Monika Borgmann

Monika Borgmann-Slim (born 25 November 1963) is a German-Lebanese journalist, award-winning documentary filmmaker, and archivist. She is an activist against what she describes as Lebanon's culture of impunity and Vergangenheitsbewältigung, countering official amnesia about the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). She is the widow of the Lebanese filmmaker, archivist and activist Lokman Slim, who was assassinated in 2021. Born in Aachen, the westernmost city in Germany at the borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, Borgmann studied Arabic philology and political science at the University of Bonn which was then the capital of West Germany. In the context of these studies she spent a year in 1986/87 in Damascus, Syria, focussing on Islamic studies. From there she visited Beirut for the first time, when Lebanon was 10 years into the civil war and its capital devastated by heavy fighting. After graduating from university, Borgmann started working as a freelance journalist in 1988. Upon the recommendation of Rupert Neudeck (1939–2016), a journalist and prominent humanitarian activist, Borgmann produced her first radio feature about daily life in wartime Beirut. In 1990 she moved to Cairo from where she mainly produced radio features for the ARD, the joint organisation of Germany's regional public-service broadcasters. In addition, she wrote for the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit and other publications like TransAtlantik and Lettre International. In 1992, Borgmann returned to Lebanon for the first time since the official end of the civil war with a project to portray former snipers. At the same time, she moved into the field of documentary films, when she worked as a location manager during the production of the documentary Balagan by German director Andreas Veiel about the Jewish-Palestinian acting troupe Akko. In early 2001, Borgmann moved from Cairo to Beirut for a film project about the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre that was perpetrated by Phalanges militia fighters who killed up to 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinian refugees and Lebanese Shiites. In June 2001, the Syrian journalist and human rights activist Ali al-Atassi introduced Borgmann to the publisher Lokman Slim, who was one year older than her. Hailing from an influential family in the now Shiite-dominated southern part of Beirut, he had studied philosophy and Ancient Greek at Sorbonne University in Paris during the 1980s.