»wider weiter« on the net: »We didn’t know that«

Inspired by a documentary, high-school students from Leipzig are reconstructing online the daily life of young people in the times of the swastika.

»Are we bad people,« Thea Gersten asked her mother. She had just come through the door after her little friend Walther had threateningly declared: »I won’t play with you any more because you are the child of a Jew!« So it was with this sentence that in 1935 Nazism made its first incursion into the happy life of the nine-year-old. Three years later the Gersten’s house and fur store went up in flames. The synagogue in Gottschedstraße burnt as well – »Reichskristallnacht« in Leipzig. The family had to flee, first to Warsaw, then to London. Thea, then twelve years old, lost her first love, Philipp, who had played music dedicated to her on the violin, and who had kissed her. Thea learned that Jewish life no longer meant festive candle lights and the solemn atmosphere of Sabbath, but fear – fear of the pillaging mob, fear of what was to come. And she learned that happiness didn’t mean going on a walk with a boy, but simply having got away.

We didn’t know all that!" insists Elisabeth Lochmann. While she went to school or hung out with her friends in the afternoon, houses in her neighbourhood were plundered, and girls just as young as her were picked up by the police. Around 14,000 Jews from Leipzig died, victims of Nazi terror. »It was a happy time with parties, wonderful wedding celebrations. These things weren’t talked about. Our teachers didn’t say anything about it either,« remembers the old woman today. She talks about being together with the other girls at the »Bund Deutscher Mädel«, the equivalent of the »Hitler Youth« for girls – »they were very intelligent young women« – and about her 17-year-old granddaughter who today doesn’t believe that she didn’t know anything. Then Elisabeth Lochmann is silent, and her eyes ask for understanding.

The people introduced in the 22-minute documentary »wider weiter«, produced by Kai-Thorsten and Mark-Steffen Buchele, are neither Resistance fighters nor Nazi functionaries. The film doesn’t tell the big story, just the stories of five individuals looking back at their school years in Leipzig. The reports and memories have been ordered into seven short sequences which give a rough idea of normal life as it may have been understood by young people who knew nothing but these times and this kind of youth. The viewer understands that »Rassenschande«, the Nazi term for sexual relations with non-Aryans, must have seemed like the eternal problem of »bad influences« and »the wrong friends«. The »half Jewish« girl’s desire to join the »Bund deutscher Mädel« with her girlfriends is shocking, but also understandable: seen through her eyes in that time, it’s nothing but the timeless wish to take part in the class field trip. Growing up in the times of the swastika: school, friendship and separations; deportation as the end of a first love.

What do you do when, overnight, because you have been declared a »Jew’s child«, you have no more friends? How can you remain carefree when your peers and school friends are picked up by the Nazis? And most importantly, was it possible for someone not to know what was going on in the concentration camps? »wider weiter« doesn’t answer these questions. The film with the cryptic title abstains from commentary; it doesn’t explain, but only gives us a rough outline of approximately how people back then saw things. A gap is left which could be filled by comparing other oral histories and integrating the events into historical processes.

The authors created the film to inspire questions and discussions in history class. They were successful: after their history teacher showed them the film, a group of students from the Leipzig-Engelsdorf High School decided to reconstruct the everyday life of young adults in Leipzig at the time of the Nazi dictatorship. They want to use their research into conditions in Leipzig and the rest of Germany between 1933 and 1945 to find out more about the context of the film.

Kai-Thorsten and Mark-Steffen Buchele are pleased by the students’ commitment, and don’t only support the students in principle. They contacted the »Zentrum für Medien und Kommunikation der Universität Leipzig« (Center for Media and Communication, Leipzig University) and the internet project D-A-S-H, with whose help the students will now produce an extended version of the film. »wider weiter im Netz« (wider weiter on the net) is a website where the seven sequences of the film will be video-streamed, but more importantly than that, the historical context of each sequence can be further investigated with the help of multimedia software. The heart of the website is a number of discussion forums where statements taken from the film – »We didn’t know!« – can be evaluated on the basis of historical data and discussed by the young visitors to the site.

Thea Hurst, née Gersten, will be delighted by the project. After 61 years, she came back to Leipzig for the first time in the summer of 2000. During the talks she had with young people in different schools in Leipzig, she stressed that the most important point for her was to be active today so that history could never repeat itself.

http://www.widerweiter.de/

Film »wider weiter«,
Kai-Thorsten und Mark-Steffen Buchele, 2001

Book
Das Tagebuch der Thea Gersten,
Schulausgabe, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt GmbH, Leipzig, 2001.