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...

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...

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...

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...

In this astonishing, searing and vitally important documentary, Oscar–nominated director Michael Verhoeven unearths the long-buried truth - while simultaneously showing modern Germany in the throes of an identity crisis. THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER documents Germany’s controversial Wehrmacht Exhibition, which for the first time ever revealed the personal letters, photographs and film footage implicating the common foot soldier in horrific acts. While...

Director Uwe Belz focuses his attention on viewing Karl Marx from an alternative perspective, showing the emotional and romantic sides of the historical figure. Passages from LOVE LETTERS that Marx and his fiancée, Jenny von Westphalen, exchanged as teenagers blend with paintings and beautifully atmospheric photographs of places connected to Marx. The letters and poems are read by well-known East German actors, such as Jenny Gröllmann and Dieter...

This 32-part playlist of newsreels gives a glimpse of what life was like in post-World War II Germany.

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...

In HEIMAT IS A SPACE IN TIME, German filmmaker Thomas Heise shares the stories of three generations of his family, tracing the contours of the major historical uphevals that afflicted Germany in the 20th century. Uncovering journal entries, photographs and contemporary footage, Heise creates a poetic meditation on individual and collective history.