Marcus Welsch ©

Marcus Welsch [Germany]

Marcus Welsch, born in 1969 in Singen am Hohentwiel (West Germany), is a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker and publicist, and has also been working as an analyst on the Russian war since 2022. He learned the film craft through 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 in the southern German outskirts reinvented escape aid (Landschaftsgeschichten, 2010), the amped-up industrialisation of sports in the GDR (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 labour 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, Welsch has been intensively involved with the Russian war on Ukraine and the (non-) reaction of the West. He has often travelled to the Donbas region with Serhiy Zhadan and his writer friends, trying to make their concerns heard in the German public, most recently with Zhadan’s book Himmel über Charkiw (Suhrkamp 2022; tr: The Sky Over Kharkiv). He is one of the controversial interlocutors in the German-Polish debate (“My lunatycy – o niemieckich błędach w relacjach z Rosją”, DIALOG 146 magazine; tr: Sleepwalkers – On German Mistakes in Russian Relations). His comments on the 2022 German discourse has been published on the platform Salonkolumnisten. For the last two years, Welsch has worked primarily as an OSINT and data analyst to find better options for action in the war on Ukraine. Kyiv Dialogue publishes his monthly air war monitoring report for politicians and specialist journalists.