Klaus Theweleit speaks with Katja Nicodemus about his book, published in late 2025 in the “n.b.k. Diskurs” series. For the first time, the publication brings together all of Klaus Theweleit’s texts on the work of Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard, which offer a unique reflection on filmmaking after Auschwitz. Theweleit notes: “Realities that are not transformed into art remain unreal. Lanzmann and Godard elaborate them, each in his own way; they conjure them up. The visible detaches itself from the eyes, the audible from the system of the ear. I do believe there are developments. An evolution of corporealities. Our neurologists — however incredibly advanced their findings may be — are still very much groping in the dark. Thus, there are always tasks set for us by the genuinely changing (sur)real. G + L are good points of entry, truly fantastic ones. No one is excluded.”

The event will begin with a screening of Der Karski-Bericht (2010) by Claude Lanzmann. The documentary focuses on the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, a witness to the Warsaw Ghetto and former courier for the Polish government-in-exile in London, who reported the atrocities committed against European Jews to the Allies — particularly U.S. President Roosevelt — in 1943.

In 1978, Lanzmann filmed Karski for two full days at his home in Washington and included his harrowing accounts of his visits to the ghetto in the landmark film project Shoah. Der Karski-Bericht contains the second, previously unpublished part of the interview, in which Karski recounts his visit to the White House with no less intensity. Theweleit writes about this in Filmen nach Auschwitz: “Mere interview technique would not suffice here. But Lanzmann succeeds, and we see and hear: what was suffered has not been repressed; nor has it been transformed or rendered unrecognizable, as evidenced by Lanzmann’s urgent and ultimately successful effort to unearth it.”

Participants

Katja Nicodemus (b. 1968) studied Comparative Literature, Latin American Studies, and Political Science in Berlin and Paris. During her studies, she worked as an assistant director and theater critic, as well as a reporter for Radio France and the independent Berlin station Radio100. After graduating, she developed a growing passion for cinema, wrote film programs for WDR television, and joined the TAZ as a film editor. She was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for her writings and interviews on French cinema. Since 2001, she has been responsible for cinema in the arts section of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT and also works as a freelance film critic for Radio Bremen and Deutschlandfunk. Katja Nicodemus lives in Berlin.

Klaus Theweleit (b. 1942) lives in Freiburg and is a literary scholar, cultural theorist, and writer. Until 2008 he was Professor for Art and Theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe. In 1976, he received his doctorate with his dissertation Freikorpsliteratur: Vom deutschen Nachkrieg 1918–1923, which served as the basis for his two-volume work Männerphantasien, published in 1977/1978, one of the first comprehensive studies in the field of masculinity and violence research. In November 2019 Männerphantasien was published in a new edition by Matthes & Seitz, Berlin.