2024-05-04 13:00:00
Culture “The Doubters”
This series is perhaps the best thing ever seen on German television
As of: 5:02 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes
Zores is coming anyway: the doubters in action
Quelle: ARD Degeto/HR/Turbokultur/Phillip Kaminiak
“The Doubts” tells a Jewish family story in contemporary Germany, where one has to endure the Shoah chatter of art lecturers and prejudices against circumcision. Why you should definitely watch this and the “Doubters” are the Jewish Sopranos.
A German-Jewish family story that revolves around a delicatessen in Frankfurt‘s red light district – I have to admit, I had some resistance when I heard this plot, I can’t quite put my finger on it. When you hear “public television” and “German-Jewish” in the same sentence, you are simply somehow afraid of kitsch, which in the worst case feeds non-Jewish German viewers with Gefilte Fish cliché morsels until they are fit enough for them again next pro-Palestine demo or whatever else he has going on that day. Especially since “Die Zweiflers” producer David Hadda’s best-known television product to date, “Friday Night Jews,” definitely has cringe elements.
David Hadda said he wanted to create a “Jewish Sopranos”, based on the legendary series about the Italian-American mafia family of the same name. God, he succeeded! Only that the “doubter”, unfortunately only available in six parts on ARD so far, much more moving because they are naturally more present. Maybe in order to approach the series you have to ask in conversations when you first start to cry while watching. For me it was the beginning of the incredibly touching love story between doubter’s son Samuel (Leo Altaras) and trendy chef Saba (Saffron Coomber), which unfolds at night in the delicatessen to “Into my arms”.
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The Zweiflers was named the best series of the year in Cannes. That’s understandable, but several sub-prizes would have to be invented to do justice to the doubters: the prize for the best amniotic bubble burst scene, for example, or the prize for the best art scene satire. When the youngest son of the extended family, Leon, invites the Mischpoke to the opening of an exhibition where his works are presented, the family encounters the “work of art” of a German fellow student of Leon’s: behind a replica of Auschwitz gate, towards which “It’s Shoah Time” is approaching read, chicks are shredded.
The subsequent discussion between the family patriarch Symcha (Mike Burstyn) and the German art lecturer, in which one initially hopes that the older German gentleman will say something meaningful that will defuse Symcha’s anger, but then it drifts into an incredible and unfortunately realistic monologue , is one of the many unbearable scenes in this famous series. In general, the subtle depiction of anti-Semitism in everyday life is extremely successful. What Samuel, a successful music manager, has to listen to from his colleagues about circumcision while eating a gigantic suckling pig (Samuel’s legendary sentence: “Thanks for the bubbly, thanks for the hot pig”) is so aptly based on reality that you can I hope it will give some people something to think about. At the same time, it is a core of ambivalence, like every single sentence in this family drama.
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The core of the story is the delicatessen, which makes you think of New York in the best way. Symcha wants to sell it, and of course that not only leads to a family reunion à la “All on Sugar,” but also opens the channel into Symcha’s past. The orphaned Shoah survivor got into entanglements in the survival jungle of post-war Frankfurt, which we learn about over the course of the series or believe we learn exactly how dark they were. Is Symcha a murderer? Who will succeed him? Dana (Deleila Piasko), who started a family in Israel? Or maybe Samuel, who actually promised Saba that he would move with her and the baby to Kyoto, where Saba was offered a job?
The series also makes you think seriously about whether there isn’t something to the woke identity politics concept that certain roles can only be taken on by people who know what it means to play the role. The incredible Sunnyi Melles as the doubter’s mother Eleanor Reissa, who, as the daughter of a Jewish mother who fled from Hungary to Switzerland in 1956, has years of experience as a stateless person: Could someone play the strange role of an old daughter with such multifaceted paralysis as she does?
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Could anyone play the Jewish Gen-Z cutie as convincingly as Aaron Altaras, caught in an existential twist between tradition and existentially accidental love for a non-Jewish woman? Who this situation gives rise to insights into himself and his family history that he knew nothing about? Who is confronted by Symcha in an already legendary forest lake scene with a camp memory that forces him to reject everything he had previously taken for granted about the upbringing of his child?
This series is so incredibly contemporary because it has chosen a milieu that you have never seen on television. And that is precisely why all the conflicts of our time can be told with an unprecedented ease.
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