Basically, Daniel Cohn-Bendit's search for his Judaism could be over in the first dispute. His older brother Gabriel is reminiscent of their father. His speech was: "I left Germany as a leftist and came back as a Jew." Gabriel says he knows the view that one will be made a Jew, but does not accept it. He was once a Trotskyist, but is no longer a Trotskyist. He was born a Jew, but now he is no longer one. This rejection is his individual freedom. “Lately I have been resisting this identity. It's the others who shape your identity, and I don't want to be locked up. ”The younger brother counters the liberal thought:“ But you will be told you're Jewish. ”Above all, the anti-Semites. Doesn't that make him think?

Two highly politicized men are arguing on a bench in the French sunshine, one in his mid-seventies, the other in his mid-eighties.

The cinematic staging is reminiscent of a sociological-philosophical argumentation idyll among contemporary witnesses of the century.

The atmosphere is characterized by a hint of gentleness of old age.

Listener and narrator

In the film by his stepson Niko Apel (Grimme Prize for “Sonbol”), which he designed as the main character, listener and narrator, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is generally looking for balance. In “We are all German Jews” he encounters Jews and Palestinians, searches for people and assessments, asks questions, is irritated, smiles at jokes, gets into trouble with arguments, names contradictions, summarizes and finally comes to a kind of provisional solution Opposites in the life principles of openness, integration and family. He determines his relationship with Israel in the dispute with the various interlocutors. He visits places of religious and symbolic importance such as the grave of the biblical Rachel in Bethlehem or the Makkabi football club in Frankfurt am Main. To his personal,He approaches non-religious Judaism. He does not make his peace with Israel. His conclusion, although obtained personally, claims more general validity.

The opposing position in this French film (a German-subtitled NDR-RBB license purchase) does not lead to the brotherly quarrel in the house of Cohn-Bendit; the exposure primarily serves to sharpen the documentary perspective. Who is Jew is not exclusively determined by individual writers, nor is there a common denominator in the debate in the newspaper, nor is the orthodoxy that only considers a Jew to be a person born of a Jewish mother to remain unchallenged. Antisemites certainly do not determine it. Cohn-Bendit begins the film as a family story in questions with and to the mother. Apel traces Cohn-Bendit's biography, the expulsion from France in the wake of the Paris riots in 1968, anti-Semitic comments, the solidarity demonstrations (slogan: “We are all German Jews”). And he travels to Israelwhere his friend, Cicerone and translator Ofer Bronchtein, advisor and peace activist, receives him.

Cohn-Bendit looks surprised when the editor-in-chief of an Israeli Jewish Orthodox fashion magazine accuses him of destroying Judaism as the husband of a non-Jewish woman. Before that, he visited the kibbutz where, as a teenager, he dreamed of a socialist future. With Naomi Bubis, daughter of Ignatz Bubis, who emigrated to Tel Aviv, he talks about freedom and drawers. Edgar and Audrey, two Jews who moved to Israel from France because of growing anti-Semitism, are about discrimination.

Of course, Cohn-Bendit also learns about this at the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, which only teaches non-Jewish children. A crying black schoolgirl talks about everyday racism in Israel, and Cohn-Bendit's eyes also get wet. With an illegal settler, a Palestinian architect, mothers in the “Parents Circle Families Forum”, with the singer Noa, who witnessed the attack on Yitzhak Rabin, and others he talks about the peace process at that time and the two-state solution. He illuminates the word “Jew” etymologically. When one of the interviewees explained that being Jewish is “a deep, philosophical state of being” and that one is a Christian simply by confession and without built-in doubts, Cohn-Bendit leaves the absurd statement uncommented.

Taking attributions personally and questioning them by virtue of the person, that is the procedure of this intellectual, rather anti-identity-political road movie.

Encounter follows encounter, definition follows specification, answer follows answer, classification follows reflection.

If one takes seriously the definition given by the liberal rabbi Nava Hefetz Cohn-Bendit, the documentary itself is an example of practiced Judaism.

Because a Jew, she says, is one who wakes up in the morning with one question and goes to sleep in the evening with another question.

We are all German Jews

runs on Monday at 11.35 p.m. in the first.