” ‘deutsche wohnen (was singen die diven)’ is a film opera about displacement, examining tensions between modernity and investment, Stalinallee and Hansaviertel, homelessness and the question of how we want to live.

“Every house is a diva!”, claimed a brochure about the Hansaviertel published by the Berlin Senate in 1957. The district was built as West Berlin’s response to East Berlin’s Stalinallee – the present Karl-Marx-Allee – which was constructed after the war. Both of these urban planning concepts are characterized by the notion of “tabula rasa”, the experience of destruction in the Second World War and the hope for a new beginning, the so-called zero hour. For Ulf Aminde and Christoph Grund there is no such thing as zero hour “1945”, rather, the caesura was the deportation of the Jewish population from the neighborhoods. In their work, they focus on both the Hansaviertel and the Stalinallee, investigating and condensing the story, thereby drawing a line to the present day. In this manner, they link current discussions and debates about nationalism, racism and remembrance of Jewish life with the struggles for affordable rents on Karl-Marx-Allee and the question of expropriation of the housing company Deutsche Wohnen.”