El amigo alemán / My German Friend

The byways of memory

By Julio Nakamurakare / Herald staff

With a vast trajectory and prolific work as screenwriter, producer and film director, Jeanine Meerapfel has the unassuming attitude of a woman who’s just making an inroad in the film industry, but behind that modest disposition there’s a professional who knows very well what she wants to achieve, and clearly possesses the tools to materialize her goals.
Adding to her professional background, Meerapfel, as the daughter of Jewish-German immigrants after WWII, as a wealth of stories to tell about the search for truth behind immaculate facades, the shock of realization, and the need for commitment, all of which is clearly reflected in her filmography.
Meerapfel, whose latest film, El amigo alemán / My German Friend, opens today in BA, is clearly aware that the story she tells will resonate with distant yet terrifyingly close echoes of the last half century in Argentina and Germany, where the action of El amigo alemán takes place.
“Which elements in this story are autobiographical?” Meerapfel rhetorically asks. It’s evident that she has always reflected on the historical-sociopolitical reasons that led Germans with a Nazi past and Holocaust survivors to choose the same country, Argentina, to settle and start a new life? Countless books, documentaries, newspaper and magazine articles, in the 1960s and 70s, would sometimes come up with the scoop that a former Nazi officer was living in hiding under a false identity, the most salient case being, perhaps, Adolph Eichmann, ambushed and captured by the Mossad, extradited to Israel, tried and executed for crimes against the Jewish people.

With this and other prominent cases spread by the media, films and TV documentaries, Meerapfel, as the self-avowed storyteller she acknowledges to be, decided to take a more intimate, personal approach to the subject of memory, shame, guilt and — however strange — love surrounding the real and symbolical issue of the bonds separating and uniting both the Jewish community and the German immigrants to Argentina.
“Our parents did not speak much about those painful days, like they were trying to leave those horrendous memories behind. So it came as a shock to the generation who grew up in the 1950s when they learnt about the Holocaust and, more impressively, that both Jews and Germans had fled to the same country, Argentina, sometime happened to live in the same neighbourhood, as though the German ancestry they had in common was stronger than historical facts,” Meerapfel tells the Herald a few days before the commercial release of El amigo alemán.
“The epic side of the story is very well known, but what remains little explored is the issue of how these two sides — one fleeing Nazism, the other fleeing justice — carried on with their lives in the same space, with daily reminders of the recent past,” Meerapfel continues.
Going back to the autobiographical elements in the film she wrote and directed, Meerapfel points out that, like Sulamit ( the young Jewish girl played by actress Celeste Cid) she too grew up as the daughter of Jewish-German parents. And that a third-generation German family lived across the street from them. They did not have a Nazi past to hide.
During her adolescence, the young Jeanine met and made the acquaintance of many German boys and girls who, it turned out years later, were the children of former Nazi officers.
Also biographical are the anti-Semitic attacks she suffered during her school years here, and her own cultural shock when, moving to Germany to continue her academic training, her fellow students were shocked to learn that she was Jewish.
Meerapfel was a student in Ulm and Berlin when les événements du 68 burst out in Paris and had a historical impact in Europe and the world over. “It was during those years that I met German students my age who fanatically tried to debunk their parents. These young men and women were so ashamed of the Nazi atrocities that they would conceal their German passports, or would blindly join extreme leftwing parties. They all had to go a long way before learning to love themselves and to love others,” Meerapfel sagely remarks.
El amigo alemán is a fictional story based on autobiographical elements, but the facts were made up. There’s a doomed love story between Sulamit, a Jewish girl, and Friedrich, a German boy living across the street. The story told in El amigo alemán may be fictitious but, as Meerapfel remarks, inventions and subconscious elements are somehow autobiographical.
Moreover, in Meerapfel’s own words, “This story may very well be the story of any upbringing, of any child making an unexpected discovery and confronting the truth.”
Imagining the love story between Sulamit and Friedrich, Meerapfel went for a classical narrative devoid of distracting detours. “After all, this is, above all, a love story developing against the historical background of victims and victimizers converging on the same place after the ravages and atrocities of war,” Meerapfel underlines.
The process of writing was arduous and not without its hurdles, for memory and subjectivity plays strange tricks on the construction of a narrative, fictitious in this case, but deeply rooted in history. Indeed, writing El amigo alemán demanded one year, and 3 1/2 years to complete. “After the writing phase, I gave the manuscript to script doctors to work on. They give you hell,” Meerapfel jokes about the process of following indications and pointers.
The casting process was easier.
“Max Riemelt (Friedrich) was picked right away, I found the perfect Friedrich in him. Sulamit was a bit more difficult to find. When a casting agent suggested Celeste Cid for the role I had my doubts, for she’s mostly a television star. But when we met I was truly impressed by her acting range. She possesses the two qualities I was looking for: beauty and talent. She’s glamorous and capable of turning in a very deep performance.”
Is Meerapfel a director who coaches her actors with rigour, with ferocity even, to obtain the results she wants?
“I think it works both ways,” Meerapfel concedes.
“I like to rehearse the lines with them and give them the necessary freedom to add things of their own to their roles. Director and actors perform a joint task when fleshing out the characters. I find it beautiful when this sort of working relationship is established.”
Is there a process of assimilation once the characters are shaped beyond a simple outline?
Meerapfel nods in agreement, as though underlining that there’s no other way to get things done.
“After rounding out these characters, we all fell in love with them.”
Happiness and pain: life, as it were
If there’s a lesson to be learnt from Jeanine Meerapfel’s El amigo alemán / My German Friend it’s probably that life moves in circular fashion, circumventing obstacles and posing new challenges, and that you must accommodate to these changing circumstances.
Concise yet rich in detail, the main force propelling the action in El amigo alemán is Sulamit, a young Jewish girl growing in a BA suburb in the 1950s. Just like memory itself, El amigo alemán develops in reverse as Sulamit, in the early 1980s, returns to Argentina after years of living in Germany. She is headed for Patagonia, which Friedrich, the love of her life, has chosen as his permanent residence with a Mapuche community. As the train chugs along the breathtaking landscapes of southern Argentina, Sulamit — played with moving adroitness and confidence by Celeste Cid — sits back and lets herself get carried away by memories. Formatted as a simple narrative devoid of artifice, El amigo alemán moves along with the characters’ growing awareness of who they are, and their desperate need to learn more about their roots. A film like El amigo alemán must necessarily strive for authenticity, and this Meerapfel achieves not so much on account of period setting but rather on the strength of the two leads, Celeste Cid and Riemelt, both equally well-suited for their roles.
Of the two, however, Ms. Cid must be singled out for her transition from adolescent innocence to the violent thrust into a sociopolitical reality far removed from her placid childhood in Buenos Aires, from parental protection to voluntary exposure to the danger of political activism, all amid the harrowing circumstances experienced by two forlorn lovers.