THE LANDSCAPE WAS BLEAK. THE PEOPLE WERE OPTIMISTIC. THE SCHNAPPS WAS GOOD.

In an age that’s about to throw off everything old, on the backdrop of a Berlin of dug-up streets, in a dilapidated ruin that used to be the legendary “Ganymed”, once more at the bar: the actors Rolf Ludwig, Stefan Lisewski and Ekkehard Schall, Barbara Brecht-Schall, the sculptor Werner Stötzer, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, Jutta Voigt and other in-crowd celebrities of the past. The glitzy life of an avant-garde who, as the “emergency association of work-shy intellectuals”, occasionally bought up all the schnapps at the Konsum shop to prepare for the 17 June revolt.
“Peter Voigt edited and mixed the elements of life, the images and sounds, in a way that makes his memories seem to float in the air. He compressed life to the core that cannot be explained or interpreted. There are people who took third, fourth and fifth paths when there seemed to be only two main streets. Paradise is not what will be but what used to be. Three times Knaup tells the story of the Australian who was locked up in an asylum. He had bought a new boomerang and wanted to throw the old one away.” (Fritz-Jochen Kopka)

---Grit Lemke

Lake Tollense in Mecklenburg, a landscape powdered with snow that looks delicate, Far Eastern. A landscape marked by death: mass suicide, euthanasia, prison camps, German Wehrmacht, SS, weapons testing bases, NPA bunkers. THOSE BODIES OF FÜNFEICHEN … A video collage of local studies texts and elegiac images into which blurred, “taste-less” ones are dropped, of Japanese music and typographic inserts of pre-Christian Greek sepulchral steles, of beauty and horror.

HOW OFTEN HAVE I DIED, BUT NEVER LIKE THIS.

---Grit Lemke

At Bertolt Brecht’s request, a performance of his production of J. M. R. Lenz’s “The Tutor” at the Berliner Ensemble in 1951 was filmed in a static long shot, in single frames and with intervals. The untouched reels were discovered in the Bertolt Brecht Archive in 1992. Voigt reconstructs seven scenes of the performance from the material and intercuts them with director’s notes Brecht had written for a planned “Tutor” model. A “film sketch” (P. V.) with an aura.

---Grit Lemke

Peter Voigt met the singer and actor Ernst Busch at the Berliner Ensemble in 1953 and was to become part of Konrad Wolf’s crew for the latter’s cycle “Busch Sings”. Here he supplements the gaps in this work: Busch’s rebellious character, which was tolerated only when it was directed against the class enemy and which gradually drove the artist into isolation even among his comrades. ERNST BUSCH NOR GALILEI EITHER HAVE EVER KNEELED IN FRONT OF A POPE. Voigt edits reports, diary entries, songs, documents, score sheets on the backdrop of a repeated sequence showing the Pergamon Altar. Fragmentary, elliptic, painful.
“A film of such relentlessness, absolute integrity and factuality and yet great aesthetic beauty can only be made by someone whose love of the subject, Ernst Busch, merges with own experiences. There is no bitterness, but a lot of rage.” (Renate Stinn)

---Grit Lemke

At the age of 16, Dresden-based sculptor Wieland Förster was sentenced to ten years hard labour by a Soviet Military Court for alleged possession of weapons, a sentence which was commuted to seven and a half years. At his request, Peter Voigt and Christian Lehmann join him on a walk through the building – which houses the Technische Universität Dresden today – in which he was detained for months and subjected to nightly interrogations.
“Förster, on the other hand, enters as a solo character, most closely resembling the subject of a traditional documentary film; and yet it’s different, a rhapsodic recital and nothing else, uninterrupted, no landscape, no music, nothing is done to make the character ‘approachable’. The term ‘records’ is executed with a salute, saluting in the sense of a genre.” (P. V.)

---Grit Lemke