Columbusstraße

"Columbusstraße", subtitled "Eine Familiengeschichte, 1935–1945", is exactly 500 pages long. It was a bundle of letters that Tobi Dahmen found in 2015 after the death of his father and which allowed him to delve into the past. The result is a contemporary document from the front row. It begins in Düsseldorf's Columbusstraße, in the birthplace of Tobi Dahmen's father Karl-Leo, who as a child witnessed Hitler's war drums, the escalating anti-Semitism on the streets, the first bombing raids and how the war took hold of his older brothers. One was sent to the Western Front, the other to Stalingrad, and then finally it was his father's turn. Karl-Leo is "the little one" and goes to school in the increasingly war-torn Düsseldorf. Tobi Dahmen depicts these dark years from the perspectives of each of those involved, creating an excellently documented, intense and dense portrait of those who allowed themselves to be blindly swept along.