Das wirst du nie verstehen / You Will Never Understand This

"My film speaks of three women from a generation which
went down in history as
a generation of culprits and victims. Their different life stories, different
narratives and memories are all a part of one family. My family." (Anja
Salomonowitz)

Hanka doesn't wish to speak about her time in Auschwitz, so
she is not going to, this is the deal: Hanka is Anja Salomonowitz's
great aunt, and one of three elderly protagonists in the film You Will Never
Understand This/Das wirst du nie verstehen, a subversive attempt to tackle
the documentary genre of witnesses of a certain time from a new angle. The
second protagonist is called simply 'Aunt'; during World War Two she was a
babysitter for the director's family, and a convinced socialist, supporting her
uncle in the resistance movement. The third woman is the director's
grandmother, who lived in Graz at the time. "She did what everybody else
was doing: absolutely nothing", the author of the film resumes from her
voice over.

"My best friend says: a film on the role of culprits
and victims, and in your family you have got both", reasons Salomonowitz
just prior to that, adding: "Like many other people, I think to myself: my
grandparents could never be the culprits." This is why she asks questions,
ultimately of herself: how can you make a film based on memories you know will
contradict each other? She decides on some sort of laboratory experiment in
which the leading actor becomes the recollection itself. You Will Never
Understand This is immediately different from what we are used to seeing when
survivors recount their memories of the war: the interiors of apartments are
covered in white, as are the interviewees. This is not a personal environment;
the situation in a comfortable living room is missing: a decision stressing not
only what is spoken, the essence of memory, but also the director's ambivalent
starting point. White blurs around the faces of her family, representing what
could not be revealed even up close, what will not let go from the darkness of
memory. Or what could not be dragged out: the film's title appears at its end.
It is the last sentence spoken by Hanka; her discomfort with the film project
was clear all along. Finally, Hanka announces over the phone that it is impossible
to describe the burden a person is left with once he or she has survived a
concentration camp: "You will never understand this", she says, and
the screen goes completely white. It is the inevitable end which is not
necessarily a failure, and even if it were, it would be a productive one: at
this moment it is long evident that Anja Salomonowitz is not after individual
clarifications, but rather a complex relationship towards reminiscence, towards
testifying itself.
You Will Never Understand This does not fascinate and touch by individual
stories, but as an attempt at reaching a resonance of contradictions between
the 'subjective', personal and everyday of the present moment, also between the
'objective' and historical, by a complex contradiction in the relationship to
the past. The inevitable result of this is dissonance, but it serves to sharpen
the consciousness: the colour white which the director chose to build her film
around serves as means towards enlightenment and not delusion.
Christoph Huber

Directed by: Anja Salomonowitz
Screenplay: Anja Salomonowitz
Photography: Lena Koppe
Editing: Anja Solomonowitz
Sound: Markus Moll
Music: Samir Zeciri
Production: Elke Kratzer
Featuring: Gertrude Rogenhofer, Hanka Jassy, Margit Kohlhauser

Organisation: Kinodvor
In co-operation with: City of Women
With the support of: Sixpack Film