“Who’s Afraid of Alice Miller?” In the cinema: The war in her – culture

Martin Miller is a mountain of a man, but also looks like an “eternal” child. When the now over seventy-year-old sees an old Norwegian television interview with his mother in Daniel Howald’s documentary, in which she explains how devastating blows are to children’s souls, he cries bitterly. “In this interview she tells exactly what she did and says you shouldn’t do that.” Even the language of this man, who is himself a psychotherapist, at this moment approaches that of a little boy.

Martin’s mother is the famous psychologist and childhood researcher Alice Miller, whose books “The Drama of the Gifted Child” (1979) or “In the Beginning Was Education” (1980) significantly changed the view of the parent-child relationship in the 1980s. Alice Miller vehemently fought for children’s rights and non-violent upbringing. But she was not a good mother herself. The shoemaker wears even the worst shoes, it is often said – in this sense the Miller family walked barefoot.

Martin Miller wrote a book about his unhappy youth, “The True Drama of the Gifted Child”. In it he writes, among other things, that he was regularly beaten by his father Andrzej Miller – who was a sociology professor and general secretary of the Swiss University Rectors’ Conference; the mother did not prevent that.

Daniel Howald uses this book as a guide when he travels to Poland with Martin Miller to research his parents’ war past. As the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish family, Alice Miller survived the Holocaust with forged papers under a false name in the Warsaw Underground. Did she project her persecution fears onto her son?

Miller’s stories about his childhood are harrowing. At least as frightening, however, are the excerpts from Alice Miller’s original letters to her son, which the actress Katharina Thalbach read off-screen in a rough, chilled voice. It is a ghostly voice that speaks, which a ghost of a mother brings before the audience.

A settlement with the parents is “Who’s Afraid of Alice Miller?” still not – we see a road movie as trauma therapy. In the USA, Martin Miller meets the film’s second protagonist, the optimistic, charismatic Irenka Taurek. She is a cousin of Alice Miller, a Holocaust survivor herself, who was Martin’s babysitter as a young girl and who was probably a kind of surrogate mother for him. Already optically, the two are an almost slapstick-like couple: next to the petite Irenka Taurek, Martin Miller looks even bigger and clumsier. Together they search Polish archives for clues about Martin’s parents’s war past. Is that how their coldness and cruelty are explained?

The journey is exciting and ultimately points far beyond the individual fate of a beaten child. “Who’s Afraid of Alice Miller?” becomes an impressive example of how trauma is passed on over generations, how a war and, in this case, the experience of the Holocaust rages on in the second generation – a generation that often does not even know what legacy it carries. Although Alice Miller herself did not live the beliefs she formulated in her books, her family history confirms her theories. Because even today countless refugees from war zones pass on their soul damage to their children, “Who’s Afraid of Alice Miller?” a brand new film – and a warning not to save on therapeutic support, especially for the “second generation”.

The film finds strong images for the journey of its protagonist, which is above all an emotional one. At the beginning, Martin Miller can be seen in darkened, cave-like rooms, in the midst of numerous photos and film documents of his mother – a man in the prison of his memories. His research in Poland is then only partially satisfactory, many family secrets remain in the dark. But when Miller finally stands on the balcony of a Warsaw hotel with the great Irenka Taurek and looks out over the city, then he cannot forgive his parents, but he can also be above certain things in a figurative sense.

Who’s Afraid of Alice Miller?, Switzerland 2020 – Director, book: Daniel Howald. Camera: Gabriel Sandru, Ramon Giger. S.cut: Christof Schertenleib. With: Katharina Thalbach as the voice of Alice Miller. Distributor: Arsenal, 101 minutes. Theatrical release: October 11, 2021.