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Movie Chile Review

The Woman with the 5 Elephants

By: Jennifer Levin
Published online: Friday, February 17, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

This quiet, important addition to Holocaust documentaries follows Svetlana Geier as she visits Ukraine for the first time in more than 60 years. Geier was a renowned translator of Russian literature into German; in the 1990s, she began working on the five great novels by Dostoyevsky. Whatever guilt she holds inside about the past is palpable in the silences filmmaker Vadim Jendreyko allows to shape the story. Friday, Feb. 17, only. Not rated. 93 minutes. In German and Russian with subtitles.

Full Review

The Woman With the 5 Elephants, documentary, not rated, in German and Russian with subtitles, The Screen, 3.5 chiles

Translating a literary work requires an intimate understanding of the text as a whole — themes, narrative arc, voice, tone, diction, and historical context — before the translator can begin. Ukraine- born Svetlana Geier, the octogenarian subject of the documentary The Woman With the 5 Elephants, translated Russian literature into German for more than 50 years until her death in 2010, the year after the movie came out. The two languages, which she calls grammatically incompatible, embody the two sides of herself: her past and her present.

In the 1990s, she turned her attention to the five great novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky — the five elephants of the title. (Before her translation of Crime and Punishment, this classic novel was known in Germany as Guilt and Atonement.) Filmmaker Vadim Jendreyko begins with Geier’s painstaking process. Each evening, she prepares a section of text, and in the morning, Hannelore Hagen, a taskmaster typist, comes over for dictation. Later, Jürgen Klodt, a well-read and learned musician, arrives to go over each page in detail; he and Geier parse the placement and pacing of each sound, the grammar and sense of each movement, making sure each word choice enhances the beauty of the translation and highlights the music in the language.

It is unavoidable that a translator will bring her perspective and experience to the page. By its nature, a translated work is always read secondhand. Geier is a quiet woman, obviously vastly intelligent, with a sly wit that she seems to be holding in reserve. We see her feeding a great gaggle of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We learn that she emigrated from Kiev to Germany during World War II and that she divorced her husband in the 1960s. But, according to Jendreyko, it isn’t until two months into filming, when her son, a shop teacher, is left paralyzed and speechless from an accident at work, that she begins to open up. She stops teaching and translating to cook and care for her son, an experience she calls “the main performance.” Her rehearsal, it turns out, was nursing her mortally ill father after his release from one of Stalin’s prisons when she was 15. Caring for her son, Jendreyko tells us in voice-over, seems to open a door to another time.

Many stories have been told about Jews in World War II and about the people who helped them and the war crimes and atrocities committed at con- centration camps. Less is said about non-Jews who lived through the violence and upheaval of Nazi occupation. Geier’s family was not Jewish, but in Stalin’s Russia, the future looked dim for everyone. As the Nazis encroached on Russia, Geier’s mother, a housekeeper, encouraged her daughter to learn languages, especially German, sure that cultural flexibility would protect her. The day Geier gradu- ated from high school, the Nazis came to Kiev. Ten days later, they killed more than 30,000 Jews and buried them in a ravine. The machine-gun fire rang out over Geier’s neighborhood for days. “It never becomes the past,” Geier tells the camera. What happened next is revealed slowly. Some people are just lucky. And Geier’s mother was right: language allowed Svetlana to survive when others didn’t.

Documentaries can tell large stories or small ones. The Woman With the 5 Elephants is a small story that might have been lost inside an epic. Jendreyko follows Geier and her granddaughter, the beautiful and attentive Anna, on a train trip to Kiev. It’s the first time Geier has been back since the war. Historical photographs and footage are cut with images of Geier and Anna on the train; we see Geier guest-lecturing at schools in Kiev and interviews in which Jendreyko asks Geier difficult questions about her interactions with Nazi officials, many of whom went out of their way to help her at their own peril. Count Kerssenbrock, the armaments commander for the southern sector, for whom she worked, was not a man she associated with Hitler. But he was in uniform, the filmmaker reminds her. “I didn’t consider it,” she says. “I cannot change the way it was.”

Geier believes that to Dostoyevsky — a writer who was imprisoned, as her father was, and has been accused of anti-Semitic leanings — no end could ever justify a wrong means. Dostoyevsky’s political opinions are often attributed to the author being a product of his time. The same can be said for Geier. The good things that happened to her in her life — surviving the war, moving to Germany, getting an education that allowed her to teach at the university level and become a renowned and beloved translator — blossomed from the wrong means. Whatever guilt she holds inside, as well as the knowledge that she had no other choices, is palpable through the silences Jendreyko allows to shape the film. We travel with her, we encounter the Ukrainian landscape of her youth with her, and with her we understand the sadness of what has been lost and what has been gained. She brings this sadness to the works of Dostoyevsky; she has suffered with him.