Loznitsa’s Austerlitz is a documentary study, with almost no audible dialogue of any kind, of the increasingly established tourist phenomenon at the Nazi death camps in Germany. He sets up fixed camera positions at the Dachau and Sachsenhausen camps, which have huge visitor numbers due to being close to big cities (Munich and Berlin respectively) and simply records the ebb and flow of thousands of tourists as they look around, chat, yawn, listen to the audio guides and take selfies. One group actually does this next to the sign saying “Arbeit Macht Frei". Of course they are dressed casually, and evidently no restrictions are put on their clothing as might be the case in a church or mosque, and yet their behaviour is not overtly disrespectful or disorderly. It is just normal. It is as if they are seeing the Eiffel Tower or Anne Hathaway’s cottage. (...) The film is about memory and truth, and that perhaps these things cannot exactly be preserved like wine or books, but rather have to be kept alive as habits of thought – especially in the age of the facetious and insidious post-truth fad – and that commercial memorials such as those at the Nazi camps, however crass, can create the circumstances in which thinking about the past is possible and encouraged. But this means a debate about what form the memorialising should take. (from The Guardian review).
