Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is nearly 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.
“From my childhood onward, I have lived 80 years in peace,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the stakes have rarely been higher.
“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans are realizing again that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom into our own hands.”
In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life,” as the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who did not die there, Wenders said. “I had the privilege to be among the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”
Europe and Germany are crammed with varied efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including somber memorial events at concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political testament from the man behind award-winning movies including “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”
The new film is less than five minutes long and called “The Keys to Freedom,” a moody, meditative visit to a little-known spot where history was made: a small school in Reims, France, where at 2:41 a.m. on May 7, 1945, the German army signed its unconditional surrender in front of allied commanders. The school, now the Lycée Franklin Roosevelt, then housed the headquarters of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe.
Today there is a small museum in the school called the Museum of the Surrender, which includes the top floor map room where the commanders worked and the capitulation was signed.
When Eisenhower and his team left the school, they handed the keys to the city’s authorities, and they are now displayed in a small display case at the museum. “The commander in chief returns the keys to the mayor of Reims and says, ‘These are the keys to the freedom of the world,’” Wenders says in the film. “I was very touched by the sight of these keys, even though now they’re just keys in a small museum.”
Wenders wanders the museum, looking at other exhibits and chatting with current students. The surrender is recaptured through archival footage of the day’s events and a modern reconstruction, with actors.
The Soviets insisted that the German high command repeat its surrender in Berlin, which they had conquered. That event took place on the following evening, May 8, which is generally recognized as the moment the war in Europe officially ended. For years, under Soviet occupation, the building where the agreement was ratified was known as The Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945, but after German reunification it was renamed Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.
“The idea was to go where the real thing was negotiated and signed, not just ratified, like what then was repeated on May 8, in Karlshorst — but the real McCoy,” Wenders said. “A place in France to which I owed that freedom in which my life has taken place.”
Wenders, who was born in August 1945, became a key figure in what was known as the “New German Cinema” movement of the 1960s and ’70s, an influential art house revolution by the postwar generation. In recent years, he has turned toward documentaries, which are less complicated to fund and get greenlit these days, he said. He narrates “The Keys to Freedom” in three languages, German, English and French, and said he considered it a political film that looked back to his earliest work documenting German protests against the war in Vietnam.
The film was sparked by an idea from Germany’s foreign ministry. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the re-election of Europe-skeptic President Trump, it has been looking to be more forthright in its public messaging, especially about German values and the country’s commitment to European security, said Peter Ptassek, a senior diplomat in charge of strategic communications.
The ministry approached Wenders, who agreed to work for free, as did most of his team. The ministry provided “under 100,000 euros” (about $113,000) for the project, to help pay for technical staff and production, Ptassek said.
“With the war in Ukraine and what’s happening now in the U.S., we realized we had to raise our voice and explain ourselves,” Ptassek said. “If you don’t explain what you’re doing, you lose trust.”
“‘The ‘Keys to Freedom’ is a symbol that fits so well,” he added. “Eighty years of American protection no longer seem reliable. We have to take these keys and assume our responsibility.”
Wenders hopes the film will speak to young people, but he has doubts. Even the French students in the school in Reims think of the war as ancient history, he said. “They are the third generation living in this peace, and therefore they take it for granted,” he said. “So it makes it easy to believe that this is eternal.”
The shoot in Reims “made me acutely aware how precious freedom can be,” Wenders said. “In my life too, I had taken it for granted, and seeing that little war room made me realize how fragile it really is.”
Talking to the students, he said, “made me realize that it’s quite a job, politically in Europe at this moment, to make people even take the word freedom seriously. Even the word doesn’t mean much because they know nothing else. So that’s why I wanted to keep the film really open at the end,” he said, to present the idea that “we have to be aware of the fact that Uncle Sam isn’t doing our job for very much longer, and we might have to defend this freedom ourselves.”
