Seminar Series

Paul Leworthy
Screening and Intervening: Documenting and Doing Memory Work in Das deutsche Volk

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.

Sport in the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos defies the modern imagination. Relying on long-forgotten memoirs and testimonies, Football under the Swastika reveals the surprisingly powerful role that the most popular wartime sport of football played during World War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, captives played football behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. To these prisoners, the ‘beautiful game’ was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen.  Drawing upon survivor accounts and captivating photos and archival film of these heroic individuals, Dr Kevin Simpson (USA) shares his research on wartime football tinged moral ambiguity and offers a reminder why sport matters as a deeply meaningful form of shared human expression.

Dr Kevin Simpson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas (USA). He is the author of two books on football during the Nazi era and in 2019, Kevin was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Slovak Republic. He has been a research fellow three times at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and has served as a teaching fellow at Yad Vashem (Israel). Dr Simpson shared the Julius Hirsch Honorary Prize for 2021, an award recognizing efforts to combat antisemitism, racism and exclusion in modern European football. Awarded by the DFB— the German National Football Association—the Hirsch Prize recognized the installation of a memorial plaque honoring the forced Jewish laborers who built the football stadium currently being used the Slovak professional football club, MŠK Žilina.  Dr Simpson is also a former college soccer player and a current coach at his alma mater, JBU.