OUR CHILDREN

One protagonist calls himself Schmutz (“Filth”), a skinhead band’s name is Abfall (“Garbage”). Roland Steiner and Anne Richter draw an oppressive-melancholic portrait of a lost generation and a society in its death throes (the GDR has only a few months left to live). The title of the film conveys their resolve to view skinheads and neo-nazis, and likewise punks and goths, not as “fringe groups” but as part of society, as people they want to understand. Interviews are conducted with the parents as well as the children, while the writers Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf place the phenomenon of neo-nazism in its historical-philosophical context.