Thomas Harlan - Wandersplitter

Undoubtedly, few post-WWII German filmmakers/playwrights/novelists so flagrantly epitomized ethno-masochism and cultural cuckoldry than the late and less than great Thomas Harlan (Torre Bela, Wundkanal), the seemingly half-deranged prodigal son of the great National Socialist auteur Veit Harlan (Opfergang, Kolberg). A man that had the positively priceless honor of dining with Uncle Adolf in 1937 at the mere age of 8 and whose father was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, filmmakers of the Third Reich, Thomas Harlan, not unlike many Germans of his generation who inherited a less than ideal legacy of shame and defeat, grew up to be a ‘Teutonic Uncle Tom’ of sorts by deleteriously dedicating his life to treasonously besmirching both his father and Fatherland and who wasted a good portion of his life exposing so-called ‘war crimes’ and directing relatively forgotten films like Wundkanal (1984), where he interrogated and even physically assaulted an elderly ex-SS officer in a mock trial interrogation carried out by fictional RAF-esque left-wing terrorists (the sort of people Harlan admired/mimicked). In the glaringly minimalistic and even amateurish YouTube-esque documentary Thomas Harlan – Wandersplitter (2007) aka Thomas Harlan - Moving Shrapnel directed by Christoph Hübner, Harlan gives a candid bastardized verbal autobiography of sorts regarding his fetishism for the ‘beloved Soviet Union’ (Harlan's words, not mine), his lifelong campaign of spiritual and aesthetic patricide, and his feeling of self-flagellating indebtedness as the less than proud progeny of a naughty nazi filmmaker who dedicated his life to exposing the ostensible horrors of the nazi era (despite the fact he personally witnessed Soviet Asiatic hordes rape and murder elderly German women). Although seeming like it was shot in a couple hours in a carelessly leisurely manner, Wandersplitter was filmed between 2003 and 2006 in the author/filmmaker’s ugly and thoroughly institutional room in a Southern German sanatorium (ironically, the clinic had a view of Obersalzberg, which is best known for being the location Uncle Adolf's scenic residence, the Berghof) near Berchtesgarden. Resembling a sad and defeated old pug dog who is so disillusioned with life that he no longer even derives pleasure from eating food, Wandersplitter is a positively perturbing and pathetic digital video portrait of Deutschland’s most degenerated member of ‘film royalty.’ Indeed, when you have a left-wing Dutch-British-Jew like Ian Buruma stating (as he did of Thomas Harlan) that you were, “an obsessive seeker of justice, a Nazi hunter in Poland, a Communist revolutionary in Portugal and Chile, and a lifelong critic of his father. He was the son, who took on the burden of guilt from an unrepentant father,” you must have some serious problems. 

