This year, the Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg faced particular challenges. On the one hand, the organizers had to ask themselves how to deal with the terrorist attack of October 7th. On the other hand, the cultural days are taking place in the midst of a new global wave of anti-Semitism. We met program director Lea Wohl von Haselberg in a café in Berlin and talked about the torn cultural scene.

WELT: Ms. von Haselberg, the festival begins and ends with a comedy. Did you intend this humorous parenthesis?

Lea Wohl von Haselberg: It wasn’t intentional. But in general we want to show that you can celebrate in these politically difficult times. With our program we are countering this politically, namely a desire for complexity and polyphony. And for art that is not a confession, but simply offers something different in this time of camp formation and open letters.

WELT: What defines a Jewish film for you?

Wohl von Haselberg: A Jewish film is a film that tells of Jewish experience and history.

WELT: WELT columnist Henryk M. Broder said: someone who is not boring.

Wohl von Haselberg: I ​​wish. There are also very boring films about Jewish life, but we don’t show them. Our program not only shows Jewish experiences in all their diversity, but also films in their entire range, from essay films to genre films and auteur films to blockbusters.

WELT: How has the planning changed after October 7?

Wohl von Haselberg: The planning has changed because we are operating in this political resonance space. We are still trying to defend two things: Firstly, we are not the Israeli film festival, but the Jewish one. Secondly, we do cultural programming, not politics. We open up a space for discourse about art, and our films are more complex and more tolerant of ambiguity than our political debate today.

WELT: In any case, dealing with terror is one of the main focuses of the festival.

Wohl von Haselberg: Yes, one of our main series is called “Confronting Fear”. That was also a reaction to October 7th. Our program planning only really starts in the fall. Back then, I didn’t think the war would last so long and that so many hostages would not be freed yet. It’s about how cinema and film can deal with terrorism and how civil society can overcome the fear that terrorism targets.

WELT: You also show films that deal with the Nova Festival that was attacked by Hamas. How do you deal with the terrorists’ film material?

Wohl von Haselberg: We have two major sources of images from October 7. Firstly, the videos of the perpetrators and the cell phone footage of the survivors and the victims. We are actually in a total flood of images and are also confronted with fake images. Ethically, the difficult question is how to deal with this. Art has the power to sort and organize these images because it works associatively. We are showing a film about the Nova Festival, and it mainly uses images of the victims. When it comes to material from the perpetrators, you have to ask yourself to what extent the images have an ideological signature and how you can deconstruct them. But the film does not use images of the perpetrators and we do not show them at our film festival.

WELT: The second focus series is also highly topical: “Anti-Zionism in Socialism”.

Wohl von Haselberg: Yes, but the idea came about before things developed like this. Last year we showed a film called “March 68” that dealt with the anti-Semitic wave in Poland in 1968 and the Jewish emigration that followed. Hardly anyone knows anything about it. The series has of course gained incredible relevance because we are in the middle of an anti-Zionist discourse. Politics has caught up with us in a way.

WELT: You teach at the Babelsberg Film University. How have you experienced the last few months at the university? Have you also seen pro-Palestinian protests?

Wohl von Haselberg: We have done very well in Babelsberg to start a conversation with our students and to keep it going. I cannot presume to say why we have succeeded in doing this and others less so. The situation at the universities has brought to light many things that frighten me. Both political positions among the students, but also a form of very authoritarian reaction to them.

I think a more differentiated view is missing. At the Humboldt University in Berlin, we are talking about 150 people out of around 36,000 students. You can get the feeling that the students are all pro-Palestinian radicals. But they are rather small, heterogeneous groups. However, that should not be an excuse for anti-Semitism. We definitely need to address anti-Semitism more intensively at universities. We are currently setting up a position for this in Babelsberg. Nevertheless, I think that the universities are being judged very harshly at the moment and perhaps we should put this into perspective again.

WELT: On the other hand, you also have to ask yourself how great the will is to engage critically with these protesters when, for example, the dean of the Technical University of Berlin likes anti-Semitic posts. What went wrong structurally beforehand?

