Doku "Aggregat": a journey through a divided Germany

An information bus from the Bundestag, somewhere to the east. Inside, an elderly man speaks to a member of parliament. "It lacks proximity to people, the link," says the man. Another states that they "brought back the foreigners, I pay them, but that my pension will be reduced more and more".

Two statements from Germany. Phrases that remain uncommented. Like all scenes from Marie Wilke's Aggregat, which will be released this week.

It's a little movie with a big theme. Director Wilke, born in 1974, and her young team have embarked on the search for traces of the German spirit that followed the migration of one million refugees in 2015. C & ## 39 was a trip to a divided country.

Shot in 2016 and 2017 in Berlin and in the east of the Republic, including in the Bundestag, during a Pegida event in Dresden, a press conference with the former president of AfD, Frauke Petry, at editorial conferences of the "taz" and "Bild", MDR Funkhaus, among SPD staff and members of parliament. The result is complex snapshots of a reality that will one day belong to the archives of this republic.

It has become a quiet movie. A feat in itself, given the excitement aroused by social media, the vile insults that poison society since the migratory movement. Wilke, once editor of news programs, asks his audience what exactly will be lost today: the ability to watch and listen.

Similarly, Wilke had worked in his 2015 film Staatsdiener, which showed the training of young officials in a police academy of Saxony-Anhalt. Its stylistic device to observe from a reserved point of view – in "aggregate" it has further reduced it.

"Aggregate"
D 2018

Book and director: Marie Wilke
Production: Scout film production, ZDF
Rental: Zorro movie
length: 92 minutes
to start: November 29, 2018

Not everything is successful, there are durations and recordings. But overall, the pictures are wearing. The strongest scenes that Wilke has captured in the midst of the SPD, a party that has shrunk, their ancestral backgrounds are turning to AFD.

Wilke shows this uncertainty with the help of a seminar organized by employees and deputies of the SPD who are trying to get acquainted with right-wing populism. A mediator wants to know what issues he faces in his constituency bademblies. "They get everything, and we receive nothing," says one SPD woman, another: "They all come with ten children and move the Europeans." The recordings are depressing as they document perplexed employees, parliamentarians and mediators who are thinking about how the SPD could "put the issues of the people in a democratic framework".

In the video: The trailer of "Aggregate"

Wilke systematically avoids the slogan of right-wing populism. In "aggregated" – the Latin word for the combination of elements – there is more: to show the arduous process in a parliamentary democracy. There is Saxon SPD chairman and Minister of Economic Affairs, Martin Dulig, he acts as the phenotype of the patient comrade: at a moderate SPD protest, he listens to the angry complaints of the citizens.

The emotional explosions are juxtaposed to tedious work on the basis in subsequent sequences, in which a group of members of the Saxon SPD struggle for individual wording of a text and submit it to a vote. Those who see these few, their commitment requires respect.

The reality of a country is made up of many realities, and the film in a scene of the alternative milieu of the left unintentionally shows it with a subtle irony: a journalist "taz" takes again the research of his colleague on the targeted history of the AfD medium. At one point, it is no longer AFD, but only that "even a woman" should be included in the report. Thus, each environment builds its own necessities and thus becomes an integral part of a global reality.

"Aggregat" begins its first images in the Bundestag and ends there too – in a room where citizens pbad an image of the painter Anselm Kiefer. The monumental work bears the line "Only with the wind with time and with the sound" of the poet Ingeborg Bachmann. This reminds us that the second German democracy can be threatened and temporary.