"You're sitting next to me in the car." "In Paris when I saw your luggage on the curb I smiled - you take nothing because you have nothing." "I cracked open the window because of the cigarette smoke." "I adjust the big sweater on your shoulders so you don't catch cold." "You seem to be sleeping, but your eyes open slightly at regular intervals." "On the phone your mother said that in Berlin with Milena she was less afraid and that she'd stay there forever." "She's counting on me to take you there." "I thought I was the last person with whom to entrust a child." "Up to now I'd been the child." "But she said she had confidence in me and that you wanted it so." "She also said that if I didn't know what to do with my life," "I could always give it to you." "It's true." "Already Italy had fallen, and I saw Europe beginning to ship toward a definitive freeze." "I try to remain concentrated on the road." "The fog is gradually living." "MY WINTER JOURNEY" "In her letter your mother wished us a nice trip." "She made a few recommendations:" "Don't smoke up the car too much." "Always leave my door open, even at the hotel." "Think about taking care of your eyes." "Don't leave you alone." "Eat well." "Don't take too many pills." "Never have I loved anyone so much." "In fact I thought I was incapable of it." "The last time in Paris even you noticed that deathly thinness on his face that makes the cheekbones protrude and fools no one." "This time it looks chubbier." "Older, but at peace." "I see Georg's face as it was when we lived together in Paris." "At that time we oren went to Stuttgart." "This apartment was still empty, a bit dead." "His brother Hermann would leave us his car and we would go as oren as possible for a swim at Schloss Solitude." "Spring was wonderful." "My withdrawal symptoms became farther and fewer between." "Georg and I had spread out on the small beach at the lakeside." "He had to talk to me." "He should have done so already." "He told me that he was HIV-positive and that I probably was too." "Without even thinking I told him that that didn't change a thing." "I would always be there for him." "Georg didn't respond." "He wanted to go back to Stuttgart." "He wanted to sleep." "He knew I didn't realize what really laid in store for us." "I couldn't manage to be afraid, that's all." "We arrived back at Luisenstrasse." "From that moment on he no longer wanted me to touch him, with or without a condom." "Soon thereafter, he went back to live in Germany, for good." "But it still happens, upon waking at night, that I pronounce his name in the darkness." "Do you have a toothbrush?" " Can I use it?" " Yes." " Does that bother you?" " No." "Because I forgot mine, or I can't find it." "With all this moving about..." "How many do you have to take?" "One in the morning, one in the evening." "And the other" " Viramun?" "Morning and evening." "I come back to find my place intact in his hollow." "You have poured drops on your burning eyes." "I can do nothing for you - save to shut tight the window." "He too made sure that the studio was kept warm." "That night I was sitting on the edge of the bed." "I hurt all over." "Georg's arms held me like a vice." "I smelled the acrid odor of withdrawal that reeked from my whole body." "I wanted to scream, but Georg clamped his hand firmly over my mouth." "He said nothing." "The words would have been lost in his dyslexia." "He had to totally re-educate me." "How to sleep, to eat, to take him gently." "The task did not frighten him." "My belly really hurt, I smelled bad." "But Georg took it all in." "The odor, the shivers, the travail and I no longer suffered." "We were one." "The seasons spent with Georg, in Georg, will have been the gentlest I've ever spent." "I hope that you will experience times as beautiful as these." "If only for a day, for a second." "She couldn't yet leave them alone in the apartment, nor entrust them to the three eldest." "So she decided to bring along the two little ones." "Stuttgart was used to daily alarms." "She was Russian and understood nothing." "She held Hermann's hand and carried little Georg in her arms." "She absolutely had to find them milk." "And she would find some." "She was told of a grocery shop near the old Rathaus." "The day had hardly gone and the sirens were already screaming." "People hurried to the shelters, but there was no panic." "Calm resignation." "One of the milk bottles shattered." "The American planes had never come so close before." "Even running wild, children and bottles in tow she could not have entered:" "no one else was being let through." "Then began the apocalypse." "Georg and his brother, terrified, their mother awkwardly humming a Russian song." "They didn't know their neighborhood was already but a distant memory." "The three eldest boys were dead." "Never again would the logic of word order enter little Georg's traumatized head." "Is spite of the Swiss institute." "Is spite of the others' love for him." "And when Georg muttered that he loved me more than anything, with verb, adverb, and, pronoun in disorder now I couldn't find my words." "I was overwhelmed... transported." "your ashen hair, Shulamith he plays with