Story Frame 23 –There is Meaning in Every Journey

Inside any given documentary workshop, filmmakers are often working on multiple films more or less simultaneously, depending upon what funding has come in. This was always the case where I worked. There were only a handful of employees at any given time and each of us was working on different projects in various stages of production. It kept things interesting.

In addition to American Byzantine, Martin was deep into a film that was his heart’s passion – about the life, teachings and spiritual mindset of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer during the 1930s and 1940s. It would be his first feature film, one that would release in movie theaters instead of going straight to PBS.

“If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders,” Bonhoeffer famously wrote, “I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

He was referring to his own participation in attempts to assassinate Hitler. The intellectual and spiritual journey this devout believer took from ‘thou shalt not kill’ to arrive at this statement was at the core of Martin’s documentary.

As one of the film’s associate producers, I was included on a shoot in Berlin and other parts of Germany in the spring of 1998.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Karen was scheduled for a stem cell transfer procedure in her battle against breast cancer the day we left the US. Needing to be in two places at the same time, I was beyond stressed. But Karen urged me to go, assuring me there was nothing I could do for her that week. Mom would be with her.

“But please come visit me when you get back,” she said. She gave me the phone number for her hospital room, just in case. Reluctantly, I packed a suitcase and left with the crew. Once again, it took several glasses of wine to get me back on a plane.

I like Germany and if it weren’t for Karen’s illness, I would have looked forward to spending a week there as Germany has been intertwined in my life story since before I was born.

My father was the eldest of three close brothers, all of whom married women from different cultures after serving in World War II. I am one of the eight resulting multi-lingual offspring. Between us, we speak eight different languages in various degrees of proficiency.

My father fell for and married my mother, a fellow student at American University who was the daughter of Danish immigrants. The youngest brother, Frank, fell in love with and married Stella, a charming Ethiopian during the years my grandparents were living in East Africa. And Larry, the middle brother, fell in love with a German ballerina named Ruth while working for the US Foreign Service in Berlin.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis in April of 1945, just days before Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Berlin fell to the Soviets and was subsequently divided into occupation zones. The Soviets controlled the eastern portion of the city, while the US, French and the UK controlled the west. As an American, Larry was based in the western section.

Larry and Ruth met on a blind date in 1949. Ruth was the eldest daughter of German impressionist painter, Joseph Bell, who died when she was just five. During the war years, Ruth’s mother taught ballet to get by financially and Ruth and her two little sisters were raised to dance by their young, widowed mother.

Completely smitten, Larry sneaked into the Russian-controlled part of the city one night to see Ruth dance. Russian soldiers sitting near him in the audience suspected he was an American and decided to trick him by asking him for a cigarette – in English. When he good-naturedly complied, they outed him, demanding to know what he was doing in their territory. He pointed to the stage and told them he was in love with the ballerina dancing the role of the little blue bird. Amazingly, they let him go.

Ruth loved telling that story. She loved that Larry risked Soviet punishment coming to see her dance. She was also proud of the ballets she performed in that had sets and costumes designed by the artist, Chagall, whom she eventually had the opportunity to meet, thanks to Larry’s next job as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

One memorable dark and cold winter, when I was fourteen, my family spent Christmas in Germany with Ruth, Larry and my two cousins. That was the year Aunt Ruth accidentally set the Christmas tree on fire by decorating it with traditional burning candles. It was famous in family lore forever after as the year of the Christmas tree with the large, charred black hole in it.

With my heart wrapped up in family memories like a cozy patchwork quilt, I was overall happy to be back in Germany again – at least until I phoned home.

After checking into our little hotel in a southwest corner of Berlin, Martin thoughtfully suggested I call Karen, an expensive thing to do back then. I dialed the hospital number for her room, but she was in too much post-surgery pain and too drugged-up to speak. She mumbled she was happy to hear my voice but couldn’t talk. The call lasted less than two minutes. It was reassuring – and crushing.

We had several days of interviews and location shoots lined up, one of which was at the Tegel prison on the northside of Berlin where Bonhoeffer had been held prisoner for a year and a half. The prison cell was so small, we had to take turns walking into it. With my sister ever present on my mind, I thought about how she, too, was a prisoner – not of a political regime, but a prisoner of her own body and the disease running wild throughout it like a malignant banshee. Bonhoeffer was contained by the physical boundaries of a prison; Karen’s own body was her toxic prison. Both were facing death sentences.

Also on this shoot was my delightful workmate, Janna. A recent addition to our documentary workshop crew, she’d been brought onboard specifically for her capabilities with research and her fluency in German. She was elfin-like, creative, cheerful, positive, charming and invaluable to the project.

Throughout the many interviews we captured on film, including several with Bonhoeffer’s former students as well as his niece and Bonhoeffer’s reclusive and bedridden twin sister – now in her nineties – Janna handled the delicate task of translating back and forth between English and German.

We brought two American freelancers with us – cinematographer Dave Goulding and his assistant cameraman, Gary Waxler. This shoot was Gary’s first trip abroad and his sheer delight at every aspect of the trip was infectious. He chattered away about navigating the confusions of the German language, the cars, German driving on the autobahn, the food, German beer and the attractive German girls. It was the first time, he told me, that he ate lunch for breakfast and drank Jäegermeister.

Because his family was descended from Russian Jews who had emigrated to the US just before the Russian Revolution, Gary says his parents would never have traveled to Germany and yet, here he was. He grew up in the DC suburbs and the only German he’d met prior to this trip was the grandfather of the kids next door – an engineer who’d once helped Germany build rockets. Gary remembers him helping the neighborhood kids design and build kites.

Rounding out our crew, Martin also hired a German sound tech for our shoots – a pony-tailed guy named Ulf Herman who greeted us each morning with the words, “Good morning, everybody!” in his Germanic Ringo Starr accent. Initially, none of us were sure how to pronounce his name.

“It’s Uhhllfff” he said with his dry sense of humor. “It sounds like you are throwing up a little.”  

At the time of our production shoot, the border between East and West Germany had been open for less than ten years. East and West were still getting to know one another again after 28 years of separation and there was some awkwardness at times. But not between Ulf and Gary, whom Ulf nicknamed “Wax.” Ulf began teaching Gary some words in German and on our day off, took him to see the remains of the Berlin Wall.

“There wasn’t much left of the wall to see,” Gary later told me. “Just a few small pieces. You could walk through it, like Dorothy inside her house looking out at Munchkin Land. It was also sort of like being in an old James Bond movie.”

Afterwards, Ulf and “Wax” went over to a museum in what used to be the Gestapo headquarters. It still had logbooks listing the names of people they’d killed. Ulf said he had known very little about the Holocaust until he was about university age. Gary told me Ulf asked him how, as an American, he felt about what happened, having no idea Gary was Jewish. Ulf told Gary his grandfather was against Hitler, but because he worked for the car manufacturer Porsche, he was forced to join the Nazi party.

Hearing these stories from Gary made me realize that the documentary films we were working on were not just healing me; they were also healing others. It was moments like these – one person reaching out to another across the years and political divides – that might actually help heal the world, I thought, if only there could be more of them.

There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

[photo of a fragment of the Berlin Wall, taken by Kristin]

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