On Sunday, I reviewed Downfall, the German film about the last days of the Nazi regime.

This article from Sunday's Toronto Star has some interesting information about how Germans deal psychologically with memories of the war.

For example, it says this about the movie: The recent Hitler film, Downfall, has drawn 5 million moviegoers.

Some excerpts:

Says historian Jorg Friedrick, when asked how May 8 should be commemorated: "As Germans, we can only weep. Anything but tears is distasteful."

German politicians will instead stress "liberation" from Nazi ideology and the birth of democracy. They'll also allude to collective responsibility — the idea that Nazi atrocities are forever a part of German legacy and identity. ...

Near the Brandenburg Gate and the site of the bunker where Hitler committed suicide, coffin-like slabs of concrete form a new Holocaust memorial that covers a whole city block.

For those willing to listen, the stones speak. But barriers to memory remain in the mind.

The story of Hanns Ludin is a case in point. In 1941, Hitler appointed him ambassador to the Nazi vassal state of Slovakia. His job was to facilitate the deportation of Jews to death camps.

In 1947, Ludin was convicted of war crimes and hanged in a Bratislava prison. Yet he remained an altogether different man to his wife and six children.

"For me, he was a martyr and a hero, as he was for my siblings," says his son, Malte Ludin, 63.

"We considered him a hero because my mother said he was. It was typical for German post-war families to put their fathers and mothers on a pedestal and say they had nothing to do with the cruelties of the Nazis.

"It was always someone else who did it — Hitler, Himmler, Goering — but never someone in the family."

Ludin didn't question his father's past until the late 1980s, when he met his Czech-born wife, who pressed him about it. He then searched the archives of concentration camps in Poland and government offices in Bratislava.

At a family gathering in the mid-1990s, he showed copies of documents directly linking his father to the deportation of Jews. Unconvinced, his mother made an extraordinary trip with her son to study the originals in Bratislava.

"She read the documents, but we couldn't talk about them. It became a silent trip. I think by then she knew, but she wouldn't admit it. She said, `Okay, he knew the Jews were deported but he couldn't know they were murdered.'"

Ludin's documentary on his family's state of denial — 2 or 3 things I now about him — appeared to critical acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival this year.

It has caused passionate public debate, but Ludin's remaining family — his mother and two of his siblings are now dead — have cut off contact except for angry letters denouncing his film.

His biggest disappointment, Ludin says, is that his sisters' children initially accepted the evidence against their grandfather but are now siding with their parents. ...

... German schools have done a good job of teaching students about the evil universe constructed by the Third Reich, Welzer (Harald Welzer, a social psychologist) said. But admitting that a family member took part in it would strain family loyalties and undermine construction of a positive, personal identity.

And so, the blame is placed on abstract Nazis rather than real ones close to home. The Third Reich is seen collectively like some dark cloud that descended on decent people, rather than the combined result of individuals forging a history most would sooner forget, but can't.

"As long as this is the case, nothing is achieved in terms of coming to terms with the past and learning from history. `Never again' is not a solid proposition at all," said Welzer, director of the Essen-based Centre for Interdisciplinary Memory Research.