features :: g. tiao :: envoy: colophon

On the Afterlife of Atrocity
An Interview With Film Director Robert Thalheim
Moira Weigel

Young German director Robert Thalheim’s vita reads like every film-school student’s daydream. He shot his first feature, NETTO (2005) on a shoestring budget as the final project for a second year seminar at the German Academy of Film and Television. A tragicomedy depicting a dysfunctional family in post-reunification Berlin, NETTO picked up a number of prestigious European film awards, among them a “Best Feature Film Debut” from the German Film Critics Circle. Following its success, Thalheim obtained funding to shoot the screenplay that was his thesis and attracted several impressive collaborators: legendary director Hans Christian Schmid, X-Film Verleih (the production company behind RUN LOLA RUN) and Warner Brothers Pictures.
         The product was AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN (2007), an understated, yet deeply moving, portrait of a young German performing his year of mandated community service in Osciewim—a small town in the Polish countryside, better known to the world by its German name, “Auschwitz.” In addition to positive reviews in multiple national presses, the film received the award for “Un certain regard” at Cannes, while its star, the young Berliner Alexander Fehling, nabbed the award for Best Actor at the Munich Film Festival.
         Thalheim has referred to his first film, NETTO, as a project of merely “regional” interest. In some sense it is. Its narrative scope is modest, focused on the relationship between an unemployed father and his estranged son. The social problems it represents, while perhaps common to a number of former Communist countries, are similarly embedded in their particular locale: the not-quite-gentrified neighborhoods of eastern Berlin.
         AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN is an achievement of a somewhat different scale. The German title—which is taken from the most recent (2002) volume by Berlin poet Björn Kuhligk and means literally “In the end come tourists”—conveys a sense of foreboding, an apocalyptic note not quite captured in the English translation, “And Along Come Tourists…” Yet, taking on the legacy of perhaps the most traumatic rupture in the history of Western civilization, Thalheim manages to animate and inhabit the finely textured, individual, local stories, which provide his lens onto events of such incomprehensible magnitude. Doing so, he produces a powerful reflection, whose authenticity is not compromised by ceding to clichés familiar from blockbuster Holocaust films or the discourse of “mastering the past” (Vergangenheitsüberwältigung).
         The Harvard Advocate sat down for an interview with Thalheim at Café Eisenstein in Berlin.

Could you explain the plot of the film?

The story is about a young German, Sven, who is unsure about his future, decides he wants to do community service [Zivildienst] abroad and then ends up, more or less unwittingly, in Auschwitz. At first he hardly knows where to start—his only connection to the place is his high school history class. Otherwise all there is for him in Auschwitz is a foreign language and a boring little Polish town and a museum. But then Sven encounters two people, who draw him into the life of the town and into its past. The first is Krzeminski, a former inmate of the concentration camp; the other is a young Polish woman, Anna, with whom Sven falls in love.

To what extent is the film inspired by your own experiences doing civil service in Auschwitz?

A great deal. That’s when I got to know the place and its fascinating contradictions. On the one hand, you feel the pull of ordinary life and go clubbing at night; and on the other hand, you pass barbed wire everyday and are all of a sudden reminded of the horrific past. I have always been very excited by the idea of telling a story before that backdrop. Certain experiences that I had with the former inmates, who really lived in the place, also influenced me in making the film. When I was there, there were five former inmates who actually still lived in Auschwitz. The question of how that could happen, how you could decide to remain in such a place forever, has interested me ever since then.
There are other similarities between my experience and the film as well. When I was there, there was a punk band in Oswiecim [like the one in the film]. I also got to know many young women who wanted to escape, like Anna does. In different ways, all that material flowed in.

Did you also have a close relationship with one of the former prisoners?

Yes. It was not exactly like in the film—I wasn’t bullied into driving him to physical therapy or anything like that. But it was an important task of ours to organize talks [Zeitzeugengespräche] with the former prisoners and to maintain contact with them. With one of them I would drive into the mountains about once a month and hike for three hours. That was something that had nothing to do with the camp but, rather, was about staying in touch with him, supporting him. Really, we became very close.

Did you find this as difficult as Sven does in the beginning of the film?

Of course it’s a difficult thing. But because there was already a history of young Germans coming to the place, I actually encountered a great deal of openness. Perhaps the generation before me experienced difficulties like Sven’s—they had to overcome the first inhibitions. But many of the former prisoners saw us as representatives of a new Germany, a better Germany, rather than representatives of the former perpetrators.
         One other interesting thing I experienced with the former prisoners was that they had a certain fascination with German culture.
         An idea so unimaginable to us is not contradictory for them. They had come to know German culture before the historical rupture [Zivilisationsbruch] of Auschwitz.
         They had learned German at school and read Goethe. They could still recite whole poems. At that time they had an entirely different image of German culture—difficult to reconcile with the inhuman treatment they had received at the hands of Germans.
         To give a concrete example: there was a former prisoner who always drove to talks he gave in a Mercedes. That was his absolute favorite car: a gigantic Mercedes from the 70s. The Germans would be waiting for the former Auschwitz inmate and he’d drive up in his Mercedes! He didn’t see that as a contradiction whatsoever.

To move beyond the biographical—I found the title of the film very powerful. Could you talk about the ambivalent character of tourism at the former concentration camp?

