Bernd – Operation Germanenkind

Director's Note

When I asked Jana Zöll to play the role of the theater director, she initially turned it down. She said she didn’t want to be part of a film in which people with disabilities are portrayed or cast in the same old way. A few days later, she called me back. She had read the script and laughed. “Everyone here is getting on each other’s nerves. Finally, I get to play a character where my disability isn’t an issue. I get to just be the annoying theater director, without a message, without having to fulfill any kind of social mission.”

BERND is not a film against inclusion—on the contrary. It’s a film against idealization. Against the habit of reducing people to characteristics, labels, or social functions.

One night during my student days, I ran into a person with Down syndrome on the street who was shouting harsh far-right slogans. That encounter became the inspiration for the character Bernd. I ask myself where the limits of our tolerance lie and how naively we view the current process of societal change. How do we react when we see that, of course, a person with a disability can also be a far-right extremist who discriminates and glorifies violence? In BERND, I examine where structural fascism, depravity, and brutality lie hidden within us, the intellectual, open-minded, and tolerant people. BERND serves as both a trigger and an indicator of this—through his at times unbearable and provocative manner, he exposes society’s vulnerabilities.

For me, Bernd is not a provocation for provocation’s sake. He is a stress test. A character who shakes our certainties and challenges our sense of self. Through his ruthlessness, his transgression of boundaries, and his often unbearable directness, he forces those around him and perhaps the audience as well to question themselves. Where does our openness end? And how tolerant are we really when we encounter someone who defies all moral categorization?

I’m less interested in the fascism of the loud and obvious than in that which hides within the subtle structures of our thinking—in our reflexes, in our prejudices, in our desire to categorize people and place them on the good side. Bernd makes these mechanisms visible by deliberately exaggerating them.

At the same time, BERND is, for me, a passionate commitment to the freedom of art. I believe that art must be a space where anything can be imagined. A space for the beautiful and the ugly, for the tender and the cruel, for the rational and the absurd. Art loses its power when it merely confirms what we already know. It begins where it asks questions to which there are no simple answers.

That is why BERND is not a film that dictates positions. It is a film that embraces contradictions. And perhaps that is more important today than ever before.

About the Director

Cornelius Schwalm was born in Frankfurt in 1967. He studied acting at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater and has performed at venues including the Schauspielhaus Bochum, the Maxim Gorki Theater, Schauspiel Frankfurt, and the Staatstheater Stuttgart. At the same time, he began directing in the independent theater scene and won the 1st Prize of the Jury at the Heidelberg Theatertage for his self-written play “Mongoflipper.” As a film actor, he has appeared in over 50 films, working with directors such as Tom Tykwer, Christoph Hochhäusler, Chris Kraus, and Thomas Stuber. He has a long-standing collaboration with Rudolf Thome, with whom he has made five films. His directorial debut, “Hotel Auschwitz,” was released in German theaters in 2018. “BERND – Operation Germanenkind” is his second film.