Das Deutsche Volk

On 19 February 2020, a racist attack sent shockwaves through the German city of Hanau. A gunman shot and killed nine young people with migrant backgrounds at multiple locations. Polish-German director Marcin Wierzchowski traveled there immediately. After making one short and one mid-length documentary on this subject (Das Attentat von Hanau and Eine Nacht und ihre Folgen, both in 2021), he has now completed this two-hour film.

In the years following the attack, Wierzchowski documented efforts by the victims’ families to get answers from the authorities. Why was the emergency call center unreachable? Why was the café’s emergency exit locked? And why was someone who had published a far-right manifesto allowed to legally own a firearm?

Links are made between signs of systemic incompetence and institutional racism. But rather than turning their backs on society, the victims’ relatives redouble their efforts to be recognized as belonging to “the German people.” When the authorities fail to act, they themselves organize a reconstruction of events. They also continue to fight for a memorial—not in some out-of-the-way location, as the authorities propose, but right in the heart of Hanau.