Wim Wenders on Where the War in Europe Really Ended 80 Years Ago

Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is almost 80 years old, as old as La Paz in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.

“From my childhood, I am 80 years old,” he says in a short film that he has ordered to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe”, he realizes that bets rarely have a high leg.

“Eight years after the release of our continent, Europeans realize that peace cannot be for granted tasks,” he says in the film. “Now it depends on taking the keys to freedom in our own hands.”

In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life”, since the war had defined the life of their parents. His father, an army surgeon, five years in the front and was the only one in his class who did not die, Wenders said. “I had the privilege of being the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”

Europe and Germany are full of various efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including shadow commemorative events in concentration camps such as Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders movie is a strange personal and political will from the films of the man behind the films that include “Paris, Texas”, “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”

The new film is less than five minutes of lung and is called “The Keys To Freedom”, a visit of bad mood and meditative to a little known place where the story was made: a small school in Reims, France, where at 2:41 am on May 7, 1945, Germany signed her. The school, now Lycée Franklin Roosevelt, housed the headquarters of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied, Europe.

Today there is a small museum in the school called the Museum of Rendiciento, which includes the maps room of the upper floor where the commanders worked and the capitulation was signed.

When Eisenhower and his team left the school, they delivered the keys to the city authorities, and now they were exhibited in a small showcase in the museum. “The commander in chief returns the keys to the mayor of Reims and says:” These are the keys to the freedom of the world, “says Wenders in the film.” I was very directed by the view of the thesis keys, just although now they are only keys in a small museum. “

Wenders wanders through the museum, looking at other exhibitions and chatting with current students. The surrender is recaptured through archiving images of the events of the day and a modern reconstruction, with actors.

The Soviets insisted that the German high command repeated their surrender in Berlin, which they had conquered. That event took place the next night, on May 8, which is generally recognized as the moment when the war in Europe officially ended. For years, under the Soviet occupation, the building where the agreement was known as the Museum of Unconditional Retention of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945, but after the German reunification was renamed Museum Berlin-Karlhorsst.

“The idea was to go to where the real was negotiated and signed, not only ratified, such as what was repeated on May 8, in Karlshortst, but the real McCoy,” Wenders said. “A place in France to which that freedom owed in which my life has placed tasks.”

Wenders, who was born in August 1945, became a key figure in what was known as the movement of the “New German Cinema” of the sixties and seventies, a revolution of the influential art house of postwar generation. In recent years, he has Turnard documentaries, which are less complicated to finance and look green these days, he said. He narrates “The Keys to Freedom” in three languages, German, English and French, and said he considered him a political film that looked back to his earlier work that documes the German protests against the war in Vietnam.

The film was caused by an idea of ​​the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany. Since the large-scale invasion of Russia of Ukraine and the re-election of the president of Europe-Shoptic, Trump, has been looking to be more direct in his public messages, especially about the German values ​​and the country’s commitment to the Europeans of the Security dive of Chartekan, the communications of the Santura.

The ministry approached Wenders, who agreed to work for free, as well as most of his team. The Ministry provides “less than 100,000 euros” (about $ 113,000) for the project, to help pay technical personnel and production, PTASSEK said.

“With the war in Ukraine and what is happening now in the United States, we realized that we had to raise our voice and explain ourselves,” Ptassek said. “If you don’t explain what you are doing, you lose confidence.”

“The ‘Keys to Freedom’ is a symbol that fits so well,” he added. “Eighty years of American protection no longer seem reliable. We have to take these keys and assume our responsibility.”

Wenders expects the movie to talk to young people, but he has Doubs. Only French students at school in Reims think of war as ancient history, he said. “They are the third generation that lives in this peace and, therefore, give it however sitting,” he said. “Therefore, it is easy to believe that this is eternal.”

The Shoot in Reims “made me aware of how precious freedom can be,” Wenders said. “In my life too, I had tasks for granted, and seeing that little war room made me realize how fragile it is really.”

Talking to the students, he said: “I made me realize that this is a job, politically in Europe at this time, to make people take the word freedom seriously. Even the word word means muse that they know that the real film notices. I wanted to see and s.