The concept of tourism at Auschwitz is something so full of contradictions that I cannot really commit myself to one position or another.
If you go there today, with your head full of the iconic, horrible black and white photos, at first you are going to be shocked. First thing, you’ll see an enormous parking lot with buses; go a little further, and there are all the postcard booths; push your way through to the cash registers; and then at some point you’ll come to the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate and see people filming and taking pictures of one another in front of it. The impression that all this creates is rather barbaric. On the other hand, of course you want people to come and look at Auschwitz. And if people are going to come, they are going to have to take a tour bus there, and eat at some point and somehow go to the bathroom. There has to be a tourist infrastructure.
The title is so nice precisely for that reason: it clearly embodies this ambivalence. The fact that this historical event has gradually been wrenched so far away from us that we have begun to perceive it as an object of sightseeing is regrettable, because that process distances us from historical realities. But there is also something positive about the fact that we are no longer trapped in this horrific past.

I found the scenes where the survivors lead conversations with tourist visitors very moving. Were they improvised, or were they written out in advance? Were they based on conversations that you yourself witnessed?

Almost everything you see in the film was written out in the script—with a few exceptions.
For instance, there is one scene where school children are asked to describe their feelings upon visiting the museum, by writing their reactions on index cards. Those children actually went the day before and saw the museum and spoke about their impressions.
But most of the scenes were written out quite precisely in advance. For instance, the scene where Krzeminski shows a group of visiting school children his tattoo is based on a scene I actually experienced. One student asked, “Can we see your number?” and then was disappointed when he saw that it had faded. And the former prisoner said, “I didn’t get it touched up” [ich hab’ ihn nicht erneuern lassen]. Sometimes it really is that way—such naïve questions. In these moments you see how great the distance is. But I think that that, too, has a certain ambivalence about it. On the one hand, you think, Ok, how insensitive can these kids be? On the other, to ask something like “Can I see your tattoo?” is a very direct, honest way of trying to confront the past. The kid that asked that question will definitely go home with a very strong impression, which he won’t forget.

Could you talk a bit about the aesthetic of the film? How you wanted it to look, to what extent it was informed by your experiences there on location?

From the very beginning I knew that I wanted to shoot with a simple handheld camera and in a documentary style, concentrating on the central actors. I certainly did not want to instrumentalize the place by aestheticizing its images. I also did not want to show the usual perspectives, the ones that everyone is already familiar with from documentaries—long, slow tracking shot to the gate, with classical music. Those images are manipulated to produce emotion. I tend to be more interested by the perspective on the place held by people who live there every day—who go swimming and then suddenly see one of the watch-towers, or who go on a bike ride and then stumble upon barbed wire. This sense of stark contrast strongly informed my aesthetic concept.

I understand that—like Steven Spielberg (when he was shooting Schindler’s List)—you were refused a permit to shoot at Auschwitz. How did that affect your creative process?

To be frank, it was pretty discouraging at first. I had wanted to shoot certain scenes on location—for instance, I would have liked to shoot the residence where the former prisoners lived, in the officers’ headquarters [Kommandantur] between the camp fence and the crematorium. That’s where they really stayed. And I would have liked to document it. So I was sad about that. But about other things I was actually thankful in retrospect. The exhibition of suitcases, for example, we ended up having to recreate, and I am happy about the fact that we didn’t really stand in front of the real suitcases and expose them to lights and everything—that we preserved a greater sense of respect before the place.
I am sympathetic to the policy of the museum – the fact that the say it is a giant cemetery and should not become a background to all sorts of films.

I find the suitcases very interesting on a symbolic level—and particularly the question that they introduce regarding the value of reparation versus conservation. Could you talk about that a little bit?

The question of repairing versus conserving interested me too. The “real” background is this: since two or three years ago there has existed a Department of Conservation in Auschwitz, with a lot of money from abroad, for scientists to conserve the place, following the most current scientific methods. The museum rationalizes this because in the past many things were destroyed—people working at the museum were acting with good intentions and much heart but incorrectly, from a scientific perspective.
At a symbolic level, this introduces a great difficulty. For us, the belated successors to this past [die Nachgeborenen], it is important that it is somehow conserved. We say, we want to preserve it, we must not let it fade away. But for Kzeminski, for someone who has experienced that, it is a real experience—an open wound. He is still suffering from these traumas and still feels guilty in a certain sense.

Have you shown the film in Poland or to a Polish audience?

Not yet. The official premiere is going to be at a festival in Warsaw. I am really looking forward to it. At the Film Festival in Munich I showed the film at the Polish consulate and there were many very moving and very good reactions. I had been afraid beforehand because during shooting and the development phase, I had already received a lot of criticism.

What kind of criticism?

Oh, many things. I received a lot of criticism over the character of the wannabe-rock-star, who really likes playing music and does not much like going to work. I find him a cool type, in spite of everything—and there’s one of him in every small town in Germany. But immediately people started saying: aha, you Germans think that we Poles don’t work properly, that we simply play music the whole day. The character was immediately taken as representative of the whole country.

On the other hand, the film was obviously received very warmly in Cannes. Do you think that it makes a different impression on a French audience than on a Polish or American or German one?

I’m looking forward to finding out. I have the impression that there’s a lot of variability in the reactions. In France I heard some criticisms. For instance, a review in the [French newspaper] Liberation said the film did not properly make use of the drama that it had at its disposal—with a former concentration camp inmate, a young German. That one could do much more with that, so to speak. Sure, all the ingredients for a big melodrama are present: the young German confesses to Kzeminski that his grandfather was in the SS and then both cry, etc., etc. However, I think the film was so well received in Germany precisely because it opens up spaces of inquiry in a different way than these melodramas of which there already so many. It does not proscribe what the viewer has to feel, rather it creates a portrait for the viewer to evaluate on his her own.

AM ENDE KOMMEN TOURISTEN had its U. S. premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on November 1.

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