Schweigen

It is above all the brutality resulting from this silence that Birgit Weyhe focuses on. The silence of the perpetrators after the Nazi era, the silence of the victims – and the silence of all those who continued to benefit from Nazi networks for decades after the Second World War. Birgit Weyhe traces how the German government and the Foreign Office remained silent and failed to stand up for the Germans abducted by the Argentine military junta – because it seemed economically expedient. One of the two victims portrayed was, of all people, a Jewish woman whose parents had fled to Argentina to escape the Nazis. The powerful metaphors, a hallmark of Birgit Weyhe’s work, bring the characters’ life stories to life. She depicts people who gradually take shape only to vanish beneath black areas. Areas that are scratched away, revealing, like grazes, the unbearable. With “Schweigen”, Birgit Weyhe powerfully sheds light on a dark chapter in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, one that should no longer be kept silent.