Screening and Intervening with Paul Leworthy

Das deutsche Volk (2025) is a stripped-back, black-and-white, observational documentary directed by Marcin Wierzchowski that screens the events and above all the aftermath of the shootings in Hanau, Germany, in 2020, in which a far-right extremist killed nine people from ethnic minority backgrounds. Rather than simply recounting what happened on the night of the attacks, the film follows the victims’ families over four years, focussing on their suffering and their struggles for justice, accountability, and commemoration. The film foregoes voiceover narration, staged interviews and reenactments, refusing to focus any sustained attention on the perpetrator. Instead, the film documents grieving families as well as police failures, political inaction and the contested memory politics surrounding plans for a permanent monument.

In this presentation, I will consider both how Das Deutsche Volk documents memory work and also performs it. By focusing on the victims’ families, the film foregrounds multiple competing forms of personal and public memory, including grief, judicial and institutional memory, and grassroots memory activism. At the same time, this documentary film thematically and formally engages in various forms of cinematic memory work, mobilising interest in adjacent causes and itself serving as a lasting monument to the victims. Intervening in debates about the racist violence perpetrated in Hanau, which it subtly positions within the contemporary context of a lurch to the right in German mainstream politics and the historical context of the Holocaust, the film ultimately asks who belongs to the German people (‘das deutsche Volk’), who is considered worthy of being remembered and whose memory is often excluded from public memory?

Dr Paul Leworthy is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, working on a project entitled ‘Reading Reconstruction: Literary Responses to Rebuilding in Postwar West Germany’. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Edinburgh. The Shape of Memory: Containers, Surfaces and Forms of Remembering in Post-War European Literature, a gold open access monograph derived from his PhD thesis, will appear this year with Peter Lang. An International Fellow of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, he is host of the Connecting Memories Podcast series, founding co-Editor-in-Chief of Memory Studies Review, and Publicity Officer of the AGS.