Sinti composer and musician Roger ‘Moreno’ Rathgeb from Vaals plays the main character in the new documentary Requiem for Auschwitz, which focuses on the fate of the Sinti and Roma during the Holocaust.
Roger ‘Moreno’ Rathgeb completed the composition Requiem for Auschwitz in 2008, which he worked on for ten years. In the documentary of the same name, filmmaker Bob Entrop follows him during a performance of the requiem in Berlin and during a visit to the former extermination camp Auschwitz.
Auschwitz
Rathgeb first came to Auschwitz in the late 1990s. During that first visit, the idea for his requiem arose. “The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I felt the misery that had taken place in my body,” he told the radio program L1 Cultuurcafé. “And then suddenly a motive came to me. I immediately thought: I have to do something with that.”
self-taught
Rathgeb is self-taught, which is one of the reasons why it took so long to complete the composition. “It was learning by doing“, he says. “Working on the requiem, I actually did my conservatory training. I’m still amazed at how I came up with this.”
Taboo
The persecution of the Sinti and the Roma has long been an underexposed history. The subject was also taboo in the community itself for a long time. Rathgeb: “It is not talked about because the events are too horrific and too bad. But since the requiem came out, I notice that more and more people are coming out with stories.”
New job
Rathgeb is currently working on a new major composition, commissioned by the conductor of the Die Roma und Sinti Philharmoniker from Frankfurt am Main. “It will be a kind of requiem about the pogrom against the Roma before, during and after the Kosovo war. Again a very charged subject.”