Nothing is left of the Lithuanian village of Ablinga. Destroyed by Wehrmacht soldiers in 1941, a forest of sculptures was erected in 1972 to commemorate those who once lived here. Larger than life, the carved wooden monuments rise to the sky. In national poet Justinas Marcinkevičius’s poem they wake up again, share some last secrets and become connecting links on a timeline that knows violence and dreams of peace. Dagnija Osite-Krüger’s montage is bold, playful and sometimes brutal, her concern credible and strong. Within a few minutes, “Ablinga” puts a spell on us, becoming a monument to German guilt and the memory of the murdered ones.

Words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish float through this film: “Tell me. Perhaps I will remember my home whose perfume is only on my lips.” A 17-year-old Palestinian introduces herself: Aida, the returning one. When her father was killed in battle, her mother was already dead, killed by a bomb. When she was eight, she was sent to a PLO orphanage in Beirut, then to an orphanage in Damascus, then to an orphanage in Tunis. Here she takes care of new orphans. The portrait of a girl expands: countless children who will forget their homeland and origin. There is nothing but war left in their drawings. The PLO had assigned its collaborator Marwan Salamah to study cinematography at Babelsberg. Here, he is also the director. In 1985, “Aida” won the Prize of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Leipzig.

Heynowski’s biographical research in the guise of an exposé film was part of a campaign coordinated by SED functionary Albert Norden to unmask the FRG as a fascist state. Documents and commentaries trace the career of Adenauer’s Chief of Staff of the Chancellery, Hans Globke, who had collaborated in the systematic marking and racist declassification of Jews as a Nazi administrative lawyer and Eichmann confidant. The facts had been on the table for some time, but acquired new propaganda value in view of the impending Eichmann trial. In 1961, “Operation J” was awarded a main prize at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week.

It was only long after the end of the GDR that the Leipzig audiences had an opportunity to get to know the work of John Smith, the British master of the trenchant, short artist film that continues to expand enormously in the mind. The ideas of conceptual art and structural minimalism prevalent in the 1970s have influenced his works, which he sees as documentary films according to John Grierson’s definition, as “creative treatment of actuality.” In his view of the world details are highlighted which then cease to be taken for granted. In “Associations”, he recites a text by the linguist Herbert H. Clark. Words conjure up matching images, but mean something different. An experience that could also be had in the “actually existing socialism” of the GDR.

Anyone interned in the Nazi Jewish transit and collection camp Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands faced death: The trains left to Auschwitz from here, to Sobibór. In 1944, the camp commander ordered the prisoner and cameraman Rudolf Breslauer, who was murdered shortly afterwards, to film the camp, presumably as visual evidence of his own “work performance”. Harun Farocki, West German doyen of essayistic image criticism, used the surviving silent material to compose an equally silent sequence analysis commented only in title cards. It is surgery on the hidden narrative, not open heart surgery.

The history of communism as the story of its crises: The two authors Ralph Giordano and Hans-Ulrich Barth take up various uprisings and protests to demonstrate the discrepancy between the claim to power and the reality in “socialist imperialism.” A more nuanced light is shed on individual uprisings, while at the same time feeding into stereotypical Cold War images of the enemy.