Biological Father
In 1989, von Trier's mother revealed on her deathbed that the man who he thought was his father was not, and that she had had a tryst with her former employer, Fritz Michael Hartmann (1909–2000), who descended from a long line of Roman Catholic classical musicians (his grandfather was Emil Hartmann, his great grandfather J.P.E. Hartmann, his uncles included Niels Gade and Johan Ernst Hartmann and thus Niels Viggo Bentzon was his cousin). She stated that she did this in order to give her son "artistic genes".
Until that point I thought I had a Jewish background. But I'm really more of a Nazi. I believe that my biological father's German family went back two further generations. Before she died, my mother told me to be happy that I was the son of this other man. She said my foster father had had no goals and no strength. But he was a loving man. And I was very sad about this revelation. And you then feel manipulated when you really do turn out to be creative. If I'd known that my mother had this plan, I would have become something else. I would have shown her. The slut!
During the German occupation of Denmark, Fritz Michael Hartmann worked as a civil servant and joined a resistance group (Frit Danmark), actively counteracting any pro-German and pro-Nazi colleagues in his department. Another member of this infiltrative resistance group was Hartmann's colleague Viggo Kampmann, who would later become prime minister of Denmark.
After four awkward meetings with his biological father, the man refused further contact. The revelations led von Trier to attempt to "erase" the connections with his stepfather by converting to Catholicism, and to rework his filmmaking into a style emphasizing "honesty".
I don't know if I'm all that Catholic really. I'm probably not. Denmark is a very Protestant country. Perhaps I only turned Catholic to piss off a few of my countrymen.
In 2009, he declared, "I'm a very bad Catholic. In fact I'm becoming more and more of an atheist."
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