Documentary – Jamel documentary: Mostly alone among Nazis

As a rule, you can’t choose your neighbors. With whom Birgit Lohmeyer has been living court by court for 21 years – “of course we dug deep, deep, deep into shit with Jamel,” literally. Because neighbors simply cannot be browner than in the West Mecklenburg hamlet between Lübeck and Wismar. After all, Jamel is known as a Nazi village, in which Birgit Lohmeyer and her husband Horst hold the position of the rational ones. And how!

Three years after moving into the environment of the NPD official and Hammerskin Sven Krüger, who has been convicted numerous times, the Lohmeyers founded an anti-right music festival on their property. Among violent neo-Nazis in the almost nationally liberated zone, local bands initially performed in front of a few handfuls of like-minded people. When the organizers’ barn was set on fire in 2015, shortly before the festival, now called “Jamel rocks the forester,” the surprise guests were the Toten Hosen. And thus triggered an avalanche, which the ARD documentary “Jamel – Loud Resistance” tells of.

“Of course we went deep, deep, deep into shit with Jamel.”

Birgit Lohmeyer about her neighbors

The filmmaker Martin Groß looks back on the first 16 festivals and at the same time shows how complicated the path to the 17th was. The day after the festival, the state parliament was elected in Thuringia, with a right-wing extremist party becoming the strongest force in Germany for the first time since the closely related NSDAP. “You can see everywhere in the country that there is no longer any shame in being a Nazi,” said Birgit Lohmeyer in the run-up to the previous European elections. And she was right.

In the 67-minute report, we not only see how continental and local elections produce ethnic winners in droves. Inspired by East German AfD triumphs, the Lohmeyers’ neighbors are also becoming more offensive. You can see it when two right-wing pensioners from the district town of Grevesmühlen lie into the microphone of the alleged “lying press” at a left-liberal demo that there is no right-wing among them. You can see it when the historian Daniel Trepsdorf explains the concept of “national conquest” in Jamel and Sven Krüger drives three times on his quad bike through the background.

But above all you can see it in the local council of Gägelow, where Krüger’s NSDAP revenant “Heimat” tries to prevent the festival with a false environmental lawsuit – and almost succeeds. “Jamel” is therefore not only a highly interesting, deeply frightening film about the new self-confidence of those of the past; He also paints an irritating portrait of a society whose enemies campaign against pluralistic democracy less with combat boots than with paragraphs and often receive civic support in return. Although in this case not enough.

Because “Jamel rocks the forester”, so much in advance, also took place this summer – and once again attracted many superstars of German pop culture who have no longer been announced since the surprise appearance of the Toten Hosen. In August, the curtain fell on the Fantastischen Vier, who even eclipsed Element of Crime, Olli Schulz and Ebow in terms of popularity – just as brilliantly as Die Ärzte, Kraftklub, Grönemeyer and Deichkind in previous years.

The film festival accompaniment is not just about the encroaching darkness of civilization, but also about the torches of brightness that tirelessly illuminate it. Above all, Birgit and Horst Lohmeyer, who adore their 3,500 paying guests per year almost more than their musical guests. Sometimes filmmaker Martin Groß works with manipulative symbolism. The fact that butterflies flutter through the idyll of the good guys while the bad guys pile up junk is sometimes too much. But the ethnic observers don’t make any special effort to come across as philanthropic.

When the police report that they confiscated an incredible 7.5 tons of propaganda material and weapons during a raid on 36 village Nazis in 2023, the deer in the Lohmeyers’ garden is perhaps more appropriate than with the Krüger family – the most terrible neighbors imaginable, the people to the left of can have on the right. By the way, you will find out at the end what the former mean by neighborhood. When one of the people on the right falls from the container that serves as their viewing platform, they ask for help on the festival site. “Of course we gave them that,” says one organizer. If he is alone among Nazis for the next 360 days of the year, he will probably be denied such assistance.

Available in the ARD media library