The Fair

In this sober picture of social disorder in Nazi Germany, the body of an Wehrmacht officer who attempted to desert after having been ordered to execute women and children is discovered at the construction site for a fairground carousel in the Eigel fifteen years after his disappearance; panic grips the village’s residents, but his parents and his younger sister know all too well what his fate was… Staudte’s drama is a damning portrait of the sense of safety in denialism in the FRG, a measured and compelling reckoning with the inhumanity of the Nazi years and the collective refusal to fully come to terms with them after the fall of the Third Reich. 35mm print courtesy of the Goethe-Institut.