Filming Familial Secrets: Approaching and Avoiding Legacies of Nazi Perpetration

Literary and cinematic representations of private and familial histories of Nazi perpetration, collaboration, and support have proliferated since reunification. Three recent German documentary films each turn the lens on the filmmaker and his family in an effort to grapple publicly with long-silenced familial legacies. These attempts to work through, or at least make readable, the affective afterlife of silenced histories of guilt and shame are evidence of the limits of any strategy for mastering the affective inheritance that this past represents.