BERLIN: The highest grossing German movie last year was a fizzy feel-good summer comedy about the country’s refugee influx, “Welcome to the Hartmanns.”
Just a year on, German screens are darkening with “Club Europa,” a sobering take on the challenges and dilemmas in the newcomers’ integration that mirrors a growing national sense of ambivalence.
The new movie by 32-year-old Franziska Hoenisch, broadcast on public television ZDF on Thursday, tells the story of a group of young Berlin flatmates who decide to take in a refugee from Cameroon named Samuel.
The Berliners show the newcomer the capital’s famous techno scene and demonstrate how to use a potato peeler while explaining to Samuel that he has arrived in “potato country.”
But the light tone of the movie soon grows ominous as Samuel’s asylum request is rejected by the authorities.
The young adults must now decide if they would keep hosting him even though his residence status is now in limbo.
“We didn’t want to just make a movie about people who succeed, which comforts the viewer and gives the impression that all is well,” Hoenisch told AFP.
The filmmaker said she deliberately centered the movie around young adults in the hopes of shaking them out of their comfort bubble to take responsibilities for their action.
“The people of my generation talk a lot, we want to be politically correct and involved, but deep down, we don’t do much,” said the young director.
“We don’t channel our energy toward changing things for the better, but more to build our personal happiness,” she said.
“It’s not enough to just assuage our bad conscience by helping a little.”
Germany saw a record influx of asylum seekers, reaching 1.1 million over 2015 and 2016.
The arrival of tens of thousands of asylum seekers cheered by volunteers handing out food, water and teddy bears at German rail stations became the defining image then.
Chancellor Angela Merkel was able to tap into a wellspring of empathy for the asylum seekers, particularly those fleeing war-ravaged Syria.
However, that enthusiasm has turned into doubts about Europe’s biggest economy’s ability to integrate so many people so quickly, and filmmaking is catching up to that reality.
Refugee drama ‘Club Europa’ hits German screens
Refugee drama ‘Club Europa’ hits German screens
Judge declares 4 men wrongly accused of 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent
- The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families
- Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999
TEXAS, USA: A Texas judge on Thursday declared four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent, formally clearing their names in a courtroom for the first time since the killings of four teenage girls that haunted the city for decades.
“You are innocent,” state District Judge Dayna Blazey said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom.
The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators’ inability to solve it for decades. Blazey called her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.
“Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
A declaration of “actual innocence” would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.
“All four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,” Strassburger said.
The murders shocked Austin and confounded investigators for years
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
“Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.
Connection to a new suspect revealed
The case effectively went cold until 2025. It got new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.
Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers’ other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
