A powerful journey through history to mark seven decades since the Reparation Agreements between Israel and Germany
This year is the 70th anniversary of the signing in 1952 of the hugely significant but little-remembered Luxembourg Agreements between Israel and Germany. To mark the anniversary, this hard-hitting yet even-handed – and deeply compelling – documentary provides vivid insights into the moral, psychological and practical complexities underlying these secret and fraught reparation negotiations – the first of their kind.
As ever with documentaries of this sort, I’m not entirely convinced of the need to include staged renactments of certain scenes. Despite this, I feel that Reckonings – a good title, although Blood Money, a term mentioned more than once, might also have worked well – achieves an effective mix of firsthand testimony from survivors, historical footage – some of it harrowing – and interviews with descendants of key players (above all, Konrad Adenauer and Moshe Sharett) as well as with scholars of the period and contemporary politicians.
The film focusses attention not just on the impossibly complex relationship between Germany and the newly-created State of Israel in the immediate post-war period, but also, and almost as disturbingly, on the deep tensions between Israel and the diaspora in terms of claiming justice for Holocaust victims, wherever they ended up trying to build new lives for themselves. (The Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, more often known as the Claims Conference, set up in 1951 by 23 international Jewish organisations, exists to this day.) It is also of course a stark reminder of what should be entirely obvious, but may well be overlooked by a younger generation – namely, the lingering aftermath of the Holocaust, on a personal and political level alike.
The makers of the film are clearly well aware of its troubling and thought-provoking nature, and have created an excellent, detailed website – Reckonings: The First Reparations – to enable viewers to explore the historical background and the issues raised by this important documentary in more depth.
Among these issues, the problematic relationship between collective shame and collective responsibility, between material and moral compensation, moral qualms and financial necessity remain unresolvable. In this context, the inadequacy of Wiedergutmachung (the German word for reparation, which literally means making good or whole again) becomes painfully apparent.
By Monica Bohm-Duchen
Reckonings screens Sunday 13 November (London); Wednesday 16 November (Edinburgh); and Sunday 20 November (Manchester). ukjewishfilm.org
UK Jewish Film Festival runs Thursday 10 – Wednesday 23 November in cinemas and Monday 21 – Sunday 27 November online.
Read more UKJFF 2022 reviews.