Archive, Film Series

Claudia Sobral’s “Ghosts of the Third Reich”

 

“Screening of the film Ghosts of the Third Reich and Discussion”

 

Claudia Sobral, a Bard Alum of the Class of 1989, is a Brazilian-born Angeleno, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. She traveled to Berlin to watch a soccer tournament with her family several years ago and found herself obsessed with the Germans around her. Who was once a Nazi? Who committed crimes and got away with it? How does the younger generation, her contemporaries, deal with the legacy? All these thoughts raced through her mind then, and she has attempted to answer those questions through her new documentary, The Ghosts of the Third Reich.

 

Sobral’s film focuses on three descendants of Nazis, all of whom, though born after the end of the war and without any complicity in its horrors, have borne the guilt and shame of the Nazis by association. In 2009 she began research on the life experiences of descendants of the Nazis, the results of her research and several interviews provided her with materials to produce and co-direct her first documentary titled “The Ghosts of the Third Reich”. The documentary has been broadcasted on History Channel and National Geographic worldwide. Also, several screenings in Los Angeles, including Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles Holocaust Museum, and at the Breed Street Shul. In Brasil, at the Sao Paulo Jewish Film Festival, Monaco, Beijing and Israel. Each of these descendants’ bloodlines haunt them — and their painful attempts to describe their own disgust with their Nazi heritage is juxtaposed in the film with horrific images of the concentration camps and contrasted with loving family pictures. If the juxtaposition of humanity and its antithesis is chilling to us watching the film, how must it feel to be born into this history?

 

This event is sponsored by the Human Rights Project, Jewish Studies, Historical Studies, and the Department of Alumni/ae Affairs.

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