David Tanen Having read multiple reviews before watching "The Flat" I knew that I would enjoy the film. It is a documentary of a family coming to terms with the death of matriarch and uncovering secrets about the Holocaust and relationships both within in the family and between cultures. Although slow at points, the film also has moments of deep emotional intensity as the protagonists asks simple questions of his family and newly discovered acquaintances/friends. The insights gained through the revelations are also highlighted by well-placed conversations with experts who try and decipher the nature of the relationships and how they influenced how the family tried to find their place in the world. Overall, a visceral film that should be seen by anyone who has interest in how their parents/grandparents deal with the aftermath of tragedy which in this movie revolves around the Holocaust.

Marta "The Flat" is a great documentary that leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is as it should be. There are really no good answers for what unfolds over the next 97 minutes. Through the course of the film director Arnon Goldfinger tries to find out his family's recent past, in both Germany and Palestine, something that had never been discussed until after his grandmother died. The documentary confronts the messy business of life, and how people deal with family scandal and buried secrets. A war generation, both German and Jewish, forgets their past on purpose, the next generation is not encouraged to question their elders about it, and the third generation wonders why the two that went before could so conveniently ignore their own, and their parents, history. Goldfinger does a good job of laying out how all the participants in this documentary handle, or don't handle, their part in the story. It's a quiet film that is shadowed by immense subjects. As the viewer, we are left to wonder just how much we understand of our own family and its history, and if we have denied parts of our own past just as conveniently as some of the participants in this documentary have.It's a human story, in the end. Humans do terrible things and justify them in ways those of us who come after might find callous and chilling. Goldfinger cannot interview any of the original participants in this story, since they are all dead; some of natural causes, some in the Holocaust. The final scenes are just as void of answers as the rest of the film. Goldfinger and his mother look for her grandfather's grave in Berlin, in an old Jewish cemetery, during a driving rainstorm. They look in vain for any sign of their family member in this overgrown graveyard, but can find none. Both say they were not prepared for not finding the grave, as if it now suddenly is of the utmost importance that they find some link with their past, after so many years of silence on the subject. That's a good sign, because it might mean they will continue to confront the hard answers and keep up the search for their history, but as the viewer you weep, just the same, for all the love and knowledge that has been lost to time and death. We don't ever get that back.

Turfseer Imagine that your grandmother has just passed away and your family is cleaning out her apartment. Amidst all the stuff your grandmother has collected, you find a tantalizing and shocking newspaper article involving your grandparents that you never heard about before from any other family member including your mother. This is essentially the set-up for 'The Flat', a fascinating new documentary by Israeli filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger.Goldfinger's grandparents, Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, were German Jews who emigrated to Palestine (now Israel) in 1936 after the Nazis forced them out. The article was from a virulent Nazi newspaper, Der Angriff, from 1934, which chronicles a trip made by a high Nazi official, Leopold von Mildenstein, to Palestine. The article features photos of Mildenstein traveling to Palestine with Goldfinger's grandparents.The mystery is not only why this SS man would go to Palestine with two Jews but why Goldfinger's grandparents would accompany him. Furthermore, Goldfinger discovers that his grandparents visited Mildenstein in Germany AFTER World War II numerous times and kept up a friendship with him and his wife.The documentary brings out the fact that in 1934 the Nazi policy of 'The Final Solution' (i.e. the extermination of the Jewish people) had not been developed and there was some consideration of deporting German Jews to Palestine. Mildenstein apparently was on a scouting mission to see if deportation was a feasible solution to the "Jewish Question". Mildenstein actually headed the SS Office of Jewish Affairs prior to it being taken over by the infamous Adolph Eichmann. Clips from Eichmann's 1961 trial in Israel are shown along with transcripts from the trial indicating that Eichmann considered Mildenstein as an "expert" on Jewish affairs and that he was basically his mentor! Nonetheless, Mildenstein, apparently was not a racialist and privately had no problems socializing with Jewish people. The Tuchlers may not have been aware of Mildenstein's Nazi affiliations and were simply glad a non-Jewish German would strike up a friendship with them.After Mildenstein's replacement at the Office of Jewish Affairs in 1937, his movements in Germany up until the end of the war were largely unknown. Goldfinger flies to Germany and meets up with Mildenstein's daughter, Edda, who firmly believed that her father was no longer affiliated with the Nazis during the war. Goldfinger seeks out a retired journalist who wrote about Mildenstein during the 1960s when he had become an executive for Coca-Cola. Although the former SS officer was mentioned during the Eichmann trial, his reputation wasn't tarnished as it was believed (as the retired reporter pointed out), that his affiliation with the Nazis had ended in 1937, when he was replaced by Eichmann. During the war (as Mildenstein's daughter's husband indicates) Mildenstein was believed to be a mere 'journalist'.The plot thickens when Goldfinger finds Mildenstein's wartime file in records located in the former East Germany, which were not available to journalists back in the 60s. Goldfinger discovers that Mildenstein was actually promoted as an official in Goebbal's propaganda ministry and worked there for the rest of the war. Goldfinger confronts Mildenstein's daughter with the new information about her father and she appears reluctant to believe what Goldfinger is telling her. Even after she shows her a copy of her father's resume indicating his Nazi affiliations during the war, it is obvious that she's now quite uncomfortable dealing with these new revelations.As for Goldfinger's grandparents, he interviews an expert on German Jewish history who points out that the Tuchlers obviously were not aware of Mildenstein's Nazi wartime activities. They were also willing to forgive him for any past Nazi associations, due to their past friendship with him. Despite being Jewish, the Tuchlers never learned Hebrew while in Israel and continued to speak German. They continued to identify with German culture in spite of the Holocaust and that's why they visited Germany many times after the war.For the most part, 'The Flat' is riveting--only the ending proves to be slightly awkward. As Goldfinger and his mother walk through an old German Jewish cemetery in Germany, they search for the grave of his great-grandfather. Goldfinger unnecessarily berates his mother for not taking more of an interest in her parents when they were alive in order to find out more about their history. Apparently, his grandparents were as complicit as the mother in not revealing information about their time living in Germany and their association with Mildenstein. The mother concedes she should have taken more of an interest in the family history but when she was younger, we have to believe her that she simply had no interest at that time.'The Flat' brings to the fore more revelations regarding issues of guilt and responsibility of ordinary Germans vis-à-vis the Holocaust. By the same token, it chronicles conflicting feelings on the part of those German Jews who survived. 'The Flat' plays out like a detective mystery, with its talented creator cast in the role of high stakes super sleuth!

