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Thomas Heise’s four-hour documentary draws on the journals of his own family to construct a powerful, agonising history

The 63-year-old German film-maker and dramatist Thomas Heise has created what may possibly come to be seen as his masterpiece. I was sometimes captivated but often frustrated by this epic essay-film, a meditation on Germany and his own family history that is stark, fierce, austerely cerebral and almost four hours long.

Using letters and journals from his parents and grandparents, he recounts an agonised story of his own Jewish background, and his forebears’ experience of antisemitism in the Nazi era and then later a queasily similar pattern of bullying from the Communist party authorities in East Germany.

How much of our ancestry is tied to the history of the places we call home? While some of us would probably answer “None,” we’d be wrong. Just because your family tree was lucky enough to exist on the periphery of major historical moments as bystanders doesn’t mean you haven’t been impacted by wars, tragedies, inventions, and art in ways that defined your choices and subsequently the choices of your children. Why did my grandfather immigrate to America from Lebanon (then part of Syria) when he did? How did my father not getting drafted to Vietnam influence my sister’s birth and my own? Where does 9/11 fit in as an Arab American who never had an ethnic option on forms to check besides “Caucasian” previously? History defines us.

With that said, however, some are embedded much deeper than others. One example is German documentarian Thomas Heise. His...