A Place in Berlin

The Marx-Engels-Forum, a ambitious, monumental project of Communist East Germany, occupies a central spot in historic Berlin like an enormous fossil of the past.

Jürgen Böttcher’s experimental documentary transforms footage he shot of the creation of this monument in the 1980s into new material. He tells a story about history and art in Berlin’s center and the loss of a monument’s meaning. (88 mins., 35mm)

Barton Byg, who introduces the film, is a professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and founding director of the DEFA Film Library, a collection of films from the former East Germany at UMAss Amherst. He is the author of Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1995).

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Film Studies Program.