Claude Lanzmann: Shoah

In 2005, the United Nations designated 27 January as International Holocaust Memorial Day. Remembering the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children and millions of other people in the Holocaust during the Nazi regime is a central mission of the Goethe-Institut. On the occasion of the exhibition Claude Lanzmann: The Recordings at the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the 100th birthday of the famous French journalist, filmmaker and chronicler of the Shoah in November last year, we are showing Lanzmann's important documentary film Shoah on the Saturday following Holocaust Memorial Day, making it accessible to those who are unable to attend during the week. 

More details about the  schedule for the screening of the more than nine-hour film will follow shortly.

With its exhibition, which runs until 12 April 2026, the Jewish Museum is making previously unknown audio recordings from Claude Lanzmann's archive accessible to the public for the first time. They document the numerous interviews that Lanzmann and his colleagues Corinna Coulmas and Irena Steinfeldt-Levy conducted in the 1970s during a research phase lasting several years before filming began – with survivors, perpetrators and others. These previously unknown audio recordings convey how many aspects of the Shoah the director dealt with. At the same time, they provide insight into memories three decades after the end of the war. The Lanzmann Collection at the Jewish Museum Berlin comprises approximately 220 hours of audio recordings in eight languages. Since 2023, this collection, together with the film Shoah, has been included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

About the Film

More than ten years (1974-1985) in the making, Shoah (the Hebrew word for ‘Annihilation’) brings together testimonies from both the victims of the National Socialist extermination of European Jews and from its perpetrators and observers. Many of them tell their story for the first time in 30 years. According to Claude Lanzmann, Shoah is not a film about survival but a “testimonial of death”. He not only asks the witnesses to recall their experiences; his questioning technique prompts his interviewees to relive the past events. Lanzmann’s questions revolve around events at the sites where Jews were murdered –Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto– laying open the bureaucratic mechanism of extermination, which began in the ghettos and was eventually implemented in the concentration and extermination camps. In its nine and a half hours, the film only makes use of only one archive document. Otherwise it exclusively relies on witness statements and newly filmed footage of the death sites showing them as they were at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. This was a radically new approach. Much of the film’s powerful effect stems from the montage of testimonies and the footage of the places referred to in their memories. “I travelled to the places on my own and I realized that you have to combine the two aspects. You have to know and see, and you have to see and know. That’s why the problem with the places is so immense. It is a down-to-earth film, a topographical and geographical film.” (Lanzmann)

Shoah, France 1974 – 1985, colour, DCP (16mm), ca. 566 mins, With English subtitles.
Directed by Claude Lanzmann, Camera: Dominique Chapuis, Jimmy Glasberg, William Lubtchansky, Editors: Ziva Postec, Anna Ruiz, Sound: Bernard Aubouy, Michel Vionnet.