Barbara Wurm: I’m really glad that our conversation has worked out. Let’s start at the beginning: We’re writing one week before the start of the festival and all that is missing are the subtitles. When did this journey, this film, begin for you?
Volker Koepp: In fact, in 2014 while travelling with our previous film IN SARMATIEN, and after the annexation of Crimea and in Chernivitsi and Chișinău a lot could be felt and heard, I already thought: I have to go back. Tanja, who is very present in the film, came back from Siberia after doing research for her PhD. We met by chance in Lviv, and she said to me, ‘Volker, this won’t end well. There will be bloodshed.’ At the time, I reacted with, ‘That’s completely absurd.’ Shortly after 24 February 2022, I showed the film at the Akademie der Künste – a few days after the outbreak of the war. Afterwards, Tanja said to me, ‘You see? I told you so.’ Of course, everyone hoped it would not become a reality. In that sense, I didn’t really want to finish CHRONOS. A year ago, I was almost there. It’s the first time at the end of a film project that there is no real hope. And now I’ve been going to sleep each night for years with these TV images of Ukraine in my head... When we made the film BERLIN-STETTIN, Werner Dütsch, a West German public television producer, said to me, ‘No wonder that you always make films about this topic.’ Back then, I wasn’t aware of it, but in retrospect it makes sense. The film begins in Karlshorst, the neighbourhood in Berlin where I grew up. Half of the district was a restricted Soviet zone, and much of East German history was decided there. Added to this were encounters with Russian people. I never liked how Germans – which they seem barely to recall today – always said mean things about the soldiers in uniform there. The war was always present. As students we would find firebombs where the Tiergarten is today. Even nowadays in Berlin or Oranienburg unexploded bombs are found almost weekly. That’s why I now wonder how long it will take until all the unexploded bombs in Ukraine are found. So it turned into a film about what war has to do with me as well.
Irina Bondas: Ukraine is now the country in the world with the most land mines. Regarding the film’s origins you’ve already mentioned that it came out of IN SARMATIEN, but you also include footage from other films. It’s a region with which you’ve dealt intensely for a long time. When you shot the film just before the Maidan Revolution, many of the changes were perhaps foreseeable in 2013. However, it seems as if you also had a premonition – at least one has the feeling that your years-long involvement with the region is based on knowledge of what is to come. After this deep study of the region, did you see the events a logical consequence?
VK: Of course I would have preferred not to have the premonition which some people are now pointing out to me. But it was really different. When I shot in Wittstock in 1989 and Soviet soldiers were overrunning the market square and later as the army withdrew, we thought the outcome would in fact be good. But then it evaporated. Around 2007, when I was shooting the film with the children, HOLUNDERBLÜTE, in the Kaliningrad region, that is, in what used to be northern East Prussia: In Kaliningrad and every other Soviet-Russian city, when you drove just two kilometres away, everything was awful. I thought: The way they’re handling people in the villages doesn’t bode well. I saw this too when I was in Zehdenick and the Russian-Soviet soldiers had to load the coal for their barracks with their hands. It was a gradual process. In fact, I wanted to connect the places between the Elbe and Oder Rivers, that is, East Germany, where I shot most of my films in the GDR era and later. Again and again, as a student I visited the village to which my mother escaped with my three sisters and I after 45. In East Germany, war was always nearby in these areas, especially since a third, sometimes even two-thirds of the villagers were refugees. The connection between East Germany and eastern Central Europe was always present. In a way, that caught up with me.
I don’t make films about history. There are historical digressions, and I’m happy to explain where I am.
IB: Your biographical and historical connection to East Germany, especially to former East Prussia and the entire region around East and Central Europe is also reflected in the biography and poetry of Johannes Bobrowski, who you draw on heavily in the film. You already dedicated your film WIEDERKEHR to him. Is Bobrowski an attachment figure with whom you identify – also because he saw himself as a foreigner in the region in which he grew up, in which he lived, in which he had roots while still surrounded by other cultures and other languages? Or did you approach his poetry more from outside? What was your filmic approach?
