At the beginning, seventy years after the big fire in the city, experienced it myself from the village next door, returning there in Nossendorf too. Came back, from the memory of the dead, women and children in the rivers at the end of the war, in Demmin at the end of the world, in the vision from the NIGHT 40 years ago on the still empty square in the center of the city, an attempt to open the market to be restored as a backdrop for 5 summers, 5 years.
The people there find their center again, even if it is for the short time of a film. To experience now how they take it in and respond with a market life again, and songs from before at school or when going to bed or in church, in the Café Zilm, rebuilt for a short time, with films that we brought with us,
also with plans from Berlin and Stuttgart and Munich or Milan to rebuild everything.
A theater from Berlin in the empty space between prefabricated buildings and a church tower that everyone came.
The city of the Hanseatic League in the past and the Uhlans and the Russians then.
Day after day from the diary after returning, noted on the computer and photographed as if filmed, by someone who knows how.
Also how they tell it, now in Berlin, where the mother lived during the nights of the bombs.
In the only surviving house at Regensburger Straße 36.
With survivors in Demmin and their descendants,
and the teacher (97), who everyone knows from the singing lessons,
and with Karl Schlösser, the painter and author of his childhood story from D. also with W. Esch, who knows everything and helped organize it, according to the citizens who gave money to make it happen.
Home song with groaning harmonium.
Collected and assembled as a film
by HJS.
For VB Berlin
