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Katja Mann, wife of German novelist Thomas Mann, recalls their fifty years of marriage and their history both as a couple and independent intellectuals. Born in Germany, the Manns were exiled to the United States during WWII, and returned to Europe after the war, settling in Kilchberg near Zurich. Katja (née Pringsheim) was a witness to all her husband’s writing and guarded him from interruptions throughout the years. Thomas Mann’s well known...
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In Rome in 1975, Claude Lanzmann filmed a series of interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last President of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, the only "Elder of the Jews" not to have been killed during the war. A rabbi in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, Murmelstein fought bitterly with Adolf Eichmann, week after week for seven years, managing to help around 121,000 Jews leave the...
5) Theater Work
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From May to October 1974, Peter Voigt filmed at the Berliner Ensemble (BE) during the 25th anniversary of the theater’s founding. Voigt, a member of the BE himself in the 1950s, interviewed theater technicians who had been part of the world-famous ensemble for decades. Sharing experiences, memories and impressions from their particular point of view, they paint an intriguing picture of the theater’s history. This documentary, originally shot on...
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At 47, German sculptor and graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) lost her beloved son Peter in WWI. She began to process her grief in drawings and sculptures, including the famous memorial The Grieving Parents, and became increasingly active in protesting social injustice. She often used the Goethe quotation "Seed corn should not be ground!" as an argument against senseless war and the killing of millions of young men. When her memorial was finally...
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A 1961 painting by Harry Blume is at the center of this film: beside the painter himself, artists Werner Tübke, Bernhard Heisig, Heinrich Witz and Hans Mayer-Foreyt appear in the painting. All five members of the first postwar generation to study art at the Leipzig Academy for Graphic and Book Design when it reopened in 1947. Some of them went on to become professors at the academy. Director Lutz Dammbeck, himself an alumnus of the academy, presents...
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In 1945, when the Allies liberated the concentration camps, they discovered thousands of secretly created artworks. With unprecedented access to paintings, drawings, etchings and sculptures held in collections around the world, BECAUSE I WAS A PAINTER conducts a gripping and fascinating investigation into art that captures, reflects and inspires in difficult times. *"BECAUSE I WAS A PAINTER maintains a funereal rhythm, alternating images of artworks...
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While working on his Hercules Concept, director Lutz Dammbeck began to study the life and work of the German sculptor Arno Breker (1900-91). How could a highly talented sculptor who had met French avant-garde artists in Paris in the 1920s, and whose works were first labeled as “degenerate art” become one of Adolf Hitler’s and Albert Speer’s preferred sculptors and protégé? In trying to find an answer, Dammbeck met with contemporaries and...
10) Dusk
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Description
Berlin in the 1950s: divided, but not yet walled. Young artists, at the start of their careers and seeking a new lifestyle, frequented the East Berlin cafés and bars that were meeting places for intellectuals, as well as Cold War secret service agents and black marketeers. Former East Berlin bohemians gather at Ganymed, the legendary restaurant near Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. In the early 1990s, soon after the fall of the Wall, they recall...
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In 1986, after suffering many obstacles and interference in his work, Lutz Dammbeck moved to Hamburg, West Germany. Two years later, in an attempt to start anew, he explores his decision and tries to sort out his past as an artist. In the process, he interviews artists Cornelia Schleime, Hans-Hendrik Grimmling and Hans Scheib, who had been core members of the alternative art scene in East Germany. They had all worked together in the 8mm-scene and...
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For Berliners, the Baltic island of Usedom was once the most luxurious destination for excursions within striking distance of the city. This is where imperial Germany’s grand health resorts of Bansin, Heringsdorf and Ahlbeck were built. Heinz Brinkmann, who was born in Heringsdorf, traces the eventful history of his island. He talks about the magnificent villas on Europe’s longest beach promenade, about the expulsion of Jewish citizens by the...
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As of the late 1970s, young East German artists, especially in the larger cities, created spaces for cultural experimentation that were separate from official art channels. Through their art, they rebelled against both the existing art market, and the country’s political climate. Leipzig, for example, became an important center of this subculture created by painters, photographers, musicians and poets. From 1985 to 1989, the EIGEN+ART gallery in...
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This film tells the story of the country’s decline from the point of view of employees of the Berlin-Lichtenberg station snack bar. Between running back and forth to the kitchen and the bar, they talk about their personal experiences in East Germany. They share their resentments about their state and talk about deciding to retreat into their private lives. The camera also carefully captures travelers standing at the snack bar, such as young people...
16) Yell Once a Week
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Deutsch
Description
This short film follows East Berlin teenagers, from hanging out on the streets to a dance party. It was banned before its release, in part because the lyrics of the title song, played by the East German rock group Pankow, call for self-determination and freedom.
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Deutsch
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A close-up of a small private company that delivers heating coal in the Prenzlauer Berg district of East Berlin. The feisty woman who runs the business does so with humor and understanding, and her seven male employees respect her. On the outside, they seem like tough guys but as they describe their lives, their vulnerabilities come to light. Their discussions range from the building of the Berlin Wall and possibly escaping to the West, to child abuse,...
18) Karl Marx City
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Description
Twenty-five years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), filmmaker Petra Epperlein returns to the proletarian Oz of her childhood to find the truth about her late father’s suicide and his rumored Stasi past. Had he been an informant for the secret police? Was her childhood an elaborate fiction? As she looks for answers in the Stasi’s extensive archives, she pulls back the curtain of her own nostalgia and enters the parallel...
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Brasch—a legendary name that represents one of the most sensational German families. Director Annekatrin Hendel presents a portrait of three generations of the Brasch family as a microcosm of the social tensions that were raging on a large scale in European history: between East and West, art and politics, communism and religion, love and betrayal, and utopia and self-destruction. In the late 1940s, the Brasch family is proud to live the dream of...
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Description
Although their team does not enjoy great success, soccer is much more than just a game for the fan club of Berlin's FC Union soccer team. But the public is often confused or frightened by soccer hooligans and their rivalries, fights and traditions. Cantzler's documentary goes behind the scenes to break down stereotypes, depicting the fans at the matches, in sports pubs and even in conflict with the police.
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