The German Friend

Jeanine Meerapfel
2012-09-18

5.5
100 min

It’s the late 1950s, and in an affluent and quietly respectable part of Buenos Aires, young Sulamit Löwenstein strikes up a friendship with her next-door neighbour Friedrich over the whereabouts of her family dog. She is the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants to Argentina, he is the son of a senior SS officer, a tragic political legacy from whose shadow both characters struggle to escape over the next three decades. Following the teenaged Friedrich to Germany, Sulamit finds him caught up in the radical politics of late-1960s student life; and she’s forced to make important decisions about her attitude to her homeland when Friedrich returns to Argentina to join the fight against the military junta.