Full Description
Angelika Levi describes her poetic chronicle as "an attempt to tell what was told and not told in my family." Using diary entries, photographs and other family archival materials, Angelika reveals the complicated life of her mother, Ursula, a woman of mixed Jewish/German heritage who survived Nazi rule. Angelika's Jewish grandfather emigrated to Chile in 1938, while her non-Jewish grandmother and her children survived the war in Europe. After the war, the family was reunited in Santiago, Chile, where Ursula studied botany and became an expert in plants that adapt to extreme environments. Returning to Germany in 1957, she married a Protestant theologian. While Angelika's father documented the family with 8mm film, Angelika's mother catalogued her own bodily sensations (after having been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease) in almost hourly reports. Ursula sometimes interpreted her battle with cancer as a kind of persecution, akin to German suppression of the Jews, and this painful association of her illness with the Holocaust contributed significantly to Angelika's own identity as part of the post-Shoah generation. The film also documents German popular media inquiries into WWII, reporting that 50 percent of Germans think that they should stop being preoccupied with the Nazi era. Audio recordings of her mother (who died in 1996) and interviews with her father, accompanied by Angelika's own unobtrusive musings, create a powerful look at how information, beliefs and myths are passed from one generation to the next. MY LIFE PART 2 is a fascinating portrait of a family whose story is both its own universe and a microcosm of European history.
