Reflecting the past – projecting the future: Salon and film room at the school on Bullenhuser Damm for the Week of Remembrance Hamburg-Mitte.
from 24.04. to 27.04.2025
Open daily from 17:00.
The building in Rothenburgsort, which served as a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp in 1944/45, is now partly a memorial site, primarily commemorating the 20 Jewish children and 28 adults murdered there by the SS shortly before the end of the war. However, apart from a daycare center, large areas of the building have been unused for decades. For four days, we are activating this empty space as a place to talk, listen and watch films – including an exhibition on the tension between memorial sites and urban development.
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation, but also of the murders at Bullenhuser Damm, our documentary film program with two films from the 1980s on the terrible history of the school provides a site-specific framework for the creation of the memorial site. In addition, we are showing selected films that focus on biographies and tell of survival and resistance under National Socialism. Our focus will be on the intergenerational consequences and traumas caused by persecution. Because the question of the future of the memory of the crimes committed under National Socialism must be answered again and again. And this is where the private and the political come together.
Our film salon is also an attempt to make the building accessible to the public again beyond the memorial in the basement – temporarily, but as a model. To this end, we want to use the films to explore the history of the building and initiate a debate about its future. The decades-long vacancy is also a testimony to the helplessness of dealing with a complicated place. With our salon, we also want to bring new impetus to an otherwise neglected part of the city of Hamburg and cordially invite you to come to the east of Hamburg.
The film salon will be complemented by two exhibition rooms: in one, the Dessauer Ufer initiative, which works on another former subcamp just a few kilometers away, will show its updated exhibition “Zeitkapsel Lagerhaus G”. The other will be dedicated to documenting the planning status of the new development in the immediate vicinity of the Bullenhuser Damm school, with a particular focus on the perspective of Aktionsgemeinschaft Ost, which is critically monitoring the redesign of the urban space in the area of the so-called ‘Billebogen’. Historical knowledge and memories will be sketched on a new map during a workshop. Both spaces are linked by the complex question of the contradictions and possibilities that arise as soon as memorial sites and urban development meet. How can urban development processes and remembrance work be combined, where do they stand in each other’s way and for what reasons? The planned film salon is also intended to be a place that provides space for this debate, offers information and provides food for thought.
The current shift to the right, with its West and East German manifestations, is shifting the social attention economies in such a way that already marginalized groups are being played off against each other. And this is happening within the context of neoliberal urban development, in which spaces of exchange are becoming fewer rather than more and memorial sites are primarily evaluated in terms of visitor numbers and rated as tourist destinations. However, memorial sites are spaces that have been fought for. They were fought for by affected communities, initiatives, relatives’ associations and allies, usually in lengthy processes – for so-called “society”, i.e. the general public. The question of the necessity and design of places of remembrance must always be updated at the specific location. The debate about a future form of use that goes beyond this, which includes accessibility and the historical significance of the site, must be conducted in contact with one another.
Let’s think together about how the common good-oriented, socio-cultural and district-related futures can be projected in the mirror of the past.
A cooperation with the association Kinder vom Bullenhuser Damm e.V., the Initiative Dessauer Ufer and the Stiftung Hamburger Gedenkstätten und Lernorte. With the support of dokumentarfilmwoche hamburg.
The salon and film room are accessible free of charge. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee barrier-free access to the rooms. A visit to the Bullenhuser Damm memorial is temporarily possible during the salon’s opening hours.
As part of funding for the Hallo: Festspiele 2025 by the Elbkulturfonds, the Ministry of Culture and Media and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.
Thursday 24.04.2025
18:30 “The Tribunal – Murder at Bullenhuser Damm” by Lea Rosh / 148 min // with guests
The opening film documents a unique process: where the legal process had failed and verdicts were prevented which, in view of the crimes dealt with, would never have been suitable for establishing justice, but could at least have brought recognition of guilt – here a non-governmental body from the middle of society authorized itself to speak publicly about this failure and its background.Lea Rosh’s film was “broadcast” on television, as it was called at the time, but was rarely shown. Finding a decent screening copy today is proving to be obscurely complicated. All the more reason, then, for this political act of remembrance from almost 40 years ago and 80 years after the murders to shed light on the political, biographical and social distortions that the Nazi dictatorship has left behind to this day. The tribunal returns to the place of its creation as a film and as an act of coming to terms with a trauma.