VK: My film GRÜSSE AUS SARMATIEN was also directly dedicated to Johannes Bobrowski. In 1962, I found his first volume of poetry in a bookshop in Dresden. At the time, I was studying at the TU Dresden. I enjoyed reading his poems, and the volume included one called ‘Die Daubas’, that’s a coastal area north of Tilsit, today Sovetsk. I wanted to have a look at it, but at the time we could not reach it. After film school, in 1972, I managed to reach the Lithuanian side of Tilsit for GRÜSSE AUS SARMATIEN – which also appears in CHRONOS – that is, from the Lithuanian Soviet Republic. But the other side belonged to the USSR, and we had to turn around. It took a few decades until I could travel to the other side in 92. Bobrowski was like a tour guide for me and accompanied me often, especially his volume ‘Sarmatische Zeit’ (Sarmatian Time). Only later did I understand the underlying themes: the Germans and Eastern Europe, and the relationship among nationalities in the East, among them always ‘Jewishness’. So he prescribed to me what I had to shoot. I don’t make films about history. There are historical digressions and I am happy to explain where I am. One time I said, ‘I’m going to Kyiv’ and then somebody said to me, ‘Yeah, to Russia.’ The same thing happened in East Germany. So I started up there. In Ptolemy’s description of the earth, ‘Sarmatian’ begins on the Baltic Sea, the ‘Sarmatian Ocean’, and continues to the Black Sea, that is, to Odessa. Then we went to Lemberg via Chernivitsi. We arrived, looked for a hotel, and I thought: If we have Bobrowski up there, then here we have Paul Celan. The next morning, I asked somebody on the main square where the Herrengasse was, because in areas that formerly belonged to Austria, it’s always the most beautiful street. He told me he didn’t know, but the Jewish house was open again and the Jewish people who were still around would always meet there. That’s where I met Mr Zwilling on the first day. And so it continued. Now, when I was in Chernivitsi again, I had a hotel room on the same main square. It appears in the film several times too. At that time in late 2023, there was already an alarm on the first night.
BW: My first encounter with your work was in 1999 with HERR ZWILLING UND FRAU ZUCKERMANN, after I had just travelled through Galizien and met people who I encountered again in your films. Now you’ve done the same in CHRONOS – you meet people again who you encountered in the past or who have accompanied you over the years, but who you also accompanied. And the artful weaving technique which you always succeed interlaces the literary narrative and culture, the historical narrative too – and in this case your own work as well. Can you remember more specifically how you worked, where you purposefully travelled back to?
VK: We began to shoot in 2021, during the pandemic. In early 2020, I was in Kaliningrad one more time, in Königsberg, and it was already very strange, already geared up for war. After that, I could not shoot there anymore. Even in 2017, 2018, when we last shot there, large swaths of the Kaliningrad region were restricted areas. And then it started again, everything was crammed full with military personnel. So we shot in Lithuania. Part of it is no longer in the film, but we visited the people there often. And then came 24 February.
I’ve always said that documentaries work far more strongly with poetic structures than fiction film, often with chance structures.
BW: How did you know which of your films you wanted to look at and how do you choose the parts you quote?
VK: Our first cut was twelve hours long. I’ve always said that documentaries work far more strongly with poetic structures than fiction film, often with chance structures. That you have, if you will, two shots: Each is a line in a poem – a beautiful landscape and a person’s face – and then you add them together, and if you are lucky, it turns into something. I implemented that with the footage. But the focal points shifted increasingly towards Ukraine. And when I looked out the window in Chernivitsi, heard the sirens and began to film the empty square with my smartphone, I noticed that I was already once in a war, in Kabul, where I landed under unusual circumstances in 1984 shortly after the Soviet invasion. We also filmed out the hotel window there, because there was a curfew. Since that film was initially not allowed to be screened, it kind of disappeared, and the footage was only assembled in 1994 or 1995.
BW: Did you watch the films all the way through?
VK: I had begun to edit with a student, and I had to show her what I had already been occupied with. So I watched all the films. I see some again and again when there is a retrospective somewhere. I had not seen others in a long time. But this time I watched everything again. In the process, I noticed things that could be improved too... I wanted to use Afghanistan as an example because sometimes something comes out of it – without it being in your head or in a script. But this attitude, the overall structure of a documentary, is poetic to me.
IB: Building off your poetic way of working and the composition of the whole film: Kabul is the only place which is from another region. Otherwise, the film consists of footage from different times and footage with your protagonists from Sarmatian. I wondered how you chose these protagonists, this footage, and the individual themes. If you perhaps consciously chose certain themes?
