Bis an den Himmel und noch viel mehr/Up to the Sky and Much Much More

2015 | DCP | 35 min | sound

There was an article in the newspaper that suddenly struck me: someone here in Holland had found gravestones of Russian soldiers from the Second World War. The traces of what was left of the soldiers memory brought the remaining relatives to come and visit their grave-sites. All of them were very grateful and moved. My father does not have a gravestone, and though that was not something I was after, the article awakened what I had decided long ago and it was made clear that I should do that now.

There are not many testimonies of Germans who resisted fascism - my father was one of them and I could tell it. So I dug up what I found of him - photos, letters, drawings, stories..., and recorded it. During the making of the film I felt that step by step I came closer to who he had been and also closer to the love and protection I experienced from him - even if I was too little to remember his presence clearly.

In Poland I was very close to where he had died. There were only empty fields of grain and old broken houses... such an estranged feeling that there were no signs left of the cruel fighting that had happened there. For myself this gap has been filled and I hope for some others too.

-Barbara Meter

barbara meter (c) 2020