"A Time of Silence and Darkness" – Film screening and panel discussion

"A Time of Silence and Darkness". Leni Riefenstahl is known to many as a celebrated filmmaker of the Nazi-regime who, throughout her life, denied her complicity as a director of propaganda-movies, her own belief in National Socialism, and who portrayed herself as a victim of the regime in the post-war period. Less well known is her film “Tiefland”, in which Sinti* and Roma* were forced to appear as extras. They were recruited specifically for the film from the Maxglan forced labour camp and, once filming was complete, deported to Auschwitz, where many of them died.
In her documentary “Zeit des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit” (1980), filmmaker Nina Gladitz, commissioned by WDR, took on this story and, for the first time, gave Sinti* and Roma* affected a voice. They recounted the promises Riefenstahl had given them and their subsequent deportation. Riefenstahl took legal action against this documentary. Although she was only successful on a single point in court, WDR kept the film under lock and key for decades, so that it was not accessible to the public – an approach that is difficult to understand and hardly bareable from today’s perspective, and yet is precisely symptomatic of how German society deals with perpetrators and victims of the Nazi regime, with regard to questions of complicity and personal responsibility under a dictatorship.
We would like to make the documentary available to the public and will therefore be screening it on 6 May at 8.15 pm at the Apollo-Cinema in Hanover. Afterwards, we will discuss Riefenstahl’s film ‘Tiefland’, the consequences for those affected and, above all, Nina Gladitz’s documentary and the WDR’s handling of it with three experts.

This event is presented to you by the Cooperation Network against Antigypyism.