A documentary by Susanne and Peter Scheiner, 2011-2025 Duration: 6.5 minutes, language: German (subtitles: English)
Content
After death, a person loses control over their estate if no testamentary provisions were made during their lifetime. What remains is the interpretive authority of the living. Not infrequently, the deceased are instrumentalized to soothe the consciences of those left behind and to serve their own needs.
One example that has stayed with me is the death of Holocaust survivor Gabor Hirsch. I found the unctuous, and at times hypocritical, obituaries and commentaries particularly disturbing—such as the article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung entitled “With Gabor Hirsch, a Witness of the Shoah Has Died” (26 August 2020). In the film "The End of Remembrance?" (41:26 - 42:00, ) Gabor Hirsch says:
“We received practically no support; we were more or less silenced.”
This statement was largely ignored. No one asked why a Holocaust survivor in Switzerland—seventy years after the end of the war—felt this way. No one dared, even on the occasion of his death or at his funeral, to take up the thoughts that had preoccupied him for decades.
The film A doer addresses the theme of contemporary remembrance culture. Through spontaneously recorded film sequences of a married couple, it portrays an attempt to pre-empt posthumous instrumentalization: through the conscious design of the funeral service, the selection of music, and the determination of both the structure of the ceremony and the circle of participants. It is an attempt to retain self-determination—and to leave as little as possible to the living.
Ironically, the protagonists outlive the CD players on which they defined their musical legacy. Should their descendants one day wish to fulfil this will, they will likely have to search for a suitable playback device on eBay.
Festivals