I recently had an argument on Twitter with some American right-wing influencers. I regret this little online drama and wish to turn it into something constructive. In fact, I will use io sketch out some thoughts that I wanted to express anyway some day. I think there is a lesson for all of us in this discussion, even though it went quite a bit in the wrong direction.

It all started when I stumbled upon a tweet by an indie film-maker I hadn’t heard of before announcing the YouTube premiere of his new 50-minute film while advertising it to several well-known accounts in the Twitter right-wing bubble. He said it was inspired by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, but also by his Scandinavian heritage and the history of his home state in America.

Elsewhere, he had some interesting things to say about art vs propaganda. Quote:

ART VS PROPAGANDA

I find stories made by activists for the purpose of propagandizing to be weak, dull and devoid of creativity. My modus operandi is to simply tell engaging tales that draw from White/European history, mythology and folklore. I have no interest in hitting my viewers over the head with a mEsSAgE. My films are White solidarity in praxis: media made by our people, for our people, putting us back at the center of our own stories.

That’s an excellent approach, in fact probably the only sound one to get anywhere artistically. Even if you have strong political convictions (of whatever persuasion) and feel inclined to make art, you have to care more about art than about politics. Most right-wing projects start the other way around. First they think of what they want to achieve in “metapolitics”, then they think of a vehicle. First, there should be the irrepressible drive to create, either to paint, film, write, perform, make music or whatever medium appeals to you.

There is certainly nothing wrong about messages in movies or even propaganda per se (though it tends to be shallow by its very nature). Messages and certain ideas about the world we live in can be found basically in every movie we see. But we do get annoyed when the message is too simple or banal or naive, too crudely stated or too prominent. We certainly do want movies not just to tell us stories but also to criticise some things while emphasising, affirming, even celebrating others, through the means of telling a story, through grand emotions and spellbinding optics.

The message-driven approach can work within narrow, ideologically committed circles. That was the case with “RAC” music, with the downside that its appeal was limited to fringe subcultural and ideological niches that were rather appalling not only to normies but also to other people within the right-wing spectrum. Ideally, at least according to old school metapolitical theory, you should aim to reach beyond the choir you are preaching to, gain respect and recognition also outside the niche, and maybe create sympathy or at least acceptance for your “message” and underlying political ideas (which, again, should not be your primary motivation).

Sometimes art and propaganda can align harmoniously on a golden spot and bring forth masterpieces. So Mick Jagger can watch Triumph of the Will a dozen times and hang out with Leni Riefenstahl without becoming a Nazi, while generations of cinephiles worshipped Battleship Potemkin religiously without becoming commies (that particular film however was far from being harmless - like no other it made Soviet communism look cool, exciting and acceptable to large parts of the Western intelligentsia). Ideology is not necessarily opposed to or an enemy of art. You always have to ask: What does it enable the artist to do? And what does it prevent or even block him from doing or recognising?

Currently I am working on a rather voluminous book on movies “seen from the right”, in which I will discuss about 100 movies that I think are relevant to and resonating with right-wing issues. It will include a discussion of the topics of nation, religion, myth, dystopia, multiculturalism, social criticism etc.

The range of the films I chose is very broad: from mainstream classics to obscure fringe stuff, from American blockbusters to European arthouse, from the silent era to present day Netflix material. In this book I will also address the question of “right-wing art” in general as well as the practical problems that come with indie/guerilla/no budget film-making. And so I am also eager to include unknown films by indie film-makers.

So my initial reaction to the film announcement was curiosity and also a “professional” interest.

Now comes the part where I have to be unpleasantly honest. Though I started watching the film with an open, benevolent mind and rather small expectations, I was not only disappointed, but rather shocked by what I saw. Aesthetically it seemed closer to evangelical Christian entertainment than to Tarantino (I have recently binge-watched parts of the hugely successful but atrocious God’s Not Dead series to educate myself).

About 30 minutes in I gave up because nothing, absolutely nothing, in it seemed to work. I privately sent the link to a few friends who had the same reaction.

I don’t want to focus on this movie too much, because I want to make a more general point. Suffice it to say that its biggest problem is its cast, seemingly consisting of amateur actors or non-actors (who may be friends or family) with little charisma, chemistry or screen experience. They are made to carry scenes that are clearly beyond their scope. As a compensation these scenes are often drowned in thick layers of emotional or ominous music that tries to fill the gap and bears little connection to what is going on.

Casting is an extremely crucial thing in film-making; it can do or undo a film in spectacular ways. If you use amateur or non-actors you need to adapt your script to what they are able to do, and some things can only be done with actors who can really pull off what you wrote and make your written characters come to life. At best, you can make them “play themselves” in a “neorealist” fashion, but even that is more difficult than some may imagine. (In a movie, it takes a lot of artifice to create a sense of authenticity.)

This poses a huge problem for indie film-makers who explicitly posit themselves on the right side of the political spectrum. The majority of the art world, especially in show business and performing arts, is politically liberal. Even in Hollywood, right-leaning A-list actors such as Mel Gibson or James Woods are in the minority and do have a hard time because of that.

Actors are usually very zeitgeist conforming people, which comes with their job: They need the approval of the audience, and they can’t afford a bad reputation (unless they settle for becoming another Klaus Kinski). Anyone today who openly aligns with dissident or right-wing politics (especially pro-white) faces the danger of getting smeared, doxxed, fired and maligned. If you want to pursue a serious acting career it is very risky to associate with right-wing people. To a lesser extent the same is true for people who work in the crew: Professionals who participate in right-wing/dissident projects may also face the danger of being exposed and not finding work in the industry again.

One could imagine an utopian future where pro-white infrastructures and sub-cultures are large enough to approach the scope of the Christian evangelist milieus, so actors can appear freely in movies associated with the political right. It may not bring forth a new Mel Gibson, but maybe at least a pro-white Kevin Sorbo, who is a decent actor committed to his religious cause.

Now I need to sum up the internet drama that unfolded when I voiced criticism of that film. Some of you will get angry for what I say here, but this is what I thought and felt.

In the past I have sometimes been asked by people who I personally like or whose activism I respect to review or promote some thing they did: a book, a video or a project. If it wasn’t good I would tell them privately why I didn’t want to support it and what I thought was wrong with it.

I remember a young, intelligent painter who was hyped in the German New Right scene many years ago who sent me an art book he had published, asking me to promote it. He had copied his whole nude body, piece by piece, on a Xerox copy machine, in black and white, including his you-know-what. I failed to see the point of this and told him I can’t possibly support this.

Now, I certainly did realise that the indie film-maker in question is an ambitious idealist whose political views I probably, roughly share (I just got glimpses) and who seems to have lots of correct ideas. So my first impulse was to not say anything at all about his film. I don’t think my voice matters much in the right-wing Anglosphere anyway. But I have to confess I was not just disappointed, but also a bit angry at this film.

Next, I saw people recommending it by saying: “Support right-wing art!” I was a bit baffled by this and replied by stating “this film is shockingly bad”, which seemed like a clear-cut, self-evident, non-controversial fact to me. I thought it was unwise, even “bad optics”, to promote it just for ideological reasons.

The next day, I saw a lengthy tweet by a musician in our sphere, someone who headed a RAC band in the early 1990s and is now running an “Evolian” Neofolk project. This is significant because back then his band was one of the few of its kind that was able to reach out beyond its niche, simply because the music was appealing and unusual for the genre, adding Goth, Metal and symphonic influences. At least it worked for me who am into totally different music and on a different spot of the right-wing spectrum. I was into stuff like Death in June, which is a fringe band as well, but which appeals to a wider spectrum of people than, say, Skrewdriver (I knew an actual German commie being crazy about it).

What this musician wrote about the movie baffled me. He praised every aspect of it - camera work, pacing, dialogue, directing - and said he was blown away by how fantastic it is. I felt exactly the opposite. His appraisal seemed to me not just wrong, but downright insane, absurdly exaggerated. It smelled a bit like “the Emperor’s new clothes” to me.

It would have been different if he had pointed out some concrete things or scenes in the film that he really liked or thought were good, but talking about a film in a general fashion as if it’s the second coming of Stanley Kubrick when it’s not can be severely self-defeating. It just reeks of boosterism for ideological reasons: an artist is over-praised and hyped simply because he is “ourguy”, and overly-generous standards are applied because of group solidarity.

And I think this is just as wrong-headed as creating art for the “purpose of propagandizing”. In fact, it is basically the same thing.

Reading these tweets, I couldn’t hold back any more and publicly disagreed with the musician in a rather harsh way. He replied to me, now putting emphasis on the film-maker’s laudable effort rather than on its end result. I replied saying that I don’t think we will help “right-wing art” by pretending it is good if it is actually bad.

Other people then joined the fray, really angry at me and sometimes viciously attacking me on a personal level. I was rebuked for criticising the film-maker who had put a lot of effort and money into the film and risked a lot by putting it “out there”. Some said I should do it better myself before I dare to open my mouth, or that I should show my own old student’s films for comparison, which is just silly. I was accused of being uncaring, callous, ruthless. I was beseeched to nurture and encourage talent rather than tear people down.

Now that the smoke clouds have evaporated, I want to make clear that I can completely understand these concerns. In fact, I share them myself. The “movement” is full of people who tear each other down for petty reasons, but I’m not one of them, and I don’t want to come across as such.

I also know from my own (rather limited) experience and through friendship with quite a few artists that any artist who puts himself “out there” is very vulnerable to criticism. Ages ago, at film school, I dabbled in low budget film-making as well, so I know how insanely difficult film-making is. But sometimes some things need to be said.

I remember that students at film school would be pussy-footing around a lot when the weekly batch of student films was screened for critical examination. Miserable, dull, pretentious, bland or mean-spirited films (there were of course fresh, inspired and charming ones too), made for mere practising purposes, would be treated and discussed like unfathomable mysteries, often by the same people who would ridicule and dismiss John Ford or Hitchcock at first sight. They were humble towards their peer group, but snobbish towards the great old masters.

The reason was their fear of being exposed at the frontline some day as well, when it would be their turn to be mercilessly shot at. Usually students freshly arriving were very arrogant, and rather humbled a year later.

Occasionally somebody would call out the bullshit and start an aggressive argument, which was refreshing and cleaned the air. It didn’t matter so much whether they were being brutally unfair or brutally honest; passionate arguments and controversy about films gave you a sense that these things mattered, that there was a meaning in what the aspiring film-makers showed on screen and how they chose to do it. Lively, unfiltered arguments and discussions were important for progress, stimulation and healthy competition.

If you haven’t had first-hand experience of film-making (and even participating in a small amateur film can teach you a lot), I recommend watching one of the countless films about film-making, both documentaries and features, both about masterpieces and about disasters. American Movie (1999) is a (fantastic) documentary about a failed small indie film, while Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014) is about a failed huge Hollywood film.

Watch Overnight (2003) about the story behind The Boondock Saints to learn how a director’s megalomania makes him meteorically rise and then equally quickly fall, crash and burn. Or watch Hearts of Darkness (1991), about the utter madness behind Apocalypse Now, one of the greatest films ever made. Or watch semi-fictional, affectionate films about “bad” yet dedicated film-makers like Ed Wood (1995) or The Disaster Artist (2017) about Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room, or classics like La Nuit américaine (1972) and Living in Oblivion (1995).

Sometimes you’ll find some of the nicest people you have ever met making bad and weak movies, and sometimes (rather often I’m afraid) terrible characters who create exciting masterpieces. Film is like a dangerous, tyrannical demon that devours those in its service, and you have to become a bit demonic (obsessed, megalomaniacal and ruthless) yourself to engage with it.

So yes, there are human beings behind both good and bad movies, and both good and bad movies can cost blood, sweat, tears and money on a huge scale, and both good and bad movies “take guts” to offer to the public.

But the public always was and always will be merciless. What counts will always and forever be not the effort, but the result of it.

And even then, the result can be received very differently by different people. (As a film-maker you also have to ask yourself what kind of audience or public you want to please or get approval from.) Films that bombed at the box office become beloved classics many years later (think of Citizen Kane, Blade Runner, Vertigo); films panned by the critics regularly become enormous commercial successes (think of almost any movie from the recent Marvel franchise), but are also forgotten soon.

So, in my opinion, the “effort” behind a film matters less than some people tend to think.

I also think it is a mistake to cut too much slack just because somebody is a “novice”. It is a hard truth that talent is given and not something gained through effort. Hard work and growing experience can improve a given talent (sometimes dramatically) and make the best of it, but only within its given limits (and very often talent declines with age some day).

Usually, real talent shows itself already in very early efforts, even if they are awkward and amateurish. A research into any great director’s first steps will show that this is true. Take a look at early films of Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Gaspar Noé, Lars von Trier or Robert Eggers. Even Kubrick’s debut Fear and Desire, which he disavowed later, betrays considerable talent. So does Tarantino’s unfinished short My Best Friend’s Birthday. He is already recognisably there, just not yet hatched from his egg.

So let me make this clear: I see this is as a rather impersonal thing. When I criticised the indie film, it wasn’t my intention to “demoralise” anybody or shit on people just to “feel smug”, as somebody put it. If I have offended anybody, I’m sincerely sorry for that. I don’t want film-makers on our side to fail, I sympathise with their efforts and want them to pursue their dreams, but I also warn them to be cautious not to chase a mirage like so many before them who were drawn to this business and drowned by it.

Further, my reaction wasn’t aimed directly at the film-maker, but primarily at the wildly exaggerated praise from the musician. I guess my response was polemical and exaggerated as well to match his. Because this is the point where things start to passionately matter to me.

“Looking for the good” in a piece of work is one thing. Out-of-proportion praise-bombing for ideological reasons is another. Mere good intentions are not enough. You cannot meme yourself or anybody else into making a good film. This kind of promotion lowers the standards, and if a film-maker can improve, baseless flattery won’t help but rather make him delusional about what he can and should do or not. I’m concerned about aesthetic blindness and delusions induced by ideological partisanship. I think this is a real threat to the possibility of something good happening within right-wing cultural (or subcultural) spheres.

I wish more than anyone else a flourishing of “right-wing art” and artists, and especially films. One of the reasons so little happens in this respect seems to be that most right-wingers care more about history, politics, biology, philosophy and such, less about the arts. I perceive a serious lack of artistic literacy in the right-wing sphere, with a few outstanding examples.

I guess this is why some in the bubble are getting so excited about AI right now, because it can easily produce fancy pictures of blonde maidens in cornfields or generic heroic figures in shining armour waving flags. All of this is rightly called “slop”. It may be used for propaganda purposes or “content” illustration, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with art or “aesthetics”, as the enthusiasts often call it.

Some people who joined the Twitter argument agreed with me. Here is what my friend “Great Rebellion” (who is a programmer of retro computer games) said:

The tendency to pretend art made by “our guys” is great for ideological reasons when it’s really absolutely not is a big problem and only makes sure the standards remain low. Things can only improve if we start to be honest about that.

