IN THE LAST TWO DECADES contemporary cinema globally has been marked by a strong autobiographical trend, a movement expressed through various strategies involving the use of audiovisual media and the blurring of former categorical boundaries. In his book The Subject of Documentary, Michael Renov locates as one of the more important subgenres within the autobiographical discourse a category of documentary films and videos he labels “domestic ethnography.” “The notion of domestic ethnography,” he writes, “has become an increasingly useful classificatory term for a documentary film type that has proliferated. In an era of great genealogical curiosity such as our own, shared DNA becomes a powerful incitation to documentary practice.”

My present task entails a reading of Felix Moeller’s documentary Harlan: Im Schatten von Jud Süss (2009) as a non-autobiographical Holocaust family film driven nevertheless by many of the generic compulsions that we find in such recent autobiographical documentaries as Jens Schanze’s Winterkinder: Die schweigende Generation (Winter Children: The Silent Generation, 2005) or Malte Ludin’s 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2 or 3 Things I Know About Him, 2004)—to name two such family films dealing with the Nazi past within the realm of perpetrator postmemory.

Jens Schanze’s Winterkinder, his film thesis for the School for Television and Film in Munich, explores his mother’s memories of her father, a high-ranking functionary of the Nazi party. Neither Schanze nor his four sisters actually knew their grandfather, who died in an automobile accident in 1954. In the stories and descriptions of him by their mother, he was always referred to simply as “that good man.” Indeed, what we discover already at the outset of Winterkinder is that we are dealing with a three-generational family in which there has been a virtual sixty-year silence regarding Grandpa’s twelve-year affiliation with the NSDAP as a member of the Storm Troopers.

Interaction between European and American performance theater after 1968 has increasingly provoked the very institutions and languages of established theater practice on both sides of the Atlantic. In earlier periods of the twentieth century such interaction was defined above all by the arrival of one or another renowned playwright whose work or style would, in turn, open up new possibilities for theatrical modernism within what was still understood primarily as a dramatic form of expression. The New York productions of Bertolt Brecht's The Mother in 1935 and The Three Penny Opera in 1954 challenged political avant-garde theater in the United States, just as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the 1950s stunned and fascinated an American theater ensconced in the realism of a Tennessee Williams or the theatrical style of Stanislavski-dominated method acting.

The emergence in the 1970s of what has variously been called performance or postmodern theater, both in the United States and Europe, has destabilized the historically generic boundaries of traditional drama just as it has threatened the very notion of representation itself. One particularly interesting example of such theater is the work of American director Robert Wilson, East German dramatist Heiner Muller, and West German choreographer Pina Bausch, all of whom performed or were produced in both the United States and Germany, in both mutual cooperation and as separate productions.