A “culture of welcome” could become the new euphemistic non-word of the year. It pervades this film which observes over an extended period of time what happens when two well-to-do Northern German villages are supposed to welcome a group of asylum seekers.
There are the citizens in their terrace houses who can’t let their daughters out into the streets if the end of the world as represented by 53 refugees (black if worst comes to worst) is near. They hastily form citizens’ initiatives to take legal action against this impending doom. There is the pub owner who in an apparently selfless gesture offers his empty guestrooms, which is presented as the “socially acceptable” option. There are the administrators who are desperately looking for housing, struggling for acceptance, at last set up a few containers and then give themselves a satisfied pat on the back. All of them can’t emphasize enough how welcome the foreigners are to them in principle (but not too many, not in our town). And there are the foreigners themselves, traumatised at the end of an odyssey and hoping for a new home.
Wendler and Rau show an everyday racism that does not come in combat boots but in the guise of charity and democracy – but also people who spend the night with a refugee’s children when the mother has to go to hospital. And at the end the pub owner frying up a schnitzel with the Albanians – in the heart of the German province.
Grit Lemke