpler.
Arnon Goldfinger is a filmmaker, and when his 98-year-old grandmother Gerda died and the family assembled at her well-appointed Tel Aviv flat to go through her many belongings, sifting treasure from trash, Goldfinger decided to film the gathering.
For a time, as family members went through the multitudinous remnants of a long, rich life, they found what might be expected -- browned photos of Gerda and her husband, Kurt, dancing in evening dress or reclining by the sea; jeweled brooches and porcelain figurines that bore the patina of age; an ancient fox-fur wrap with the muzzle still attached. (The younger members of the family couldn't believe that women once wore such things.)
Then they unearthed a couple of things that surprised and puzzled all of them -- a strange coin with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other, and a newspaper story from the 1930s about a Nazi leader and his wife visiting Palestine. According to the story, the German visitors, the aristocratic von Mildensteins, were accompanied on their tour by Goldfinger's grandparents, Kurt and Gerda Tuchler. At the time, Leopold von Mildenstein was in charge of Jewish affairs for the Third Reich, and one of his proposals for removing Jews from Germany was to encourage immigration to what became Israel.
Goldfinger was shocked. His grandparents had been pioneers in moving from Germany to Palestine before the Holocaust, and they helped other German Jews get out of Nazi Germany before it was too late. Yet the newspaper story, and other clippings, letters and photographs that soon came to light, suggested that Gerda and Kurt Tuchler had been good friends and traveling companions of the von Mildenstein's both before the war, and after it. Further research revealed that von Mildenstein had been, for a time, the boss and mentor of Adolph Eichmann, and had later been a top underling of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
Goldfinger was astonished -- baffled at how his grandparents could have been friends with such a man, particularly after the war when the full horror of Hitler's slaughter of Jews was revealed. And to his further astonishment, his mother and other members of her generation seemed only mildly interested in the story, and told him they hadn't really talked with their parents about their lives in Hitler's Germany.
The director realized he was on the trail of something much more interesting and important than a sweetly melancholic story of a family dealing with the death of a matriarch. The answers to his questions, he soon realized, lay with members of his own family, both in Israel and in Germany, and with the descendants of von Mildenstein. He traveled to Germany and discovered that von Mildenstein's daughter felt sure that her father had been only a "journalist" and that after the war he had been cleared of any taint of Nazism -- after all, he became the head of public relations for the German branch of Coca Cola.
As Goldfinger closed in on elusive truths, he had to confront the question of why his mother's generation, not just in Germany but in Israel, seemed to lack curiosity about the horrors of the recent past. And he also pondered what it was about his grandparents that made them make so many trips back to Germany after the war, and remain friends with the man who hired Eichmann. His answers to some difficult questions are partial and tentative, but revelatory, and "The Flat," which has become the all-time top-grossing documentary in Israel, tells a compelling story.