Bridging a wartime divide
FILMMAKER Philippe Mora wanted to make a movie about his father’s exploits in the French Resistance during World War II.
However, his plans changed direction when he attended a function in Berlin in 2009 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and met musician Harald Grosskopf, the son of a soldier who was a member of the Nazi Party.
They struck an immediate rapport as they shared their experiences as children with a German heritage who grew up on opposite sides of the war – Mora was the first Jew that Grosskopf had met.
Mora soon realised that there was a film in the offing about this encounter and their reflections on their disparate upbringings.
The result is German Sons, a 90-minute documentary that is screening at this month’s German Film Festival.
Mora was born in Paris in 1949 and two years later his family moved to Melbourne – father Geoges became a well-known restaurateur and his mother Mirka became an artist.
Mora went to work in London in 1969 and became an artist and filmmaker. One of his early documentaries, made in 1973, was Swastika, which depicted Hitler’s rise to power. It featured Eva Braun’s colour home movies that were discovered in the Pentagon and had never been seen before.
For the past 30 years Mora has been based in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife Pamela.
His father, Georges, died in 1992, but his life story has all the ingredients of a movie.
Georges was born in 1913 in Leipzig as Günther Morawski, a young communist, who escaped, aged 19, from the early days of Nazi terror in 1933 and joined the French Resistance in Paris, later rescuing his family. He moved up the ranks in the French Resistance, partly because he could speak German and looked French.
Mora says that he is working on a film script about his father, titled Monsieur Mayonnaise.
“Monsieur Mayonnaise was his codename in the Resistance. He worked closely with mime artist Marcel Marceau, who is my godfather,” he explains.
“Marcel told me the story about how my father and other members of the Resistance dressed up as Catholic nuns to take kids across the border to safety.
“He noticed that the Nazi customs men would not open a baguette or sandwich if it had mayonnaise in it because they did not want to get sauce on their gloves.
“So my father spread the word through the Resistance movement to put all documents in wax paper and smother it with mayonnaise in baguettes.
“Thousands of kids and adults got through and survived because of mayonnaise.”
In German Sons, Mora uses family photos, home movies and newsreel footage to relive the prewar and postwar periods. Grosskopf produced the movie’s music.
There are also family snapshots from Grosskopf’s father, Gerhard, including photos of him in the Hitler Youth and as a Wehrmacht soldier on active service in Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1939.
When Grosskopf was 12, he saw a documentary on the Holocaust and confronted his father about his role in the German army.
For more than 25 years Grosskopf questioned his father, but he did not want to talk about his wartime service, or express remorse, and this left Grosskopf feeling traumatised.
Mora says: “Harald said: ‘It basically destroyed our family because every time I sat down with my father, I asked him how he could have joined the Nazi Party.’
“When I met Harald in Berlin and we started talking about the documentary, we realised that our fathers were trying to kill each other during the war – they didn’t know each other but were on opposite sides.
“We thought it better to make a very personal film so that people could relate to it rather than try to make an objective documentary, which would have been impossible.”
He says Grosskopf believed that it was important for Germans to know more about World War II by listening to the stories of those who were there, both victims and perpetrators. For Grosskopf, as the Nazi generation dies, it was important that the next generation speaks out.
Mora says his father did not want to talk about World War II.
“Georges did not want to talk about his wartime experiences because so many friends had died during the war. He had no choice – resist or die.”
Mirka survived the war by being hidden by a Catholic family until 1945.
“One of the reasons that he and Mirka came to Melbourne was to get away from Europe. And they became atheists because of the Holocaust.”
During the making of German Sons, Mora and his film crew went to the Berlin university where his father studied for several years until he was expelled by the Nazis.
“Einstein was one of his professors and when I went to the university I found the papers that listed his expulsion – it had survived the war,” he says.
“It was an amazing feeling to be in the university where my dad was, but he never spoke about those days – it was painful for him.”
Mora and Grosskopf filmed on location at iconic German landmarks including the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall. They also visited the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which is now a museum attracting thousands of visitors each year.
“We have read about Auschwitz, but standing there and seeing the remnants of the ovens was staggering to comprehend. It was a very moving experience.”
He says: “Harald and I are examples of German sons trying to understand what happened.”
Mora and Grosskopf will be in Australia for the German Film Festival and attend Q&A sessions at some screenings.
Mora was invited to screen German Sons at a film festival in Brisbane in February organised by the Jewish Film Foundation, which led to it being invited to screen at the German Film Festival
“From a screening at a Jewish film festival to being part of Goethe’s German film festival, it all came together – a bit like Harald and me.”
The Festival of German Films is currently being screened in Sydney until May 14 and Melbourne until May 15. German Sons screens on May 9 and 10. Bookings: www.goethe.de/ozfilmfest.
REPORT by Danny Gocs
PHOTO of Philippe Mora filming his documentary in Auschwitz.
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