Demminer Gesänge

Home song with groaning harmonium.
Collected and edited as a movie
by HJS.

For the VB Berlin

At the beginning, seventy years after the great fire of the city, experienced by myself from the village next door, also returned there in Nossendorf.
Returned from the memory of the dead, women and children in the rivers at the end of the war,
in Demmin at the end of the world, in the vision from the NIGHT 40 years ago
in the still empty square in the center of the town,
an attempt to restore the market as a backdrop for 5 summers, 5 years.

To help the people there find their center again, even if only for the short time of a film.
To experience now how they take it up and respond with a market life again, and songs,
from school or at bedtime or in church,
in Café Zilm, rebuilt for a short time, with films that we brought with us,
also with plans from Berlin and Stuttgart and Munich or Milan to recreate everything.
A theater from Berlin on the empty square between the prefabricated buildings and the church tower that everyone came to see.
The city of the Hanseatic League in the past and the Uhlans and Russians later.
Day by day from the diary after my return, noted on the computer
and photographed as if filmed, by someone who knows how.
Also how to tell it, now in Berlin, where her mother lived in the nights of the bombs.
In the only surviving house in Regensburger Straße 36.

With
Survivors in Demmin and their descendants,
and the teacher (97), who everyone knows from the singing lessons,
and with Karl Schlösser, the painter and author of his childhood story from D.
also with W. Esch, who knows all this and helped organize it,
the citizens who gave money to make it happen.