ARD series: “The Doubts”: A terribly nice mishmash

»This country is full of assholes. Just keep working just as hard, then you’ll show them that they’re useless,” says Dana Zweifler (Deleila Piasko) in the series “The Doubts” to her younger brother Leon (Leo Altaras) as she attends his opening at a Frankfurt group event. Visited exhibition. There’s another idiotic installation there by another artist that tries to make a connection between chicken shredding and the Shoah (much to the annoyance of all the doubters), and some visitor has smeared an anti-Semitic comment on her brother’s painting.

The Jewish Zweifler family from Frankfurt am Main, who run a thriving delicatessen and restaurant in the Bahnhofsviertel, are under a lot of pressure right now. An investor is supposed to take over the store, but the local press focuses on the head of the family, the Auschwitz survivor, grandfather Symcha Zweifler (Mike Burstyn) and his past in the red light district.

“The Doubts” is an extraordinary series. The ARD six-part series won this year’s series festival in Cannes and is well-crafted high-end television with a good, if over-the-top story, but one that is convincing, with great pictures and brilliantly used music, for which there was also a prize the fast-paced and never boring plot drives forward.

The Zweifler family lives together across generations in several apartments in a house in Frankfurt and bickers all day long, just as they always remain loyal to one another. In addition to grandfather Symcha and wife Lilka (Eleanor Reissa), there are three grandchildren: music producer Samuel (Aaron Altaras), who lives in Berlin, his little artist brother Leon, who paints large satirical oil hams depicting family members with their legendary self-produced kosher sausages can be seen, and sister Dana, who has just left her husband in Israel and is coming back to Frankfurt. Her parents, mother Mimi (Sunnyi Melles), who works in the delicatessen, and father Jackie (Mark Ivanir), who runs a psychotherapeutic practice, are in a violent marital conflict that involves screaming, crying a lot and throwing dishes.

While the grandfather tries to have grandson Samuel at his side either when selling the shop or as a successor in the business, he falls in love with the British-Jamaican cook Saba (Saffron Coomber), who becomes pregnant and is actually on her way to Japan. to take over a chic luxury restaurant there.

Siggi, Symcha’s former friend, who has just been released from prison, is always lurking in the background and is blackmailing the family because he knows about the corpses in the Zweiflers’ basement. Because before the grandfather came to his shop, he had to help the previous Jewish owner shortly after the war against some Nazis who were threatening him, and someone died in the process. His grandchildren have no problem with the fact that Grandpa shot a Nazi shortly after the war. »What was he supposed to do if there were problems? Go to a judge? Or to the police? To the same people who were previously convinced National Socialists? Turning to a system that wanted to exterminate us all just a few months before?” Dana sums it up pointedly.

“The Doubts”, this satirical series with great actors, performs a daring balancing act and lets its characters talk seriously about the Shoah, the traumatizing experiences in the camps and the way the Germans deal with history. It doesn’t seem artificial, although the entire Zweifler family, including their hip young friends, are pretty crazy and in places are more reminiscent of the Portnoys or Zuckermans from Philip Roth’s novels.

Sometimes there is an argument about the circumcision of the offspring or about the delicatessen, the young doubters are busy using drugs, Samuel’s nightmares look like scenes from a mysterious fantasy film, and Grandma Lilka refuses to go to a German doctor. Much of the snappy dialogue is in Yiddish, there is also a lot of English in this series, and Father Jackie has a three-minute, heartbreaking monologue in Russian at the cemetery.

This fast-paced big city series between comedy and tragedy, which is about racism, anti-Semitism, collective trauma, kosher sausages, romance, desire, loyalty, the fight for one’s own identity and the crushing love of a family, is absolutely worth seeing.

From May 3rd in the ARD media library.