Looking for the right mix of personal and artistic freedom and the necessary degree of professional and financial security, I've ended up in that year at the Stuttgarter Zeitung. In a job that allows me to dispose of most of my free time and stories to address the appeal to me because they focus their gaze on people that deserve encouragement erksamkeit. The encounter with the Greek social workers Jorgos Louizos took me a few weeks ago to the movies - at a special performance of the remarkable documentary A Song for Argyris the Swiss Stefan Haupt in 2006 - a film that definitely deserves attention.
I remember a time 15 years ago, I was tired of the topic. She repeatedly told the same story again and again they warned. And as bad as this story was that had dated back 50 years and over, and was filmed by Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List so painfully insistent, so I tired of hearing it. It would not in my head, what I, what my generation had to do with what our grandfathers had done wrong. Draw a line debates that time there was already abound. Today I am on the other side of the person who argues. The witnesses are dying out slowly. The more urgent it is to get the memory up.
Stefan main focuses in A Song for Argyris the history of Argyris Sfountouris (see photos above), as not yet four years old on 10 July 1944 (four days after the Allied landing in Normandy) was a massacre by SS thugs on the Greek agricultural village Distomo experienced and survived, in contrast to dozens of his relatives and his parents. His sisters and he survived this cowardly war crimes because one of the Germans, who attacked their village, Small threw stones at them to scare them away before they discovered his comrades. Imagine the consequence of such act before, they imagine change as sometimes split-second decisions made through life. Main shows not only the inexplicable cruelty of the people are capable of, the existential distress and helplessness that causes such an act in the traumatized survivors, he assigns this act and its consequences in the course of time. Argyris, the grieving boy, who bites on pictures then only on his teeth, comes in a nursing home, several years later traveled to Switzerland, arriving in Pestalozzi Children for war orphans. He later studied nuclear physics and astrophysics, will later aid workers in Somalia, Indonesia, Nepal, always with the moral imperative of his father and with himself. From the boy who learned early in a grief that can not be put into words, a man who imprints his mark on the world. But the time of his life pursuing the question of how one has to deal with such a history.
Can you handle such an injury? Should we replace it? His sister, the documentary also has found the way out of their grief before. "Your mind has stopped," it says - on that day when the Germans came and killed them, did things which are inexplicable, you listen to but in order to visualize yourself how people can be. Perhaps to draw conclusions for themselves their own small, to find their own little moral imperative of dealing with people and for individual social responsibility. When the Germans came to Athens, they went to the Acropolis, in order to study the history and culture of the Hellenes. On the way back they broke starving children with a piece of bread in his hand the arm.
But not the individual episodes for Argyris are subject of the film, but also global. The fact that the colonel in 1967 their cruel right-wing military dictatorship in Greece could obtain only reason, because all socialist groups in the West fear of communism criminalized. Or Willy Brands knees fall of Warsaw in December 1970, an admission of guilt of a new generation that changed the view of the Germans. Also the beginning after the reunification fight for compensation from the survivors of Distomo against the Federal Republic, which is not decided at the highest legal level at the European Court of Human Rights - and which was initiated by Argyris Sfountouris. All these elements make A song for Argyris to the virtually exciting history lesson as to a sustainable Filmerlebenis disturbing - a document against forgetting.
