Ein ganz gewöhnlicher Jude (2005)
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Directors
Cast
Ben Becker, Siegfried Kernen, Samuel Finzi
A Hamburg journalist’s attempted refusal to speak about Judaism becomes a searching monologue on being Jewish and German.
The story
Hamburg journalist Emanuel Goldfarb, the only son of Holocaust survivors, is invited through the Jewish community by a teacher to speak to a class and answer students’ questions about Judaism. Goldfarb begins drafting a refusal. As he works through the wording, he becomes angry at cautious formulations such as “member of your religious community” and “Jewish fellow citizen,” which avoid saying “Jew.” His draft grows into a monologue recorded on a dictation machine, examining his identity and his life as a Jew and a German in Germany. He spends more than 90 minutes working through what he calls the “Jewish topics,” trying to make his refusal plausible to the teacher.
Full plot (contains spoilers)
Hamburg journalist Emanuel Goldfarb, the only son of Holocaust survivors, is invited by a teacher, through the Jewish community, to speak to the teacher’s class and answer the students’ questions about Judaism. As Goldfarb drafts his refusal, in which he examines his identity and his life as a Jew and a German in Germany, it becomes a monologue that he records on a dictation machine—angry at such cautious phrasing as “member of your religious community” or “Jewish fellow citizen” instead of “Jew.” For more than 90 minutes, Goldfarb works his way through the “Jewish topics” in his monologue to make his refusal seem plausible to the teacher—but at the end of the story, viewers nevertheless see him in the classroom, though his actual dialogue with the students is no longer part of the plot.
Genres
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