Back to Berlin

Accus­tomed to all forms of mul­ti­me­dia, the Holo­caust awaits fresh inter­pre­ta­tion in this road trip doc­u­men­tary. Over 80 years since the fall of the Nazi régime, Back to Berlin recounts the jour­ney of 11 motor­cy­clists car­ry­ing the Mac­cabi­ah torch from Israel to Berlin. Accept­ing the ubiq­ui­tous knowl­edge sur­round­ing these atroc­i­ties, it opts to focus in on those whose lives were impacted.

Cather­ine Lurie-Alt’s film cel­e­brates the deter­mi­na­tion of these sur­vivors, depict­ing the pseu­do-pil­grim­age with a sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty com­mon­place in films of its denom­i­na­tion. This is bol­stered by plain­spo­ken inter­views prov­ing ingen­u­ous­ly raw, expos­ing these hered­i­tary scars still bleed­ing decades after the lib­er­a­tion of the last con­cen­tra­tion camps. Lack­ing a polit­i­cal stance, it is only con­cerned with the immoral­i­ty of this persecution.

Despite its con­cern for the indi­vid­ual, this road trip serves as an effec­tive device for touch­ing on the glob­al scale of the event. The cama­raderie between par­tic­i­pants adds wel­come lev­i­ty to pro­ceed­ings. Some­times more akin to touris­tic lec­ture, these unnat­ur­al con­tex­tu­al quag­mires throw sub­tle­ty to the wind. Nonethe­less, they per­mit an empa­thet­ic inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty between view­er and subject.

Ulti­mate­ly bear­ing mod­est inten­tions, the film takes time to cal­i­brate its true inten­tions. An intru­sive voiceover from Jason Isaacs attempts to steer the nar­ra­tive back on course, though it often feels jar­ring among the cacoph­o­ny of anec­do­tal voic­es vying for atten­tion. While the Holo­caust remains omnipresent in its rel­e­vance, it’s well-trod­den ground, mak­ing the open­ing expos­i­to­ry sec­tions sur­round­ing the Mac­cabi­ah (help­ful for the unini­ti­at­ed) an intrigu­ing avenue down which to wan­der, some­thing regret­tably omit­ted for much of the runtime.

With its final moments, sights of the Bran­den­burg Gate, inter­cut with archive footage, instil a shared tri­umph, cement­ing that ​“the focus was the peo­ple”. Ignor­ing its sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to stray toward the euphuis­tic, Back to Berlin remains a touch­ing mon­u­ment to Jew­ish per­sis­tence with ret­ro­spec­tive melan­cho­lia, and opti­mistic anticipation.