After Shoah

Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, which was first screened in 1985, can be seen as a “decisive turning point in the film history of Shoah representation”. Following Gertrud Koch's assessment, documentary film history can be divided into a period before and after Lanzmann's influential work. Discussions of the representability or non-representability of mass murder, the use or non-use of historical footage, the function of eyewitnesses and contemporary witnesses, the lack of traces or legibility of places of the crime - hardly any question about the conditions and possibilities of a cinematic remembrance of the Shoah remains untouched by Lanzmann's film.

The series After Shoah brings together films that were made with an awareness of the aesthetic, ethical and political positions of remembrance that Claude Lanzmann and his film stand for. They do not follow their ideas without contradiction. Some films even seem to have explicitly opted for other forms of representation. What they have in common, however, is a reflexive moment that draws on modern forms of representation and narration. Pictorial illustrations become pictorial interrogations that research the contexts in which they were created, present different readings, invite re-readings. Instead of omniscient commentators, we hear the voices of contemporary witnesses whose memory has reached its limits, of those born later in whom traumas are passed on, of experts who are aware of the gaps in their research. These are “preliminary films” that result from investigations and document a state of knowledge that will be revised by further research and films.

The retrospective After Shoah, curated by Stephan Ahrens, Chris Wahl and Lea Wohl von Haselberg, which accompanies the exhibition On Displaying Violence: First Exhibitions on the Nazi Occupation in Europe, 1945-1948, is a cooperation between the Zeughauskino, the documentation center German Occupation of Europe in the Second World War and the DFG long-term project Images with Consequences – An Archaeology of Iconic Film Footage from the Nazi Era.