Marcus Welsch ©

Marcus Welsch [Germany]

Marcus Welsch, born in 1969 in Singen am Hohentwiel (West Germany), is a Berlin based documentary filmmaker, publicist and has also been working as an analyst on the Russian war since 2022. He learned the film craft in feature film projects with Roman Polański, Volker Schlöndorff and Wolfgang Becker (Good Bye, Lenin!) and has directed documentaries that primarily deal with different perspectives on the politics of memory in order to shed new light on National Socialism, the GDR or the left-wing extremism of the 1970s in West Germany. He is interested in sideshows: how the last Jewish families (Landschaftsgeschichten, 2010)  in the southern German outskirts reinvented escape aid, the high-armament in GDR sports (Katarina Bullin 2005) or how Maoist groups in West Germany prepared the transition from the red to the green decade. His film „The Chronicler “ (Kronikarz,  2019) about Nazi forced labor and the involvement of Swiss capital with the production facilities of the Second World War met with great interest in Berlin, Kiev and Warsaw – but not in Switzerland.

Since 2014, Marcus Welsch has been intensively involved with the Russian war in Ukraine and the (non-) reaction of the West. He has often traveled to the Donbass region with Serhij Zhadan and his writer friends, trying to make their concerns heard in the German public, most recently with Zhadan’s book “Himmel über Berlin” (Suhrkamp 2022). He is one of the controversial interlocutors in the German-Polish debate (My lunatycy – o niemieckich błędach w relacjach z Rosją, DIALOG 146 magazine). His comments on the 2022 German discourse has be published on “Salonkolumnisten” platform. For the last two years, Welsch has worked primarily as an OSINT and data analyst to find better options for action in the war in Ukraine. “Kyiv Dialogue” publishes his monthly air war monitoring report for politicians and specialist journalists.