And here is what another guy said, replying to the previous:

I hate how seemingly people are scared to properly and harshly criticize art. As an artist, when I show my work, what I really want to hear is what people hate about it. That’s the signal that allows me to improve.

And finally Kerwin Fjøl , defending Yours Truly:

People are dragging this post for not being supportive enough, but yeah, I watched like a third of this thing and it’s indeed quite bad. It’s comparable to those Christian videos on the YouTube channel EncourageTV but less competently made. This kind of thing needs to be avoided.

So I guess the conflict is really a conflict of values. To some it mattered more to be socially supportive of an artist “on our side” in the making, to me the actual result and the way it was promoted mattered more. I realise I was too confrontational in the spat, and once people get upset they stop listening and interpret everything you say in bad faith.

The escalating dynamics of the debate however brought forth other, more general questions. I guess everybody who is passionate about art has been there before (especially when young and strident).

Some were upset with me for having the audacity to pass such harsh judgment on the film. How can I be so sure that it is a bad movie? One person framed this as arrogance-ignorance and asked what “credentials” I have that I would dare to judge someone’s talent. My answer:

I don’t need “credentials” to make an assessment of talent, and neither do you or anyone else. You just have to open your eyes, and gather some viewing experience. If you disagree with my assessment, I can’t force you to see what I see. (…)

If you want to know why “I feel confident”, it comes from a lot of viewing experience, some practical experience and friendship with artists. That doesn’t mean I’m always right or that you are obliged to take my word. You have to decide whether I’m making sense or not.

The question at stake here is whether an objective statement about a piece of art can be made at all - or even if there are any clear criteria to objectively declare what is art and what isn’t, or, on another level, what is “high” and what is “low” art - or, even more generally, what is truly good, true and beautiful, if you happen to care about these things.

Jonathan Bowden, ever the elitist, used to say that art is “mercilessly hierarchical”. That sounds good and edgy in theory, and you might agree if you dread to sink into the dull swamp of subjectivism and relativism where everything is just a matter of “taste” and everything lies in the eye of no matter which beholder. I doubt that any lover of the arts ever thought or felt like that, even if it seems true on some level. We want our art to be distinct, to excel, and we don’t want it placed on equal footing with art we think is inferior (for whatever reasons; those can be very subtle).

However, when it comes to the arts, things become notoriously very complex, and you will often find even people who know a lot about it or who are skilful artists themselves getting into astonishing, vast disagreement with each other.

Sometimes it would be so very nice and satisfying to have infallible authorities at hand to confirm once and for all that our opinions are the correct ones - just like in the famous “wish fulfilment” scene from Annie Hall, when Woody Allen miraculously produces Marshall McLuhan out of nowhere to utterly destroy some annoying wannabe intellectual in a cinema queue behind him. Next, the Allen character breaks the fourth wall, telling the audience that such things unfortunately only happen in the movies.

But in real life, who shall be the judge? There is no God or Pope of the Arts to tell us which of us is right or wrong and why. And it is certainly true that many of our assessments are very subjective. But if we give up making passionate judgements and subscribe to a lame relativism and “art egalitarianism”, it becomes boring, because then any opinion is as good (or bad) as any other and any work of art equal to any other. That is to take all tension and meaning out of art. Without standards, there can be no criticism. But standards shift and might not be shared or acknowledged by everybody, including other critics. When criticising art, you have to act “as if” your critique is objective, even though you know it’s not really. This is a paradox that cannot be solved, only endured.

To sort this problem out thoroughly is beyond the scope of this essay, but let me outline a few things. Everybody seems to know what beauty and truth are and has feelings about those notions, but both evade a clear definition. Truth in an artistic context is not necessarily factual truth, but the truth of just one way among others of looking at things. That is why artists speak of “poetic” truth or “ecstatic” truth, as Werner Herzog once put it.

Beauty can take many forms, and sometimes one can find beauty in ugly and terrifying things because they make us understand aspects of the truth (Rilke, speaking of angels, wrote that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure”.) Beauty sometimes is just the moment of seeing something extraordinarily well, “truthfully” expressed, in ways we have never seen before.

Truth is not some thing you just find, own and put in your pocket for good. Truth is an ongoing, never-ending process. It must be lived and experienced, step by step in order to be discovered and understood. It is a matter of stages, as Kierkegaard put it.

And I think the same principle applies to aesthetic experience and understanding. If you want to learn something about literature, read many different books from different epochs and countries. If you want to learn about movies, watch many different movies. If you want to learn about music, listen to lots of different music. The more you do that, the more you will enjoy the art you are studying and the more confident you will become in your judgment. But you do need a talent for that as well, and you will only be able to operate within the potential given to you.

At some point you will learn to discern between craftmanship and ingenious inspiration, between form and content, and then about the relationship between these two. You may learn to appreciate “mere” artistry and craftmanship, but - depending on which stage in your life you are and what your soul craves, needs or abhors - you may be wildly antipathetic to the content it expresses, or you may find that you are facing a perfectly made empty shell. You may also realise that a form can create a content that can only be expressed through this particular form.

You may fully understand a composer’s genius, but still feel revolted, even threatened by what his music expresses, and this can have highly intricate reasons (think of Nietzsche’s enmity towards his once-idol Wagner in his later years). You may intellectually “get” why Stanley Kubrick is such a revered film-maker, but you may still not like or enjoy his work, maybe because you find it cold and cynical. You may understand that Bach wrote much more complex music than Bananarama, yet still enjoy the latter far more. Sometimes you will open a book that dislikes and rejects you immediately, and will only accept you years later when you have matured and are ready for it.

Sometimes you have to dig yourself into a major piece of art (say, the Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust or a Shakespeare play) in order to understand what makes it great, and that can be demanding, hard work until you get to the pay-off. Sometimes you’ll rewatch a film that delighted you in your childhood, and as an adult you realise how cheesy and badly made it is. Nonetheless you enjoy watching it, because it gives you a cozy sense of nostalgia. Sometimes you prefer watching a mediocre but entertaining trifle to a harrowing, uncomfortable masterpiece with subtitles. Sometimes a piece of art succeeds perfectly, but only on a small scale, and sometimes it succeeds only partially or even fails, but on an epic, nonetheless impressive scale.

What I want to say is that the ways of talking about the merits and shortcomings of a piece of art (or just entertainment) are endless, but it can be done without either appealing to authority (your own or somebody else’s) or a fruitless relativism.

I was told that my criticism of the indie film wasn’t “constructive”. My bad, and I hope I have somewhat made up for this neglect with this essay. But I also must say that those who promoted the film didn’t give me the impression that they actually liked it, and an idea what exactly it was they enjoyed.

And so I hereby advocate not only constructive criticism, but also constructive praise.

It was shot on location in Brandenburg and Potsdam-Babelsberg, near the DEFA studios. It premiered in East Berlin shortly before the Prague Spring, in which the Czechs were “liberated” by Warsaw Pact troops, among them East Germans (the last time Germans had invaded Czechia was in 1939).

The DEFA was under the control of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, which saw film primarily as a propaganda medium. “Anti-fascist” films had been a tradition in the GDR since the very first DEFA production, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946), and they naturally served above all to portray communism in a heroic light and the Soviets as liberators.

The DEFA was founded under Soviet supervision in the eastern occupation zone. A high-ranking official of the Soviet Military Administration announced its propagandistic goals in a ceremonial speech:

… the eradication of the remnants of Nazism and militarism from the conscience of every German, the struggle to educate the German people, especially the youth, in the spirit of true democracy and humanity...

I Was Nineteen tells the story of a young Soviet lieutenant of German origin whose parents were communists and emigrated to the Soviet Union after Hitler came to power. He returns to his former homeland as a stranger and a soldier, and is repeatedly confronted with his origins, which often embarrasses him. His main task is propaganda work: he uses loudspeakers to call on Wehrmacht soldiers to surrender.

The young lieutenant Gregor Hecker (Jaecki Schwarz) is an alter-ego of the director Konrad Wolf (1925–1982), who processed his own war experiences in this film. Wolf was of Jewish origin and came from a family of staunch communists; his father Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953) was the author of the anti-fascist, anti-antisemitic drama Professor Mamlock, which was filmed in 1938 in the Soviet Union and again in 1961 in the GDR by his son Konrad.

The Wolfs returned to Germany in 1945 and quickly became part of the GDR establishment, not only in the cultural sphere: Konrad’s older brother Markus (1923–2006) was the notorious head of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (Main Directorate for Reconnaissance), a department of the Stasi mainly responsible for foreign espionage, from 1952 to 1986. So the Wolfs fulfilled many stereotypes about “Jewish bolsheviks”, active both in culture and politics.

Wolf himself emphasised the almost “documentary” nature of his 1967 film: “Extensive documents, political, military and historical literature” combined with his own diary entries formed the basis of the screenplay, which was co-written with his frequent collaborator Wolfgang Kohlhaase (1931-2022).

Wolf remembered:

Added to this were Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s experiences on the other side, the experiences of a young German who had grown up in fascist Germany. This enabled us to show people today everything as it really was...

The script, “Weg in die Heimat” (The Way Home), was approved in 1966 by “Arbeitsgruppe Babelsberg” (a committee that controlled the ideological content of films) with the following words:

Such a review of an important stage in our national past, the aesthetic design and the recognition of this tremendous historical achievement of the “German Democratic Republic” serves the development of national and socialist self-awareness. The effective presentation of this theme would also be an important artistic contribution to the struggle for the solution of the national question.

So the “national question” was considered a very important thing by the GDR ideologues. The film aimed to question, stage and interpret history for the purpose of defining a national identity, even (cough) “national and socialist self-awareness” – in contrast to a National Socialist consciousness, which was also semantically disposed of with the preferred catchphrase “fascism”.

How real can a reality be when it is staged by a committed communist and produced by a communist state with strict control over the film industry, which celebrated the film as a showpiece of its cultural output? Especially since Wolf definitely saw himself as a director with a “stance”, and it is no coincidence that many of his most successful films revolved around National Socialism. In his own words:

As long as there is war in this world, as long as classes remain in irreconcilable opposition and as long there are thousands upon thousands of people in the world who are locked in relentless hostility – often without even understanding the mechanisms of war – this theme will remain relevant. Especially for our people, there can be no true and genuine friendship with the peoples of the Soviet Union – even for the generations that come after us – if we are not aware of this shared part of our past. This also applies to other peoples who have suffered under fascism. School knowledge alone is not enough.

For this attitude he had been celebrated in 1959 by the GDR magazine Deutsche Filmkunst:

With his films, Wolf wants to educate people and warn them so that the terrible days of the past will never return. Art is not an end in itself for him; like his father before him, he regards it as a weapon.

Thus, I Was Nineteen is completely in line with GDR orthodoxy. As in today’s Federal Republic of Germany, the interpretation of the defeat of 1945 as “liberation” was state doctrine in the GDR. In Wolf’s film, the Russians and Soviets are the forces of socialist, progressive, enlightened good, fighting the fascist, capitalist evil with righteous anger and holding the instigators of a criminal war accountable for their misdeeds.

However, the film also aims to bring the German people on board the Soviet socialist bandwagon, and therefore distinguishes between German fascists and communists and those who have the potential to become the latter. The Germans that Hecker encounters are essentially divided into those who have already seen the light and those who haven’t (yet). In one iconic scene, he even meets a German soldier who is literally blind and believes he is talking to a comrade.

There is symbolism in this scene. The soldier’s blindness is also metaphorical, as he is blinded by Nazi ideology. But Hecker, representing the Soviets, hasn’t come to kill the blinded Germans, but to help them see the light of communism.

Here are some of the Germans Hecker meets: The mayor of a small town who has quickly cut his swastika banner into a red flag and welcomes the Russian soldiers with champagne glasses; an educated, yet conformist “Bildungsbürger” with a large library and record collection who lives near the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, delivering world-weary philosophical monologues to ease his guilty conscience; a Nazi official who is surprised by the Soviets while sitting at his office desk and asks for allowance to call his superiors in Berlin in order to sign off his duty properly (his request is granted).

And a young girl who asks Hecker for accommodation, saying: “Better with one than with everyone.” This was probably the most delicate way possible to allude to the rapes committed by Red Army soldiers, but the girl is immediately rebuked by a female Russian soldier who angrily accuses her of the crimes committed by the Germans in the Soviet Union.

This Russian woman clearly has no qualms about German women being raped by her compatriots, but the desperate German girl, who is rightly worried and certainly innocent of committing atrocities in occupied Soviet territory, immediately goes on the defensive: “I didn’t do anything. Not me! And even if it’s true, what can I do about it? How does that help me now?”

In another scene, newly liberated German anti-fascists are invited by the Russians to a May Day celebration in the occupied Sanssouci Palace, where they are entertained and addressed as “comrades”.

One of the German communists angrily demands that everyone “who wears a uniform” be hanged: “Exterminate the rabble with sticks and stones, otherwise it will start again in 20 years.” The zealous comrade is called to order by a Russian general, who says that while these feelings are understandable, “you can’t make politics with feelings, and revenge is a bad advisor, especially for the future”.

In the next scene, a liberated German proletarian with a wrinkled face advises the (presumably Jewish) officer Gejman (Vasily Livanov, who later became the great “Russian Sherlock Holmes” admired even by Queen Elizabeth II) on how he, as a German teacher in Kiev, should explain to his students the incomprehensible fact that Hitler was able to come to power:

German anti-fascist: Industry paid him, the Reichswehr supported him, the whole military clique... they handed him power on a plate!

Gejman: But how am I supposed to explain that, Goethe and Auschwitz? Two German names in every language?

German anti-fascist: It’s my language too.

In another scene, the surrender of Spandau Fortress is shown as a “courteous capitulation”, an event that apparently actually took place. Gejman and Hecker appear at the gate as parliamentarians and are hoisted up by a rope ladder to negotiate with a group of Wehrmacht and SS members who show varying degrees of indoctrination (some still believe in the final victory).

The commander of the fortress is a jovial and somewhat eccentric Swabian (“This is my second lost war”) visibly weary of war. A young and rather dashing Wehrmacht officer with an Iron Cross, who is ordered by a Waffen-SS commander to shoot the Soviet envoys, lets the two men go and uses the opportunity to desert. The “fascists” are therefore by no means demonised, at most occasionally caricatured (especially when it comes to the Germans’ supposed “blind militarism”). Even the negatively portrayed characters remain human.

There were ideological reasons for this. After all, the film aimed to build a kind of historical “bridge”, a narrative to make the audience understand how this defeated fascist country could rise from the ashes and become the glorious GDR.

Hecker, who like Wolf comes from an emigrated communist family, but is not portrayed as Jewish (nor played by a Jewish actor), initially feels like a foreigner in his old homeland. His character serves as a connecting link between socialism (spearheaded by the Soviet Union) and the German nation, between the Russian and German people, between the Soviet Union and the future GDR.

