Lothar König is an original. The long-term youth pastor from Jena doesn’t fit into any system. In the GDR he was under state surveillance, after reunification he was one of the most tireless warning voices against the growing right-wing radicalism. To this day, he takes to the barricades against the extreme right, often on the frontline. Nevertheless, this film portrait by his son Tilman is not an homage but a critical tribute to an outspoken character forced by retirement to re-invent himself.

Pastor König is not only regarded as one of the figureheads of the left-wing scene that organises punk concerts, rallies and football tournaments with young refugees. He also has a reputation as a fairly challenging personality. Tilman König shows his father only marginally in his role as a church official. Most of all, he introduces a man who can be courageous and determined, but also stubborn and unfair. His film is enjoyably interested above all in the here and now of this man, the things that Lothar still has to come to terms with. How will he manage the transition to retirement after a restless life between community work and political activism? How can the old rhetorical warhorse hold his own among people who really agree with him but seem to move away from him in thought, speech and action? The border-crosser is entering unknown terrain.

For technical reasons – too massive! – this 50-ton bronze colossus was not demolished in 1993. Today it is listed as a historical monument, along with the associated housing estate. A relic from the old days: Today, the raised fist of the former German Communist Party leader and erstwhile GDR hero Ernst Thälmann in the Prenzlauer Berg park defies the collective forgetting of a not-so-long-ago past instead of heralding the victory of communism.

In 1986, an old municipal gasworks in East Berlin made way for a housing estate – and a monument that was controversial even then. Partly imagined, partly remembered and extensively researched throughout, Betina Kuntzsch assembles a complex narrative as part of her project “Vom Sockel Denken” about the Ernst-Thälmann-Memorial in Berlin: about a place full of history, viewed from ten different perspectives. In her omnibus film she skilfully uses various aesthetic and research tools. The successful combination of own footage, animation, archive material and oral history generates a kind of kaleidoscope, a gem of historiographic documentary-making and a parcours through a whole range of documentary film genres.