Shoah

French intellectual and director Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018) devoted almost twelve years of his life to researching, filming, and editing Shoah. This epic work, with a running time of 566 minutes (9 hours and 44 minutes), is still considered a unique cinematic monument to the systematic murder of European Jews and has become a central reference point in the examination of Nazi mass crimes.

In Shoah, Claude Lanzmann refrains from showing historical footage of the victims and the camps. Instead, he shows the disappearance of traces, the absence, and the difficulties of putting the extermination into words. In cinematic arrangements and stagings of reminiscent speech and historical landscapes, Lanzmann follows the past into the present. In this sense, he never understood Shoah as a documentary film, but rather as an attempt to make the invisible visible.

In Germany, Shoah was first shown at the Berlinale in 1986 and soon afterwards on WDR and NDR television. The film received a mixed reception – Shoah challenged the self-image of the Federal Republic of Germany at the time too much. Internationally, however, the film and its director received numerous awards.

In 2023, Shoah was added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register of the World Documentary Heritage, together with Claude Lanzmann's audio archive.

In cooperation with Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art e.V.