Colonia Dignidad - From the inside of a German sect

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Television broadcast
Original title Colonia Dignidad - From the inside of a German sect
Country of production Germany , Chile
original language German , Spanish
year 2020
Production
company		 LOOKSfilm , Canal 13 , WDR , SWR , Arte
length Arte version: 52 minutes
Episodes Arte version: 4
genre documentary
Director Annette Baumeister ,
Kai Christiansen ,
Wilfried Huismann ,
Heike Bittner
script Annette Baumeister,
Wilfried Huismann,
Cristián Leighton
music Hans-Peter Ströer
Initial release March 10, 2020 on Arte , Arte-Mediathek

Colonia Dignidad - From the Inside of a German Sect is a German - Chilean documentary film from 2020 that tells the decades-long history of the German Christian sect Colonia Dignidad , which was founded in Chile . The film appeared for the first time in a four-part version on Arte and was also broadcast in a two-part version in the first . In addition to interviews with contemporary witnesses, it contains numerous, previously unpublished, original recordings from Colonia Dignidad .

Several critics praised the work, for example as important and outstanding. Others, however, complained that it wrongly portrayed Colonia founder Paul Schäfer as being solely responsible for the crimes committed in the colony.

content

The story begins with Paul Schäfer's years in post-war Germany , during which he worked as a lay preacher , built a congregation and, despite the sexual abuse of boys, founded a reformatory for children near Siegburg , where he abused other boys. The film explains how Schäfer, on the run from legal investigations, managed to flee to Chile with the help of diplomatic contacts and several members of his group and to found the Colonia Dignidad there. In the further course it is about the structure and everyday life of the Christian sect and the management of the extensive property as well as the strict regiment of Schäfers, under which the residents had to live. An important stop of the documentation are also the political circumstances in which shepherds cooperated with the Pinochet government and her on the grounds of Colonia Dignidad in torture helped and killing of political opponents. The film also mentions the escape attempts of some residents of the area, the influence of Schäfers on German diplomats and finally the time when the Colonia Dignidad opened up to Chilean children as well, and the long unsuccessful efforts of the police to find the shepherd, who was noticed for child abuse on the site to take.

The documentary contains numerous interviews with former residents of the colony as well as historical film recordings that members of the sect shot within the premises.

Emergence

The Chilean director Cristián Leighton once filmed the settlers of Colonia Dignidad for several years . One day, Wolfgang Müller, who headed the Colonia film department , turned to Leighton. As a confidante of Paul Schäfer, Müller was sentenced to a three-year suspended sentence in 2013 for assisting in child abduction in Chile. Müller handed Leighton a large number of film rolls and recordings along with the statement that the history of the Colonia had to be evaluated. The material was in very poor condition at the time. It was damp, moldy and broken due to underground storage. In addition to 9,000 photos, it comprised around 400 hours of film and 100 additional hours of sound recordings that had been made over a period of four decades. In 2016, Leighton contacted the German film production company LOOKSfilm , in which the decision was made to tell the story of Colonia in a series using the material received from Müller . For this purpose, the material had to be detoxified, repaired, digitized , restored, transcribed and tagged .

The German journalists Wilfried Huismann and Annette Baumeister played a key role in the creation of the documentary and the evaluation of the material . For the documentation, they conducted over 40 interviews, some of which lasted several days, with settlers, secret service and judicial employees, tortured, refugees and relatives of the people who had disappeared in the Colonia . About the work on the documentation, Baumeister reported in a press interview that her younger residents of Villa Baviera , as Colonia Dignidad is now called, were open and helpful, while many older people were suspicious and hostile. The division into perpetrators and victims was difficult for her.

publication

The documentation was first published in Germany on March 10, 2020 when it was broadcast on Arte and when it was published as video-on-demand in the Arte media library . This version consists of four 52-minute parts with a total running time of 208 minutes. The parts are titled Im Paradies , Lange Schatten , Blick into the Abyss and Ans Licht .

The first broadcast the documentation in two 90-minute parts in the evening program on March 16 and 23, 2020 and also made it available in the ARD media library . The parts here are called from paradise to hell and from darkness to light .

