IAC logo

The world of non-commercial film and A-V

Events Diary Search
The Film and Video Institute find us on facebook Join us on Facebook

Bookmark and Share

The making of Mahnmal

To BIAFF 2008 results | To Full Making Of Index

Mahnmal (Memorial) by Bernhard Zimmermann won a 4-star award at BIAFF 2008.

We thank Dr. Gert Richter, editor of BDFA's1 'Film & Video' magazine, for permission to reprint this article in translation.


So, Bernhard Zimmermann, why did you make this film?

It was an icy winter day in January 2000, when I was travelling through snow-covered Poland to attend an international festival whose motto is "For the Love of Man" (Festival details). The festival takes place every two years in Auschwitz / Oswiecim, close to the two biggest concentration camps of the third Reich, Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau which killed most people of all. I just had to visit them and so I found myself in a bus with a group of mainly teenage Poles, who were also festival delegates like me.

It is very hard to endure the sights of a place of horror like this and so I made my film Three Days in January in the diary style to capture the impressions of my trip. From the beginning, I realised that I was not properly ready to deal with this theme and that this first film could be only a first step into this enormous topic.

Mahnmal title How did the ideas at the heart of the second film, Mahnmal, develop?

For more than ten years now I have regularly driven to Berlin each year for the international competition in March, that used to be called "A Window to the East" and is now "Window Without Borders"2. So, I have watched the development of the city over 10 years or so, including the opening of the Jewish museum3. In my film are shots of documents from there which show what life was like for Jewish people in the last century. I also followed with interest the discussions about the planning stages of the memorial, whose construction was very controversial. The Spring after it opened, when I came to Berlin, I visited it for the first time.

It was an unusual day - almost as cold as winter although it was the end of March. It had rained and the drops dripped like spilled tears down the stone blocks. Incipient twilight wrapped the field of stones in a quite special light - bluish, alien, smooth. In the dim atmosphere of this apparent maze of charcoal grey walls stretching before me.

I was gripped by a sense of oppression. And yet a cold order prevailed in it. There was plenty of space for the depressing memories of my trip to Auschwitz. Again and again I was moved to look upwards - and before my astonished eyes the mirage of a white star appeared in the sky. Star

Beneath the memorial is a museum with the formal facts - the explanations, the human fates, details of that final solution.

The visitors of today stand quietly and share devoutly, sympathetically, the horrors that were once part of Jewish life in Germany: the creeping incipient catastrophe, the annihilation in the concentration camps. Back in the open air again they breathe eagerly the fresh air of life. Between the standing stones, that almost seem to crush you, they pause. The individual human being is lost here in this cold artistic installation.

Silhouettes Faces Silhouettes2

When was the film ready to be shown?

In February 2007 it was ready for the Rhineland regional festival where it was chosen best film of the festival. I was delighted, just as I was when more success came in the BDFA-national festival where it won the gold medal as best documentary. The jury stressed the following points:

Caption Death is master Blocks

The film went to the national DAFF festival 2007 in Rostock and was movingly discussed there at length:

Bernhard, what did you make of these comments and what's next for the film?

It became clear that people found it difficult to get to grips with this topic and accept the unloved memorial in Berlin. But the main problem was trying to assess this film rationally. If you try to do that, it simply doesn't work. The audience should be willing to get emotionally involved in the film to open themselves emotionally. That has happened many times at previous presentations. For example that happened with our very good Jewish friends from Switzerland, who saw the film in Rostock and congratulated me spontaneously.

Old photograph For me the high points are the shots from the Jewish museum in Berlin, the documents from Auschwitz and the lines quoted from the Todesfuge. Through them I wanted to turn my thoughts and sensations into pictorial form, to set them out for other people.

The film has been widely seen but will go further as well. It is in the German programme for UNICA 2007 in Slovakia. It was requested for the Dortmund Film Days in October. And next year the intention is to take it back to "Berlin Window Without Borders" international film festival where it began.

Railway Huts Tracks Huts2

Translated from an article in BDFA's 'Film & Video' magazine, April 2008.


Editor's note: We asked Bernhard why he chose to put the words of the poem "Die Todesfuge" as captions rather than have them spoken:

Sometime during the making of the soundtrack of the film it became clear me that an additional sound would disturb the effect of the machine noise and the music. So I decided on captions. Particularly with speech there is a danger that lyric poetry will divert too much attention from the pictures. We had decided that the viewer should feel as alone and unimpaired as possible. With the written words each person reads as much as they want. One does not have to read everything in order to understand the film.

Bernhard Zimmerman, April 2008


1 Bundesverband Deutscher Filmamateure (BDFA) - Federation of German Amateur Film and Videomakers
2 The Festival changed its name from "Window to the East" to "Window without Borders" after the fall of the Berlin wall separating East and West Berlin in 1989. The fall heralded the reunification of East and West Germany.
3 The Jewish Museum in Berlin tells the history of Jewish people in Germany. The museum was originally founded in 1933, but closed by the Nazi regime in 1938. It was re-opened in a new building in 2001.
4 Paul Celan is a pseudonym of Paul Antschel, one of the major poets of the post-World War II era.
5 Todesfugue (Deathfugue) is a complex and powerful poem written by Paul Celan commemorating the death camps. We reproduce a few lines of it here:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped.


Share your passions.

Audience silhouette.

Share your stories.

Page updated on 07 October 2011
Contact Webmaster
Data Privacy
find us on facebook Join us on Facebook
Bookmark and Share
UNICA information UNICA member
Company Limited by Guarantee No. 00269085. Registered Charity No. 260467. Authors' views are not necessarily those of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers. Website hosted by Merula. JavaScripts by JavaScript Source. Menu by Live Web Institute. Art work by Tony Kendle.