Out Of Passau by Anna Elisabeth Rosmus

Author:Anna Elisabeth Rosmus [Rosmus, Anna Elisabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6796-5
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2014-01-06T23:31:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Encounters in America

AFTER THE FILM The Nasty Girl had been introduced at the annual Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale, in February 1990 and was playing nationwide at movie theaters in Germany, I received a particularly large number of defamatory letters. In the fall the movie would be shown at the New York Film Festival, and beginning in January 1991 it was running in all major American cities. The film had generally received excellent reviews, a fact that had not only brought me some degree of fame in the United States, but had also resulted in something that was even more important to me—a degree of trust put in me, especially by Jews of European descent who had escaped to America. For this I will always be grateful to the director as well as the American film distributor Miramax, because there was nothing that I had wanted more.

In the winter of 1990 I traveled to the United States for the first time. The American distributor had invited me to come for three weeks to introduce the movie and to publicly discuss it. For me this trip had an added bonus: it would be my first opportunity to meet some of Passau’s former Jews. I would eventually meet with them in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where they would come to see the film and so reacquaint themselves with Passau. Some of them I knew already through their letters, files, photographs, and our telephone conversations. I knew about their dreams, their work, and their lives. But I came to know only four of them personally: Günther Blättner, Robert Klein, Ilse Greenbaum, and Trudl Burian. Over the course of the past four years I had invited them to return to Passau for a few days as guests of honor. Now I would visit Robert in San Francisco and see Ilse in New York. The film would also help me to meet up with several more people: I’d meet Eduard Frischmann, stay at Eric Hartmann’s house, and perhaps even get to know his two siblings, Ruth and Kurt.

ERIC HARTMANN

When Eric had heard that I would be coming to New York to introduce the movie and to give interviews, he had immediately decided to invite me to his house. I was thrilled at the invitation. Eric came to pick me up at John F. Kennedy airport, where we both were met by a representative of the Miramax film company who escorted us to a long, black limousine with a refrigerator and a television. What intrigued me far more, however, was that I found myself sitting next to a former resident of Passau. It is true that of all the former Passau Jews he was the one who had been initially most suspicious of my intentions. He had asked me all kinds of questions when we had first begun exchanging letters. I felt as though I were being cross-examined. And even then my answers could not convince him that I was trustworthy. Hans

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