Wohl von Haselberg: There are definitely many failures that I am shocked by. The only question is, how can we address them? We must ensure that we remain in dialogue with all democrats, especially now. This dialogue must remain critical, and the ability to criticize is always evident when it involves self-criticism. I see the national sport of looking for anti-Semitism in others in Germany again. The conservative or right-wing conservative camp looks to the universities, the left-wing spectrum looks to the AfD. But anti-Semitism is a problem for society as a whole. It would help if everyone at least questioned themselves and their own environment.

If we assume that the TU President, Ms Rauch, is not a right-wing extremist and not an open anti-Semite, I believe that we need to look at how we can start a conversation. Instead of simply calling for resignations in an authoritarian manner and throwing everyone who does something wrong out of the dialogue. Demanding this does not take seriously the fact that anti-Semitism is a cross-cutting issue in society that we cannot tackle in this way. Demanding this is not trivialization, but a call for constructiveness and prudence.

WELT: In your experience, how are Jewish students doing?

Wohl von Haselberg: The situation is very difficult for Jewish and especially Israeli exchange students who happened to be in Germany this winter semester. It is hard for them to endure the sometimes very unevenly distributed empathy. The alienation from the other students is immense, or at least that is what I hear.

WELT: You research and teach on audiovisual culture of remembrance. A paper recently emerged from the office of Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth, who is the patron of the Jewish Film Festival, calling for Germany’s colonial past and Germany as a country of immigration to be included in German culture of remembrance. There was strong opposition to this, saying that this would weaken the memory of the Holocaust. What went through your mind when you heard this news?

Wohl von Haselberg: I ​​think the debate here is similarly charged. I don’t think that the issues should be played off against each other to this extent. I do believe that the culture of remembrance needs to be more pluralistic, because our society is too. I also see the need for us in Germany to deal more with colonialism. But we shouldn’t pretend that there are no relevant projects. There are already a lot in this area. The large memorial sites that signed an open letter against Claudia Roth are also working on the topic of entangled history and are showing exhibitions.

At the same time, the emphasis on the Shoah must be one that we as a society should think about politically and not in terms of identity politics. Remembrance is important not because everyone in Germany is a descendant of the perpetrators – this perspective is still rather unpopular today – but because we as a democratic society have chosen to do so. We have to be careful here, because the desire to draw a line under the past has always been there, comes in very different guises and is now strong again. We must not give in to it.

WELT: Do we perhaps need to counteract it more actively? What do you think of the CDU’s push for an anti-discrimination clause?

Wohl von Haselberg: Signing declarations of commitment does not change attitudes. At the same time, it is true that reality can change if the right legal framework is created. We need to focus more on education and give people more know-how; that is the most important step. At the same time, of course, many cultural institutions say they want to find solutions themselves. I know many colleagues in the cultural sector and I see that some are making an effort and have started down this path, but of course not all of them – there is no point in kidding ourselves about that – and sometimes they are perhaps just fig leaves in response to political pressure.

We are seeing that there is also a silent boycott. There is never just the loud boycott that goes along with an open letter. You can’t put your finger on it because you can always say that it was an artistic decision that we didn’t include this or that film. That is a task for science. Then you can look back and say: Yes, after October 7, Israeli films gradually disappeared from film festivals, for example, and I am sure that this will be reflected in numbers, but we don’t have them yet.

WELT: A currently very prominent and celebrated Jewish series is “The Doubters” by David Hadda. It is about a Jewish family in Frankfurt and the aftermath of the Shoah in the generations up to the present day.

Wohl von Haselberg: Yes, I am pleased that the series has received such a positive response and is being watched so much. A major theme of cultures of remembrance is that history is not over, but continues to have an impact in the present. “The Doubters” shows this very well. The history of the Shoah can still be very present in Jewish families today. And David Hadda has already been a guest at the Jewish Film Festival and will be there again this year as a guest on a panel, which is of course also wonderful.

The Jewish Film Festival Berlin Brandenburg takes place from 18 to 23 June.