Film: Shoah   Claude Lanzmann

In the mid-1980s, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann presented Shoah, one of the most radical and comprehensive film works on the genocide of European Jews under the National Socialists. Twelve years of work, 350 hours of material, 9 1/2 hours of film, lest we forget. This epic film was made without music, without any form of commentary and, above all, without the use of archive materials – images of mass graves, gas chambers and emaciated bodies. The focus is not on documents of the past, but on remembering in the present. Lanzmann travelled to the extermination sites and found places where the grass had grown over everything. Hence the tenacity with which he sought out the last eyewitnesses of the Holocaust in Poland, Israel, the USA and Germany, and questioned them about the deportations and life in the concentration camps.

In cooperation with the Department of Contemporary History, the Department of Romance Studies, and Leo Kino.