Kleine Germanen - Eine Kindheit in der rechten Szene

Documentary that uses a true story of a teenager who was indoctrinated by her grandfather into Nazi ideology and how her children were affected.

Throughout the film there are actual interviews with parents some who are openly far right and others who were but later rejected the views.

Shocking that in our times children are exposed to such a brutal upbringing.

I recommend watching and educate people about what is unfortunately a rising element in Europe with the rise of the far right (nazis) and how their children are taught to hate.

Be sure you see the full version. In some broadcasts a shortened version of 54 minutes is offered and you'll miss the whole a lot.

While the theme of the documentary is really interesting, the filmmakers messed it up by mixing various forms of narration and artistic forms that do not help the subject matter much. First there is a badly narrated story of a woman deeply rooted and attracted to nationalist idea who is also shown to be not too critical of setting fires to refugee homes in Germany. Obviously she teaches her children the "values" of being of the "noble" germanic race and their ongoing and "important" fight to defend the germanic culture from influences of other races or believes. She only changes her style of life when she starts to get oppressed by her violent husband, thus escapes the clutches of the right-wing small town community. This part of the film is told in crude rotoscopic animation - with narration by an actress instead of the real person in her own words. I can only assume the filmmakers used that artistic form of animation, because the real person was unwilling to appear on screen (which is understandable given the circumstances, but there are ways to disguise a person both visually and sonically, so she could have appeared and told her own story to much more effect - IMHO).

A second part consists of on-camera interviews with some main figures of the intellectual (and not so intellectual) new right. They were given a platform offering insight in their own upbringing and their value system that is strictly opposed to a multi-cultural society and clearly anti-muslim. There is also one person who used to consider himself very xenophobic and far right - also due to his upbringing and thus transported believe-system - who while studying in Canada changed his views radically. While they are delivering their ideas on why they think it's important to keep a cultural identity as germanic people, there is not much argument that counters their standpoint. The far right views trigger deeply rooted fears: The idea of a vanishing cultural identity that will be replaced by muslim believes. That strong emotional hypothesis is not really countered by facts nor the question why it is bad to be open for other cultural influences from other cultures? Obviously this is not the point of this documentary, as this is about the upbringing and education of children to be proper far right citizens in the future. But the non-discussion of these points triggered by the interviewees left me with feeling of uneasyness.

Additionally there are surplus "audio only" statements by specialists of right-wing extremism who offer their perspective of things. It stroke me odd that they only appear on the voice track and not in person. I somehow feel this was a conscious decision by the film makers, yet it left me also with a strange feeling of discomfort.

There's also hidden camera footage from neo nazi holiday camps for kids, albeit very short.

All in all the film didn't tell me anything I didn't know already. The mix of media and narrative forms didn't do the film any good - au contraire, it distracted me from the actual theme. I guess in today's documentaries the artistic form - the surface - is much more important, than the content. Or to better rephrase that - it is felt that the content alone is not enough to make a great documentary - you need to have added elements - a lot of stock footage to illustrate EVERYTHING, a lot of superficial music, artistic / poetic narration - to make it work.

I, for one, are content with a well executed argument and information when it comes to documentaries.