Thomas Harlan / Wandersplitter

Summary

Thomas Harlan - Moving Shrapnel
Thomas Harlan, author and filmmaker, was born in 1929 as the only son of the German film director Veit Harlan and the actress Hilde Koerber. He grew up in Berlin and as a child sat at Hitler′s dinner table. In 1942 he was evacuated to Pommern. After WWII, he returned to Berlin, followed by emigration to France in 1948. An author of plays, prose and poetry he began researching National Socialist war crimes in 1959 in Poland, which led to numerous court cases against suspects in West Germany. In 1964 his father died. Since 2001 he has been residing in a respiratory clinic in Southern Germany.

"I came across Thomas Harlan for the first time in the course of a retrospective of his films at the Munich Film Museum. For a longer period of time, I had myself been working on the subject of ′children and grand-children of the Nazi Period.′ I drove to Munich to meet Thomas Harlan and we decided to work on a film together." (Christoph Huebner)

The result is a full-length documentary, consisting of major and minor fragments, circling around a topic without defining it in full and without offering easy explanations. Moving Shrapnel is what Thomas Harlan called these fragments at the beginning. They enter the body by injury. They can be painful and irritating in the long run.

Source: German Films Service & Marketing