However, there are numerous human, historical and ideological divides, hurdles and distances to overcome.

The most impressive episode in the film is probably the last one, which literally shows a divide that must be overcome. Like the episode with the blind soldier, the scene is both symbolic and concrete. It takes place in the first days of May, Hitler is already “kaputt” and Hecker and his troop rest at a small river crossing.

On the other side of the bank, he sees the Germany passing by that has become alien to him, shattered and defeated: refugees with suitcases and ox carts, women, children, old people, miserable-looking Volkssturm recruits with rifles slung over their shoulders, wounded soldiers. He urges them to surrender and cross over to the Russian camp.

Gradually, people cross the river. They are treated well and fed by the Russians. A particularly successful scene shows Russian soldiers, German prisoners of war and German civilians eating together. They are all silent; only the clattering of spoons on plates and tin cans can be heard.

Another symbolic figure appears: the prisoner of war Willi Lommer (Dieter Mann), an earthy Berliner who has long since lost faith in the Endsieg (final victory).

He is one of the already “enlightened” Germans and quickly befriends Hecker. When a scattered group of stubbornly “unenlightened” Waffen-SS soldiers unexpectedly appears on the other side of the river and opens fire on the Russian camp, Lommer grabs a weapon lying nearby and fires alongside Hecker at the “fascists”.

The political message of this scene needs no further explanation. Similar heroic changes of allegiance can be found in other GDR films such as Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt (The Adventures of Werner Holt, 1966), but also in West German productions such as Steiner – Das eiserne Kreuz II (The Iron Cross II) where the protagonist defects to the Americans.

This brief fight at the end of the film is one of the few scenes showing warlike “action”. I Was Nineteen shows a war almost without horror, violence or fighting. The Russian advance on Berlin is swift, almost cheerful and without any significant resistance. The Red Army seems to consist only of sympathetic, good-natured and level-headed people, even if they occasionally show angry contempt for the “fascists”.

The liberation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp is briefly hinted at and its horrors evoked through the insertion of a “documentary film”. Here, too, the Soviets appear as authorised prosecutors and exposers of crimes, almost like police officers who have come to arrest and apprehend criminals. However, the “documentary film” used is a 1946 DEFA propaganda piece, Todeslager Sachsenhausen (Sachsenhausen Death Camp), staged in a wooden, didactic manner and very obviously “acted”.

It is emphasised that people of all nations were victims in this camp, but especially Russian prisoners of war. As usual in early post-war propaganda both in the East and the West, the film does not postulate a special role for Jews among the victims of National Socialism.

Of course it also doesn’t complicate matters for its viewers by mentioning the “Speziallager Sachsenhausen” (Sachsenhausen Special Camp), installed by the Soviets after the war at the very same location, where thousands of people died between 1945 and 1950 (including the great German actor Heinrich George).

Nor does it mention the true story of Paul Sakowski. He is shown in the film as one of the camp’s executioners, explaining to Soviet officers in a dry matter-of-fact tone the function of a gas tap and a “neck-shooting device”, which were “restored” for the purpose of filming and removed again in 1952. But Sakowski was himself a prisoner at the camp, forced to work as a henchman and severely abused. A committed communist who (like Konrad Wolf) came from a deeply red family, he had first been arrested and mistreated by the Gestapo when he was only fourteen.

None of this was mentioned by the Soviets in their propaganda film. Instead, they presented him as a willing participant in Nazi killings of Russian prisoners of war. (It is very possible he was speaking “dialogue” that they had fed to him.) But things got worse afterwards. The Soviets proceeded to build him up as the “Executioner of Sachsenhausen” and sentenced him in a Stalinist show-trial to life imprisonment with hard labour at the infamous Workuta Gulag (where he was assigned again to bury corpses of inmates).

He was sent back to Germany in 1956 where he remained imprisoned until 1970. Sakowski was thus an exceptionally tragic and unlucky fellow who spent over 30 years of his life in detention: in a Nazi concentration camp, a Soviet gulag and various NKVD and GDR prisons.

But misrepresentations of him continued until shortly before his death in 2006. He was featured in a 2002 documentary, Henker (Henchmen). In Berliner Zeitung historian Annette Leo criticised the filmmakers harshly, accusing them of “manipulation” and even “forgery”. They had used footage of an interview she had conducted with Sakowski, but edited it in a very misleading way:

In the interviews conducted by Regina Scheer and myself in 1997 on behalf of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation with Paul Sakowski, he vehemently denied having been an executioner. He repeatedly said that the Russians had beaten this confession out of him. In truth, he had never killed anyone; he had only had to erect the gallows and then remove the dead bodies and place them in coffins.

You can believe him or not. You can interpret it as his way of dealing with his memories, as a desperate attempt to draw attention to his predicament as a prisoner. However, the authors of the film simply omitted Paul Sakowski’s version. Instead, they edited all of Sakowski’s statements in the interview in question, in which he talks about the executions, the murder of Soviet prisoners of war, and violence and death in general, as if he (like the other interviewees in the film) were reporting on his own activities as an executioner. (…)

Sakowski, who is now seriously ill and lives in a nursing home, is no longer able to defend himself. After being repeatedly exploited by changing regimes throughout his life, he is once again being objectified in ‘Henker’. This time by filmmakers who claim to be serious, but who are not exactly squeamish about historical truth and human dignity.

Whatever the truth may be, the information provided by Annette Leo gives us a glimpse how many layers of falsehoods and distortions, one heaped upon the other, can cover a single life story entangled in the tragedies and carnages of World War II.

To return to I Was Nineteen, the attempt to get closer to historical reality by using this propaganda film excerpt disguised as a “documentary” backfires aesthetically pretty hard on Wolf’s intentions. This has been noted not only by naughty right-wing revisionists such as Yours Truly, but by the author of a paper written for the University of Cologne in 2005, from which I have taken many facts and quotations about the film:

If one considers this in conjunction with Wolf’s above-mentioned statements, it becomes clear that Wolf realised that he could only work with “real” documentary footage from Sachsenhausen, as anything else would have been implausible, a reasoning which is understandable to a certain extent.

However, there is a problem with the excerpts themselves. The documentary film seems implausible, bizarre and staged, almost fictional, due to the sobriety of the “executioner” and the Soviet officers present. In addition, the whole thing is interrupted by Gregor’s shower scenes, which confuse the viewer. A 1968 survey of young viewers showed that not all of them understood these scenes as documentary footage. In addition, 27% found the excerpts unconvincing.

As expected, today’s Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education) is not quite as critical when it comes to recommending the film for school lessons and does not say a single word about its staunchly communist background. The parents of the protagonist Gregor Hecker are merely described as “politically active”, while the author focuses on the weakest parts of the film, complaining that its anti-fascism is not thorough enough “from today’s perspective”.

Gregor Hecker is less an actor than an attentive observer. He tries to understand how the atrocities of the National Socialists could have come about... In history lessons, it can be discussed whether the explanations offered in the film – German subservience, Prussian sense of duty, blind fanaticism – are sufficient from today’s perspective.

Apart from that, I think it is fair to say that I Was Nineteen is steeped in GDR ideology, but genuine at least in some major parts, similar to The Adventures of Werner Holt. Despite all the historical distortions and the educational intent, this visually powerful film contains many scenes and characters that feel “authentic” and undoubtedly reflect Wolf’s own first-hand experiences.

I Was Nineteen is, at its non-ideological core, a legitimate piece of subjectively experienced history. However, one should not forget that there are countless other stories from the Second World War that show quite different perspectives which never made it to film and probably never will.

I am thinking, for example, of the book by a man who, like Wolf, was born in 1925 and fought on the other side of the front as a very young member of the Waffen-SS: Wolfgang Venohr’s harrowing account Die Abwehrschlacht (The Defensive Battle) shows clearly that even this section of the German fighting troops cannot be condemned or demonised across the board (as both Kurt Schumacher and Konrad Adenauer publicly affirmed in the 1950s) as is usually done today.

It is more likely that in the future we will continue to see films mainly about German atrocities. A recent example is Der Hauptmann which deals with the bloody “Captain of Köpenick”-like story of another 19 year-old German born in 1925, Willi Herold.

Finally, I want to emphasize that the young Red Army soldier Konrad Wolf did not see himself as a “liberator” of the German people.

This is what he wrote retrospectively:

I was a member of the Soviet Army. My feelings were not significantly different from those of my comrades and friends in the army. I saw the soldiers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht as my enemies, who had started this criminal war. They had destroyed a country that was very close to me. People I had grown up with were subjected to severe suffering. Only when we entered German territory, I had mixed feelings for the first time. (1977)

Today, we speak of liberation with historical justification, but back then we did not use this term in relation to the Germans – and certainly the Germans themselves didn’t feel this way! For me, it was not the “zero hour”: for me, it was the twelfth hour, the climax, the goal that had finally been reached. A great celebration. Satisfaction. (...) I was in Majdanek, in Sachsenhausen, I experienced Warsaw during the uprising and afterwards. For me, Berlin was a symbol of where it all came from, the suffering, the millions of dead, the madness, the fanaticism. Berlin was no longer a city, it was a corpse. (1964)

Within Germany, the official commemoration narrative of this day holds that the defeat of the Wehrmacht not only liberated “the world” from fascism, but also Germany itself. The victors of 1945 in both East and West framed themselves as “liberators”, and this idea was implanted into the minds of the German people through American and Soviet “reeducation” programmes. Gradually, in a process that lasted generations, the Germans learned to see themselves through the eyes of the victors.

Today we have reached a stage where, for example, “thank you” in the languages of the Allied Forces (Russian, English, French, plus German) was projected on the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on May 8th, 2020. German leaders routinely fall on their metaphoric or actual knees to demonstrate how deeply sorry and “responsible” they feel for the crimes of WWII Germany, vowing that they will do anything within their power so that all of this will “never happen again”, for example by fighting against the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland.

The “liberation” frame was employed both in Eastern and Western Germany, with some differences. DDR (GDR), a communist country, annually celebrated the Great Victorious Soviet Union that freed the German people and the German workers from the tyranny of “Hitlerfascism”. At least, they did not claim that such a thing as “collective guilt” existed. In their portrayal, the German people were alright, only the “fascists” were bad.

The AfD-affiliated East German writer Michael Klonovsky, born in 1962, recently remarked how the talk of “liberation” will always ring to him as “communist propaganda, slave language, semantics of oppression”.

At the same time, he admits that it describes at least part of the truth. “Liberation”, he wrote, certainly came “for the prisoners of the concentration camps, for the Jews who had survived in hiding, for the nations who had suffered under the Nazis, for those Germans who had lived in opposition to the regime”, but not for the mass-raped “women of the defeated”, “the twelve to fourteen million” German refugees from the East, “of whom nearly two million perished” and for the “millions of prisoners of war, many of whom often returned home only years later or never at all”. One should also consider the fact that “a second German dictatorship was established” in what was now “Eastern” Germany, after East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and other parts of the Reich were “amputated” and lost for good.

This dual face of the German defeat (and the interpretation of defeat as liberation) was addressed in a famous speech by Richard von Weizsäcker, then president of the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) from May 8th, 1985. “Famous”, because it officially established that the “8 May was a day of liberation” framing was binding for West Germany as well.

Nevertheless, Weizsäcker (1920-2015) emphasised:

For us Germans, 8 May is not a day of celebration. Those who consciously experienced it look back on very personal and therefore very different experiences. Some returned home, others were left homeless. Some were liberated, while for others captivity began. Many were simply grateful that the nights of bombing and fear were over and that they had survived. Others felt pain at the complete defeat of their homeland. Some Germans were bitter, their illusions shattered, while others were grateful for the gift of a new beginning.

But there it was, the ominous word “liberation”. Now that it had been uttered, it could not be taken back again. Unlike in the DDR (GDR), where the German people had been liberated only from “Hitler fascists”, people in the BRD (FRG) started to believe that they had been liberated also from themselves, or at least from a very problematic and sinister part of their own nature.

And what remained of this had to be systematically eradicated. In the 1980s, multiculturalism and the vision of transforming Germany into a multi-ethnic state started to become a tool for this policy, first embraced by elements of the radical left, and after the 1990 re-unification adopted by the entire political system. It is now basically the “unofficial” guiding doctrine of German state politics.

Today, the state of the “debate” about “liberation vs. defeat”, insofar as it is still being conducted at all, has fallen far behind Weizsäcker. In 2025, “8 May” is indeed supposed to be “a day of celebration for us Germans”. But there are only a few people who are in the mood for actually “celebrating” on this day (mainly because they just don’t care anymore), and the self-flagellation rituals of the political class appear increasingly sclerotic, tired, outdated.

Inevitably, all of this will find an end through biology some day. The generations who actually lived through World War II have almost entirely disappeared, and the guilt-ridden post-war Boomers are now in their seventies and eighties. German schools are still trying to guilt-trip and brainwash children, but I don’t think making the Zoomers feel bad for the deeds of their great-grandparents whom they never knew will seriously work out.

German politics are certainly still fatally informed by the trauma of National Socialism, war, defeat and its post-1945 ideological interpretations. It is pretty obvious that it is the German guilt complex that is primarily responsible for the fact that it has become impossible in Germany to pursue politics for the German people or even to think and act in a sovereign political manner.

I am aware of the objection that similar problems exist in the Allied “victor countries” France, Great Britain, the USA and, to some extent, even Russia. “White guilt” is a widespread syndrome around the Western world. The causes are manifold, but one of them is that the ideology, policies and crimes of German National Socialism serve not only in Germany but practically globally as a reason why “ethno-nationalist” politics must be morally rejected and defeated (the further away one is from Europe, the weaker this premise becomes). But that would be a topic for another discussion.

If I am asked, I cannot name a film about the end of the Second World War in Germany that I would consider really good, really truthful.

I explained the reason for this in my first book Besetztes Gelände (Occupied Territory, 2010), a treatise on the portrayal of the Second World War in film. Behind this is basically nothing more than the truism that the victor writes history in his own favour, and that it often does not take long before the defeated and subjugated see themselves through his eyes. In film, this is literally the case.

In my book, I quoted French film director Jacques Rivette, who wrote in 1961:

Making a film means showing certain things from a certain point of view. (...) There can be no absolute mise en scene, just as there can be no mise en scene in the absolute.

I commented on this as follows:

But there is also no film viewing in the absolute; it always has a subjective and filtering resonance space around it. A film about the past is always also a film about the present, as a mirror and projection surface of the “zeitgeist”. In this respect, historical and science-fiction films are similar. The claim of film as a medium of “memory” in the sense of “This is how it was!” is deceptive, because it works with physical evidence in front of the camera lens. But the location, angle and frame chosen by the cameraman alone make a statement about what is depicted.

Even in non-fiction film, the machine eye of a camera can only be “objective” to a limited extent. Even “documentary” material needs to be interpreted and contextualised through commentary and editing. Since the dawn of photography, we have known that even a photograph can lie or have an opinion.