Friday 25.04.2025
17:00 “Then I’ll forget everything” by Daniel Poštrak and others / 15 min // PREMIERE with guests
Lined up, the vehicle bodies drift slowly through an industrial hall. Ali Rıza Ceylan is sanding paint defects by hand here. He has been working on the assembly line at Ford for more than 40 years. He withdraws during breaks. Ali Rıza sits at a table away from the hustle and bustle of production and creates works of art on the remains of the sandpaper in the light of a neon tube. “Painting is good for me,” he says. Even his experience as a survivor of racist terror fades into the background. Ali Rıza’s paintings are not created for the general public, but surprisingly find their place in a large museum. “Then I forget everything” is a film about the pain caused by racist violence, the power of resistance through art and, last but not least, the story of a late recognition.
17:45 “Mirjam – Life with Mauthausen” by Allegra Schneider and others / 37 min // with guests
Mirjam Ohringer was born in 1924. Even as a child, she and her parents supported people in hiding who fled from Germany to the Netherlands. When the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans, she was 16 years old and active in the communist milieu, e.g. in the distribution of the communist party newspaper “Wahrheit”. She had to go into hiding in 1942, which is why she survived the war. In 1982, she traveled to Mauthausen for the first time, where her fiancé Ernst Josef Prager had been murdered. She became a founding member of the Dutch Mauthausen Committee, of which she was also the chairwoman. At the end of her life, she talks about the anti-fascist resistance and the losses that still have an impact today.
19:00 “We must not forget” by Thorsten Wagner / 74 min // with guests – to the trailer
Antje Kosemund was born in Hamburg in 1928. She was the sixth of twelve children in the Sperling family. Her early memories paint an impressive picture of the oppression, poverty and violence that families had to endure under National Socialism – especially those who came from resistant working-class backgrounds. Her sister Irma Sperling fell victim to the National Socialists’ crimes against so-called “unworthy life”. She was deported to Vienna and murdered on January 8, 1944, at the age of 14, in a so-called children’s ward. In the 1980s and 1990s, Antje Kosemund began to investigate the circumstances of her sister’s death. On behalf of her family and hundreds of other victims, she dealt with Irma’s fate in a painful process and fought for a dignified commemoration. For decades, Antje Kosemund has reported on her family history as a contemporary witness, which she also wrote down in her book “Sperlingskinder” in 2011. With her precision, moral clarity and empathetic narrative style, she vividly conveys the realities of life for victims of National Socialism. In doing so, she not only makes the individual effects of fascism tangible, but also shows how this period continues to have an impact on many levels to this day. Her central message is as simple as it is essential: “We must not forget”.
21:00 “Nelly & Nadine ” by Magnus Gertten / 92 min – to the trailer
The film tells the incredible story of two women who fall in love in a concentration camp. The Belgian opera singer Nelly Mousset-Vos and the Chinese resistance fighter Nadine Hwang meet on Christmas Eve 1944 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, where they are both prisoners. They were separated shortly before the end of the war, found each other again and moved to Venezuela to live their love freely. For many years, Nelly and Nadine’s remarkable love story was kept secret, even from close family members. Now Nelly’s granddaughter Sylvie has opened the couple’s private archive.Magnus Gertten’s touching documentary uses Nelly’s diary and photos, love letters and film reels to tell a remarkable story about the horror of war, well-kept family secrets and love against all odds. The film was awarded the Teddy Award at the BERLINALE, the highest honor for an LGBTQ+ film.
Satmday 26.04.2025
17:00: “Mendel Schainfeld’s second journey to Germany” by Hans-Dieter Grabe / 43 min
Filmmaker Hans-Dieter Grabe travels by train with Holocaust survivor Mendel Schainfeld from Oslo to Munich because he has to attend a medical examination there in the hope of being certified that his burdens are great enough to receive a higher pension – as compensation for the work he is unable to do because of the unresolved concentration camp period. The three-quarter-hour film is a unique document: a porous body, all voice, wrestling with a guilt that should be felt by the people living in the sunlit landscape behind the window of the train compartment; that he almost apologizes for not having experienced the Germany his father had raved about to him; that he suffers from the fact that he took bread from a dead man in a concentration camp or from the fact that he was only able to translate inaccurately for the Soviets after the end of the war (the difference between “criminal” and “secret police”), despite all the stories with which Germans painted themselves as “fellow travelers” after 1945 and the willingness of the victorious power to identify the guilty. Schainfeld even apologizes for not feeling any hatred for his tormentors, even if that might make him feel better: “But unfortunately I can’t do it.”
