Ein Chinese mit dem Kontrabass

He was born as Anton Chen in Berlin in 1925. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he first emigrated to Switzerland, then to China and finally to the Siberian part of the Soviet Union. At 75, Anton resides as Han Sen in Kharkiv/Ukraine. When asked about his identity, his answer comes fast and clear: "Berliner!" From his special perspective, Han Sen offers a highly personal perspective on the history of the 20th century and what it means to be a wanderer between wildly different worlds. *** When Han Sen is born Anton Chen in Berlin in 1925, he grows up like many other boys at that time. He plays in the streets, scuffles with other boys. But Anton's parents are different from those of the neighbourhood boys. They had taken part in the Shanghai student uprising in 1919 and fled to Berlin in 1924. Officially enrolled as students, their communist struggle for a better life for working class people soon became their main occupation in "red" Berlin. Zhou Enlai, Zouh De and other later leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are regular visitors at the Chen family apartment. As an eight-year-old, Anton witnesses the fire that devastates the Reichstag at close range. It marks the beginning of brutal Nazi terror against any critic of their ultranationalist, racist agenda. The little Chinese boy with Communist parents is no longer safe in the city of his birth. As an emigré, he visits the reformist Odenwald school while his father departs to Spain to fight against the fascist Franco regime. Probably out of homesickness, his father changes Anton's name to Han Sen, which means "born in China". But Han Sen can neither write nor speak Chinese. After seven years in Switzerland, at the age of 15, he moves on to China and, after Stalin's death in 1953, first to Siberia, later to Kharkiv in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. This is where he was living when filmmaker Ullabritt Horn met him after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He would have liked to return to Central Europe, but the path is blocked for him. The film tells the story of a man whose life was changed forever by the dramatic turning points of 20th century history: the rise of fascism in Germany, the Spanish Civil War in which his father takes part, the Second World War in China and the subsequent Chinese civil war, which he witnesses in the legendary cave city of Yan'an, Mao Zedong's centre of power. He experiences life in the Soviet Union during the period of de-Stalinisation and finally, perestroika in Ukraine and the collapse of the Soviet empire. On his journey for this film, Han Sen reconnects with former classmates and friends in Switzerland and China whom he had thought lost forever or dead. From his aunts in China he learns that his mother was murdered during the Cultural Revolution. At his father's grave, Han Sen is finally able to reconcile with him, who had never understood his non-Chinese, non-communist son.