Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is almost 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.
“From my childhood I have lived in peace for 80 years,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of the Second World War. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the effort has rarely been higher.
“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans again realize that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom in our own hands.”
In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace ‘defined my life’ because the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who didn’t died there, said Wenders. “I had the privilege of being one of the first generation of Germans who lived in peace for 80 years,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”
Europe and Germany have been crammed with various efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including gloomy Memorial Events in Concentration Camps Like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political will of the man behind award -winning films, including “Paris, Texas”, “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend”.
The new film is less than five minutes and called “The Keys To Freedom”, a moody, meditative visit to a little -known place where history was made: a small school in Reims, France, where at 2:41 am on May 7, 1945, the German army signed are unconditional surrender For Allied commanders. The school, now the Lycée Franklin Roosevelt, then housed the head office of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander, Europe.
Today there is a small museum in the school called The surrender of the surrenderIncluding the map of the map of the top floor where the commanders worked and the capitulation was signed.
When Eisenhower and his team left the school, they handed the keys to the authorities of the city and are now displayed in a small display case in the museum. “The supreme commander gives the keys to the mayor of Reims and says:” These are the keys to the freedom of the world, “says Wenders in the film.” I was very touched by the sight of these keys, although they are now just keys in a small museum. “
Wenders wanders through the museum, looks at other exhibitions and chat with current students. The surrender is recaptured by archive images of the events of the day and a modern reconstruction, with actors.
The Soviets insisted that the German high command repeated its surrender in Berlin, which they had conquered. That event took place on the following evening, May 8, which is generally recognized as the moment that the war in Europe is officially ended. For years, under the Soviet occupation, the building where the agreement was ratified was known as the Museum of the unconditional surrender of fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945, but after the German reunification it was renamed Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.
“The idea was to go where the real work was negotiated and signed, not only ratified, like what was repeated on 8 May in Karlshorst – but the real McCoy,” said Wenders. “A place in France to which I owed that freedom in which my life took place.”
Wenders, who was born in August 1945, became a key figure in what was known as the “new German cinema” movement of the sixties and 70s, an influential art house revolution by the post -war generation. In recent years he has turned to documentaries, which are less complicated to finance and nowadays be enlightened green, he said. He tells ‘the keys to freedom’ in three languages, German, English and French, and said that he considered it a political film that returned to his earliest work that German protests against the war in Vietnam documented.
The film was fueled by an idea from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Since the full invasion of Russia in Ukraine and the re -election of Europe-Sepeptic President TrumpIt has seen more frank in his public messages, especially about German values and the dedication of the country to European security, said Peter Ptassek, a senior diplomat responsible for strategic communication.
The Ministry approached Wenders, who agreed to work for free, just like the majority of his team. The ministry provided “less than 100,000 euros” (around $ 113,000) for the project, to help pay for technical staff and production, Ptassek said.
“With the war in Ukraine and what is happening in the US now, we realized that we had to raise our voice and explain ourselves,” said Ptassek. “If you don’t explain what you are doing, you lose confidence.”
“The ‘keys to freedom’ is a symbol that fits so well,” he added. “Eighty years of American protection no longer seem reliable. We have to take these keys and take care of our responsibility.”
Wenders hopes that the film will speak to young people, but he has doubts. Even the French students in the school in Reims consider the war as ancient history, he said. “They are the third generation that lives in this peace, and that’s why they consider it a matter of course,” he said. “So it makes it easy to believe that this is eternal.”
The shoot in Reims “made me aware of how precious freedom can be,” said Wenders. “Also in my life I had taken it for granted, and seeing that little war room made me realize how fragile it really is.”
In conversation with the students, he said, “let me realize that it is a good job, politics in Europe at the moment, to let people even take the word freedom seriously. Even the word does not mean much because they know nothing else. So I really wanted to keep the film open at the end,” he said, to present the idea that “we should be aware of the fact that uncle no longer does, and we have to do, and we have no longer doing, and we have” “” “” “” “
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