18:00: “Pizza in Auschwitz” by Moshe Zimmermann / 64 min (POSTPONED from 19:00 to 18:00)
The 52-minute documentary “Pizza in Auschwitz” by Moshe Zimmermann, the son of Holocaust survivors, tells the story of a family’s journey and the agonizing memories of a 70-year-old man who was once imprisoned in Auschwitz. The film shows that the Holocaust and the traumatic experiences associated with it not only affect the direct survivors, but also their descendants. It thus sheds light on an intergenerational conflict. This documentation of an impressive journey turns the usual understanding of the culture of remembrance on its head. Danny Chenoch (74) survived five extermination camps, including Auschwitz, and has visited the places where he lost his childhood several times since the end of the war. Now he wants to make such a trip with his children and spend a night in his old cot in Auschwitz at the end. So Danny sets off for Auschwitz with his son and daughter, who are not too keen on the idea, and a film crew.
21:00: “Nicht verRecken” by Martin Gressmann / 110 min – to the trailer
Keep running to escape with your life… At the beginning of 1945, wherever the front came close to the concentration camps, prisoners were herded westwards. Prisoners from the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück camps had to march up to 250 kilometers. At the beginning of May, the survivors of the ordeal in Raben Steinfeld near Schwerin, in Ludwigslust, in Plau am See and further north are liberated by the Red Army and the US Army. Over seven decades later, director Martin Gressmann (“Das Gelände”) follows the main routes of the death marches through Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where 200 memorial plaques now stand. In his film “Nicht verRecken”, he lets the last, now very old witnesses have their say. Some of them talk about it for the first time. They remember a horror that will not go away. How far back do you have to look to understand how strongly the past is linked to the present?
Sonntag 27.04.2025
14:00 Boat trip via Spreehafen, Reiherstieg, Lagerhaus G, Rothenburgsort, Tiefstack and Bille (IDU) 
Registrations to initiative-dessauer-ufer@riseup.net (15-20€ per ticket, according to self-assessment) – trip is fully booked!
18:00 “The children from Bullenhuser Damm” by Karl Siebig / 75 min // with guests
Karl Siebig’s film deals with one of the most terrible Nazi crimes committed in Hamburg during the dictatorship. On April 20, 1945, shortly before the liberation of the city, 20 children were hanged and killed in the school on Bullenhuser Damm, which had been converted into a satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. A senior SS doctor had carried out medical experiments with tuberculosis pathogens on the children. Driven by the fear that the Allies might discover these deeds, the young children were murdered on orders. Two prisoner nurses, two prisoner doctors and 24 Soviet prisoners of war were executed with them. The film uses documents and eyewitness accounts to reconstruct the tragic events. The film was made at a time when the first memorial was being set up in the school on Bullenhuser Damm, but also when neo-Nazis carried out a bomb attack on the site and the failures of the legal process became apparent. Siebig’s film is a journey through time in more ways than one.
20:00 “Hammerbrook Blues” by Louis Fried / 65 min // with guests – to the trailer
An essayistic search for traces in Hamburg-Hammerbrook. The filmmaker’s family used to live here until the densely populated working-class district was almost completely destroyed by air raids during the Second World War. Traces are still inscribed in the cityscape today – both visible and invisible. Hidden between the memorial and the reconstruction is a history that has turned the entire district into a huge cemetery. The area on the eastern edge of the city center has always been part of urban planning strategies. After the war, the area was declared a commercial zone, and today new apartments are to be built there. A new studio space led Louis Fried to Hammerbrook. With quiet pictures, chance encounters and subtle observations, he reflects on his family history, the past and future of Hammerbrook and the life that takes place in the almost unreal setting between canals, industry and exit roads.