The film’s main idea and central theme involves analysing the real or stipulated naivety of the witnesses. Emil Glesener, Pierre Kiesch and Fernand Artois insist in their interviews that they were naïve and participated in the general strike on the 31st August 1942 without thinking about the consequences or even considering that there might be any. The film tries to evaluate whether the three young men were actually as naïve as they pretend in their presentation or if they constructed an image a posteriori in order to justify their de facto irrational behaviour.
In order to give a coherent structure to the film, we decided to introduce a narrator who expresses himself in the first person. This voice-over (in blue in the storyboard) has two functions. On the one hand, it serves as an internal link between the different entities of the video. On the other hand, the narrator can trace a historical context and give the essential information to the viewer, without creating a complicated theoretical frame.
This narrator is a young adult whose infantine voice resembles the age of the three witnesses at the moment of the general strike. The implication of a young adult obliged us to create a voice-over with a simplified text, which is furthermore spoken in Luxembourgish, even though the interviews are in German.
The film studies the witnesses’ real or stipulated naivety in three different phases. First of all, the students experience a fundamental change in their daily school routine after the implementation of the Nazi occupation structures. Secondly, we focus on the day of the general strike. It is in narrating this event that the witnesses most often use the word ‘naive’ to describe their attitude. Finally, the film analyses the period of the (failed) re-education at Stahleck castle, since the failure of this measure proves that the young men were less naive than they pretend today.