Soldiers train for urban combat in a fictional war in the largest military training city in Europe. Recruits examine grenades from the Second World War in an ammunition museum. In a lecture, a colonel speaks to district administrators about the Zeitenwende. Visitors on a company outing try out weapons and climb into tanks. Soldiers dig a trench. Members of the press question a general about the war in Ukraine. A temporary employment agency sends extras who play refugees in a military exercise.
The past, present and the future of war in Germany and Europe collide at the Altmark military training area in Saxony-Anhalt. The documentary film Scenario tells this story in fragmentary scenes. The Altmark training area is located in the Colbitz-Letzlingen Heath, the largest uninhabited area in Germany. It is visible to the naked eye from space. The site is 28 kilometers long and covers an area of around 23,000 hectares. Today it is home to the Army Combat Training Centre, the central facility for operational training of German soldiers. But the Altmark training area also has a history: beginning in 1936, the Wehrmacht tested artillery weapons there and later heavy weapons such as the railway gun Dora at the “Hillersleben Army Testing Facility.”
Two villages located in the area were forcibly evacuated and demolished for this purpose. From 1945 to 1994, the Soviet Army used the site and at times stationed up to 20,000 soldiers at its westernmost training ground. In 1994, the German Bundeswehr took over the training area and began clearing the ammunition that had accumulated there during nearly 70 years of military exercises. Even today, 30 employees search daily with probes and spades for unexploded bombs, grenades, and ammunition debris in the soil of the site. The training area is also home to the most modern military training city in Europe, called “Schnöggersburg.”
The city has 550 buildings. Fifteen high-rise buildings, supermarkets, a 16-kilometer motorway, a chemical plant, an old town district, an industrial zone, a subway, a sports stadium, an airport, and even a 22-meter-wide river with five bridges were built for more than 100 million euros. A captain says: “In the past, it was difficult to justify why we spent so much money on this military model city.
Today, as terrible as it is, that’s no longer a problem.”
The training city is architecturally designed so that it could be anywhere in the world, because no one knows where German and NATO soldiers might be deployed in the future. The aim is to be prepared for all possible scenarios. Throughout the year, battalions from across Germany and from other NATO countries come to the Combat Training Centre. They are given a fictional war scenario and then train in the field and in the training city, using laser weapons, sensors, and blank ammunition.
Scenario was filmed at the Altmark training area during the year 2024. In observational, fragmentary scenes, the film portrays everyday life on a German military training ground in a time of transformation and uncertainty.
CREW:
Director: Marie Wilke
Producer: Heino Deckert (Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion/Germany)
Cinematographer: Alexander Gheorghiu
Editor: Jan Soldat, Marie Wilke
Sound: Uwe Bossenz, Anton Feist, Helge Haack
Production
Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktion in co-production with SWR in association with MDR
Sales:
Film Harbour
Director
Marie Wilke
Marie Wilke studied directing, editing and cinematography at the School for Documentary and Television in Bolzano, Italy, and at the University of the Arts (UdK), Berlin, with Harun Farocki and Heinz Emigholz. From 2004 until 2014 she worked as an academic assistant in the directing department of the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. From 2021 to 2022 she was also the artistic director of the Berlin film school DFFB.
Her feature-length documentary Civil Servants was released in theatres in July 2015, her feature-length documentary AGGREGATE premiered at the Berlinale in 2018. Among other films she also made a six-part documentary series Höllental for ZDF Das Kleine Fernsehspiel in 2021. She works as a writer, director and teacher and lives in Berlin.Selected Filmography
Scenario (2026), Höllental (2021), Aggregate (2018), Civil Servants (2015), Con anima e corpo (2000)
