THE LESSON

As a native German, the Holocaust is a very personal topic for me. As a young person I remember realizing I had never encountered anyone of the Jewish faith, and I assumed that many young Germans, who were not born in one of the nation’s metropolises, might be in a similar situation — that the pain and disruption of these Jewish family histories weren’t visible to me but rather situated in my imagination.

I initially intended to make a film about how the German culture of guilt is established within our population. A feeling that I carried inside of me ever since I learnt about it. With fewer and fewer survivors being able to tell of their experiences under the fascist regime, I saw the schools as the only place where this memory and feeling could be awakened. But when I returned to my hometown and began to film in my old high school, the situation in the classroom turned out to be profoundly different from how I remembered it.

I wanted to reject the premise that the Holocaust is either ‘“inexplicable” or completely relegated to a previous age. I sought to gain an understanding of our national reality by exposing elements in German society that glorify our tragic past.

This film does not focus on aggressive gestures and hate speech of the alt-right but rather on the slow and pernicious creation of “Mitläufer” or “bystanders”, who allow a complacent, dehumanizing shift in society to happen. We want to inspire people to question whether they themselves might passively contribute to a power system that is murderous for others.

I grew up in close proximity to the town of Dortmund and its active neo-Nazi scene. I have followed the rise of political antisemitism and Islamophobia. And, my roots in the rural town of Fröndenberg have informed what I think is a unique approach to the subject. Often, right extremism is framed as an East German problem but this story is set right in the heart of former West Germany.

The film shows that Germany’s Holocaust education is unfit for our time. I hope that the documentary will help raise awareness of the importance of Holocaust education, which is under dramatic decline. 40% of German children today do not even know what Auschwitz means. Germany’s self-image of mastering its history of genocide needs to be revisited. The notion that Germans are immune to future Nazi movements because the people have “learned their lesson from WWII” must be abandoned, a fact which is brought into full relief by the results of the last general election.

We must confront the remnants of nationalist pride in the collective memory of older generations as well as the resurgence of the modern-day far-right. This film focuses on ordinary children who are standing in a rift. My hope is that people who watch the film will understand the subtle ways in which fascism self-propagates and lingers within society, and that this understanding will inform and drive us to rectify the future.