20/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The Polish-born, German-raised director explains his take on structural racism as he breaks down his documentary about a hate crime in Hanau

Cineuropa sat down with documentarian Marcin Wierzchowski to discuss his Berlinale Special film Das Deutsche Volk [+see also:
film review
interview: Marcin Wierzchowski
film profile]. The Polish-born, German-raised filmmaker talks about his motifs and how he made a film about a hate crime – a shooting that took place in Hanau on 19 February 2020. He also explains his take on structural racism.

Cineuropa: Why did you want the Hanau shooting to be the subject of your film?
Marcin Wierzchowski: There was a very racist climate in Germany prior to the crime. The right-wing AfD political party was very successful at the time. There had already been several right-wing attacks before that, such as the one in Halle and the murder of the CDU politician Walther Lübcke by a neo-Nazi. When I heard about the shooting on the night, I realised it must have been a right-wing attack. Because where does a right-wing perpetrator go if they want to murder many migrants? Where there are many migrants. Hanau is a city with 100,000 inhabitants, and half of them have migrant roots. I immediately realised I had to go there and make a film.

Your feature is mainly composed of interviews with the families of the boys and a girl who were murdered, as well as the survivors of the Hanau shooting. Emiş Gürbüzone, one of the mothers who lost their children, says, one assumes, to and about the German people: “Why don’t you love us?” It’s a very powerful question.
The whole story of humankind is a story of migration. Men are always travelling, on their way from one place to another. Look at art or music – it’s an amalgam of many different influences and sources, and so is civilisation. And suddenly, there comes a time when people want to build walls or borders. The mother is right in asking: “Why do you hate us? Why don’t you love us?” It’s the only thing that you can ask another person in the end.

How would you answer this question?
Men have something in them that makes them try to build boundaries, and to look at other things that are different, not at what we have in common. But, in fact, we should be looking for things that are the same and appreciate what is different. Because this “difference” is interesting and cool. If everything and everyone were the same, the world would be boring.

Before you show anything else from the investigation into the Hanau attack, we listen to the victims’ families and the survivors’ testimonies. We form a bond with them. Was this the structure you had in mind from the beginning?
At first, I was listening to them a lot, also without the camera rolling. Those who survived and those who lost their loved ones are such interesting people. It can also be seen in the way they find the words to talk about what happened. So, very quickly, I realised that I just needed to capture what they were saying with a camera.

One of the most shocking moments was hearing one of the survivors saying that the paramedics hid behind him when they heard more shots being fired. They basically saw him as a human shield. It was also a moment when I realised that your film would not only be about the Hanau shooting, but would also be a story about structural racism in German society. When was the moment that you noticed that very thing?
To comment on what you said first, I don’t think it’s so scandalous to hide behind someone at a moment like this. Anyone could possibly react in the same way – they’d want to save their own life. The point is that after what happened, nobody said, “Sorry.” Everyone kept saying that everything was alright and that the police did a good job. There was no conversation about that. And I think this is the structural problem. Nobody apologises; nobody gives any information. The families didn’t know for seven days where the bodies of their children were. And then, for weeks, they weren’t told how their children died. How traumatic must that be? And to this day, there is no answer as to why it happened. This is structural racism, when people are made to feel like second-rate citizens. The families were kept in the dark; they all needed to get the information by themselves.

There is this scene where one of the fathers of the victims is in the car, and he says that he doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know why his son was in the car or what happened exactly. I think it wouldn’t have been the case if these victims had had German names. Their families would have been treated differently. Everything they did was for their children. They wanted them to feel like a part of something. People have a basic need to belong to a group – it could be a society or the country they live in. That’s what it’s all about.