Un naufrago della storia: David (1979) di Peter Lilienthal

In works of film history many pages have been written on the representation of World War II and the Shoah in the BRD. A relatively less known chapter is the interpretation of German-Jewish history in German-Jewish films, starting with such early works as Lang ist der Weg (1948). - Peter Lilienthal is a German-Jewish filmmaker with a background in the diaspora and a firm political commitment to internationalism. This drives him to seeing in the Nazi persecution of Jews a metonymy of oppression well beyond the time of Hitler's dictatorship. Lilienthal won the Golden Bear at the 1979 Berlin Film Festival with a biopic of a survivor, David, who escapes deportation by chance. Yet Lilienthal's film has been forgotten shortly afterwards. This article investigates the contest of Lilienthal's work - the political and cultural changes unfolding between the Seventies and the Eighties, - in an attempt to explain the limited impact of the film on German public opinion and the ensuing amnesia. A new glance at the history of German Jewish culture after World War II is thus offered by the failed collaboration between Lilienthal and the former DDR writer Jurek Becker. Their discussion on the representation of Israel in the film, analysed through the lenses of Becker's first script, shows different views of the Jewish Diaspora in the aftermath of the Shoah