On Thursday, 13 November 2025, at 6 p.m., we will be screening the documentary film ‘The Return’ (South Africa, 2024, English with German subtitles, 96 min) at SFU Berlin.

In this documentary, Mark Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum, both Jewish South Africans, explore the complex and interwoven aftermath of the Holocaust, apartheid and colonial racist violence.
Based on Heidi Grunebaum’s family history, the film unfolds a multi-layered panorama of contemporary struggles with memory in South Africa, Germany and beyond.

Following the screening, there will be an opportunity for discussion with Heidi Grunebaum, filmmaker and professor at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of Western Cape, South Africa.

The Film
The South African documentary explores the aftermath of the Holocaust and antisemitism, as well as apartheid, colonial violence, contemporary racism and lsrael/Palestine through the interwoven stories of South African and German interviewees involved in a range of memory struggles. lt highlights fractures and connections between ideologies and structures and explores the return of ‘white supremacy’ and fascism today. Using Heidi Grunebaum’s family story as a portal, the film explores these wider issues as it moves between South Africa and Germany and from there to the controversial significance that Israel has for the German politics of remembrance.

Heidi Grunebaum‘s work focuses on social and aesthetic responses to the afterlives of genocide, war and mass violence and on the Holocaust, apartheid and the Palestine Nakba, in particular. Her research interests include Holocaust and genocide studies, critical memory studies,aesthetics and politics, comportative literary, film andnarrative studies, postcolonial theory and public culture. She is the author of the monograph Memorializing the Post: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission
(New Jersey: Transaction, 2011), co-editor with Emile Maurice of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive (Cape Town: CHR, 2012) and Athlone in Mind (Cape Town: CHR, 2017) with curator Kurt Campbell.

Department Psychologie
Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität Berlin
Campus Tempelhof
Columbiadamm 10, Turm 9
12101 Berlin – Tempelhof

Tel.: +49(0)30 695 797 28-0
E-Mail: psychologie@sfu-berlin.de
Web: https://psychologie.sfu-berlin.de