the serpent" "He should play death sweeter" "Death is a master from Germany" "He should play the strings louder and your smoke will rise toward the sky" "Then you'll have a tomb in the clouds" "There is room up there" "Black milk of dawn we drink you at night we drink you at noon" "Death is a master from Germany" "We drink you in the evening and in the morning" "We drink and drink" "Death is a master from Germany his eye is blue" "You say you like it here, in this land of flower pot and weekly sales." "But beware of Christmas stories." "Things are never that simple, which may be why I loved this county and its people so much." "Tom brought me to Germany:" "every winter to Erlangen, and then farther on." "Little by little I learned how to perceive its beauty as one deciphers written words." "There were bleak, cities full of holes with worried, fragile people." "Nothing could heal." "Walls of buildings with minute traces sewn on the bodies of men:" "everything is telling, in excess..." "Everything signifies more than elsewhere:" "a song, a smile, a caress immediately doubled by the still trenchant violence of history." "Here even lightness is hard work." "I finally managed to hear the droning, to grasp its nuances." "It was crucial to me in the museum..." "like silence of the world." "So listen to everything, observe all, breathe deeply." "Soon here and elsewhere, the Empire and the snow will have buried all and even the suffering will be forgotten." "Listen." "It must be at nightfall." "Max follows the hunter Kaspar to the depths of Wolf Valley." "The music grows dark and the child, sitting on the old man's knees, hugs him tighter." "The child knows that all will end well because he has heard the recording of "Freischtz" dozens of times." "But he's still scared and buries his head in his grandfather's neck." "He breathes in the comforting smell of Cologne and cigarillos." "He should be in bed." "But in the cursed valley, Kaspar and Max have joined the diabolical Samiel." "The challenge is launched and the seven shots resound in the night." "The child seeks calm in the blue gaze of his grandfather, whose glass eye no longer frightens him." "Unknown German words filter into his oncoming sleep." "The old man embraces the child as if to protect him from the legend and its terrible chords." "He releases him and sends the child to bed with a kiss on the forehead." "He'll listen to the last act alone in the darkness of his office of his insomnia." "There..." "It's over the record spins round an' d round." "The child falls fast asleep, stealing a few more notes." "You sometimes fall asleep like that, all of a sudden, entirely, like this child who I no longer am." "Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing here, embarked on a journey with a cumbersome boy who can't remember the names of towns he travels through." "Tom loved you a lot." "One summer you were confided to us for a few days." "I can still see you climbing up his knees as one would scale a cliff." "You held on to him with all your might." "Poor Tom, paralyzed with mad tenderness, not knowing what to do with his big body, with his arms, with you, who wanted it all." "He forced himself to smile." "Absolutely at a loss." "Tom is now dead." "And you are here." "Even if the arbitrariness of childhood has been dulled every town, every face, every note becomes a sketch of becoming." "I say too much, doubtless because I know that you do not judge anybody." "Yes, he's taking care of me." "No, really!" "And in Berlin, is it nice?" "Is it snowing?" "I was with your mother." "It was in Paris, in the springtime, at a café table." "There was this intelligent man, convincing too... who said he'd like to but he wasn't strong enough," "Germany was too much..." "He did because, of course, he wasn't prejudiced at all!" "At the airport, the word "Ausweis" ripped open his heart and soul." "I shudder." "I think about Georg's mutterings the tenderness of loving bodies here, the gravity of words finally weighed, the wounds that never heal... about Ulrich, Werner, Milena." "He continues to parody the language, making syllables ring like knives." "It's clear that his consciousness of history is so great, that he'd rather avoid this ordeal." "Gently the music rises inside me, hidden treasures and my secret Germanys surge forth to protect me from any anger." "I don't hear him any more." "You don't know it yet." "Music is never time lost it is loss." "Some have forgotten." "Many are still wounded." "Those films the conquered, children were made to see the pages they were forced to tear out of their books." "They have grown old, but their knowledge is precious." "In turn you must learn to live by their side, to hear them, to love them." "You want me to speak to you as an adult to stop sending you back to your youth, to childhood." "I'll do that." "I don't know how to do otherwise." "But sometimes your silence scares me." "Sexuality for Ulrich has always been a kind of athletic effort a complicated discipline he practices with ease." "I'll work it out so that you don't meet him." "My relationship with him has always been willfully clandestine, sometimes painfully so." "He want