 Quasi-morbidly obese, lacking even the most miniscule inkling of testosterone, and sporting a shabby head of white hair, Thomas Harlan resembles a burnt out retired lesbian who used to work as an American public school administrator and suffered some sort of mental break and was thus subsequently institutionalized. Indeed, a lonely man who is spending his remaining days living in a sterile room in a sanatorium (apparently, he was being treated for emphysema) with an outside view of Southern Krautland that he absurdly likens to China, Harlan’s life has reached its end (he would die in 2010 at the age of 81), though one gets the impression while watching Wandersplitter that the spiritual death of the author/filmmaker/playwright happened long ago in 1945 when Germany was defeated in the Second World War and his surname forever became tainted with the legacy of his father's infamous melodrama Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss. Born in 1929 to German filmmaker Veit Harlan and Viennese actress Hilde Körber, Harlan had a relatively prestigious childhood as a privileged little boy that got to dine with Uncle Adolf (who he refers to as a ‘fakir’), hanging out with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, and routinely receiving rare Reich stamps (rather unfortunately, the stamps were later stolen by some frog while Harlan was living in Paris during the 1950s) from official National Socialist photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. By 1945, Thomas Harlan witnessed the mangled corpses of 80-year-old women who had been gang-raped by Soviet Mongol hordes, but instead of growing up to be a stern anti-communist, he became of a commie of sorts himself, taking pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, Israel, and Poland during the 1950s. Moving to Poland in 1960, Harlan researched nazi concentration camps and eventually began getting sued by a number of ex-nazi politicians who he started making libelous claims against, which eventually resulted in the loss of his German passport and ability to legally enter his own homeland. Harlan tells a number of these tales in a shockingly jubilant manner, but when it gets to the segment of Wandersplitter fittingly entitled ‘Patricide,’ he begins to shed a couple of tears, expressing his lifelong determination to no let his love of his father deter his treasonous anti-nazi commie activism. Most interestingly, Harlan confesses in what amounts to a sort of premature deathbed confession that he flirted with arson, setting fire to two Berlin movie theaters the played his father’s movies, which included The Trip to Tilsit (1939) aka Die Reise nach Tilsit—an inferior anti-poetic remake of F.W. Murnau’s American masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)—and The Immortal Heart (1939) aka Das unsterbliche Herz. As Harlan makes quite clear during the doc, he was most mad at his father for continuing to make films after the National Socialist era and for being acquitted of ‘crimes against humanity’ for his role as the auteur of Jud Süß, a film that was made mandatory-viewing for the SS men that sassed and gassed god's chosen race. According to Harlan, the man who acquitted his father also previously sentenced Ukrainian children to death for stealing a mere scarf and who also married a nazi euthanasia doctor (someone else he had also previously acquitted in court). Since his father did not pay for his ‘crimes,’ Thomas Harlan thought it was his responsibility to do so, just as any white American bourgeois liberal wimp would. 

 As a number of his family members candidly confessed in the documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss (2008) directed by Felix Moeller, they felt Thomas Harlan had wasted his life due to his undying hatred of his father. Judging by his rather weak cinematic and literary output, Uncle Tom Teuton’s attempt to ‘follow’ in his father’s footsteps in a sort of antagonistic manner was also a failure. On top of only managing to direct three films (one of which, Torre Bela, is a communist agitprop ‘doc’) during his seemingly sporadic yet lifelong filmmaking career, Harlan lacked an eye for beauty and the sort of angelic high-camp aestheticism that dominated his father’s work. Indeed, Veit Harlan may have directed Jud Süß, which inspired a bit of hatred against hapless Hebrews, but Thomas Harlan’s Wundkanal is nothing but seething celluloid hatred in its most pathetic form as American Jew Robert Kramer clearly revealed in his companion documentary Notre nazi (1985) aka Our Nazi, which features the patricidal commie kraut verbally and even physically berating an elderly gentleman (essentially a stand-in for his own father, who was by then already long dead) that he hired for his film under false pretenses. Aesthetically institutional and cold, Wandersplitter certainly makes for an apt bio of Thomas Harlan, a lunatic left-winger of the extra-extreme sort who lived in the past and who will ironically be forgotten before the father he loved-hated so dearly and undyingly. To his credit, Thomas Harlan was slightly less ethno-masochistic than his sister Susanne Körber, who not only married a holocaust survivor and converted to Judaism, but also committed suicide in 1989. Namedropping people like Isaak “the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry” Babel and stating such absurd things as “Of course, as a child I was a member of the gang” (Harlan’s summing up his role as a German child during the Third Reich), Thomas Harlan proved with Wandersplitter that, despite Hebraic Hollywood and the mainstream media’s claims to contrary, post-WWII Europids, especially those of the Germanic/Nordic persuasion, are not only amongst the most self-flagellating and ethno-masochistic people in the world, but also the most empathetic and individualistic. After all, when has anyone ever heard a Jew cry about the anti-white genocides of Judeo-Bolshevik hangmen Kaganovich or Yagoda, or an American negro acknowledge the fact that his/her people are, collectively speaking, the most violent and murderous people in the present day United States. Indeed, white genocide will not be the result of Tyrone, Avi, Muhammad, and Carlos, but spiritually and mentally sick individuals like Thomas Harlan, a man that unwittingly singlehandedly proved the nazi generation had more dignity, integrity and pride than all the degenerate generations that followed it. 

-Ty E