Filmmakers express anger
BERLIN: The racist killings of nine people in a German town cast a shadow yesterday over the Berlin Film Festival, where a minute’s silence was held to remember the victims, and stars who will feature in the festival spoke out.
Filmmakers, some from Germany’s minority communities, expressed their shock at the Berlinale, which is seen as the most political of the major film festivals and traditional champion of arthouse movies and progressive causes.
The attacker, who shot dead people in shisha bars in the town of Hanau on Thursday before killing his mother and himself, published a manifesto online strewn with conspiracy theories and racist views, prosecutors said.
The attack, at least five of whose victims were Turkish nationals, followed another by a farRight gunman on an eastern city’s synagogue, where two people were killed.
Burhan Qurbani, director of Berlin Alexanderplatz — a retelling of a German novel of social exclusion from the 1920s that premieres on Thursday — said he feared such attacks could become ‘‘normal’’.
Born in Germany to Afghan refugees, Qurbani retells Alexander Doeblin’s novel with an African refugee as the central character instead of the novel’s freshly released, disoriented prisoner.
‘‘Yesterday there was a massacre,’’ said Qurbani, who had close family ties to Hanau.
‘‘It’s not normal in Germany, and I hope it’s not going to become normal. Our history should teach us that we can’t allow nationalist, racist and xenophobic elements to define our image.’’
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow in more than a million refugees — mainly people displaced by Syria’s civil war — transformed German politics, fuelled the rise of a farRight party and prompted soulsearching over whether the country could live up its commitments to asylum and human rights.
‘‘As a refugee you not only lose your home, you are leaving your language, your confidence, your family, the feeling of being secure: that is human dignity to me,’’ Qurbani said.
His comments reflected the views of the many people who had lauded Merkel’s decision.
Meanwhile, German Kurds called for stronger Government action against farRight radicalism and racism as they mourned the victims of the gun attack on two shisha lounges.
Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of the ‘‘poison’’ of racism as she condemned the killings.
President FrankWalter Steinmeier said the country was united against violence as he attended one of about 50 candlelight vigil in German cities.
However, GermanKurd occupational therapist Ayten Kaplan, from the western city of Essen, said words and gestures were not enough.
‘‘We need a national campaign that celebrates Germany’s multiethnic population and condemns those trying to sow division,’’ she said.