DAS WIRST DU NIE VERSTEHEN

‘My movie is about three women who belong to what is historically referred to as the generation of perpetrators and victims. With their different life stories, different narrations and memories they all belong to one family, my family.’

Three women formed the upbringing and life of director Anja Salomonowitz. All of them were young girls during the Third Reich. Great Aunt Hanka survived Auschwitz. Her pain and horror at the memory of the camps is so great, that she is incapable of speaking about it. Grandmother Margit is a good catholic. Like most, she belonged to the silent majority and denies any knowledge of the regime’s atrocities.

And then there is the filmmaker’s former nanny Gertrude Rogenhofer. She tells the story of her youth, fighting for her socialist ideals and resisting the system, even if on a small scale. 

Salomonowitz rehearses the theme on a personal and an artistical level, inserting essayistic excursions, and gently stylizing by keeping all clothing and interiors white. At the end she herself appears, thereby acknowledging the impossibility of fulfilling the scope of the film´s theme. She will never understand what it means to have experienced a concentration camp. Nevertheless, this ending is temporary: we must try to describe the indescribable.