VK: For one thing, the selection focused on Ukraine because of the war, and of course on Jewishness. Back in 72 when I was filming Bobrowski’s poems in Vilnius and Kaunas, the massacre of the Jews always played a role in those landscapes. It was of course the same in Bukovina and Galizien. Bobrowski’s work deals with this directly in ‘Kanaus, 1941’ or ‘Bericht’. That’s also why Annette Kahane is a protagonist in the film. In 2008, while working on BERLIN-STETTIN, I had already talked to her about how deep this whole history of the Nazi era was still engrained in the villages between Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pommern, etc. International Holocaust Remembrance Day just happened. I added two title cards to the end of the film regarding the direction we are moving in again. As the film was finished on 2 February 2026, I wrote that it was the 1,440th day since the start of the war of aggression against Ukraine and that anti-Semitic crimes have also reached a peak in Germany over the past year. That was also unimaginable. In Moscow and Poland one occasionally heard stupid jokes about Jews. In 68, I was at a festival in Krakow as a student and met Jerzy Bossak in a bar. He was Jewish. Somebody at the bar said to him, ‘Off to Treblinka with you.’
IB: Your films are very meaningful for people with complex German family histories, for the descendants of the dispossessed, for East Germans – histories which were not talked about in the post-war years, which were made taboo, but also instrumentalised. Not least in GEHEN UND BLEIBEN, you’ve examined this in a very complex way, including the traumas of the dispossessed and the countryside populations under Soviet occupation, without glorifying history. Do you see this film in this context too, as an examination of German history? For you, is this film in fact about Germans?
VK: Yes, I noticed this once again while viewing the film. In GEHEN UND BLEIBEN, I have a conversation from the ‘Jahrestagen’ (Uwe Johnson) about whether or not Soviet tanks would invade Prague. It says, ‘No, they’ll only make manoeuvres.’ Like the manoeuvres in 2014 before the annexation of Crimea. And again a few days before 24 February 22. I wanted to say something about the claims that East Germans really liked it in Russia. There were organised meetings with the Red Army, for school classes or business groups. Otherwise only malicious stuff was said about the ‘big brother.’ Alliances which suddenly exist – these are frightening. A form of forgetting history. That was unimaginable in the 1990s.
BW: Do you see yourself alone in the former ‘East German film landscape’ or do you have the feeling there are still others?
VK: There were not so many people in general in East Germany who worked in documentary in the true sense of the term. In the domain of documentary for cinemas, there were only two, three groups – a handful of directors. Certain friendships came out of that, which have been maintained until the present. Regarding the opening up of this Central European space: I still remember when KALTE HEIMAT was shown in the Forum in 1995 and the first angry question was whether I wanted ‘all of East Prussia back.’ As if the words Memel and Tilsit meant revisionism. And unfortunately it didn’t occur to me to reply, ‘But the first scene is in the house on the Samlandic Baltic Sea coastline with Bluma and Samuel who outlived Hitler and Stalin.’ A scene which I went back to in CHRONOS.
These are also life stories, and when one can accompany people over part of their life, one is very fortunate.
BW: To perhaps bring in the other interviewees: The conversations are incredibly lively, but also profound, and always lead back to the past or to history. Do you know in a way what people are going to say? Do you have expectations when they speak?
VK: I read a poem in the newspaper by Volha Hapeyeva and contacted her through her publisher, because it was important to me and it was somehow fitting, but it was not in fact a reunion. I wanted the poem, and then we met, and afterwards we met many times for filming, and that was by chance. I met Ana-Felicia Scutelincu very early, while looking for an interpreter in Romania. She started studying direction in Berlin and stayed in touch. I met Tanja Kloubert from Chernivitsi there in 2000, already a quarter century ago... Chronos, river of time! These are also life stories, and when you’re fortunate if you can accompany people over part of their life. I was in touch with many of them outside of the project. But it’s the same as in any human relationship: If you maintain contact over a long time, you can’t always film together too. A certain tension needs to be established, otherwise it gets boring.
BW: You already mentioned that you were at the Forum with other films, and we are delighted that you have remained loyal to us and that we are able to show this truly epic film, which feels like a grand conclusion to a chapter in life and, at the same time, a revival of other chapters in life. That’s why I'm going to put aside the question that Irina actually wanted to ask, but which you have already answered in a way in your opening statement, namely the question about hope, about the perspectives and insights that the film has for you personally. And since you said that hope has actually become very slim, I would like to ask you about a possible cinematic outlook: If you would still like to give one, as far as your own future anniversaries are concerned. Whether we can expect another film – and if so, whether you already have any idea what direction it will take.
VK: A sequel. If something nice happens, I can continue the film at any time. Then I would put music at the end again.
BW: It’s now consciously excluded?
VK: Yes. I didn’t want any. And thank you very much, of course I am happy too – even after decades of filmmaking, you are really as happy as a kid when someone writes or calls and says that the film will be shown in the Berlinale Forum.
BW: Great. Then we’re also looking forward like kids to the big moment of the premiere on Sunday afternoon in Delphi.
