Surviving in Demmin

In spring 1945 Demmin, a small town in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, becomes the scene of a terrible tragedy: while the Red Army approaches, hundreds of inhabitants take their own lives. They slit their wrists, poison or shoot themselves; parents kill first their children and then themselves, whole families go into the water weighted down with stones. Until the end of the GDR, the concrete circumstances of the unprecedented mass suicide are kept silent; the exact number of victims of the collective hysteria is still unknown. Today neo-Nazis try to fill the void and abuse it for their own purposes. Every 8 May, the day of the end of the Second World War, a ghostly ritual takes place in Demmin: Neo-Nazis march in silence through the streets of the community where several hundred police forces have taken up positions and try to keep counter-demonstrators off the route. On this tense day, the cracks within German society are deepening to the utmost. With their "funeral march" the right-wing radicals instrumentalize the memory of this terrible tragedy. In his film ÜBER LEBEN IN DEMMIN, director Martin Farkas explores the hidden consequences of the events. Survivors speak for the first time about the terrible, long repressed experiences of their childhood and youth. Farkas explores what traces the trauma and the silence about it have left on those born afterwards - and how deeply they affect our present. The city as he portrays it in this carefully observed, complex and sincere film appears deeply divided. Next to the desire for reconciliation and the will to come to terms with it honestly, there is hatred and hostility. In this exemplary location, the film thus opens up a new view of the Germans' current, still difficult way of dealing with their history.