HERE AND NOW at Mu­se­um Lud­wig Günter Peter Straschek

One of the most im­pres­sive doc­u­men­tary films in the his­to­ry of Ger­man tele­vi­sion lan­guished in the archives of the WDR for de­cades: Gün­ter Peter Straschek’s 1975 Filme­mi­gra­tion aus Nazideutsch­land [Film Emi­gra­tion from Nazi Ger­many]. Now it stands at the cen­ter of an ex­hi­bi­tion that si­t­u­ates Straschek’s work in the con­text of the rev­o­lu­tio­nary cin­e­ma of the 1960s and 1970s. This five-hour film of­fers a fo­rum to many of the more than two thou­sand peo­ple from the film in­dus­try forced to flee the Nazis. The ex­hi­bi­tion pre­sents Straschek (1942–2009) as a man un­re­c­on­ciled, a film­mak­er whose in­sis­tent gaze put a will­ful­ly for­got­ten past back on the agen­da.