Die Kunst des Erinnerns - Simon Wiesenthal (1994)

The Art of Remembrance: Simon Wiesenthal, by Hannah Heer and Werner Schmiedel, is a documentary about a man revered as one of the great Jewish humanitarians of the 20th century. Raul Hilberg and other intellectuals also perceive him as a philosopher, although his primary work for many decades was the investigation of Nazi criminals. In a society which, since the Holocaust, has largely accepted repression of its own history, remembering appears as an art, as an ever-repeating necessary process which permanently borders on social taboo. Thus Simon Wiesenthal, in his capacity as survivor, describes his mission in relation to those murdered as "remembering as a duty"; he gives his life to the service of truth. For "anyone who denies the crimes and genocide of the past is opening up the way for the murders of the future". The filmmakers, Hannah Heer and Werner Schmiedel, were given unprecedented access to this pioneer of the human rights movement, despite his hectic schedule, and spent ten years producing and filming this non-fiction biography. They traveled with Wiesenthal to eight different countries, including Holland, France, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, Israel, and the United States. The film traces Wiesenthal's life from his childhood in Galicia, Eastern Europe, through his ordeals in Nazi concentration camps to his post-war dedication to keeping alive the memory of those who did not survive the genocide. Wiesenthal's colleagues, friends -- and enemies -- offer insights in numerous interviews, interwoven with innovative visual and aural documentary techniques. Accompanying extensive conversations with Wiesenthal himself are interviews with U.S. Colonel Richard R. Seibel, liberator of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York; Raul Hilberg, professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, who was forced by the Nazis to leave Austria in 1939; Paris-based Attorney Sylvie Corrin-Zyss, whose father survived the death camp at Auschwitz; and many others. "While we do not have the opportunity to alter the world in a grand way, we all have plenty of opportunities to contribute towards peace, to speak out against prejudice, racism and against anti-Semitism. Therefore the opening sequence, which is the prologue to our film, shows such an opportunity to speak out and to avoid to be an 'accomplice by silence'." --Hannah Heer