Der Kuaför aus der Keupstrasse (2015)

On June 9, 2004, a bomb explosion rocked Cologne's Keupstraße. A nail bomb detonated in the commercial street populated primarily by residents of Turkish origin, injuring 22 people, 4 of them seriously. The Kuaför from Keupstraße, a Turkish hairdressing salon, suffered the most severe material damage.But the explosion is followed by the implosion of the faith of the Keupstraße residents. The police investigation is initially directed exclusively against the residents of the street itself. A right-wing extremist attack was rigorously ruled out.

It is not until the investigation of the members of the National Socialist Underground, which began in 2011, that it quickly becomes clear that the residents' long-held suspicions that they had been the victims of a terrorist attack correspond to the terrible truth.Ten years after the attack, documentary filmmaker Andreas Maus visits the residents and those affected in Keupstraße and lets them tell their stories in calm and touching images, sometimes supported by the use of actors who reproduce the interrogation transcripts of the police investigation. Maus strikes exactly the right tone with this, because the residents of Keupstraße are not 'foreigners' in the first place, but citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany who go about their daily lives as small businessmen just like any other citizen of this country. The only thing that makes the Keupstraße residents special is the general suspicion they were automatically under on the part of the constitutional state. The film takes no position whatsoever, but left me with the impression that there was clearly a double standard in the police investigation. And the opera of the attack, which were under general suspicion, did not get more than a warm handshake from the Federal President.The viewer is left with the uneasy feeling that the free democratic basic order is far more unstable than previously assumed.For this insight alone, the documentary by Andreas Maus is worth watching.