New film on the bombing of German cities in WWII

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa's latest film starts innocently enough — people go about their daily lives, stroll through Berlin, peer out the window in a southern German village and watch the goings-on in the village square. There is even a scene where a cow is herded onto a river ferry.

Then, 12 minutes into the film, the first bombs fall from thousands of planes, dropped on German cities, including Cologne, Dresden and Berlin.

In his new film "A Natural History of Destruction," which celebrated its German premiere in Berlin on March 15 and opens in national cinemas on March 16, Loznitsa focuses on the Allied bombing raids on Nazi Germany.

For the movie, he edited archival material from the Second World War era and set it to a score by Dutch composer Christiaan Verbeek — a soundtrack that gives the audience the chills.

Loznitsa has been producing documentaries exclusively from archival footage for many years. His goal is to "get the skeletons out of the closet of history," he told DW. His films are about traumas that no one talks about.

Lessons to be learned from history

"If something is not discussed openly and honestly, it becomes a skeleton in the closet that will eventually come back to haunt you," says Loznitsa. And that can have serious consequences, the award-winning director adds.

"History follows certain laws and tends to repeat itself, in particular if you don't reflect and analyze certain events, don't draw lessons from them; there is a danger that they will repeat themselves," he says.

Who is Sergei Loznitsa?

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa knows what he is talking about. The 58-year-old has experienced historical upheavals firsthand. He grew up in the former Soviet Union, a totalitarian state, and finally experienced its collapse in the late 1990s. Almost simultaneously, he changed his profession. The trained mathematician became a filmmaker.

He is now one of the best-known European documentary filmmakers, and has a unique approach. In his role as director, he sees himself purely as an observer, which means that critics regularly accuse him of lacking discernment. Is it permissible to simply set up one's camera on the grounds of the former Auschwitz concentration camp and film happy groups of tourists as they take selfies there? That's exactly what Loznitsa did for his film "Austerlitz" (2016) — it didn't comment on the disturbing scenes. 

For his film "Babi Yar. Context" (2021), Loznitsa combed through German, Russian and Ukrainian archives and assembled a film from the footage that recalls the Babi Yar massacre, which was suppressed and forgotten for decades. In a ravine in Kiev, 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were murdered over two days in September 1941 by German Nazis and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen. The fact that the film also features Ukrainians who greeted the approaching Nazis was met with criticism in his homeland. 

Loznitsa occasionally makes feature films. Most recently, he devoted "Donbass" (2018) to the war that has raged in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists since 2014. Its protagonists have turned away from society, they no longer believe in the government, Fake news is omnipresent. In the wake of the Russian invasion, Loznitsa's work seems frighteningly prescient.

Harrowing footage 

That's the reason why he took a closer look at the brutal episodes of European history in "The Natural History of Destruction."

Some of the footage shown is harrowing. In one shot, corpses are laid out side-by-side on a street in the ruins following a night of bombing. One image shows the body of a toddler dressed in a fine, light-colored dress, staring lifelessly at the sky.

Loznitsa says he is used to working with difficult material, and he is careful not to go too far and shock the audience too much. His goal, he says, is that both he and the viewers can create a certain distance from the events shown.

"The further away in time you are from what is in the film, the less personal it is, the less emotionally disturbing," he says, which makes it possible at times "to take a step back and understand quite rationally what happened." That distance can help us learn from the experience, he says.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine not unexpected

Loznitsa say that he was inspired by an essay by W. G. Sebald, a 20th-century German author. "I started planning this film back in 2017," citing Sebald's "On the Natural History of Destruction."

"Sebald had inspired me to make a film before, which was 'Austerlitz,' and I wanted to go on from there."

"Another reason for making the film was that I was already expecting this new war," the Ukrainian filmmaker says, referring to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. "I could foresee that. In a way, I was expecting the horror of what's happening right now."

However, he doesn't want his film to be seen only in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine. We already knew that such things were happening, he argues, for instance, in Syria where cities were shelled and the population attacked. "That may be another reason why I felt the issue was more relevant than ever," he says.

Loznitsa read extensively before making "A Natural History of Destruction."In an interview with DW, he referred to war theorists, including 19th-century General Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian arch-conservative who held the view that war is the actual normal state of humanity — and peace the exception.

'Conflict of mentalities'

"As soon as humans organize themselves into groups, certain patterns seem to emerge," Loznitsa says, arguing that the problem is not human nature but a conflict of mentalities.

"We think we all live in the same era, but that's a mistake. Some people still live in the Stone Age, some in the Middle Ages, some in the 19th century, others in the 21st century. For some, the most important thing is to conquer territory; for others, individual freedom and intellectual development are the highest good," he observes.

The problem, he adds, is that these values are really incompatible. "The conflict arises from the fact that the mentalities cannot be reconciled," he says.

His film shows the effects such conflicts can have. No one speaks much in "The Natural History of Destruction." The war machinery just plods on until the cities depicted are in ruins.

It is "difficult today to form even a halfway-adequate notion of the extent of the devastation of German cities that took place during the last years of World War II, and even more difficult to reflect on the horror associated with that devastation," wrote W.G. Sebald. 

In recent years, Neo-Nazis in Germany have repeatedly used the bombings to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime. That is not Loznitsa's intention at all.

Nevertheless, the lack of context and the focus on the suffering of the German population poses potential for criticism. Thus, "an irritatingly skewed view of the war emerges, in which the victims of Nazi terror remain a blank space," said cultural journalist Christian Berndt on Deutschlandfunk radio. Film critic Patrick Seyboth also notes that Loznitsa's attitude is "very consistent, but also worthy of discussion." 

In DW's conversation with him it becomes clear that he wants to raise the following questions: What happened during this period, and how do we deal with it today?  "The answer to the first question is relatively simple," the director says. "The second question — what did it actually mean for people — is still a mystery."

This article was originally written in German.