All this applies even more to the history of the wars and revolutions of the 20th Century, in which the new media of film, photography, radio and television were used extensively (the printing press had already been serving propaganda for several centuries) to shape our perceptions and judgements of events and to heighten and control our emotions. This began with the Spanish-American War (1898) and did not end with NATO’s interventions against Serbia (1999).

It goes without saying that war propaganda, regardless of which side it comes from, is characterised by extreme exaggeration in its portrayal of the enemy, while one’s own atrocities are covered up, downplayed or justified. There is no time for differentiation in the midst of a life-or-death struggle, and it often takes a long time afterwards for the “heat” to cool down and more differentiated portrayals to emerge. The questioning of narratives established in earlier historical phases will sometimes be denigrated as “historical revisionism” although permanent revision is part of the historian’s craft.

The films produced about the Second World War since its end always have a political and contemporary background. It affects the perspective whether they were made in, say, 1945, 1955, 1965, 1985 or 2015, whether in the BRD or the DDR, whether in Hollywood or by Mosfilm, whether in an Eastern or Western bloc country, whether in a country that was occupied by Germany or was its ally.

There are chapters, aspects and events of the war and its pre- and post-history that have either not been depicted at all in film, or only rarely or in a highly distorted form. These include flight and expulsion, all Allied war crimes, Communist-Soviet crimes, the massacres of the political “purges” of 1944/45 (for example in France and Italy), but also the complicity of the victorious powers in the outbreak and escalation of the war, or even just an unfiltered portrayal of the perspective and motivations of the Axis powers and their allies and volunteers.

All these things are barely present in the collective public consciousness because, unlike other topics, they have much less frequently appeared in films, documentaries and TV series, and when they have, it has often been in a tamed form.

This results in different constellations and perspectives depending on the country. It took decades for Polish cinema to show the truth about Katýn and the Soviet occupation of Poland, or for Baltic countries to produce films such as 1944, in which Estonian Waffen-SS volunteers are portrayed in a nuanced manner and with understandable motives.

However, even in countries such as Romania, where communism raged particularly brutally after the war, it is difficult to portray the anti-communist side in a sympathetic light. The film Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man (2010) about Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu, who led a guerrilla war against the Securitate for over a decade, met with fierce international opposition because Ogoranu had been a member of a youth organisation of the antisemitic “Iron Guard”.

Yet the national histories of countless countries from east to west, north to south, are united by the common experience of German occupation and their liberation from it (here, the word is appropriate): Russia, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece. In his novella “German Requiem”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “Under the onslaught of vast continents, the Third Reich perished. It had raised its hand against everyone, and everyone’s hands reached for it.” There is an international consensus that Germany was the central villain of the war, and there are understandable reasons for this.

The extent to which Germany’s military expansion in all directions was due to the dynamics of the war is another matter (for historians to debate). For example, there can be no doubt that “Operation Barbarossa” was a pre-emptive strike to forestall an imminent attack by Stalin. The German-Soviet war was fought with unprecedented cruelty on both sides, but the sympathies of the world and the storytellers will always be on the side of the defender, which is why the atrocities committed by the Red Army on German soil are still seen by many today as deserved retribution and are downgraded on the scale of horror according to a hierarchy of victims.

In 2020, 75 years after it ended, the public image of the Second World War and the period of Nazi rule (as well as the Weimar Republic) is more flat, garish and ghostly than ever before. Alexander Gauland from AfD can basically say the same thing as Richard von Weizsäcker in his famous commemorative speech in 1985: mere ambivalence is considered intolerable, right-wing extremist, proto-Nazi.

However, Germans have never been good at tolerating ambivalence. The brilliant conservative commentator Thorsten Hinz rightly remarked:

The longer the Third Reich recedes into the past, the more maniacally it dominates German history. The simplification of the historical situation corresponds to the needs of a levelled society that wants to spare itself any cognitive dissonance. This would be inevitable if it had to question, even in the slightest, the integrity of its 1945 conquerors, whom it recognised as moral superpowers under the influence of re-education. (...)

Two lost world wars, the devastation, losses and moral burdens, the division into two states, which were caught up in hostile power blocs and thus became frontline states once again, are more than a people can bear. Freed from inner turmoil, the Federal Republic is liberating itself from Germany.

In a comfortable and somewhat infantile age, the concept of tragedy has been lost, and so the past becomes a projection screen for simplistic films, rampant emotions, complexes and ideological justifications of all kinds. We are called to celebrate “liberation” on 8 May and to trivialise, repress and deny the suffering and sacrifices of our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, now already great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, to condemn their generation wholesale as “Nazis” and to view them as cartoonish demons from a Hollywood film. This must seem utterly despicable to any feeling and thinking person who really “remembers” history.

But let us now return to the question of how the end of the war was portrayed in films. A central thesis of Besetztes Gelände is that, over time, Germans increasingly lost their own perspective and were unable, for political and historical reasons, to confront their own trauma without putting on the interpretive glasses of the victorious powers (and not doing so does not necessarily mean putting on National Socialist glasses instead).

Certainly, even under these conditions, films and novels of merit and value were produced that were able to come to terms with, preserve, interpret and make comprehensible a good deal of the reality (or realities) of the war. But one must always examine these films and books for gaps, whitewashings, compensations, omissions, cover-ups, for what has not been said, for what you can read between the lines or see between the images, as well as for the historical context in which they were produced.

For example, it is particularly revealing to compare the book Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, 1959), a personal account of the Red Army invasion of Berlin and the mass rapes that came with it, with Max Färberböck’s 2008 film version. This is not merely a matter of dramaturgical “translations” into another medium, but of deliberate, “pedagogical” retouching.

According to a press release, Färberböck initially even planned to tell the story from the perspective of a Russian soldier – there could hardly be a clearer illustration of the Germans’ neurotic fear of their own perspective. But even the perspective of the “anonymous” author Marta Hillers was only partially adopted. The content of the book (itself a partly fictionalised reworking of original diaries) was considerably softened, and a “German guilt” angle was emphasized (“for balance”, I guess). The film is an attempt to present Hiller’s and other women’s reports of Russian mass rapes without shaking up the overall narrative too much, to keep it intact while admitting some basic facts.

I will not say much about what is probably the best-known film about the end of the war in Germany, Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), as it focuses on the fate of Hitler and the occupants of the Führerbunker rather than the civilian population. It is characterised by a heightened realism, which was received with considerable irritation by some critics because it showed a very “human” Hitler and not so much the one-dimensional demon of countless other films.

Wim Wenders complained that it was a film without a (sufficiently anti-fascist) “stance”, a common reaction when a film about World War II and National Socialism is straining the usual interpretative framework. Some felt that Downfall lacked the firm grip of an educational “message”, which was only added as an afterthought in the credits through a few self-accusations by the real Hitler secretary and Führerbunker veteran Traudl Junge, who had died in 2002, and who appears as a character in the film.

Miraculously untouched by the celebrating Russian soldiers, she manages to escape from Berlin, riding off on a bicycle into freedom in the final scene, accompanied by a former Hitlerjunge, equally liberated from the horrors of war. To its credit, the film does show how nightmarish and horrifying the capture of Berlin was for the Germans trapped in the city, both soldiers and civilians, as for many of them it brought suffering, death and destruction. It is “liberation” only in a very abstract sense, as it brings an end to the war. Yet many will not live to see it, many will spend years in Soviet camps as prisoners of war, and many women will be brutally raped.

Despite impressive scenes and acting performances (you all know countless “Hitler finds out” false subtitle parodies), I find it overall a somewhat hollow film. Like its Eichinger produced successor, The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), it is a technically perfect and detailed ghost train ride through German history, a mere reenactment without much depth.

Personally, I prefer Der letzte Akt (The Final Act, 1955) by G. W. Pabst with Oskar Werner and Albin Skoda (as Hitler). It is far more focused on a moral message (against war, militarism and fascism) than the Eichinger film, but distinguished by its historically “authentic” atmosphere, especially with regard to the way the soldiers and military personnel speak and act (many of its actors, including the deserter Werner, had actually served in the Wehrmacht).

Instead, I will take a look at the DEFA production Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen) from 1968, directed by Konrad Wolf, a film that is partially communist propaganda but still manages to capture a great deal of the reality of the war, especially in respect to the defeat/liberation question.

More on this in the second part of this article.

We are talking about the recent conspiracy theory according to which Brigitte Macron, the wife of Emmanuel Macron, is in fact a man.

However far-fetched it may sound, it is currently doing the rounds in American and French media after being presented to a mass audience by black influencer Candace Owens (6.8 million followers on Xitter) in a six-part series on YouTube (part 1 has 3.8 million clicks to date).

It has received further exposure through advertising by Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential American conservative journalist at the moment. (Meanwhile, also Joe Rogan has taken the bait, so the whole thing will probably soon become “alternative mainstream”.)

Carlson described how sceptical he had initially been about this theory ardently promoted his clever and nice friend Candace. Despite all his love for her, he felt it was “flat earth” territory that he would rather not enter.

But now, lo and behold, he is amazed to admit: “And then it turns out - she’s right! My mind is blown!” His interview partner, a former Fox News colleague named Clayton Morris, invited to shed light on the infamous Israeli attack on an American ship in 1967, enthusiastically agreed:

The Candace Owens pieces on this are phenomenal. I’m giving Candace Owens full credit for really opening up this story from the French journalists who first broke it, and then were I think like ostracised and basically told not to report it.

I don’t know whether Carlson and Morris sat through the tedious, more than six hours during which Owens presented the matter and “asked questions” interrupted by announcements from her (now probably very happy) sponsors, or whether they, like your humble narrator, have actually read the English translation of the book Becoming Brigitte by the right-wing French “investigative journalist” Xavier Poussard, which is now being marketed under Owens’ brand (seemingly a poorly edited AI translation; for example, the personal pronouns constantly change, sometimes within a single sentence).

Even though I only listened to parts of the series on YouTube, I was hooked and ordered the book. It proved to be a captivating and rather illuminating read that kept me enthralled for a few days, but for entirely different reasons than those intended by Xavier Poussard.

What’s the story? I’ll sum it up for you, so you don’t have to go down that rabbit hole.

It all started with a lady named Natacha Rey, who is described by Xavier Poussard (a frequent guest on Alain Soral’s Égalité & Reconciliation, which regularly promotes his work) as an “ordinary, self-taught citizen”, i.e. not a journalist who has “investigated along the usual methodology”.

She was irritated by Brigitte Macron’s “unusual” physique, as she wrote on Facebook:...

the width of her neck, her shoulders, the length of her ribcage compared to her narrow, waistless lower body. Hence this unbalanced silhouette, her virile gait always with long strides, this way of sitting naturally with her legs apart.

The striking, somewhat harsh and masculine appearance of Brigitte Macron (born 1953) is one of the reasons why the transgender theory seems instantly plausible or at least conceivable to many people. Another is the unusual optics of the Macrons themselves.

Emmanuel Macron (born 1977) is a handsome, relatively young man who looks a bit like Alain Delon (Note: Some people in the Unz commentariat have complained about this comparison. I’m just saying “a bit”. Of course nobody matches Delon who looked like a living God.) Since 2007, Macron has been married to a woman who is almost 24 years older than he is and who, in terms of age, could be his mother.

Since the sexual attractiveness of men fades more slowly than that of women for biological (and socio-biological) reasons, this is a constellation much less common than the opposite-sex variant. The story is made even more unusual by the fact that the love affair had already begun when Emmanuel was still a teenager and Brigitte was his 40-year-old teacher.

On top of that, the couple presents themselves in an extremely “LGBTQ”-friendly way, and Macron, apart from repeating rumours, has a certain narcissistic, suspiciously homosexual aura about him (this is my impression at least). And I guess you have all seen the photos of him embracing sweaty, half-naked black thugs with visible excitement gleaming in his eyes. Whatever the case may be, there seems to be something odd about him and his sexuality.

In the 2018 documentary Un Roman Français by Virginie Linhart, Natacha Rey came across a photo of the Trogneux family (Brigitte’s maiden name) from 1954 that seemed suspicious to her.

It was supposed to show baby Brigitte on her mother’s lap, but Rey had the impression that another person on the far left of the picture looked much more like Brigitte today, even a “spitting image”. As it turned out later, this is “officially” Brigitte’s older brother Jean-Michel Trogneux, born in 1945.

The first version spun by Natacha Rey on the basis of this intuition was as follows: Brigitte is in fact the boy on the left, not the baby on the right in the photo. After a sex change, this Jean-Michel called himself “Brigitte” and is identical to the Brigitte Macron we know today.

Before his “transformation” (still according to Natacha Rey), Jean-Michel fathered three children with a woman named Catherine Audoy, who are now considered Brigitte’s official offspring from her first marriage to a banker called André Auzière: Sébastien (1975), Laurénce (1977) and Tiphaine (1984).

According to Rey, they carry the surname “Auzière” because they were adopted by a man named Jean-Louis Auzière when he married Catherine Audoy. “Brigitte Trogneux” and “André Auzière” are merely fictitious characters in this version of the story, invented to conceal Brigitte’s true identity and biography.

According to Mr. Poussard, the following occurred: In June 2021, Madame Rey sent Madame Audoy two sets of photos via WhatsApp which were supposed to prove that Jean-Michel is identical to Brigitte and Jean-Louis is identical to André, accompanied by the words: “I know everything. I know everything about you, Jean-Michel, Sébastien, Laurence and Tiphaine!”

Three weeks later, the police were at Rey’s doorstep, arrested her and subjected her to a harsh interrogation, during which she was threatened and harassed. At least that’s how she told it (among others) to journalist Emmanuelle Anizon, who wrote a book aiming to debunk the “fake news” of this conspiracy theory.

Poussard reports also that, after Rey named him as one of her journalistic contacts, his house was searched and the webmaster of his own site Faits & Documents (which had taken up the theory in May-April with a large dossier) was arrested.

Natacha Rey got into trouble again when she presented her accusations and theories about the identity of Brigitte Macron in epic detail in a four-hour (now deleted) YouTube interview (which was simultaneously streamed on Twitch, Facebook, VK and Odysee) with a clairvoyant who goes by the stage name Amandine Roy on 10 December 2021.

Both ladies with the “royal” surname were sentenced to pay damages of 8,000 and 5,000 euros respectively to Brigitte Macron and her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux, who, together with the Auzière offspring and his sister, was one of the plaintiffs – and thus, apparently, does actually exist.

These harsh reactions naturally fuelled the zeal of the amateur detectives even more. Had they really uncovered a state secret? And why, why didn’t Brigitte just publish documents that would confirm the identities of everyone involved beyond any doubt, why no photos from her “former” life as Madame Auzière and mother of three children? That would have settled the matter once and for all!

