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.

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.

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.

Why this film document about a street in East Berlin is the way it is, why it conveys an almost touching, basically unformed honesty and perplexity, is due to the specific institution it was made for. The State Film Documentation was founded to provide the GDR with uncensored testimonies of its own reality. Three long-time residents look, through notoriously draughty windows, at the notoriously chilly German-Jewish history: Herr Miegel, former pub owner, Frau Kramp, former cinema employee, Mischket Liebermann, writer and GDR cultural politician. They have been neighbours in their district forever. They will probably remain strangers to each other forever.

On 29 April 1959, Hessian Broadcasting transmitted an alarming survey of the Federal German school system. The first of three parts of the report “Focus on Our Youth” investigates the question of what has stuck in the minds of higher form students about Hitler’s and Ulbricht’s Germanies. Hesse under Polish administration? Hitler sold badges to come to power? At least they are about right concerning the number of murdered Jews – that is, the third who could think of anything to say about this at all. One television critic rightly pointed out that this represented the sum total of all parental table talk. But were these parents watching television on 29 April 1959?

The inauguration of the “National Buchenwald Memorial”, the first national memorial of the GDR, took place in 1958. The monumental site was also meant to demonstrate the state-supporting importance of a selective culture of remembrance, commemorating the communist resistance fighters – and omitting the fact that the graves were mainly filled with Jewish victims. In 1961, DEFA completed this “introductory film”, commissioned by the Buchenwald committee, which talks about Goethe, Schiller, Thälmann, but only very marginally about Jews. Every visitor’s memorial tour started with this until 1975. Its scriptwriter and production manager was the playwright Heiner Müller, a fact that was not known until 2004.

After reunification, immigration made the Israelite Religious Community of Leipzig grow to considerable size, too big for its old rooms. The Ariowitsch House, built in the 1920s as an Israelite old people’s home, is to become the home of a generously dimensioned cultural and community centre – and at the same time commemorate the residents of the home who were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. But the start of the development is delayed: neighbouring land owners file a lawsuit. Miriam Pfeiffer intervenes in the ongoing public debate, asking citizens of the city about their suspicions concerning reasons of the refusal that the competent court may not be aware of.

Silvia Szuprizinski has lived alone with her little daughter for a year now: time to take stock. The young woman talks, her stories commented by Gabriele Hochneder’s pictures of everyday life that tell of efforts. Silvia, leaning against the tiled stove, talks about the failed relationship with the child’s father with detachment, but also with a certain degree of regret. At least her own family are present, all of them at the door in time for the first birthday. Still, Silvia spends her nights alone with herself – and the television. The fact that Hochneder’s film, despite the adversities, does not become a lament is at least partly owing to its sanguine main protagonist.

The project “Germany 09” brought the upper league of German auteur filmmakers together to take stock of the Berlin Republic in individual film contributions. Dominik Graf contributed to this collage of the German image a reflection about post-1945 urban architecture shot on old Super8 stock: provisional, slipshod ensembles of pretty-ugly public buildings, fenced-in urban wasteland, draughty storefronts and uninhabited housing blocks in Munich, Duisburg, Frankfurt am Main, West Berlin, all of them testimonies to an unplanned through traffic for social and migrant milieus. A thorn in the side of the reunited mania for cleaning up, renovating and decorating.

“Won’t make it today, hope you don’t mind.” A casual call, the husband will be late again, not to be expected before eight. He is an officer in the National People’s Army, still young, but with a lot of postings under his belt, always accompanied by his wife. She has resigned herself to her fate, while he flourishes enviably in his profession. Róża Berger-Fiedler spends most of the time by his side, following him in brisk cuts from appointment to appointment. Talking is required and demanded constantly: to representatives of the Soviet armed forces, young recruits, subordinates. Words come easy to him, but not everything runs smoothly.

Workers reconstruct a railway bridge and Eva Fritzsche reconstructs the process behind it – by re-enacting what she couldn’t film, supported by the participants, who re-play themselves. The film sings the praises especially of those whose commitment was held in low esteem: young people who even give up playing football, and women who suddenly find themselves working in the factory. “Women as blacksmiths, what a joke!” a job centre employee sneers. This echoes what Eva Fritzsche herself had to listen to at DEFA: “Women don’t make films!” Yes, she did – and created one of the most impressive testimonies of the years of reconstruction.

Archaeological evidence of medieval Jewish life had barely been discovered during excavation works in Frankfurt am Main when it was to be “built over” again. The civil protest in 1987 spread to the whole of the Federal Republic – and called Peter Nestler to the scene. His film undertakes what the Frankfurt authorities wanted to avoid: a thorough securing and contextualization of the findings. He not “only” places the discovered remains of the Jewish ghetto in the context of urban and German history, but also lays bare the contemporary Federal German insensitivity regarding cultural history and commemorative politics, displaying it as if in a museum cabinet.

Kollwitzplatz, Prenzlauer Berg: Children are playing and climbing all over the monument to Käthe Kollwitz, frowning adults are watching them. What would Gustav Seitz, the creator of the sculpture, say? Christa Mühl has asked him but reveals his answer only when the adults have finally disappeared. Until then, she constructs explosive matter as light as a feather, set to Belgian cembalo jazz and with the perky montage style that characterises her early documentary work. After Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler himself had the most controversial scene cut, the film could be broadcast on television and triggered a lively discussion about the practical value of art.

“If you want to storm, you use stormer methods”, to quote a direct reference to the infamous anti-Semitic smear sheet of the Nazi era. Set to shrill trumpet sounds, this outraged film pamphlet dissects, or so it seems, the drastic jargon of the “West German monopoly press”, especially the publications of the Springer publishing house, in their coverage of the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. At the same time, it uses the reviled style for its own argumentation. Under the auspices of the DEFA newsreel editors of “Der Augenzeuge” (The Eyewitness), a sweeping blow against the Bonn Republic arises from news images and superimposed newspaper articles.

The core of this most personal of the Thorndikes’ projects are Annelie’s diary entries: Her story is to be the starting point for a kind of all-German ‘Heimatfilm’ that praises the utopian power of the GDR and sharply condemns Federal German wrongs, but finds transcendent beauty on both sides of the wall. Over the course of production, however, the visionary dimension of the project was progressively trimmed down, though it’s still tangible everywhere in the compromised final version: The intensity of its pathos is both oppressive and enchanting; some historical simplifications and ideological twists and bends may be hair-raising, but they still achieve the desired effect.

“Imminent danger, fear, catastrophe,“ the Austrian-Jewish composer Arnold Schönberg wrote on top of his film score in 1930, to which – except in this collage, swaying like a battered boxer between austere reading document, black film abysses and roaring tempests of images – no film was ever made. Schönberg’s letters articulate the forebodings of the disaster the National Socialists were to bring upon the Jews, describe anti-Semitism that was becoming systematic, marginalization and defamation. Inserted in between, as a look back and forward at historical continuities: bombers approaching Vietnam, the shot Paris Communards in coffins arranged like letter cases.