Shoah Film Series: 50 Films from 75 Years

Impact: Cultural impacts

Narrative

In September 2018 Berlin’s cultural centre Babylon hosted a series of film screenings and public discussion events on the Shoah and its impact on today’s cultural and political life. The series was held under the patronage of Thomas Krüger, President of the German government’s Federal Office for Political Education. It was dedicated to the late filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose documentary Shoah (France, 1985) set new standards for Holocaust film.

In collaboration with Berlin’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European Jewish Studies Potsdam and the Federal Foundation Magnus Hirschfeld, Babylon screened feature films from Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Among Us (Germany, 1945) through to László Nemes’s Oscar-winning Son of Saul (Hungary, 2015), documentaries from early concentration camp footage through to a retrospective of Claude Lanzmann’s entire oeuvre, as well as Shoah survivor testimonies filmed in Germany since the 1990s. The series, which came amidst a renewed outbreak of right-wing extremism in Germany, drew nearly 4,000 interested visitors during the two weeks of its running.
Impact date16 Sept 201830 Sept 2018
Category of impactCultural impacts
Impact levelEngagement