The lack of publicly available photos and documents from the time before Brigitte Trogneux-Auzière met Emmanuel Macron is one of the main suspicions of “conspiracy theorists”. They suspect that something is being deliberately hidden.

The perception that little material is available about Brigitte’s life as Madame Auzière is apparently accurate. The family seems indeed to be very keen to keep their private affairs out of the public eye. Poussard quotes Virginie Linhart, the director of Un Roman Français:

The interviewees, apart from her former students, all had the authorization of the Élysée Palace and were very careful about what they said. There is a thick wall of silence. The level of control and checking is, well, quite astounding. (...) [The film] is a 90-minute very personal portrait. For it, I needed photos of young Brigitte Macron, small children… that would show an itinerary, not those approved by the Bestimage agency. What doesn’t come out is everything to do with her past life. It’s a total blackout.

I guess this is another reason why the theory catches on with many people: Poussard & Co are undoubtedly right when they emphasise that both Brigitte Macron’s and Emmanuel Macron’s public personas are media-made shiny facades.

Macron, originally an investment banker in the service of Rothschild & Cie, was from the outset a kind of “test-tube” politician, carefully groomed and pulled out of the hat to be presented to the electorate in 2016 as a centrist saviour from the “right-wing populist” danger. Jacques Attali, a grey eminence of the globalist elites in France, even openly boasted: “I discovered Emmanuel Macron. I invented him.”

The media offensive in favour of Macron also had to present his strange relationship with Brigitte in a palatable way. This apparently involved a number of “cosmetic corrections” (such as Emmanuel’s age when the two met), which the investigators are now pouncing on. As is so often the case, the driving force is a profound mistrust of the ruling political elites, which is of course completely justified.

In the wake of the first version of the theory, which spread like wildfire on social media, various investigators set out to either refute or confirm it.

Poussard as well found birth announcements of Brigitte Trogneux (mentioning her brother Jean-Michel) in old newspapers, as well as of Sébastien, Laurence and Tiphaine, of course under the name “Auzière”. When he confronted Natacha Rey with this, she dismissed all these finds with the same old answer: “It’s all fake!”

Now that there was sufficient confirmation that Brigitte Trogneux and Jean-Michel Trogneux are (or at least were) two different people and that Brigitte had indeed married a real, now deceased man named André Auzière in 1974, the theory had to be modified.

In the revised version by Xavier Poussard, it now reads as follows: a Brigitte Trogneux, born on 13 April 1953, did in fact exist. She is the person who can be seen on the few photos that officially show today’s Brigitte Macron before 1986: the family photo from 1954, a first communion photo from 1963 and a wedding photo from 1974 published in April 2019 in the magazine Le Point.

And now comes the banger: According to Poussard, this Brigitte Auzière née Trogneux is not identical to the Brigitte Macron we know today.

This Brigitte Auzière is said to have died sometime in the 1980s. After that, her brother Jean-Michel took over her identity. Brigitte Macron is therefore not the mother, but the aunt (or rather uncle) of Sébastien, Laurence and Tiphaine. So there are two Brigittes in this mysterious family saga: a real one (Trogneux), who has died, and a false one (Macron), who has assumed her identity.

This is the crux of the matter, on which Poussard’s theory stands or falls, and it is precisely what he is unable to substantiate or prove in any way.

Since there is no death certificate for Brigitte Trogneux and no grave, her family must have covered up her death. How is that possible? Was there no one outside the family who noticed her disappearance? Was there no one who noticed that a completely different person was now acting under her name? And what happened to her body? Was it buried in the Auzières’ garden?

As outlined in the book, all of this is pure invention, to fill the crucial gap in the theory of how Jean-Michel could become Brigitte. Because we have no proof whatsoever this supposed “identity theft” actually happened, we are left with our own imagination. Poussard speculates that maybe the real Brigitte Trogneux “knowing she was doomed by a serious illness, entrusted the custody of her children and her identity to this brother to whom she was so close and who had always felt like a woman.”

But such an improbable, melodramatic scenario still doesn’t explain why this whole manoeuvre was carried out and why the entire Auzière-Trogneux clan went along with it.

There is now another complication for Poussard’s theory, one that completely undermines it.

In January 2022, the journalist Jonathan Moadab, a Jewish (yet anti-zionist) opponent of Macron who has written for the conservative weekly Valeurs actuelles and RT France, published a number of documents proving that Jean-Michel Trogneux is not only a real person, but that he still lives in Amiens under that name today: An extract from the birth certificate, an entry in the city’s electoral roll, and a marriage certificate from 1980 documenting Jean-Michel’s marriage to a certain Véronique Dreux (with Brigitte as the maid of honour). In a footnote, Poussard himself confirms the existence of a social security number and a car and licence plate under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux.

Moadab reported that he visited this Jean-Michel Trogneux at his official, easily found address in Amiens (where there is also a Trogneux family shop), but that he refused to speak to him.

Finally, Moadab published a video of Macron’s inauguration on 14 May 2017 at the Élysée Palace, in which a man can be seen who he claims is none other but Jean-Michel Trogneux, identical to the gentleman he saw face to face in Amiens. This man appears in several photos and videos of official events with the Macrons.

Poussard is naturally not satisfied with this. Where is the proof, he asks, that this man, whom he refers to as “the chubby guy” (“le petit gros”), is the same person who lives in Amiens under that name and who turned away Moadab at the front door? He has no explanation (not even a theory) who “le petit gros” or the guy named Jean-Michel Trogneux in Amiens really is (Ockham’s razor: he is Jean-Michel Trogneux, Brigitte Macron’s brother, née Trogneux, and also the “chubby guy”).

And now enter Poussard’s big trump card. Since the whole theory is based on perceived similarities, which are often interpreted very subjectively depending on the observer, he examined the existing photos using the Chinese facial recognition software Face+++.

Stamp-sized black-and-white reproductions with the AI’s assessments take up a considerable part of his book, including comparisons with the youth and old age photos of several celebrities from Brigitte’s generation (like Kim Basinger or Isabelle Huppert) or Jean-Michel’s former schoolmates.

(Almost) every time, the AI provides him with the desired, because suspicious, results. Some other childhood portraits of Jean-Michel that Poussard tracked down show between 57.73% and 66.97% similarity with “the chubby guy”. The similarity of these images with pictures of the later and present Brigitte is however only slightly higher, between 62.2% and 68.29%. Matches between the 1974 wedding photo of Brigitte Auzière and various photos of the present Brigitte Macron range between just 48% and 57.7%, which Poussard presents as proof they are not the same person.

Funnily enough, there is no AI comparison between the photo of Jean-Michel which started it all (the family photo from 1954) and photos of today’s Brigitte. Poussard merely mentions in a footnote that both “Brigitte” and “the chubby guy” only achieved a 55% match with the family photo boy.

According to Poussard this picture is unusable anyway, because Jean-Michel’s teeth were “obviously” changed afterwards to match the “repaired” teeth of today’s Brigitte (also a lampshade was retouched!!). Of course, this makes no logical sense, because the conspirators would rather seek to obscure the traces between Brigitte and Jean-Michel than to align them.

It is obvious, of course, why the AI method is weak evidence. The poor quality of the photos, the camera angles, the facial expressions, the fact that Brigitte has had several facelifts, etc., all this naturally affects the results.

The “bombshell” that is supposed to dispel any doubt finally explodes on page 287 (of the English edition). Candace Owens and Xavier Poussard present this find as the great, decisive proof that should convince even the last sceptic.

After a long, obsessive search, Poussard finally managed to recover a youthful portrait of Jean-Michel from 1964 from the depths of an archive.

I can only imagine how excited, almost ecstatic Poussard must have been when he found this photo. On it, Jean-Michel indeed looks remarkably like Brigitte Macron. At least that was my immediate impression. However, I showed it to several friends, all of whom were less impressed and saw more differences than similarities.

The problem for Poussard is that Jean-Michel is wearing glasses in this picture. This ironically makes this one crucial trophy photo unsuitable for AI verification.

Poussard’s reliance on visual similarities also backfires when it comes to “the chubby guy”, whose existence creates a huge problem for his theory. Because this man, even though he has grown old and fat, clearly has features of the Trogneux family, especially in terms of his nose, ears and mouth-chin area.

Now a sceptical friend of mine, just for fun, used a Face app to make “the chubby guy” look younger. The result is crude, but bears a clear resemblance to Jean-Michel’s childhood photos. What are the chances that “the chubby guy” is just some actor with no family connection to the Trogneux clan?

So the simplest explanation is the official one: Jean-Michel from 1954 and 1964 looks so much like Brigitte simply because he is her brother. With age, the resemblance faded because Jean-Michel has gained weight and Brigitte today is a scrawny bean pole with multiple facelifts.

That would be the “Brigitte Macron is a man” theory in its essential features. I have to leave out countless details, assertions and associations that Poussard brings into play, which are without exception weak or downright irrelevant, for reasons of space and to spare the reader more rabbit hole spergery.

However, I cannot leave two particular delicacies unmentioned.

First, there is the male-to-female transsexual “Véronique”, who appeared anonymously in silhouette on a French television programme in 1977. It is striking that his voice cannot be distinguished from that of a woman (a friend of mine claims she can hear the subdued male pitch, which is impossible for me). According to the extended theory, this person is identical to Jean-Michel Trogneux and thus to Brigitte Macron.

Poussard, for example, believes that one can clearly tell from the intonation, the choice of words and the voice that they are the same person, always considering the fact that Brigitte Macron’s present voice has of course aged quite a lot since. A graphic, taken from the Audacity programme, is also supposed to prove the identity of the voices.

It seems particularly striking to Poussard and Candace (whose French is the most atrocious rape of a language I have ever heard) that Véronique uses the phrase “c’est à dire”, which Brigitte Macron has also done (and practically every living Frenchman and -woman). Véronique mentions Chopin, and decades later the French press reported that Emmanuel likes to play Chopin on the piano for his wife. Do you need more proof??

At some point, I sat there and started comparing the two voices and characters over and over again like a maniac, but without coming to a definite conclusion. Because it was so exciting, I wanted to find Brigitte in Véronique, but it didn’t really “click”.

Now, if “Véronique” is Jean-Michel (and thus Brigitte Macron), then Poussard’s theory faces serious problems (which he doesn’t seem to realise). The moderator explicitly states that Véronique has already had her operation. She, in turn, explains that “women” of her kind can “copulate, but not procreate” (“copuler, mais pas procréer”).

However, according to official documents that Poussard not only does not doubt but incorporates into his narrative, Jean-Michel Trogneux married in 1980 and fathered two children. How was that possible if Véronique had already been “post-op”? Did she retain her reproductive organ? And did she re-identify as a man for the purpose of the wedding?

Neither Poussard nor Owens bother to explain, let alone address blatant inconsistencies and contradictions like these. They simply sweep these elephants under the rug. Poussard wriggles his way out by evasively stating that Jean-Michel and his wife “declared” these two children as theirs “whatever the materiality of the couple they formed”.

As for Jean-Michel’s children, they lead us to the second delicacy, the absolute cherry on the top of the theory cake.

His son Jean-Jacques Trogneux, born in 1982, bears a striking resemblance to Emmanuel Macron, according to the unmaskers. At least in some photos of Jean-Jacques, such a similarity can indeed be seen; see f. e. this sample poll video shot in a French city centre – almost everyone questioned immediately associates Macron with the image of Jean-Jacques.

But what would be the implication? Poussard only hints at it: since he also believes that there are gaps and inconsistencies in the biography of Emmanuel Macron, the whole thing implicitly amounts to the fact that Macron and Jean-Jacques Trogneux are related, possibly half-brothers, possibly both sons of Jean-Michel.

And because Jean-Michel, as we all know now, is in fact Brigitte, this in turn would mean that Emmanuel married his own sex-changed father.

To add fuel to this mind-boggling suggestion, Poussard gives his book an epilogue about “The Blood of the Rothschilds”, whose long-lived dynasty he attributes to extensive incestuous-endogamous practices. In doing so, he relies on statements from Nathalie Reims, the cousin of David de Rothschild, who in turn is one of Macron’s most important supporters.

I’ll leave out the references to satanism (satanists also love incest as you all know) and a wedding cake that is supposedly decorated “with the horns of Baphomet” (they look more like an antelope’s). Pedo-satanic allegations of course belong to the standard repertoire of QAnon and related conspiracyland flavours. Poussard does not explain what this mixture of sinister allusions, which he tries very hard to link to his theory, is supposed to really mean.

Politically, of course, the Brigitte thesis boils down to bringing down the French arm of the global “cabal” by exposing this one swindle (which, if true, wouldn’t be that evil after all in my humble opinion, unless you are buying into the “statutory rape” and “pedophilia” frame Poussard and Owens are trying to impose on the story, which I don’t.)

In this script, Brigitte Macron is not just a transsexual (like supposedly Michelle Obama), but a puppet-master connected to the Rothschild clan, paedophile rings and the LGBTQ mafia, who truly rules the Élysée Palace while the gay, weak-willed cocaine-addicted Emmanuel is just a puppet. This probably also explains the missionary, fanatical zeal of the devout Catholic Poussard (Owens is a Catholic convert as well).

I have the impression that Poussard is seriously, almost religiously convinced of the truth of his theory and sees himself as a kind of crusader of God. The introductory page to his chapter “Looking for Jean-Michel Trogneux”, in which he after 240 pages gets to the heart of his research, is heraldically adorned with quotations from Nietzsche, Chesterton, Malraux and Pierre Schoendorffer (a film director much appreciated by French right-wingers), all of which revolve around the theme of lies and truth.

Owens, who is far less clever than she and her fans think, is probably sincerely convinced as well, but she is also an extremely business-minded American who has stumbled upon a goldmine for her sponsors.

Since people like Tucker Carlson are now picking up this theory and promoting it, it is becoming “respectable”, if not proven, in parts of the right-wing bubble. But as I have shown, this is not the case at all. Rather, it is one of the most poorly reasoned conspiracy theories I have ever seen (and I’m a staunch 9-11-Truther and Oxfordian). Carlson and Owens have (once again) done significant damage to the reputation of the “alternative media”.

This is, of course, only in the eyes of that remaining minority for whom content is more important than mere click quantities. Exciting, sensational stories like the Brigitte Macron theory will always have a greater reach than sober analysis and factual presentations.

I realise that the label “conspiracy theory” is often used as a weapon to ridicule dissidents and critics of the powers that be. Any doubt that the rich and powerful of this planet may not be nothing but benevolent humanists and democrats will earn you this badge of shame. As a means to stigmatise doubters and adversaries it has grown weak however, mainly because it has been overused. During the Covid years we often saw “conspiracy theories” turn miraculously into truth after only a few months or even weeks.

My own approach to any “conspiracy theory” would be simply to check how strong its arguments are. It would be foolish to deny that conspiracies, false flag operations, media manipulations and cover-ups really happen. Also, the problem of cognitive bias is a general human phenomenon, not just of “conspiracy theorists”, but also of their “debunkers”.

