Tracks (1989)

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Movie
Original title traces
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1989
length 21 minutes
Rod
Director Eduard Schreiber
script Regine Kühn
production DEFA-Studio for Documentary Films , KAG: Effect
music Lutz Glandien
Georg Morawietz
camera Andreas Bergmann
cut Viktoria Dietrich
occupation

Traces is a documentary film by the DEFA studio for documentaries by Eduard Schreiber from 1989.

action

This color documentary reports on the demolition of the last remains of the former Reich Chancellery on the corner of Vossstrasse and Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse in Berlin . In addition to the recordings, the West Berlin actor Martin Brandt speaks in his apartment texts from Lessing's drama " Nathan the Wise ", with which the theater of the Jewish Cultural Association in Berlin was opened in 1933 and in which he played the role of Sultan Saladin. There is hardly a visible trace of this theater. Faded-in historical black and white film recordings from October / November 1938 as well as from the destroyed Reich Chancellery in 1945 provide a better understanding of the events.

The camera pans over the work in the excavation where the Reich Chancellery used to be, to the opposite building of the former Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels and to the area of ​​the former garden with still visible walls of Adolf Hitler's bunker . From October 6, 1938, Jews were no longer allowed to enter this quarter . Further historical film clips show the view of Hitler standing in his open limousine when a parade with enthusiastic people is being held on Wilhelmstrasse, which is decorated with swastika flags. Then you see the tour of the destroyed Reich Chancellery by Russian soldiers after the end of the Second World War .

A visit to the Jewish cemetery in Eberswalde in 1988 shows the trunk of a mighty oak, which, however, was not able to avoid the destruction of the grave sites. Overturned and broken tombstones with Jewish characters give cause for thought. On one of these stones in the cemetery overgrown with ivy is written "Here rests in God Ernst Liepmann". Back in Berlin we take a look at a painted wall of a house on an abandoned property at Auguststrasse 15. The picture, with the Jewish star, eyes, hands and people, was painted by students to remember the children who came from here, a Jewish one Orphanage, were deported.

The film ends with eyewitness accounts from the morning after the National Socialist pogrom night : “It was a clear, transparent morning. The street reverberated with the noise of cars and trams. The Jewish shops with broken shop windows were boarded up ... We drove in silence in the hazy light of the November morning. It was a sunny morning and late autumn lay over the city. The light was gray, it had started to rain ”.

production

Traces was filmed under the working title Jewish Theater, Memories of Jewish Life in Berlin on ORWO color and had its world premiere on October 13, 1989 at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival . The film was shown for the first time in the GDR on November 10, 1989.

The dramaturgy was in the hands of Richard Ritterbusch . The actor Martin Brandt speaks texts from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's " Nathan the Wise " and William Shakespeare's " Macbeth ". A scene excerpt is from Stanley Kramer's film " The Judgment of Nuremberg ".

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