It’s fitting – and slightly eerie, perhaps – that one of the most powerful, complexly layered films at the Berlinale has been the Austrian/German co-production about the Holocaust, The Counterfeiters.
Year: 2007
Then we take Berlin
Around this time last year, Clement Virgo wasn’t just hanging out at the Berlin International Film Festival, watching as the foreign buyers snapped up rights to his 2005 film Lie With Me.
He was also busy prepping his next film, Poor Boy’s Game, a boxing drama that digs into themes of race and tribalism in Canadian communities, which he shot in Halifax in June. Next week he returns to Berlin for the movie’s world premiere.
Wilfried Weinke
The two aims driving Wilfried Weinke’s work as a historian are, on the one hand, to confront a young, mainstream German public with the Holocaust in ways that bring the country’s former Jewish legacy to life, and, on the other hand, to rescue the names of forgotten German Jewish artists and intellectuals from the past. As J. Joseph Lowenberg, the grandson of the early 20th century poet Jakob Loewenberg, said, “Without Weinke’s efforts, I doubt that my grandfather’s literary reputation would receive any recognition in Germany today.”
ERNST SCHÄLL
Every day except on Sundays, for more than 20 years, Ernst Schäll, a retired mechanic, would wake up, step out his door and go to the Jewish Cemetery in Laupheim where his workshop, filled with tools and the crumbling parts of tombstones, awaited him. There he would set to work, grinding and drilling, repairing and rebuilding, sculpting each stone with 30 to 70 hours of labor before he replanted it on the grave where it belonged. According to those who watched and sometimes participated with him, Schäll brought more than technical skill and an artist’s instinct to his voluntary work restoring graves.
Lars Menk
In his job as a letter courier, Lars Menk has to be careful
not to let the names on the mail he is delivering distract
him. Menk, after all, knows something about names. He
compiled close to 13,000 of them for “A Dictionary of German-
Jewish Surnames,” an 800-page, scrupulously detailed
reference book that took him nearly a decade to complete.
And that is why today, when he stumbles across rare variants
of Jewish names – or names he’s never even seen before,
and which he thinks are on the verge of dying out – Menk
has been known to go home, research the names’ origins and
contact the names’ owners to discuss their family heritage.
Inge Franken
After working for six years on a book about Jewish orphans
in World War II, Inge Franken can explain what motivated her
in a single breath.
Johannes Bruno
It’s hard to know exactly what to call him: Teacher, Author,
Activist, Historian, Journalist, Guide. Johannes Bruno is
a mixture of all those things – and when his friends and
colleagues in Speyer started to simply use the name “Juden
Bruno,” or Jewish Bruno, it was easy to see why they would
describe a Christian in such a way.