In this respect, Poussard is, in my opinion, a fascinating “case”. Becoming Brigitte is meticulously researched, with endless detailed biographies of the main and supporting actors in the drama, both in the text and in the footnotes.

But as a critical reader, you constantly stumble over Poussard’s distortions, suggestions, insinuations, interpretations, plot holes and cognitive twists until you almost get dizzy or want to throw the book against the wall in anger.

Poussard reminded me of two characters in films: on the one hand Jake Gyllenhaal in the thriller Zodiac (2007) by David Fincher, playing a journalist who, for over a decade, manically tries to find out the identity of a mysterious serial killer (who actually existed and whose case was never solved).

His obsessive search leads him into a labyrinth of clues, suspicions, bizarre coincidences, false tracks and dead ends. When he believes he has finally identified the culprit, he escapes again, this time for good.

The other is David Hemmings in the arthouse classic Blow Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni. A hip fashion photographer in 1960s London becomes obsessed with the idea that a few photos taken by chance in a park show evidence of a murder.

To this end, he makes ever larger prints (“blow up”) of details of these photos, until only the grain can be seen. He does indeed find a body in the park one night, but it has disappeared the next day. The film leaves it open whether his imagination has played a trick on him or whether he was really on the trail of a murder case.

I see Xavier Poussard as someone who, based on his subjective perception, has become fixated on an idea and built a house of cards of cathedral-like proportions on it, which grows ever larger the more “indirect” evidence he finds to support the structure.

Like the characters in Fincher and Antonioni’s films, what he is looking for eludes him every time he finally thinks he has it in front of his nose. After a long search, he finds a phenomenal photo that seems to confirm all his theories, but he cannot use his main tool, the Chinese facial recognition software, because the object of his search is wearing glasses in the photo.

He repeatedly comes into contact with supporting actors of the drama who refuse to provide him with evidence even when he promises not to publish it and to withdraw his claims if they are conclusive. As a reader, you find yourself rooting for Poussard as he plunges into the next and the next investigation, only to return empty-handed and with a few more speculations in tow again and again.

Towards the end of the book, this Captain Ahab finally seems to get his “white whale” in his sights. He manages to track down the phone number of Jean-Michel’s ex-wife Véronique (she has the same first name as the transsexual in the 1977 TV show!) and arranges to speak to her on the phone.

Poussard describes the essence of the conversation with Véronique Dreux, formerly Madame Trogneux, now Madame de la Simone, which lasted about thirty minutes:

“Listen sir, I have been divorced from Jean-Michel Trogneux for many years. Listen sir, I have remarried and my children are here, I don’t want any problems. But I can tell you that Jean-Michel is not Brigitte; that’s ridiculous.” (…)

I take her at her word and ask her of photos of her shared past with Jean-Michel Trogneux, promising, if they are conclusive, to close the case without even publishing them.

“Brigitte told me not to get involved. I don’t want any trouble about my children, or about uh... it’s not relevant to the family anymore.”

As I argue she should hold Brigitte Macron to account, because it’s because of her silence that her own photo, as well as those of her children (Jean-Jacques in particular) are circulating on social networks, she cuts me off and inexplicably blurts out: “... and also I know Macron’s father.... Well, I don’t know him very well. He was a surgeon at the Amiens hospital. But I didn’t even know Macron. We lived in Toulon, I didn’t even know him. I saw him at my daughter’s wedding. First time I’d ever seen him.”

I can hear another person in the line. Véronique Dreux stops, visibly embarrassed, as if she’s gone too far. She pulls herself together and asks me: “Well, and what is your name?”...

The whale dives down again, the oasis has once more proved to be a mirage. I can well imagine that Poussard has been driven to madness by repeating frustrating scenes of this kind.

Now he has no choice but to stick to this story if he wants to keep face. Likewise Candace Owens, who has now stuck her neck out as far as possible, including in a full-throated tweet in which she staked her “entire professional reputation” on the claim that Brigitte Macron “is in fact a man”.

She added: “Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as establishment.”

Well, that would probably expose me as a stooge of “the elites” too.

I listed his most famous movies to spare myself a filmographic litany. If you are not familiar with Lynch’s work, you can look it up elsewhere. Suffice it to say that he was the rare case of a true-blue avant-garde underground artist and filmmaker who managed to enter the mainstream without ever “selling out”. In fact, he changed our very notion of what is artistically possible within the mainstream, at least in the niche areas of it.

For most of my life he and his work meant quite a lot to me. I know it’s silly to cry about departed celebrities whom you never knew personally, but I have to say that the news of David Lynch’s death really drove a pain into my chest. He was not only a great filmmaker, but he seemed a decent, honest, thoughtful and unique man. I felt as if a good spirit had left this earth.

I first became aware of him in 1987 at the age of eleven, when I read a negative review of Blue Velvet in Austria’s biggest tabloid newspaper. The reviewer was shocked and disgusted by such a perverted, ugly film. It seemed incomprehensible to him what sick mind could come up with such a monstrosity.

Around the same time I saw clips on TV from the movie’s most infamous scene, with Dennis Hopper doing his horrifying frenzied “Baby wants to f——” shtick. I was a very innocent child, raised in a similar way as Lynch himself, and I was utterly shocked.

I think the first film of his that I actually saw was The Elephant Man, again on public TV. I was very moved, without realising any connection to the director of Blue Velvet.

In 1991 Twin Peaks was also hyped and broadcast on German and Austrian television. I wasn’t really a “fan” back then; after a few episodes I realised that the ever-growing mysteries would pile up incessantly but never be solved and felt frustrated about that. But I also owned a CD of the marvellous soundtrack and like many teenagers was mesmerised by Julee Cruise’s title song Falling.

In 1995 I would see Eraserhead for the first time, appropriately at midnight on a cinema screen in Vienna, together with pals from my Goth clique. It’s a unique film of unmatched dark atmospheric beauty, made with basically no budget, purely with light, shadows, sound and imagination.

Contrary to its reputation, I don’t think it is very hard to “get”, once you tune in to its dreamlike anti-storytelling and vibe. One key is young David Lynch’s anxiety over unexpected fatherhood, and maybe it can also be read as an allegory on abortion and the feelings of guilt that come with it.

The film certainly goes far beyond that, expressing an almost “gnostic” fear about being incarnated as a mortal body at all, “inter faeces et urinam”, as St. Augustine famously put it. This is an “existentalist” feeling you have to know by yourself to understand what is (probably) happening here.

Within the Goth subculture I was part of, Lynch was of course a revered figure. When Lost Highway was released in 1997, it was an incredible hit in my peer group, not least because of its fantastic “scene-related” soundtrack, featuring among others Rammstein (back then the newest, hottest stuff around), Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor, Peter Christopherson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, This Mortal Coil, Barry Adamson and Smashing Pumpkins. Everybody had to see it and everybody had an opinion about it.

One day in early 1998 or so, I met an old school friend on the train to Vienna who, with a manically radiant look in his eyes, announced that he had finally deciphered the film after watching it for the third time or so. He was very excited as if he had stumbled upon a great, thrilling mystery.

It’s typical for Lynch movies to require repeated viewings. The first time you see them you may be confused and even angry at the strange goings-on and seemingly random plot twists, when the movie halfway through seems to turn into something entirely else. After the second, third, fourth viewing things begin to fall more and more into place.

The “sense” they start making after that is not necessarily rational, but operates on a different level you have to open up to. Lynch movies work best if you are ready to give yourself over as if you were on a “trip”, putting rational thought aside (but not switching it off) and willingly letting the director lead you into a world full of emotional rollercoasters, where beauty is only the beginning of terror.

Lost Highway resonated deeply within me and has haunted me ever since. To this day I consider it Lynch’s most accomplished and visually beautiful film. Even after repeated watching, it remains scary as hell. I prefer it a lot to the subsequent and in many ways similar Mulholland Drive (2001) which for some reason got far more critical praise (I like it very much, but, being based on an aborted TV series, it seems a bit incomplete, fragmentary and too TV-ish to me).

When I was at film school in Berlin in the early 2000s, Lynch was a living god to us film students, a model to study, admire and imitate (which was of course impossible). Among contemporary, active directors only the equally “idiosyncratic” Lars von Trier came close.

It was also in Berlin, in 2007, when I had a “live” experience of David Lynch. I will tell you about that later, because this is the “self-indulgent” edition of this article, and I have to get some thoughts out of my way, which may very well be blind leads. But there we go.

The 20th of January, Lynch’s birthday, was also the day of the second inauguration of his generational colleague Donald Trump (also born in 1946), who Lynch once said could go down in history as one of “the greatest presidents of the United States” thanks to his disruptive power – if only he would stop “causing suffering and division”.

As a teenager, Lynch had attended a presidential inauguration in person, again on a January 20th: in 1961, on his 15th birthday, as a member of a Boy Scouts delegation that paid tribute to the new President John F. Kennedy.

Lynch was proud of his boy scout career for his whole life: his Twitter biography simply read: “Filmmaker. Born Missoula, MT. Eagle Scout.” The latter is the highest rank a boy scout can achieve.

Two future presidents and one past president attended the inauguration, so young Lynch was able to experience four consecutive US presidents up close: Kennedy, his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower, his vice president and successor Lyndon B. Johnson, and the losing candidate Richard Nixon, who became the American head of state in 1969 after his rival Robert F. Kennedy was mysteriously assassinated.

The assassination of Robert’s brother John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 was America’s great national trauma of the 20th century. To this day, in the minds of many Americans, it marks the end of their country’s “golden age”. It is often precisely this period before the Vietnam War and the cultural revolution of the 1960s that they have in mind when they say “Make America Great Again”.

Even though the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone wolf” narrative is still “officially” the accepted version, according to reports the majority of Americans today believe that Kennedy was in fact the victim of a conspiracy by the “deep state”. It is the most widespread and most socially accepted “conspiracy theory”.

“Kennedy” has become a cipher for the ever-growing loss of trust in American institutions since the 1960s, with such a strong symbolic effect that it is also used by Donald Trump to prove that he is serious in his (alleged?) fight against the “deep state”. For example, he announced that he would release the still classified files on the Kennedy assassination to the public. The appointment of Robert Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health also has a symbolic significance in that respect.

In a film by Laurent Guyénot about the assassination of the Kennedy brothers (ignoring whether the theses it presents are correct), I came across a quote from the author that stuck with me:

The Kennedy assassinations are obsessing the American psyche and corrupting its character. The sense of a terrible truth, hidden by the government, is making America deeply neurotic, like a repressed family secret affecting the whole personality. This lie, buried within the deep state, has rendered Americans vulnerable to other lies, just like any lie creates a predisposition for new lies, and even the need for new lies to cover it up.

It was probably this deep-seated sentiment that helped 80 year-old Bob Dylan make a curious comeback to the Billboard charts in 2020. The sixteen-minute piece Murder Most Foul, performed in a dry spoken-word manner, addresses Kennedy’s assassination as a lasting scar on the American soul.

I have a love-hate attitude towards Dylan, but I think this is a fascinating piece. Dylan also doesn’t seem to believe in the “lone gunman” theory:

President Kennedy was riding high
A good day to be living and a good day to die
Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb.

(...)
You got unpaid debts and we’ve come to collect
We’re gon’ kill you with hatred and without any respect
We’ll mock you and shock you, we’ll grin in your face
We’ve already got someone here to take your place
The day that they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing...

(...)
What is the truth and where did it go
Ask Oswald and Ruby – they ought to know
Shut your mouth, says the wise old owl
Business is business and it’s murder most foul.

“The wise old owl” of the Illuminati order? The owl effigy at the Bohemian Grove? “The owls are not what they seem”?

“Murder most foul” is of course a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the play about the covered-up regicide that poisons the “State of Denmark” as an open secret and drives the murdered king’s son into madness.

I was not surprised to find out that in his memoirs, Room to Dream, Lynch had expressed the suspicion that Lyndon B. Johnson was involved in the assassination (“We’ve already got someone here to take your place”). Agent Dale Cooper, the boyscout-like hero of the groundbreaking 1990–91 Twin Peaks TV series, also expresses interest in the case and doubts about the established narrative on several occasions.

Even more than that, Lynch expressed doubts about the “official” version of 9/11 in an interview in 2006 after he was shown Dylan Avery’s film Loose Change. The things he had seen did not seem to fit well with the story he had been told by the media: for example, the all too small hole in the Pentagon and the absence of an airplane, the collapse of WTC 7, which just like the collapse of the Twin Towers (Twin Peaks?) looked suspiciously like a controlled demolition.

The implications of this are very disturbing. Lynch commented:

Now it’s just an event that has many questions and no answers. And the suggestion that the American government is behind it? That’s too big for people to think about. It’s too big. (…) It’s just, you know, it’s like something no one wants to think about.

I for myself believe, among other things, that Oswald was “just a patsy”, and the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives, not airplanes.

I hope you forgive me this little digression into conspiracy land.

It would certainly be misleading to give these things too much weight in order to understand David Lynch. However, I am convinced that they play a subliminal role in his films. In his world, evil spirits have undermined and taken possession of America and its institutions, exemplified in the small town of Twin Peaks, which proves to be riddled with lies, murder, corruption, crime, drug trafficking, dark family secrets, perversions, incest, rape, conspiracies and literally demonic forces.

David Lynch himself had spent a happy childhood with loving parents and two siblings in an idyllic world of densely wooded small towns and suburbs in Montana, Idaho and Washington in the 1950s.

It was only as an art student in Philadelphia that he got to know the rough, dirty, ugly side of his country, which made a lasting impression on him. The theme of the loss of innocence, of shock at the realisation of the existence of evil, corruption and cruelty, runs like a red thread through his films. Following Blake (William, not Robert), his films may be seen as poetic “songs of innocence and experience”.

Lynch’s idyllic childhood seems to have left a lasting positive impression on his character. The same man whose films (and paintings) are so full of fear, violence, darkness and terror on the edge of horror was (seemingly) in private a mysteriously relaxed, humorous, enthusiastic person with a sympathetic face and friendly eyes, a physiognomy that is not often seen among Hollywood people. So far, I have not been able to find a single negative judgment about the man Lynch: his employees and collaborators, often long-standing personal friends, always spoke highly and lovingly of his professional and social behaviour.

In 2007, I was able to experience Lynch in person in Berlin, at an event where he promoted a project of the “Transcendental Meditation” organisation he adhered to. Afterwards, I felt as if I had witnessed a UFO landing. Suit-wearing representatives of the self-declared “global country of world peace” wanted to buy the Teufelsberg in Berlin to build a meditation centre that they seriously referred to as the “University of Invincible Germany.” Due to strong public resistance to this “cult,” it never came to pass.

Lynch was a life-long dedicated follower of this Indian spiritual movement created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which had also briefly captivated the Beatles in the 1960s. One can view the activities of this organisation very critically, as the German filmmaker David Sieveking did in his documentary David Wants to Fly, which was inspired by Lynch’s Berlin appearances of that time.

