Berlin Lost. Searching for Traces of a Jewish Berlin

11.10.2023 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Daniel Eisenberg, Richard Kostelanetz

Introduction: Lea Wohl von Haselberg, researcher at Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and curator at Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg

Ein Verlorenes Berlin (A Berlin Lost)(1983, 21 min., English version)
by Richard Kostelanetz and Martin Koerber

“In 1983, Martin Koerber and I began a film about pre-WWII Berlin as reflected in the great Jewish cemetery there. Our theme is that of the Weissensee Friedhof, as it is commonly called (…). So on the visual track we show the cemetery now, in all its grandeur, with tall trees that are unusual for Berlin (where so much other foliage was bombed through WWII). For the soundtrack we recorded former Berliners talking about the cemetery and its significance.” – Richard Kostelanetz in: Testimonies from A Berlin Lost, self-published, date unknown, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program archive

Cooperation of Parts (1987, 40 min. OV)
by Daniel Eisenberg

Daniel Eisenberg’s Cooperation of Parts (1987) was made in 1983 while traveling by train from Calais, France to Radom, Poland. Depicted are monuments and everyday scenes in cities such as Paris, Munich, Berlin, and Warsaw, as well as the concentration camps of Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Cooperation of Parts is a contemporary examination of the Shoah incorporating the vestiges of history in landscapes and cities.

“The fragment contains within it an implied reference to something that was once whole. It suggests damage and violence, time and distance. These qualities I found were integral to my own constitution, and it was with the making of Cooperation of Parts that this became clear. (…)
The questions about identity, of the possibility of annihilation and survival, of the ruptures of daily life, of dislocations across continents—these are not merely Jewish questions. They have come to represent the paradigm problems of this century, and can be applied to conditions surrounding many peoples all over the world. That my own existence was made possible by the annihilation of so many (in the chance meeting of my parents in Dachau after the war) is an irony that does not go unnoticed in my everyday thoughts. I myself can be considered a fragment, reflecting a history that was once continuous and intact. (…)“ —Daniel Eisenberg, 1988

The screening is part of the collaborative project If the Berlin Wind Blows My Flag. Art and Internationalism before the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

Admission free

daadgalerie, Oranienstr. 161, 10969 Berlin