The Wandering Dust
A documentary about Edgar Hilsenrath and the history of his controversial novel The Nazi & the Barber.
Edgar Hilsenrath didn’t believe in anything. The only thing he knew for sure is that we don’t learn from the past and that mankind therefore will perish. In the meantime, he writes books. About his memories of the Bukovina, the ghetto, the Nazi terror, and his own odyssey, which led him from the ghetto in the ruined city of Mohyliv-Podilskyi, on the shores of the river Dniepr in Ukraine, via Palestine, Southern France (where he was reunited with his family) and New York, back to Germany. He writes about them with such satire and ironic detachment that he, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, was accused of anti-Semitism in Germany. “Evil is so absurd, that I simply had to make use of the satiric and the grotesque.”
‘The wandering Dust’ is a story of one of the most remarkable books in world literature, how it came about and how it was received. Nowhere else the banality of fascism is so mercilessly exposed as in this novel. By seemingly poking fun at it, Edgar Hilsenrath provokes moral and existential questions. The Nazi and the Barber is an ingenious study of crime and punishment, a social-psychological perspective regarding the question of how and why human beings are capable of committing atrocities.
The director examines the current meaning of the book against the background of the turbulent life of the author Hilsenrath, and reflects on his relationship with Germany.