In any case, the practice of “transcendental meditation” seemed to do Lynch himself an extraordinary amount of good. Until the end of his life, he enthusiastically promoted this practice, extolling it as a purification from stress, anxieties and worries, and an ecstatic gateway to creativity and happiness, to the eternal and indestructible (ultimately, I guess, to God).

He believed in a life of the soul after death, in angels and other supernatural powers and entities. This spiritual aspect of his thinking is also reflected in his films: the forces of good and evil were not fictions or metaphors for him, but real things.

However, he also believed that beyond personal spiritual growth “transcendental meditation” could also usher “world peace” and make other utopian benefits happen. Of course, that seemed rather naive. He was not a person who beyond his religion was particularly interested in or knowledgeable about politics. According to Wikipedia, he called himself a “Democrat” who hated Democrats because they supported smoking bans. In 2016, he endorsed Bernie Sanders, a kind of left-wing populist “middle ground” between Trump and Hillary Clinton for many white Baby Boomers such as Lynch.

Nevertheless, there are some who have identified him as kind of “crypto-right-winger”.

For example, in an obituary for the Austrian right-wing magazine freilich, Russian-German writer Ilia Ryvkin called him the “last, perhaps the most lucid witness to the slow disappearance of traditionalist consciousness”; Greg Johnson, a leading intellectual of American “white nationalism” who uses the pseudonym “Trevor Lynch” for his film reviews, categorised the late director as a kind of conservative, implicitly “pro-white” moralist; and one Washington Post writer even considered him “America’s greatest conservative filmmaker” (“Sorry, Clint Eastwood”);

As evidence, he cites, like many others who point in this direction, Lynch’s now almost forgotten film The Straight Story (1999) - a G-rated, Disney-distributed story about an old man’s last journey on a riding lawn mower, who, before his imminent death, wants to reconcile with his estranged brother:

The Straight Story is the closest Lynch gets to epitomizing mainstream conservative art and politics. It’s a love letter to small towns, neighborly affection, the ties of family, the geography of the Midwest, and (let’s be honest) the myths and orthodoxies of White America.

Lynch’s love for “traditional” America, its landscapes and people and their ways of living, was undoubtedly sincere.

His “conservatism” was, however, notoriously ambivalent. As an artist, he was always searching for forms, expressions and experiences beyond conventional restrictions.

The Washington Post writer remarks:

He was a filmmaker for whom conventional electoral politics were as sterile as conventional realism was stifling. But as Mel Brooks supposedly said, David Lynch was actually “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”. He was both all-American and something alien.

Why an “alien”?

His films, often (somewhat lazily) labelled “surrealist”, are notoriously difficult (though, contrary to popular belief, not impossible) to “decipher”. Lynch, who was also a painter and musician, was a dyed-in-the-wool artist who drew his imagery not from other films, but mainly from his own subconscious mind.

He created a bold, unique style, for which there is now even a special adjective, “lynchesque” or “lynchian”. No other director was able to capture the emotional “logic” of dreams and nightmares as intensely and precisely as he did, and to recreate them with their hellish, magical, bizarre, whimsical states of consciousness, with their exciting plots and riddles that captivate the sleeping self, only to burst like soap bubbles upon awakening, always at the moment when their apparent “solution” seems dramatically imminent.

Those who have experienced intense nightmares will recognise them in many of Lynch’s scenes, which are charged with an incomparable and inexplicable atmospheric tension. Often it is not clear what is “happening”; the director plunges the viewer himself into a dream-like, trance-like state, which is interrupted, but not ended, by sudden shocks.

Lynch also explored closely related areas that are even more frightening and dangerous than mere dreams: his characters are haunted by psychoses, amnesia, trances, waking dreams, somnambulism, personality splits, delusions, dissociative states, and even literal demonic oppressions and possessions.

In Lynch’s films, external reality and the individual ego are only shaky constructs, like flickering candle lights in the wind of mysterious “hidden” powers, that may originate in one’s own psyche as well as in realms beyond the visible world. The criminal conspiracies that his heroes uncover always have this psychological and spiritual dimension.

Film, the supreme machine to create illusions and manipulate time, is the perfect medium for depicting these things, and Lynch used this instrument with stunning virtuosity.

In his heyday, no one would have thought of putting Lynch in a “conservative” pigeonhole. He was rather considered an “iconoclast” and had few inhibitions when it came to taboo breaking and explicit and often shocking depictions of sex and violence. However, in his films, sex is generally a kinky and alluring, yet suspicious, shady thing, a drug that is as heavenly as it is dangerous, and one that only rarely (as in Wild at Heart, for example) appears as a clearly positive force.

The quintessential film that most directly unlocks Lynch’s universe and his attitude to the world is undoubtedly Blue Velvet from 1987. If you want to “understand” the director, this is the best place to enter the rabbit hole.

When it came out, Blue Velvet was recognised as an extraordinary but also deeply disturbing work, subversive of the “triumphalist” patriotic spirit of the Reagan era, which is emblematised today by films like the Rambo trilogy and Top Gun.

In fact, Lynch was no leftist and had actually voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984. Evidently, his “case” was more complicated than it appeared to some.

Blue Velvet is set in an idyllic small town called Lumberton (the name refers to forests and lumberjacks), which looks as if it has been taken from one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, in a strangely anachronistic “uncanny valley” time zone where the 1950s and 1980s merge visually.

The famous first shot, accompanied by Bobby Vinton’s 1963 (the year of the Kennedy assassination) crooner ballad Blue Velvet , shows a white fence against a blue sky, lined with red roses – adding up to the colours of the American flag. Next, we see a bright red vintage fire engine driving along a street at a leisurely pace, with an elderly firefighter waving cheerfully at the camera on his footboard, a panting Dalmatian at his feet, followed by a grey-haired female crossing guard or teacher guiding happy schoolchildren across a crosswalk in slight slow-motion.

Lynch begins his story in a seemingly harmonious “high-trust” society, such as he himself grew up in, depicted with a kind irony (the irony of the grown-up who knows a bit better know.)

Almost immediately after this set-up, the forces of death and darkness are breaking in: In the very next scene, the father of the main character Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) suffers a sudden stroke while watering the lawn with a garden hose.

Meanwhile Jeffrey’s mother watches a crime thriller on television (stylised as a black & white image of a hand holding a gun), signalling the intrusion of violence into the domestic idyll (which is, as in Hitchcock’s proto-Lynchian thriller Shadow of a Doubt apparently also somewhat boring and requiring the entertainment of fictional crimes).

Lynch’s camera now literally goes underground: beneath the green meadow teems with slimy, smacking insects with shiny black shells.

This elemental evil, inherent in nature itself, is followed by the discovery of human evil. During a walk in the forest, Jeffrey finds a cut-off ear, half-eaten by ants (some think of Bunuel-Dali’s Un chien andalou here), apparently evidence of a violent crime. This discovery awakens in him a passion for amateur detective work that leads him deep into the underworld of Lumberton.

Together with Sandy (Laura Dern), the daughter of a local police official, who is the same age as Jeffrey and as clean, naive and lovable as apple pie, he sets out to find the culprit. He comes across the nightclub singer Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini).

In what is arguably the most iconic and infamous scene of the film, Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment and, hiding in a closet, witnesses the singer being abused by a sadistic, psychopathic, black leather jacket-wearing gangster named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). He is holding Dorothy’s son and husband captive in order to blackmail her into performing perverse sexual favours and role-playing games.

However, the darkness that Jeffrey discovers has unexpected layers. To his horror, he realises that Dorothy is a masochist who enjoys Frank’s beatings and abuse. He begins an affair (is it reality or just fantasy?) with the obviously mentally disturbed woman and discovers in himself tendencies and possibilities that deeply frighten him (notably, he has strong voyeuristic tendencies). Evil and perversion also lie dormant in the hearts of the good, who can be corrupted by its temptations at any time.

The forces of evil are embodied by Frank and his bizarre gang of freaks, whores, drug addicts and homosexuals (nobody who saw it will ever forget Dean Stockwell’s eerie lip-synching performance of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, also from 1963). Like the other characters in the film, they are pure fantasy products with no claim to realism.

Frank, still one of the most terrifying villains ever to appear on screen, resembles a walking “id” from a Freudian textbook, constantly under the influence of drugs (he uses a kind of laughing gas to lustfully intensify his frenetic fits of rage), constantly driven by violent and sexual impulses. He is also often haunted by mysterious emotional outbursts. Lynch suggests that Frank’s monstrous character may also be a product of early childhood trauma, violence, incest or abuse. He uses the word “fuck” incessantly, but is possibly impotent.

Some details suggest a national context beyond the exemplary small town: (John Wilkes) “Booth” was the name of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin; “Lincoln Street” is the name of the street where Dorothy’s apartment is located. Jeffrey uncovers a criminal conspiracy in the course of his amateur detective work: Frank and parts of the police force are in cahoots. (Does all of this subliminally refer to Kennedy and the national divide that his assassination marked?) However, the police are not completely corrupted, and in the end the old order is restored.

Blue Velvet is by no means a “deconstruction” of the small-town America in which Lynch grew up. The world of friendly teachers, firemen, policemen and neighbours, of intact families, integrated blacks and blonde apple pie girls is not a “façade”. Rather, it exists “Manichaean style” alongside the world of criminals, murderers, sadists and sexual deviants.

At the end of the film, the forces of good seem to have triumphed. Dorothy is free and reunited with her child, Sandy forgives Jeffrey his sexual adventures, and the young couple is miraculously visited by a robin that perches on their windowsill with a huge black beetle in its beak, symbolising the victory of love over darkness.

Lynch, however, has built in an irritation: uncommented by the protagonists, the bird is obviously a mechanical model. Is it all just “fake”? Can this peace and idyll be trusted?

Lynch would go on to make two more films with “happy endings”: the outlaw romance Wild at Heart (1990) and The Straight Story (1999). Since Twin Peaks, the forces of evil have been gaining the upper hand in his films, and not even “pure” characters like Agent Cooper are immune to falling under their spell. Had the director grown more pessimist? Do “bad endings” make a better story?

Unlike Robert Eggers, one of the last representatives of “auteur films”, David Lynch was able to look beyond evil and terror. He was neither a nihilist nor an accomplice of demons like many other artists of fear. I’m not even talking about the occasional happy ending or the appearance of angelic forces in his movies. I rather think of Lynch’s never-ending sense of wonder or his (often odd and quirky) humour, a feature that Eggers completely lacks (always a bad sign).

More important is the fact that his movies betray an honest interest in human beings and their emotions, and most of all that they do have a clear moral sensibility about what is right and wrong. Even if Lynch may have felt that life is like a dream within a dream, he seemed to care for the truth. He believed that there is actual truth out there, also spiritual, transcendent truth, and that lies cause evil and evil causes lies.

The escape from truth, the hiding of truth, the distortion of truth is the cause of many of the evils in his films. It poisons marriages, families, communities, towns and even nations. It invites evil and avenging spirits, it causes the psychiatric dissociation phenomena, compulsive disorders and nightmares that haunt Lynch’s guilt-ridden and traumatised characters. Obscuring the truth and selling lies is the business of Hollywood, which the director portrayed as being ruled by literal satanic entities.

Many think that the “key” to understanding Mulholland Drive is that the last third of the film reveals the “real” background story about the emotionally abused actress Diane getting her former bisexual lover whacked by a contract killer, while the first two thirds of the film are “imaginary”, a fantasy in Diane’s mind designed to bury the truth about her heartbreak, her failed career and her murderous guilt. When those defence mechanisms break down, she is hunted to death by Furies in the shape of an infernal elderly couple.

That interpretation may not explain everything, but it does makes a lot of sense. Simple truth may sometimes be much scarier than any “Mystery Man”, BOB or Frank Booth. The suppression of truth may very well conjure such demons, or at least draw their attention.

Trevor Lynch has emphasised Lynch’s moral sense as well and interpreted Blue Velvet in an almost theological way:

What is the political philosophy of Blue Velvet? I read Lynch as fundamentally conservative. The typical sneering Leftist take on Lynch’s opening is that the idyllic surface of Lumberton is fake and kitschy, whereas the truth about Lumberton is the bloody struggle of vermin in the dark. But Lynch’s own view is far more nuanced.

Lynch knows that civilization is artificial, a construct, a triumph over nature. But Lynch is not a liberal or a Leftist because he does not think that nature is good. Thus he does not conclude that the conventions that constrain nature are bad. Lynch thinks that nature is profoundly dangerous, especially sex and sadism, which for him have a supernatural, demonic quality. Lynch does not believe in the “natural goodness” of man. He believes in the natural—and supernatural—badness of man. Which means that human nature needs to be constrained by human conventions.

Frank Booth is Lynch’s portrait of what you get when nature is liberated by the breakdown of social repressions. The French Revolution ended with the Terror. The Sixties ethic of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll didn’t lead us back to the Garden of Eden. It gave us the Tate-LaBianca murders, the Weathermen, and Frank Booth.

This is one possible way of looking at the film, but it is certainly not the only one.

Lynch said in an interview that Blue Velvet is about the “mysteries of darkness and love”, the discovery of a “strange sickness” in the fabric of human society (not only America) and in the depths of the human heart.

In his private life, Lynch believed he had found a cure for this metaphysical “miasma” in the form of transcendental meditation; in his films, he invited viewers to cathartically see, feel, experience, and perhaps better understand those forces.

If a true artist is exploring mysteries, don’t expect “messages” or “solutions”. To figure these out for yourself is the one thing he can’t take away from you.

To explain why, and to understand what Eggers did with the source material, I have to go back a little.

The groundbreaking original from 1922 is one of my all-time favorite films. I saw this “Symphony of Terror” for the first time in the fall of 1989, late at night on Austrian television, as part of the legendary Kunst-Stücke (“Art Pieces”) program, hosted by square-head Dieter Moor, who today inexplicably calls himself “Max” Moor. I still have my original VHS recording of the broadcast. (It was preceded by three episodes of Louis Feuillades 1915/16 serial Les Vampires.)

The version shown was the 1980s restoration by Enno Patalas, with a newly composed, fantastic score by Hans Posegga which I prefer to Hans Erdmann’s original. Unfortunately, this version has not yet been released on DVD (to my knowledge).

Since then, I must have seen the movie about forty times, including several times at the cinema with live musical accompaniment. There are several versions on YouTube; a good-quality one with English subtitles can be found here, for example.

So much has been written about this enormously influential film that I can spare myself the big words here. Nosferatu – A Symphony of Terror is the original godmother of all vampire films, if not (together with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Golem: How He Came into the World from 1920) the horror genre itself.

There is hardly a vampire film that has not drawn on it in some way, whether directly or through conscious and unconscious iconographic genealogies. At the same time, Nosferatu is one of very few silent films still popular and accessible to a wider audience today, more than a hundred years later.

