Gray Matter

Synopsis
Gray Matter is a documentary from 2004 by director Joe Berlinger (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost 1 & 2). Berlinger traveled with a small crew to Austria to attend a mass funeral for 700 children who were euthanized in an Austrian hospital under the direction of an Austrian forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Heinrich Gross during the Holocaust. The children had been deemed mentally incompetent or retarded at the discretion of Dr. Gross. Despite this atrocity, he continued to work at the same mental hospital where his experiments and euthanizations were carried out until he retired well into the 1990’s. Berlinger attempts several times while in Austria to contact Dr. Gross for an interview but is unsuccessful. The film chronicles these attempts as well as Berlinger’s attendance at press briefings regarding the funeral for the children.

Observations
Matter is only an hour long. The short duration of the film is fairly obviously because Berlinger was unable to contact Dr. Gross, find out where he lived, or speak with anyone on Gross’ side besides Gross’ trial lawyer. I wasn’t bothered by Gross’ absence in the film. Berlinger was naïve to think that a man protected by the Austrian government, legal and medical establishments would agree to an interview by a curious American. The film leads the viewer to believe that rather than accept it’s social responsibility to the past, Austria prefers to act demurely, as if they as Austrians were innocent victims during Hitler’s regime rather than avid Nazi supporters. This didn’t really bother me either. I don’t know Austrian history and social climate, but I could understand the collective Austrian conscious preferring to sweep this little piece of history under the rug.

But I was disappointed in the movie. Berlinger tiptoes around the most interesting and far-reaching idea that the documentary almost (but not quite) suggests. The brains of the children who were deemed mentally incompetent/retarded were meticulously preserved in the basement of the hospital in which the euthanizations and experiments took place. Hundreds of glass jars sat on dusty shelf after dusty shelf each with a brief description of the child’s condition and the birth and death dates. Thousands of slides had been prepared for microscopic examination and were labeled and boxed accordingly. In one disturbing scene from the movie, the entire head and neck of a small child had been preserved in a glass-pickling jar. And it was this availability of subjects and data that enabled Dr. Gross to continue to publish new papers in medical journals well through the 1980’s in the field of neurology.

Berlinger brings this up, but then never addresses the issue he raised. Could it be possible that medical science advanced through the deaths of these children? Could it be, that despite this atrocity and the human degradation it reveals, the empirical data gathered benefited the medical community? I don’t really know. The documentary is unclear as to the conclusions of the papers that Dr. Gross published in professional journals. Perhaps his research could have been conducted without the brains, slides, and pictures in the hospital’s basement. Maybe the horrible fate that these children faced was not completely in vein. Maybe data gathered from that basement of horrors has helped modern families of children with disabilities. I don’t know.

I was disappointed that Berlinger chose not to directly examine the question that he skirts. The Holocaust is reprehensible. Gross’ participation in and direction of the exterminations in that Austrian hospital are repugnant. But though he was able to point out the Austrian’s ambiguous relationship with the events of WWII, Berlinger was ultimately too unwilling, unable, or uncomfortable to explore the greater moral ambiguity that his documentary suggests.

Rating:

Amazon's entry for Gray Matter