Greco-German History: Resistance From Afar
Editorial meeting of the Greek Broadcast of Deutsche Welle with journalist Danae Koulmasis, the director’s mother (Photo: Pantelis Pantelouris)
7 April 2010
The timing is a coincidence and nonetheless telling: just as Greece and Germany are experiencing tensions, director Timon Koulmasis remembers an epoch of special bonds between the two countries. In Athens, his film about the role of the Deutsche Welle during the military junta is celebrating its premiere.
Hundreds crowded into the auditorium of the Goethe-Institut Athens. The president himself was present. Yet, Karolos Papoulias’s attendance at the “German-Greek Summit” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) had nothing to do with the atmospheric tension between the two countries nor was it a representative obligatory act by the head of state. No, Papoulias himself was one of the protagonists of the film that was premiered here in late March.
Wort und Widerstand – “The Word and Resistance” – is the name of Timon Koulmasis’s work, which deals with an historic era during which solidarity between Greeks and Germans was particularly intense. The word and resistance – actually the film could also have been named Words are Resistance considering that it illustrates the role of Deutsche Welle for the Greek resistance during the military junta. This is where the current president comes into play. From 1967 until 1974 he was in exile in Germany and worked freelance for the editorial department of Deutsche Welle, which supplied Greece with independent news every evening at 8:40 PM. In spite of threats of harsh penalties, the colonels’ regime could not stop up to three million Greeks from listening to the banned radio broadcast every evening.
Deutsche Welle thus became part of Greek history. Director Koulmasis was six years old when the military took over power in Greece in a 1967 coup d'état. His father was the writer Peter Coulmas, his mother, Danae Koulmasis, a member of the editorial staff of the Greek Broadcast at Deutsche Welle. He describes how he experienced the premiere for Goethe aktuell:
Wort und Widerstand – “The Word and Resistance” – is the name of Timon Koulmasis’s work, which deals with an historic era during which solidarity between Greeks and Germans was particularly intense. The word and resistance – actually the film could also have been named Words are Resistance considering that it illustrates the role of Deutsche Welle for the Greek resistance during the military junta. This is where the current president comes into play. From 1967 until 1974 he was in exile in Germany and worked freelance for the editorial department of Deutsche Welle, which supplied Greece with independent news every evening at 8:40 PM. In spite of threats of harsh penalties, the colonels’ regime could not stop up to three million Greeks from listening to the banned radio broadcast every evening.
Deutsche Welle thus became part of Greek history. Director Koulmasis was six years old when the military took over power in Greece in a 1967 coup d'état. His father was the writer Peter Coulmas, his mother, Danae Koulmasis, a member of the editorial staff of the Greek Broadcast at Deutsche Welle. He describes how he experienced the premiere for Goethe aktuell:
The Power of the Committed Word
By Timon Koulmasis
A child is lucky enough to be able to awaken places and people in his memories in random sequence, without having to be aware of the probability of the event or its causes and consequences. Perhaps that is the honest response to the question of how and why I began the film about the men and women who were forced into exile by the fascist regime of the colonels and created the famous Greek Broadcast of Deutsche Welle that was transmitted daily between 8:40 and 9:40 PM and secretly heard by the great majority of Greek people during the dark years of the dictatorship. It conveyed free information to the subjugated nation, appealed daily to resist and gave the people hope and the strength to preserve their dignity.
But, for me – then a child – they are my mother’s friends. They are young, funny; I remember them behind a thick cloud of cigarette smoke on the sofa in our living room that looked onto a small garden. They talk, sing and argue incessantly. They dream of freedom and a return to their homeland and, to us children – who they will watch grow up in Germany – they are delightful.
The eyes of the child remind us that behind the mask placed by posterity on the faces of the evil or the heroes are men and women and that it is they who write history. My film describes the historic role that those people – who childhood memory captures for one instant in front of the window panes behind which a cherry tree glows – played during and after the dictatorship, and sheds light on the place that they only forty years later still hold in the collective memory of the nation.
Director Koulmasis (Photo: Margarita Kiaou)
For me, it was a matter of telling the story in such a way that it becomes valid for the present time. I include the December 2008 youth revolts in Greece as a distanced counterpoint, for it reflects the political disillusionment and the loss of reference points and values that threaten our awareness today. In my film, I describe the dilemma faced by the word when it wants to become reality in order to bridge the abyss between poetical ethics and political demands. That was relevant then and is still burningly acute today.
To me, the Goethe-Institut in Athens seemed the suitable venue for a premiere of the film about word and resistance for a number of reasons. During the junta, it was probably the only truly free forum in the city where opinions against the dictatorship could be expressed: although the German government did not officially support the colonels, it ultimately put up with them in the interests of economic and military relations with Greece. Today, while incomprehensible malice is poisoning the relations between the countries and reporting is, in part, being done on a deplorably low level, it was important to me as a Greek who grew up in Germany to screen my film in a framework of dialogue and mutual understanding. I would like to thank the Goethe-Institut Athens, which continues the tradition of the free forum with this premiere. I also recall the two evenings in March 1995 at the Goethe-Institut Athens, where hundreds of young people debated my film Ulrike Marie Meinhof until the early morning hours.
This time after the screening, viewers of all generations followed the panel discussion, which seemed like a theatre play to me. The protagonists of the film emerged suddenly in the flesh from the screen onto the stage and continued to vibrantly act out the play, argued amicably across the rows of the auditorium and included the hotly debating audience.
