MOVIE AM MITTWOCH
Black Box Germany
A film by Andreas Veiel
2001: Documentary : 102 m : German with English Subtitles
29 September 2021 | 18:30 hrs IST
Link to the film: https://widerstand.goethe-on-demand.de/movies/black-box-brd
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Summary:
Broad-scale confrontation with the Nazi dictatorship began in the late 1960s and was an aspect of the student revolts. This shaped the next generation, as Andres Veiel – born in 1959 – showed in his documentary “Die Überlebenden” (1996), in which he portrayed his high school class in which three classmates had committed suicide.
In BLACK BOX BRD Andres Veiel contrasts the biography of Alfred Herrhausen, then CEO of Deutsche Bank, with that of RAF terrorist Wolfgang Grams. Herrhausen was murdered by the RAF in a bombing on 30 November 1989. In 1993, when he was arrested at Bad Kleinen train station, Grams was killed in an exchange of fire with the police. Andres Veiel deals in detail with their biographies, beliefs and ideals. He interviews survivors and contemporary witnesses. He interweaves these with private film clips, contemporary television recordings and re-enacted scenes to create a complex contemporary document. Veiel implemented a mixture of documentary and fictional narrative forms to show how close feature and documentary films can be.
Andres Veiel neither wants to reveal the background to the attack on Herrhausen nor clarify the death of Grams. He is interested in the comparison of two biographies from different generations that were shaped by the circumstances of the time. Both made decisions that isolated them from their friends and family. This included how Herrhausen was shaped by Nazi cadre training units and his impressive career during the economic boom, but also the fact that he later campaigned for debt relief for the countries of the ‘Third World,’ which did not please all of his colleagues at the bank. Grams’s depiction includes dealing with his father’s SS past and his radicalisation when he went underground with the RAF in 1984. The two life stories are skilfully juxtaposed by the editor Katja Dringenberg. Ultimately, it is the opposites, but above all the parallels between these biographies, that make Veiel’s film BLACK BOX BRD so exciting – a piece of contemporary history of the Federal Republic in all its contradictions.