dromasca Arnon Goldfinger's most recent documentary The Flat (best documentary awards at the Jerusalem and Haifa film festivals) starts as a typical family story. A few weeks after the director's grandmother dies the family starts looking into the things accumulated in her Tel Aviv flat. The apartment is full of objects gathered through a full life, and as it gradually empties and light starts penetrating the shady corners, details from a hidden past start to emerge. As many other immigrants coming from Europe Gerda and Kurt Tuchler had gathered not only things from a past time and an old country, but also photos and documents of a life that brought them from the Berlin between the two wars to Palestine which was to become the State of Israel. Soon we learn that the Tuchlers seemed to be the kind of immigrants who kept not only memories and nostalgia, but a strong attraction and relationship with the old country. An intriguing story completely unknown to the third generation starts to uncover from the drawers and boxes left in the flat – photos, letters, newspapers from Nazi Germany and one of the strangest coins that ever existed, with a Magen David on one side and a swastika on the other. The Tuchlers were friends with a family of high Nazi dignitaries named von Mildenstein, they traveled with them to Palestine after the Nazis came to power and before settling here definitively, and the trip was described in details by Leopold von Mildenstein in the German press of the time under the title 'A Nazi travels to Palestine'. Despite the fact that the story was researched and mentioned in the German and Israeli press after the war, the family knows close to nothing about it. The film describes the process of gradual discovery which is not void of surprises, as they soon learn that the Tuchlers and the Mildensteins continued their friendly relations after the war, despite the fact that von Mildenstein seemed to have been quite an important figure in the Nazi regime, and related to the fate of the Jews (he was the one who recruited Eichman and preceded him in the position of responsible of the Jewish affairs). How much the Tuchlers knew about the activities of their German friend during the war and what these really were remains in part a mystery.The film focuses on the process of gradual discovery which is for the author-director a trip in the past of his own family, a trip which will take him to Germany, to Berlin where he discovers remote relatives still living in the same area where his grandparents lived and to a series of meetings with the daughter of the Mildensteins. Dialogs between German and Jewish families who lived through the war and between their descendants are never easy, and they say a lot about how people who lived through the period relate to history, how they cope with the horrors of the war and of the Holocaust and how they passed these feelings to the coming generations. A strong similarity soon emerges, as in both families, the German one and the Jewish one, the same rule of silence seems to have been enforced, the past was kept secret and almost nothing told to the next generation. The children were raised not to ask questions, and their lives were completely disconnected from the history of their families. During Goldfinger's inquiry and film making both families are up for painful revelations and none of the second generation is really prepared to cope with role played by the high German functionary in the Nazi regime, or with the fate of the Jewish grand-grandmother left behind in Berlin and murdered in the Holocaust. It is the third generation (of the director) who is destined to ask the questions and get part of the answers. The mystery of the Tuchlers is not fully revealed and will probably never be completely. In one of the final scenes of the film the director and his mother are looking under a pouring rain for the grave of the grand-grandfather in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. They cannot find it, the place where it should be is covered by vegetation. The physical link with the past has completely vanished. The spiritual link of the old generation who could not tear themselves from the cultural and mentality relation with the old Europe even after the horrors of the Holocaust is the troubling secret investigated and revealed in part by this documentary.