Antifascist Art Brigades and Solidarity Movement in the 1970s

Conversation with Gerald Warnke

Gerald Warnke is an activist, cultural policymaker and networker. He was active in various collectives in the cities of Marburg and Kassel during the 1970s anti-imperialist solidarity movement, in particular for Chile, Vietnam and Palestine. During that time, he ran the Marburg Students’ Film Club, organizing theme-based film series such as a week of proletarian, revolutionary films, an antifascist and a Soviet film week, films for the anti-imperialist struggle and third world films. In 1973, immediately following the military coup in Chile, he organized a Chilean film week. On the fringes of documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, with support from the Jugendbrigade Salvador Allende and German art students, Warnke organized the production of a mural on the forecourt of the theatre in Kassel painted by the Pablo Neruda antifascist painting brigade of Chilean artists in Parisian exile, including José Balmes, Gracia Barrios and Guillermo Nuñez.

Screening: Chilenische Wandmalerei, directed by Franz Lehmkuhl, D 1977, 30 min, followed by a conversation with Franz Lehmkuhl and Paz Guevara

The film director and photographer Franz Lehmkuhl completed his studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Kassel with the film Rashidiiya, which was awarded the first prize at the film festival Liberation of Palestine is Cornerstone for Worldpeace in Baghdad in 1978. He shot further films in the Middle East, some commissioned by UNESCO. As a filmmaker and camera correspondent, Lehmkuhl documented the so-called “Kurdish problem” for international press and film agencies in Iraq, the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979 – 1980) as well as matters related to apartheid in South Africa and Namibia (1987). His film Chilenische Wandmalerei (1980) was shown in Leipzig at the festival Filme der Welt für den Frieden der Welt. In 1980, he and Christian Fuchs founded IKARUS-Film- und Fernsehproduktion GmbH, which made films, for example, for the ZDF Kleine Fernsehspiel, for ARD, SR and WDR.

To the biography of Paz Guevara