In the first part of a 2-part interview, I speak today with Jewish-Australian artist and documentary filmmaker Ella Dreyfus. Together with her uncle George in Melbourne and her cousin Jonathan in Berlin, she sets out to discover her family's history and finds her own way to reconnect with Germany.
Since Ella can only converse in German to a limited extent, we speak English. The topic, however, is one of the most important for us Germans - it is about our Jewish fellow citizens and their descendants, of which Ella is one. However, Ella did not deal much with this family history until she was 49, because her father did not want to talk about the past. Her uncle George, her father's brother, dealt with it in a completely different way. He accepted a sponsorship opportunity in Germany as early as 1955 and returned there from time to time as a composer and musician. His son Jonathan even lives in Germany. With these two relatives, Ella dealt with the family past in her film, into which she also brought her visual art, which was exhibited separately in various countries. George Dreyfus composed the music and Jonathan Dreyfus realised it with Amy Anderson and Tori Newberry in the soundtrack, from which we also hear some short excerpts. First, however, it is about the search for the past with Uncle George and the question of processing intergenerational trauma.
