BERLIN – November 9, 1938, marks the night when synagogues burned across Germany, thousands of Jewish shops were looted, and with the arrest of more than 30,000 people, the terror against Jews in Nazi Germany reached a new dimension.

On the eve of the anniversary of the events which came to be known as the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, a film is being released in selected German cinemas, which brings to life and audibly remembers a world lost with the Holocaust: “I Dance, But My Heart is Crying.”

The musical film by Christoph Weinert revives the music of Jewish artists from the 1920s and 1930s. The film tells the story of the two record labels, Semer and Lukraphon, which continued to produce music by Jewish artists in Nazi Berlin until 1938.

November 9, 1938, marked a turning point: Texts, scores and original musical themes were either completely destroyed or went missing after World War II.

Nevertheless, the music survived – on shellac records of Jewish emigrants, for example. More than 70 years later, two record collectors painstakingly gathered them from the remotest corners of the world. The film recounts this effort and presents 12 songs as examples, interpreted by contemporary singers and musicians of Jewish music.

The songs and diverse musical styles also represent the variety of Jewish life in Berlin during the Weimar Republic: Sophisticated chanson singers stand alongside the religious fervour of the Hasidic songs of devout ultra-Orthodox people, or the sounds of Yiddish songs from Berlin’s Jewish quarter with its Eastern Jewish population embodying the world of the Polish and Ukrainian shtetls.

According to the distributor, collaborations with schools are planned for the film’s release.

Co-producer Yves Kugelmann stressed, “Films or journalistic formats are not school lessons with a pedagogical implication: They are an offering in terms of enlightenment, opinion formation and mediation.

“Good stories and well-told stories are always more than that: They open up perspectives in the present.”

The film, Kugelmann told dpa on Thursday, tells the story of artists and their work and history not from the perspective of tragic fate and destruction. Instead, he said, it celebrates “people, work and life.”

The film shows what was, without narrating it from the tragic end, he explained. “This is important. These people were not victims, they were artists. They became victims, and at the same time, this should not become their identity, but rather a part of their history.”