Jewish Film Heritage between Cultural Practices and Memory Institutions

• Applicants: Privatdozentin Dr. Anna-Dorothea Ludewig; Dr. Ulrike Schneider; Dr. Lea Wohl von Haselberg
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 557805092

The exploration of the hitherto little-studied but extremely diverse subject of Jewish film heritage has been taking place at the Potsdam research location since 2022. The project Jewish Film Heritage between Cultural Practices and Memory Institutions aims to carry out basic research on Jewish film heritage in a dialectical movement of thought in dialogical exchange with the relevant actors in the field: a) the film and cultural heritage institutions, in this case the Jewish museums; b) the (Jewish) filmmakers who both create Jewish film heritage and use it in their work; c) the audience, which is just as involved in doing heritage through its active reception practice as academic researchers. The project follows the methodological approach of focusing on discursivations of Jewish film heritage in its interdisciplinary, transfer-oriented approach, which is made up of three sub-projects: In the project Jewish Home Movies.Amateur Films in Jewish Museum Collections, in addition to researching and securing individual amateur film collections of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Jewish Museum Frankfurt/Main, further material from amateur filmmakers will be identified and secured in the course of a "Jewish Home Movie Day" organized jointly with the two museums, enabling a lively Jewish film culture within this framework and at the same time developing a typology to enable future research. The project Heritage Journey Films examines various heritage journey films (feature films and documentaries) with a view to the concepts of cultural heritage that are implicitly and explicitly addressed and juxtaposed in the films. Particular attention is paid to the question of how the intimacy of family memories is placed and positioned in relation to the internal discourses of Jewish communities and the expectations and attributions of a majority-society public in Europe. Film heritage as material in the sense of found footage finds its way into cinematic works in different ways, many film genres have references to heritage and archive, and the work of many filmmakers is characterized by the explicit or implicit examination of artistic traditions of various filmmakers from different generations. Against this background, the third subproject Artistic Research on and with Jewish film heritage will invite two artistic filmmakers to the Film University for 12 months each to combine creative and academic aspects of Jewish film heritage in a project. The common link between all three projects is formed by family archives and family memories that have been handed down in moving images. All projects, in their diverse methodological concepts as well as their different objects, refer to the significance of moving family images as Jewish film heritage. In order to link the projects intensively with each other, their objects are to be related to each other and brought into dialogue in a curated film series and presented in an exhibition.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2357: Jewish Cultural Heritage