Professor Fred Sondermann was well known on the Colorado College campus as a political-science teacher. He was perhaps less well known for his personal history, the subject of a documentary airing on Rocky Mountain PBS at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and on CPT Channel 12 Nov. 20 at 9:30 p.m.
The 35-minute film “Return” is an important visual and aural record of a German Jewish intellectual’s experience of and reflections on the Holocaust.
Three decades after escaping from Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II, Sondermann visited his hometown of Horn in 1969.
“By sheer coincidence, I re-entered Germany with my wife, Marion, and our two sons and daughter exactly 30 years minus one day after I had left it,” he wrote — “and at about the same time (9 p.m.) and at the same border station (Aachen) from which my parents and I had left just a few short days before the outbreak of World War II.”
Sondermann chronicled his apprehensions before the trip, his experience of being there, and, most movingly, his thoughts on blame and forgiveness.
He weighs the concept of national guilt, observes that the young generation of Germans cannot be burdened by the guilt their parents must carry, and while noting that he “cannot forget what happened, nor can I forgive,” Sondermann concludes that “human forgiveness is impossible and irrelevant.”
Colorado Springs first-time filmmaker Cyd Chartier-Cohn spent four years producing the film based on Sondermann’s writings, traveling to Germany and retracing Sondermann’s steps — including to Dachau, where most of his family perished, and to the site of the temple where Sondermann had his bar mitzvah in 1936. A soulful original score by Colorado College Music professor Ofer Ben-Amots accompanies the film, with CC students on violin, piano and cello.
Sondermann’s widow is briefly interviewed and his son, Eric Sondermann, a prominent local political analyst, comments on his father’s journey.
The film is a short but frank and forceful first-person narrative.
“All-American Muslim.” TLC launches an eight-part series, “All-American Muslim,” on Sunday, delving inside the lives of five American Muslim families in Dearborn, Mich. It’s a community “struggling to balance faith and nationality in a post- 9/11 world.”
The profiles succeed in exploding Muslim stereotypes. The number who wear headscarves and worship traditionally is balanced by those who sport tattoos or aim to open a nightclub.
The metaphor of America as a melting pot really is better served by the image of a tossed salad instead: The diverse elements thrown together influence one another but retain their particular flavors, all coming away richer.
A perfect all-American Muslim tossed-salad moment: The high-school football team schedules its workouts overnight to accommodate the majority of the team members who are fasting for Ramadan.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
