The Commandant’s Shadow
Out now | ★★★★★
Reviewed by Alma Green
Daniela Völker’s feature-length documentary The Commandant’s Shadow follows the journey of Hans Jürgen Höss, the 87-year-old son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz and history’s most prolific mass murderer. After a lifetime of avoiding the truth behind his upper middle-class German childhood in a house besides Auschwitz, he confronts it, and he does so with his son, Kai Höss, in tow.
Comparisons between The Commandant’s Shadow and The Zone of Interest (loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name) are tempting to make, especially as both projects were produced by the BBC’s former director of television, Danny Cohen. However, while The Zone of Interest explores the banality of evil, The Commandant’s Shadow is concerned with its legacy, in how guilt trickles down the generations. In this utterly fascinating film we are introduced to four generations of the Höss family, and each one grapples with the family’s terrible inheritance in its own way.
Völker’s directing encourages us to warm to Hans early on: he comes across as a jovial grandfather with a childish sense of humour. Yet, for most of the film he’s in deep denial about his father’s crimes. This is a cause of deep frustration for his more introspective son, Kai, who is a pastor. In one particularly poignant scene the pair are seen walking in Hans’s childhood garden, which shares a wall with the concentration camp. Kai remarks on the implausibility of his father not being able to smell the stench of burning bodies.
“But I didn’t… I really didn’t smell anything,” Hans insists. And in his indignation, it’s as though he transforms from an elderly man back to a little boy, whining that he hasn’t done anything wrong. I believed him. While it is surely impossible that he could not, over the course of a year, have smelt or heard the daily mass murder of human beings, a few metres from his bedroom, I think he has repressed the memories somewhere very deep indeed.
Over in America, we’re introduced to Hans’s sister, Inge-Brigitt “Püppi” Höss, who cuts a less sympathetic, though equally anguished figure. Püppi never denies outright the genocide of Europe’s Jews, but she is delusional in protecting her father’s memory. In place of straight admissions of guilt, she talks in vague emotional generalities, at one point lamenting the unfairness of her having to “suffer so bad, physically”.
The physical manifestation of Püppi’s discomfort, and incoherence, imply she has, to a point, more complex feelings towards Rudolf than she reveals to the camera. But she refuses to scratch beneath the surface and, at the age of 90, I almost don’t blame her. There’s no obvious way of being able to cope as a child of an ideological murderer. Plus, it must be even more confusing if the child in question has nothing but loving memories of the parent. Püppi has spent her whole life avoiding the emotional labour of challenging her childhood view of Rudolf. And so, as she enters her hundredth decade, she’s content with letting sleeping dogs lie.
The crescendo of Hans’s journey is meeting a survivor, something he had never knowingly done before taking part in the documentary. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was a cellist in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. After liberation, she moved to England where she co-founded the English Chamber Orchestra, married the fêted concert pianist Peter Wallfisch, had two children, and settled in a leafy London suburb. Her story is the most heartwarming part of the programme.
Despite being in her nineties, she presents as confident and razor-sharp. She is happy to meet Hans, but on her own terms, which means not in Auschwitz, as initially suggested by her daughter, Maya. Instead, the two convene in her sitting room, and it makes for pretty surreal viewing. Over plates of German apple cake, the pair engage in friendly but stilted dialogue. I don’t think there can have been much audience expectation that the meeting would provide catharsis, and it certainly did not. The best Anita could muster was, “You can’t help who your father was – and neither can I.” This doesn’t mean it didn’t make for mesmerising viewing. I was captivated throughout.
The Commandant’s Shadow is in cinemas now