it that way." "Of his family, his home, his work, I know next to nothing." "O Germany, pale mother!" "How you sit defiled Among the peoples." "Among the sullied You stand out." "Of your sons the poorest Lies struck down" "When his hunger was great Your other sons" "Raised their hands against him." "Rumor spread the word." "With their hands thus raised" "Raised against their brother" "They traipse around insolently in front of you" "And laugh in your face." "Everybody knows." "In your house Lies are loud cries" "But truth Must keep silent" "Is that so?" "Ulrich is lying next to me in the room at the Dom-Hotel." "He's sleeping or pretending to." "Out of tact or cowardice I see he's not wearing his ring." "I contemplate his heavy body, his forever tanned face revealing childhood rising to the surface, the same childhood that you are losing day by day." "In the middle of his chest I find the still visible hollow' which years of working out could not erase:" "the brand on a generation, of malnourished children growing as they could amidst the disaster." "I would like to place my lips over this stubborn hollow run my finger along the minute depression." "I didn't do it." "In turn I pretended to sleep to let him slip away in silence." "They're waiting for him." "You too, you must waiting for me." "Your mother has already lived here." "A long time ago - and then she returned to France." "She couldn't stand the German winter." "As I insisted on knowing the real reason for her return and why sadness overwhelmed her whenever we spoke of Germany, she said that over there "There are no men."" "She repeated it several times, like a regret." "At the time, I didn't understand her." "Now I know what she wanted to tell me like today I know what "Drink the black milk of dawn" means even though I am still incapable of explaining it to you." "To tell the truth I don't know him well." "It's his name that's always fascinated me:" "Goethe." "He said that before all else one had to learn to feel to shudder..." "When I asked you what image the word Germany evoked in you, you talked about men in leather rain- coat getting out of big black cars." "It's not that I want to make an ace out of you." "I would simply like you to have the choice." "An opportunity to give to the instant its full depth, all of its possibilities." "Afterwards, you will do with it as you like." "I will no longer be there." "Let's go in." "Two thin red roses are posed there for Rosa." "Their deep color stands out against the darkness of the water." "You see, it's a place like that one, exactly..." "Several of them ganged up to strike her." "As her jaw was already wounded, yelling made her scream." "Passersby watched the scene without saying a word." "It was all so confusing, but everybody knew it was better not to interfere." "The young men insulted her tirelessly, to persuade themselves of their moral right." "They struck her hard." "To finish her one of them shouted to throw her in the river." "They grabbed her limbs, swinging her small, nearly naked body and laughing." "A splash sounded the fall of all hope in the dark waters." "They had already executed Liebknecht elsewhere a bit earlier that afternoon." "Wait!" "Wait!" "Come back!" "It was up to you to decide." "Tom didn't want to go either." "The camp, he didn't want to, ever." "Something held him back." "He'd rather not give it substance, nor see it with his own eyes." "He changed the subject." "Yet Tom had told me everything:" "the night hidden underneath a car, the fake names his diffuse fear as a Jewish child on forced vacation." "I always had a hard time admitting why at the age of 3O he had accepted the position as assistant in Erlangen." "He said it was a different world that all was to make anew." "He wanted to be a part..." "I'm aware of having set a trap for you." "You will go alone, when the time comes." "What's more there was that endless forest the dreadful silence the absolute white." "There was your anger without phrases, my rather cowardly relief, and rows of parked, loudly colored busses." "There was the East, disenfranchised." "At the first slap, I gave a start, though while I blinked my eyes, I said nothing." "We did it because that's our work our right." "The man with dark eyes had a gentle face and nothing really brutal could be seen in it." "He must have learned how not to really hurt like on video tapes from the West." "He knows what matters now is the rendering of an image more than a shared pleasure." "By the looks of it, he wasn't German." "You know, it needed so little a smile, a word for the whole thing to shift." "In fact neither of us wanted that." "Not enough time, too complicated." "I can't." "I don't know how." "I don't want to read it." "Don't read poems, my son, read train schedules they're more precise." "Roll out the maps before it's too late." "Be vigilant, don't sing." "The day will come when they post lists on doors and paint signs on the chest of those who say no." "Learn how to walk without being recognized, learn better than I to change neighborhoods, passports, faces..." "You could wait up for me!" "I'm eager to welcome you!" "Time adjourns." "Harder days are coming." "A