Have you ever seen a film scene that you thought was too violent to watch?

I don’t think so. I would also never watch anything like that. My husband and I are old, we get up early and go early to bed. And because of youth protection we never see any violent films on tv. Well I look at Tatort (German crime series), but that’s a curbed violence made for families.

Also not randomly on tv?

I don’t zap. I look in the program and decide what I want to see. Through zapping you get to see violent things and I don’t do that.

And you haven’t for example never seen a romantic movie, that suddenly turned out violently?

Yes, one of the most romantic films I’ve ever seen, a Lars Von Trier film, ended in a kind of meaningful violence, that you don’t see, but just know has happened. It has a German actor in it, Udo Kier.

And what happens in this film?

It’s about a young couple. A naive and simple girl from a village marries a pretty well-to-do man who works on an oil platform. She’s portrayed as the dumb one in the village, but she was loving, naive and good, and it benefited him. Then something bad happens, and the more the girl suffers, the better the man feels. The girl sacrifices herself and is strangled to death when she sleeps with this sadist. It was the most romantic and at the same time most cruel movie. But you never see any cruelty or violence. Instead you sense it. In the end she dies so that he can live. So it’s symbolised in the skies. She dies and he gets up again. But then he doesn’t have her anymore. I think that’s the most violent film I’ve ever seen without seeing any violence.

If you were to embody one of the characters, victim, perpetrator or bystander if there is such, what role would you rather play and why?

Who would want to play a murderer and on top of that a sadistic one? And who would want to be an inactive bystander? Maybe an actor would find it interesting, but I would definitely not want to play any of them. For me the only acceptable figure is the victim. I would play the woman, not because I am a woman, but because I would do a lot for a person that I love. Also for friends. Not everyone who got caught in Nazi Germany were murdered.

What do you mean?

Let’s think of July 20th 1944, not everyone was hanged or shot. There were all these lousy court cases where one could say about the other that he or she was just a follower, other followers helping the other out. I think in dictatorships these things happen often, in a democracy it doesn’t have to be like that.

When were you born if I may ask?

I was born in 1938, so I was a child. So I don’t really have anything to do with the Second World War.

Is this self-sacrifice realistic?

I think for my generation yes. In my generation less women were studying or maybe more the generation before. The women could not support themselves and I think this also led women to sacrifice. To me it’s always difficult to see when people loose their self-esteem and they become victim to other people.