Am Ende kommen Touristen...

Cecil say: A young German man is sent to Auschwitz for his national service (the civilian option, not the military!). It is present-day Poland, and the old concentration camp has been rebuilt as a museum and memorial - coach loads of Germans pass through every day and are encouraged to reflect on what the place means for them today. Our protagonist's main task is to look after an old inmate, Polish, who still gives talks to the visitor groups and repairs the old suitcases left behind by those who perished in the camp.



Bea and I had different views on what the point of the film was. I'm not actually sure the film had a point to make. It had an underlying feel of a road movie, but the movement was more through the camp (German tourists passing through in coaches; young German national service guy spending a few months there; the Polish tour guide he falls for is about to set off to a new career in Brussels...) - was that a reflection of the gruesome movement through the camp of the prisoners 60 years earlier?



The static character was the old Polish gent: so static that his methods of repairing suitcases were no longer up-to-scratch for the new museum curators; his talks about life in the camp apparently too static also for the entrepreneurial woman who sets up a new memorial in the next village. He even lives on the campsite still, but by the end of the film, it looks as though this too cannot continue.



But our young German protagonist, although despised by the locals, does come to some understanding and empathy for the old Polish guy. True, he dithers over commitment to the Polish woman, and she also appears uncertain of whether she wants to be involved with him - she must at all costs get out of the place... But, at the end of the film, our German national service character seems set on seeing out his time in Auschwitz. As with any person in the early 20s, life is a series of steps forward accompanied by dithering and uncertainty, and even some steps back to safety zones: I found his character very believable.



What was slightly annoying was the lack of research into just how an interpreter (or translator) goes about getting a job in Brussels. The Polish woman is called for interview 'at the Agriculture Commission in Brussels' and we learn that she is offered a job on-the-spot and should start almost immediately. If only it were so simple! The recruitment procedure for any EU officials is a good deal more convoluted and even if we allow for poetic (or cinematographic) licence with the timescales, why on earth refer to an 'Agriculture Commission' when no such thing exists in Brussels?
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Bea says: Cecil makes some good points - there was certainly something about movement/arrival/departure in this film that seemed eerily reminiscent of the footage I have seen about the arrival and departure of people to and from Auschwitz during its darkest hour. This film had thought provoking moments; such as when the (local) young Polish woman who becomes involved with our protagonist talks about growing up and living in Auschwitz (the town) - "its just the place where I live"; and there were also interesting moments around language - what it means to locals to use the German language, although the elderly Polish survivor spoke German almost exclusively, and the young Polish woman enthused about the beauty of the German language. But after this film Cecil and I had a lively discussion about whether the purpose of narrative and story is to describe a transformation of some kind, and if so what kind of transformation occurred in "Am Ende kommen Touristen..." The answer is not clear to me.
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