Reactions and criticism

Some of the critics of the German-speaking media gave the film great praise. For example, Martin Thull said in media correspondence that it was “Outstanding Documentary Television” with the advantage that the authors abstained from any comments and let the images and sounds speak for themselves. The viewer could “in view of the moving testimony” make up his own mind. The Frankfurter Rundschau praised the work for its "precise and impressive representation" of the Colonia Dignidad . For the critics of the standard, the documentary is “without question one of the most essential things television can do as an educational medium.” The FAZ critic praised the film as one of the few German “television events ” of the year and as “shocking, fascinating and absolutely worth seeing “Emerged. The film service awarded four out of five possible stars.

According to the critic Tilmann P. Gangloff from RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland , the documentary shows that reality was even worse, at least for Paul Schäfer's victims, than the previous fictional works about Colonia Dignidad - the feature film Colonia Dignidad - There is no turning back and the television series Dignity - could have shown. The authors Huismann and Baumeister had provided a detailed chronicle of Schäfer's career with the film, which was particularly "illuminating" that in post-war Germany many war widows had left their children in Schäfer's care because they could not have provided enough food.

Thull also praised the fact that Huismann and Baumeister had "responsibly evaluated" the extensive archive material. However, Karsten Umlauf questioned the way they handled the material in a review on SWR2 . Because the fact that "mainly children of functionaries and former confidants of Schäfer" had their say in the documentation and "less the common residents or Chilean dictatorship victims" gave the impression that Paul Schäfer was "the lone ruler of terror" and everyone else "More or less his prisoners". The work runs the "danger of spreading a reading that accommodates earlier accomplices and their descendants and that counteracts a real reappraisal of historical guilt." Ute Löhning, for example, pointed out in the TAZ that hardly anything was learned about the role of the former Colonia resident Günter Schaffrik, who was interviewed in the film, in recruiting Chilean children for Schäfer's systematic sexual abuse, and criticized the lack of contextualization on the one hand other victims do not do justice and on the other hand suggest that Schäfer is solely responsible for the crimes.

The criticism of the lawyer and former Colonia resident Winfried Hempel that the archival material on which the documentary is based must be made available to the investigating authorities was also reflected in the criticism, also because there were still pending proceedings. He also claimed that the material had been stolen from the Colonia Dignidad and smuggled into Argentina. In reviews that appeared on the occasion of the initial publication, Gunnar Dedio from the production company LOOKSfilm was quoted with the announcement that the archive material would also be made available to the public in future.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Martin Thull: Outstanding Documentary TV , in: Medienkorrespondenz from March 24, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  2. ↑ a b Peter Burghardt: Von Tortter und Folklore , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of March 16, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  3. ↑ Andreas Schoettl: Behind the facade of the "Colonia Dignidad": Who was the perpetrator, who was the victim? , in: Weser-Kurier of March 2, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  4. ↑ The Colony of Hell - a startlingly real documentary , in: Frankfurter Rundschau of March 10, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  5. ↑ Christian Schachinger: "Hell on Earth": Documentary "Colonia Dignidad - From the Inside of a Sect" on ARD , in: Der Standard from March 16, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  6. ↑ Oliver Junge: Abuse of Dignity , in: FAZ from March 10, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  7. ^ Colonia Dignidad - From the interior of a German sect , in: Filmdienst , accessed on March 26, 2020
  8. ↑ Tilmann P. Gangloff : Colonia-Dignidad-Doku: From the Heart of Darkness , in: Web presence of RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland from March 9, 2020, accessed on March 30, 2020
  9. ↑ Karsten Umlauf: "Colonia Dignidad" - Documentation about German sects in Chile , in: SWR2 of March 10, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  10. ↑ a b Ute Löhning: Who Owns History? , in: TAZ of March 10, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020
  11. ↑ 400 hours of propaganda evaluated: German documentary on Colonia Dignidad , in: digitalfernsehen.de from March 9, 2020, accessed on March 26, 2020