time temporarily delayed is visible on the horizon" "Soon you will tie your shoe and push the dogs back to the outland farms." "Because the fish gut have gone cold in the wind." "The light of the lupines scarcely burns." "Your beloved on the other, bank sinks into the sands the other climbs in his hair he cub off his speech," "orders him to be quiet, he sees him as mortal and ready for the farewell after every embrace." "Don't look around you." "Tie your shoe." "Send the dogs away." "Throw the fish back in the sea." "Turn of the lupines!" "Harder days are coming." "After Naples, I saw little of Werner." "From years spent in the underground, from prison mostly, he had retained a sullen bitterness I had managed to break through." "He decided to settle in former East Germany." "He took up painting again." "Once he came through Paris." "Another time I met up with him in Dresden." "I loved cuddling up against him, this big man who couldn't stand closed windows even in the heart of winter." "But that night I felt Werner nervous, febrile." "Two former comrades had been arrested in Berlin." "A tenacious past rose to the surface again." "I talked about other things." "I tried all the black records on the old player." "We ended up going to bed under our two small quilt." "He had drunk a bit." "I didn't feel Werner's short, thick member grow hard against my back." "I slipped underneath the blanket and took his cock in my mouth." "I put all my tenderness and patience into it." "But Werner didn't get it up." "Slowly I lifted the thick white blanket and I saw big tears streaming down his face, getting lost in his beard." "He said he was sorry, asked my forgiveness, he wept." "I said it was nothing." "He said no, it was everything." "I had never seen him cry before." "We never slept together again." "I'm going to go back to the hotel." "We'll see each other tomorrow." "I look at the paintings in the studio:" "Larger and larger monochromes, more and more empty." "You must already be sleeping." "I see you walking by his side, crossing the bridge over the Elbe." "The wind is icy." "His hand is on your shoulder." "Maybe he didn't speak to you about it, but you must hear it:" "it wasn't he who took the shot." "He was waiting in a car parked on a street corner." "As soon as they got in, he took off." "They reached Wiesbaden in a flash." "The others got out of the car and Werner never saw them again." "At any rate, he didn't know their real names." "It was no big deal, but he did it." "It was such a long time ago, but he related every second with astonishing precision." "He abandoned the car on some street." "I heard very little about what happened next." "I only found out that his mother died while he was in prison, before he sought refuge in the East and then in Italy." "When he says that in a way he did it for us" "I sense what he want me to understand." "I can see you turning Werner into an unlikely, funny, temporary father." "I'd like to be there with you, to become your accomplice as quickly, as strongly." "Something holds me back..." "The cities were changing too quickly." "Street names were being changed." "Buildings, luxury stores, hotels were springing up all over the place." "Werner couldn't recognize his old territory, now littered with wrecking cranes and new holes." "His sufferance was almost physical." "He had been betrayed." "As we approach Leibnizstrasse, I can see him freeze up." "Werner is shaken, but a strange smile light up his handsome face." "He's not very sure and he keeps his eyes shut, as if to freeze an image." "Did I recognize it?" "It was still there obvious, tenacious, reassuring:" "the smell of the East." "He hugged me with all of his regained strength." "As if nothing were lost, as if all were possible." "A passerby watched us and smiled." "Werner, my treasure, my friend, my darling, my beloved, my love..." "Razed, reconstructed, flooded" "Dresden still stands tall like an insult against all those who no longer believe in it." "But we must go." "You too, I've seen it you're a bit sad." "Don't believe that everything was better before." "Don't believe anything." "I'd simply like you to understand that we did live here in this city cut in two, sliced by a razor blade." "There was that absurd wall crossing out with a long gray line a still legible world from the point of view of good and evil." "In the wall's shadow, every day was exciting, dangerously intense." "Close your eyes." "Run your finger along the ashes of a still smoldering history." "Soon the wrecking cranes will have finished their job." "All the better." "And you are going to live here, in an absolutely new city, slick and agreeable." "Reconciled, as if nothing had ever preceded it." "Help me." "You're all that remains." "I'm so cold." "All I need is a bit of warmth a bit of meaning." "I didn't have the time." "Already my fingers are starting to freeze." "Look, I'm shivering." "I don't know a thing any more." "Soon I'll no longer feel the pain." "There's the world of before seized in ice." "It's being erased." "I'm disappearing with it." "So please remember it all, my child, my little one..." "Subtitles:" "SUB-TIL Adaptation:" "Joseph Simas"