The Passenger – Welcome to Germany (Der Passagier – Welcome to Germany)

The Passenger – Welcome to Germany (German: Der Passagier – Welcome to Germany) is a 1988 West German drama. It is the fourth and last feature directed by the playwright Thomas Brasch. Starring Tony Curtis in the lead and running about 102 minutes, it was entered into the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.

At its centre is an American film director who comes to the Germany of the day, the late 1980s, to shoot a picture. His film rests on a partly fictionalised true incident from 1942: thirteen Jewish prisoners in a concentration camp are promised their freedom if they appear in a German propaganda film, but their hopes come to nothing. The director wants to tell what really happened and, in doing so, hopes to come to terms with his own personal wound from the Holocaust.

Brasch wrote the screenplay with Jurek Becker. Alongside Curtis, the cast includes Katharina Thalbach, Matthias Habich, Karin Baal, Charles Régnier, Alexandra Stewart, Birol Ünel, Gedeon Burkhard, Peter Lohmeyer, Leslie Malton and Anna Thalbach.