Film Series »Linguistic Landscapes«

On Wednesday, 21 October 2026, at 6 p.m., the film »Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann« by Volker Koepp (Germany, 1999) will be screened at the Passage Kinos Leipzig. The film marks the start of the »Sprachlandschaften« (Language Landscapes) series, organized by the Dubnow Institute as part of the »Tacheles« theme year. Albert Wiederspiel, the series' curator, and Anna Artwińska, a professor at Leipzig University, will open the series. Following the film, a discussion will take place between two historians from the Dubnow Institute, Jörg Deventer and Nicolas Berg.

The film series centers on the linguistic diversity of Jewish life and Jewish culture. Language is a central vehicle for the expression of belonging, experience, and memory, but also serves as a marker for the loss of entire worlds. In the mid-twentieth century, violence, war, expulsion, and murder culminated among other things in the destruction of Jewish »linguistic landscapes.«

The diversity of Jewish languages persisted under completely different parameters after World War II and the Holocaust and developed anew. The films shown in this series therefore cover a broad chronological spectrum and emerged in different decades. They offer insights, for example, into the endurance of Ladino in Israel and the demise of the German language in Bukovina after World War II, and engage with the emergence of German and Russian as Jewish languages in Israel from the immediate postwar period through to the present day. The series thereby aims to disentangle a cultural wealth that was largely lost during the twentieth century.

Curated by Albert Wiederspiel, the former director of the Hamburg Filmfest, and Yfaat Weiss, the series of international feature films and documentaries also offers an opportunity for audiences to converse on this topic with filmmakers and other experts.