Scene by scene, a biography is delicately peeled back layer by layer, and German history along with it: National Socialism, GDR, the post-Reunification era. A granddaughter visits her grandfather. The elderly gentleman exercises regularly, has a gym in the house. She explains her project to him – and her film will remain a project in character. It is a permanent probing of how deep, how far she can go with her questions.
He keeps family photos from the Nazi era in a shabby metal box that has obviously not been opened in a long time, including a picture of his older brother in the uniform of the Nazi’s Reich Labour Service. It was not until a few months after the end of the war that great-grandmother took it off the wall, fearing it could be seen by Red Army soldiers. Grandfather revered his brother, who fell on the east front in 1944, admiring his strength and athleticism. He continued this cult of the body in the sports-obsessed GDR. The talks frequently revolve around personal responsibility and moral grey zones, around forgetting and repression. The granddaughter seems to be wondering who she is actually sitting opposite.

Even after more than a century, the poetry of this film is overwhelming. Viking Eggeling, who had already designed so-called scroll paintings with his friend Hans Richter in the 1910s – up to 15-metre-long drawings to be read from left to right showing shapes in transformation –, now takes the logical next step of changing his medium to set the delicate graphic elements in motion.