Educational Media Reviews Online

Heidi Schmidt Emberling, founder of Spirit Productions, produced, directed and wrote Tangled Roots, an exploration of her dual identity as both a German and a Jew. Tangled Roots is Emberling's second film. A Bay area film producer, Emberling's first film, Spirit of the Dawn explored changes in Native American education in the United States. She garnered an Emmy nomination in 2000 for editing Birth of a City, a documentary for San Francisco's NBC affiliate KRON-TV.

Emberling's German-born father grew up in Freiburg, the son of a German soldier who fought on the Russian front. After immigrating to the United States to pursue a filmmaking career, he married Emberling's Jewish mother against her family's wishes. Her mother's family left Europe after World War I, eventually establishing themselves in the Jewish community of Fairfax in Southern California. Oddly enough, Emberling never reveals exactly where her Jewish family originally lived in Europe. Though Emberling's parents are no longer married to each other, she discusses their endeavors to expose her to her heritage from both sides of her family.

When Emberling sets out to trace her roots, she faces several obstacles to knowing the truth. Her aunts, one living in France and the other in Germany, as well as her Jewish American family members prefer for the most part to remain silent about the past. Her mother states that the family really didn't talk about relatives in Europe during World War II and afterwards there were no relatives left alive to discuss anyway. Emberling's aunts and her father lovingly portray her grandfather as an artistic, sensitive, and loving father. They also describe how his stint in the German army destroyed him psychologically. The biggest family secret that Emberling uncovers is her grandfather's membership in the Nazi Party.

Because Emberling's father and his siblings were children during the Holocaust, their mother shielded them from most Nazi propaganda. They only learned about their country's horrible crimes as young adults and react with anger, shame, guilt, and even resentment, especially about paying for "the sins of the father." They also discuss the burden of enduring post World War II anti-German sentiment.

The film's most interesting controversy occurs when Emberling reveals her desire to visit Dachau while visiting her aunt Carola who lives in Germany. Carola reacts defensively to Emberling's wish, questioning her niece's motives for proposing such a visit. Her aunt speaks passionately about the guilt and anger this segment of German history engenders in her and other German citizens and her strong desire to dissociate from the past.

It is ironic that the unwillingness of Emberling's family to reveal their thoughts gives Tangled Roots such potential and yet also thwarts the film's goal of successfully exploring dual identity. Because Emberling focuses so much of the film on revealing the secrets surrounding her German heritage, the film becomes not so much about an exploration of her dual heritage as an attempt to embrace half of her heritage, aspects of which some members of her family would rather forget or deny. The makeup of Emberling's family background presented a unique opportunity to explore not only the difficulties of a dual identity but the struggles of Germans' and their descendants to bear the burden of their ancestors' transgressions against humanity. While the film makes excellent use of black and white film clips of Nazi soldiers and family photos, a couple of times, there are ineffective, even amateurish shots of Emberling posing as if writing thinking to serve as a transition between segments. She might have used this precious film time more wisely explicating her topic.

Tangled Roots does succeed in demonstrating how stereotypes, in this case the stereotyping of Germans, can appear to have historical validity but also unfairly promote intolerance against future generations. Tangled Roots could also serve as good choice for introducing the topic of this particular dual identity to students in history, Judaic studies, or ethnic studies classes, but this film it is not recommended for purchase. Viewers trying to locate films about the struggle to reconcile with the Holocaust might want to consider Claudia von Alemann's Shadows of Memory (Women Make Movies).