Three-Minute Quickie Comeptition

 

Topic: German

What were we expecting? Great things, undoubtedly. Insights. Putting clichés into perspective or solidifying them would be neat. Perceptions and surprising outside views, a couple of transcended borders, a bit of humour, the incorporation of the world through friendly pats on the back while everything too friendly is getting a cordial rejection, the re-establishment of the conflict between the North and the South and the incorporation of the East into the thought processes just so that it can be forgotten again right away, and more. In short a multi-perspective avantgarde study to shatter all politics and enlighten the nation with.

 

Eventually we ended up with a comparatively small vintage of approximately 100 films, most of which were made in the Fatherland itself. (Though admittedly there were a bunch of submissions from Swedish adult evening classes as well. But their connection to the subject at hand was rather tenuous, to say the least).

 

These are the things that were sent to us: Anthems, Nazis and Sauerkraut, all staged by disciplined and reliable German craftsmanship.

 

But punctuality, reserved deck chairs, BMWs and Mercedes? Lets give you an insight on what we had been ranting about for years while abroad: ›The famous German angst, zeitgeist, hinterlands and doppelgangers? Come on! These are all wonderful German words, did you not know that? The German language is in fact blah blah blah and although I don’t really consider myself German, you may find that blah blah blah Marx, Adorno.‹ Have all our dear friends from the US, Australia, the UK and elsewhere simply been polite while listening to these rants?

 

Whatever! If there is one thing we have learned it’s that being German seems to be defined by our own obsession with the concept of a German identity. Meanwhile, the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn. And frankly, why should they.

 

All that remains for us to say, and we are being quite serious here (and what else could we be, we are Germans after all), is that we genuinely attempted to give new definitions while being relevant and interesting. And what remained in the end were Adam, Helmut, Siegfried, Hans-Dietrich, Brecht and Goethe. It’s not our fault! We too would have enjoyed to be a woman.

 

Film selection: Achim Heyng, Sabine Horn, Michael Schwarz,

Apollos Suppiah, Swenja Thomsen, Cristina Tudose, Birgit Utz, Jutta Wulf

 

The Audience Award ›Three-Minute-Quickie‹ is funded by the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung and is worth 1,000 euros.