Jüdische Metamorphosen

A short film connecting Berlin’s contemporary Hebrew literary scene with the city’s Jewish literary past.

In 2021, I co-created and co-produced the short film Jüdische Metamorphosen with filmmaker Helge Renner and AphorismA Verlag.

The film explores the border between Hebrew and German, between yesterday and today. In recent years, a new Jewish-Hebrew scene has emerged in Berlin, shaped in part by migrants who have come from Israel to Europe, Germany and Berlin for different reasons. This scene adds new facets to the Jewish cultural life already existing in the city.

Jüdische Metamorphosen seeks to bring this contemporary Jewish-Hebrew life into dialogue with the Jewish literary life of Berlin that was destroyed or displaced by the Shoah.

The film brings together the Berlin-based Hebrew poet Ronen Altman Keidar and the Jewish German poet Gertrud Kolmar, a major Berlin writer who was murdered during the Holocaust. Through an imagined dialogue between the two poets, the film connects the literary culture of Jewish Berlin before World War II with the contemporary Hebrew literary scene in Berlin.

The film was created for SPD politician Mechthild Rawert on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

It was conceived as the first realization of a larger artistic project that I was developing at the time, exploring connections between contemporary Hebrew writing in Berlin and the city’s Jewish literary history.

Credits

Direction, camera and editing: Helge Renner
Idea and script: Mati Shemoelof
Production: AphorismA Agentur und Verlag

Featuring: Ronen Altman Keidar

Gertrud Kolmar poem: Der Engel im Walde
Read by: Agnes Winkel

Ronen Altman Keidar poem: Dann schieß doch auf mich
Translated by Gundula Schiffer, from Was es bedeuten soll. Neue hebräische Dichtung in Deutschland, parasitenpresse, 2019, edited by Adrian Kasnitz and Gundula Schiffer.

Portrait of Gertrud Kolmar: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

Café atmosphere: BockelSound, CC BY 3.0