F. W. Murnau (1888-1931) is considered one of the pioneering giants of early cinema. He left behind many important and influential works, including The Last Laugh, Faust, Sunrise and Tabu. Murnau, his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen, who specialized in fantasy, and the enigmatic producer Albin Grau, who was also mainly responsible for the visual design, reset Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel Dracula (1897) to a Biedermeier Germany in the vein of E. T. A. Hoffmann, in a fictitious town called Wisborg, located by the sea. To create this town for the film, a mixture of original locations in Wismar and Lübeck was used.

Galeen’s script reduced the novel’s ensemble of characters to three main figures, to whom he gave new names: Dracula/Orlok, Jonathan Harker/Hutter and his fiancée Mina/Ellen. Renfield, the mad insectivore, fanatically devoted to his undead “master”, reappears as the real-estate agent Knock. The role of Van Helsing is at least faintly echoed in the character of Dr. Bulwer (named after the novelist Bulwer-Lytton), a “Paracelsian”, who however is not a vampire hunter.

After Orlok arrives in Wisborg on an empty ship steered by his ghostly hands and whose entire crew he has killed one by one, the plot deviates greatly from the original: from coffins filled with cursed soil “from the fields of the black death” the vampire brought with him, masses of rats emerge and cause a plague in the city.

When Hutter’s bride, Ellen, reads in a book her fiancé brought from Transylvania titled “On Vampires, Horrific Ghosts, Sorcery, and the Seven Deadly Sins” that the spell can only be broken by a “sinless woman” surrendering to the vampire and making him forget the first cock crow, she decides to sacrifice herself to end the mass death.

Galeen’s adaptation is simply ingenious. From the novel’s somewhat convoluted plot, he distilled an eery romantic fairy tale in which the female protagonist, no longer a mere passive victim, becomes a heroine through the power of her love.

He created a “Germanized” alternative Dracula, which has since led a legitimate “life” of its own alongside the Anglo-Saxon original, which was not filmed until 1930 with Bela Lugosi in the leading role under its original title (albeit based on a then-popular stage play, not the novel itself).

Murnau/Galeen/Grau also created a vampire archetype that has survived in popular culture to this day: haggard, balding, with pointed ears, rat-like front teeth instead of canines, spider-like hands with long claws and a posture and moving patterns as if rigor mortis has already set in - that’s “Nosferatu”, not “Dracula”.

He was played by an enigmatic actor fittingly named Max Schreck (=“Terror” in German), who is remembered today only for this role. Thanks to him, Nosferatu is the only movie which makes me believe I am watching an actual vampire every time I see it (an idea that was taken up in 2000 for the rather disappointing movie Shadow of the Vampire).

Countless viewers of the film have had this strange impression of “authenticity”, paradoxically all the more if their first encounter was a washed-out copy of the umpteenth generation on television or VHS. Robert Eggers also experienced it as a child.

The “Nosferatu” type, an animalistic relative of rats and bats, with hardly any human traits left, is far removed from the later seductive, suave Draculas like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and their countless heirs, or the sexy rock stars in the novels of Anne Rice. He has remained an enduring alternative, and appeared, among other things, in the 1979 Stephen King film adaptation Salem’s Lot (as well as its rotten “diversified” 2024 remake).

In the same year, Werner Herzog remade Nosferatu with Klaus Kinski in the title role, joined by Bruno Ganz (Hutter/Harker) and Isabelle Adjani (Ellen/Mina/Lucy), under the title Nosferatu – Phantom of the Night. This version is based on Murnau’s 1922 film, not on Bram Stoker’s novel (although the main characters have regained their original names).

Herzog more or less copied Murnau’s pictorial compositions and staging, but in color, and with actors who sometimes act in the silent film style and repeat exactly the gestures of their predecessors from 1921. Other scenes he playfully varied and modified.

Thus, Phantom of the Night is more a “re-enactment” than a remake of Symphony of Terror. The idea behind it is maybe that a cinematic work is a composition that can be replayed just like a piece of music can. Gus van Sant tried something even more extreme in 1998 with Hitchcock’s Psycho, but with little success.

Like Murnau, Herzog drew his atmospheric magic from original locations, some of which are the same, such as the High Tatras in Slovakia and the Lübeck salt storehouses, which in the film serve as a species-appropriate dwelling for the vampire. It was not possible to film in Wismar as it was now on GDR territory. Instead, the canals of Delft in the Netherlands served as a backdrop for the fictitious German Biedermeier town.

Herzog’s film, very effectively accompanied by the prelude to Richard Wagner’s Rheingold, Charles Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass and the sounds of Krautrock band Popol Vuh, also breathes the spirit of German Romanticism. But the director also wanted to draw a conscious connection to traditions of German film that were torn down in 1933, to the forefathers of German cinema like Murnau and Fritz Lang.

Lotte H. Eisner, an author religiously revered by Herzog for her influential books on the “expressionist” cinema of the Weimar Republic such as The Haunted Screen, generously attested to his success in this endeavor: “This is not a remake, this is a rebirth.”

As usual, Klaus Kinski is brilliant under thick layers of makeup, but he is visibly Klaus Kinski and not a mysterious nobody or anonymous figure who could just as easily be a real vampire. He adds a melancholic, deeply sad note to the character; unlike Murnau-Galeen’s Count Orlok, he longs for deliverance from his dreary existence as a restless, hungry shadow.

Of course, Herzog wouldn’t be Herzog if he hadn’t put his own poetic stamp on the material, despite his fidelity to the original film. This shows right from the start in the opening credits, featuring genuine creepy Mexican mummies. Some scenes, not least because of Herzog’s typical oddball supporting characters, border on the unintentionally comical, which makes the film easy prey for an unfriendly audience, as I (woe is me) once experienced at a screening in Berlin.

The most significant deviation from Murnau is the “pessimistic” ending: Count Dracula is destroyed by the rays of the rising sun, held back only by the beautiful, pale maiden who gives him her blood, but his victim Jonathan Harker turns into a Nosferatu-like vampire who apparently can survive in sunlight and rides off in the final scene of the film to spread evil further into the world (similar to the infamous end of Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires).

Herzog’s film is captivating today because of a style that was, and still is, completely opposed to “Hollywood”: long, static shots and a generally decelerated, almost trance-like pace that allows the viewers to “hypnotically” immerse themselves in the cinematic space and time. The landscapes and locations are as they were, at most altered only by lighting.

So, what about Robert Eggers and his recent adaptation of the material? Born in 1983, he has been obsessed with Murnau’s film since childhood and has been working on his version for over a decade.

Since his first short film attempts (such as Hansel and Gretel, 2007), Eggers has focused on the horror genre with a decidedly “Northern European” sensibility. This, and the fact that his films have so far been free of “diversity” and “wokeness”, has made him a favorite of the Anglo-American dissident right. They never tire of praising how “white” his films are (see for example here and here), although he, of course, positions himself ideologically in a completely mainstream-compatible framework.

Even if not all of his films fit 100% into the “horror” category, they are all about dark, demonic forces that lead to destruction, death and madness. Evil always wins. In The Witch (2015), a Puritan family in 17th-century New England is corrupted and destroyed by satanic witches, while in The Lighthouse (2019), two 19th-century lighthouse keepers lose their minds due to isolation, excessive drinking and unseen dark, occult influences.

The Northman (2022) may be a Viking movie, but it is also full of supernatural apparitions, shamanistic delirium and, above all, relentless brutal bloodshed. The world Eggers portrays is indeed one of great visual beauty and mythical fascination, but there is also something nightmarish and absurd about its mind-numbing fixation on revenge, combat and slaughter.

The nihilistic streak of Eggers’ previous films culminates in Nosferatu in an almost unsurpassable way (spoilers ahead). This is one of the reasons why I was unable to really like it, despite its undeniable qualities.

The film is certainly a feast for the eyes: the costumes, the sets, the visuals, all of this succeeds on a spectacular level most of the time.

The plot closely follows the Murnau-Galeen template for the most part, but in many respects returns to Bram Stoker. The title character is particularly well done. This was probably one of the biggest challenges for the director, because vampires have become rather (so to speak) sucked dry figures that are no longer very creepy.

Eggers returns the horror to his count. As in the novel, he sports a massive moustache, as a Wallachian prince of the 15th century might have worn it; and similar to Stoker, he is - in contrast to the clichéd depictions since Lugosi - a repulsive, putrid figure, in fact literally a living corpse with a decomposing body. At the same time, the traits of the “Nosferatu” type are clearly recognizable. Eggers has skilfully varied the character without repeating it.

What he has done with the vampire’s voice is also successful. It sounds rough, deep, metallic, leaden, inhuman. Orlok has to take deep, rattling breaths before speaking, as if it takes him endless effort. He has a strong Slavic accent and at times speaks (as I gathered from Wikipedia, I wouldn’t have figured it out myself) “Dakian”, the language of the ancient Proto-Romanians. Authentically antiquated language is a significant element in all Eggers films.

Similar to Herzog, Eggers also plays intriguingly with elements from Murnau, be it sets, props, certain gestures, pictorial compositions or visual motifs (such as the shadow scurrying across the walls). Those who are familiar with the German predecessors of this American revenant will particularly enjoy Eggers’ passionate devotion to details, quotations and variations.

Where Murnau and Herzog find the uncanny in nature, however, Eggers’ digitally-processed world is thoroughly “artificial”. Its perfection also makes it rather sterile. These are the kinds of movie landscapes and sceneries that in the future will probably be created entirely with AI.

The “demonic” element is strongly emphasized. Albin Grau, a member of the magical order “Fraternitas Saturni” and later acquainted with Aleister Crowley, had the real estate agent Knock, who sold Count Orlok a “beautiful, gloomy house” in Wisborg, read a letter from his client written in a secret language of sigils and occult symbols. Eggers spells out in shocking detail what Murnau and Galeen only hint at: Knock practices black magic to summon his “master” to Germany.

It is significant that his counterpart, a Van Helsing-like character called Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, who played Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire), who has lost his academic reputation because he started to occupy himself with occultism, also resorts to magical weapons and spells instead of crosses, holy water and consecrated hosts to defeat the Nosferatu.

In fact, it doesn’t even occur to Franz to try these genre-typical methods, which the scientifically “enlightened” vampire hunters of the classic films (think of Edward van Sloan and Peter Cushing) routinely used like magic weapons that work at the push of a button. In Robert Eggers’ vampire-infested Germany, there are Christmas trees, but no priests and no churches are to be seen (unlike in archaic, orthodox Romania). A small cross around the neck of Ellen’s friend Anna offers no protection at all.

As always, there is no God and no Christ in Eggers’ world, only demonic, devilish, magical, malevolent forces that triumph unchecked.

In contrast to the later iconography of the genre, Murnau also did not employ crucifixes and hosts (in Herzog’s film, the latter still have a certain banishing power, but their effect is greatly weakened), no priests and no prayers, even when the plague rages in the city.

The woman who sacrifices herself to stop the plague is, however, described as “pure” and “sinless”; her love, which transcends space and time, has already, in one of the film’s most famous scenes, telepathically drawn back the vampire when he was about to give her fiancé the fatal bite. For Murnau-Galeen, “love is stronger than death”, even if the hero’s bride dies in the end.

Eggers sabotages this idea by introducing a demonic possession theme that provides the female lead with a central motivation. But here, too, no exorcist with prayers, holy water and incantations can help, nor is any attempt made to do so.

The backstory goes like this: Ellen, who is the central figure in the film even more than in Murnau’s version, called upon a demon during her childhood to rescue her from loneliness and desperation. An evil entity gladly obliged and took possession of her. In the very first scene of the film, we see her, years before the action begins, longingly summoning her “demon lover”, whom she calls “guardian angel”. She writhes in bizarre, supernatural convulsions when he answers her “prayer” and brutally ghost-rapes her.

The movie had barely started and I was already annoyed. The opening sequence was what should have been a climax at the end. Basically, everything was said with this gruesome horror sex attack, and now no more suspense was possible: Ellen belongs to the demon, who turns out to be identical to Nosferatu himself, right from the beginning.

He is basically death itself. Her husband knows about the afflictions that have haunted her since childhood. She tells him, also in the first act, about a dream (you can see the scene in the trailer):

“It was our wedding. When we turned around, everyone was dead. The stench of their bodies was horrible. Standing before me was... death. But I’ve never been so happy.”

When she utters the last, monstrous sentence, her facial features burst into a strange grimace full of perverse, painful, irrepressible joy, while a nervous laugh escapes her. The closer the vampire gets, the more often she loses control of her mind and body, which repeatedly freezes in unnatural, obscene poses, similar to the hysterics described and photographed by Jean-Marie Charcot at the end of the 19th century. Linda Blair’s diabolical contortions in Friedkin’s The Exorcist also appear to have been a model.

Eggers is too sophisticated to turn this into a trite Freudian story about the suppressed sexuality of women in pre-feminist times. Nevertheless, he makes a few half-hearted forays in this direction. The result is rather confusing.

In many scenes, another horror film seems to have been the inspiration: Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession from 1981, a grotesque relationship drama in which Isabelle Adjani (the heroine of Herzog’s Nosferatu) terrorizes her estranged husband with psychotic seizures while cheating on him with a mystic and secretly raising a slimy tentacled monster. In this film, the boundaries between mental disorders, dream visions and demonic influences also disappear.

Particularly, one rather deranged scene seems to have been inspired directly from Possession, in which Ellen draws her husband into an escalating histrionic argument, at the climax of which she provokes him with the words “You could never please me as he could”, causing him to immediately take rough action to prove her wrong. This is one of several instances in which the film descends into crass, self-serving vulgarity.

Vampires and sex, the bite as a substitute or metaphor for coitus – these are certainly not new motifs, but rather old and fixed components of the genre. They are already present in the original film, albeit in an infinitely more subtle way. The sleepwalking Ellen longingly stretches out her arms, reaching for her far-away lover, while Murnau uses a parallel montage to show Hutter and Count Orlok approaching at the same time, the former by land and the latter by sea. Which of the two will become her bridegroom? In the end, it is Orlok, who spends the night sucking her neck until the cock crows and the sun’s rays dissolve him into dust.

Eggers makes this subtext explicit in a drastic, almost pornographic way; in his version, there is biting and shagging. And nothing else. The nature of the relationship between Ellen and Nosferatu is not a grandiose Gothic romance like the one between Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder in the opulent Dracula adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola from 1992 (another all-time favourite), which was advertised under the slogan “Love Never Dies”.

It is rather a pure morbid lust, heightened by fear, violence and abuse, satanic orgasms, similar to those experienced by the young girl seduced by the Devil at the end of The Witch. “I am an appetite, nothing more,” says the vampire, before giving Ellen an ultimatum of two nights within which she must voluntarily declare herself his bride and surrender to him. In the meantime, he carries out a few more cruel acts to blackmail her, such as exterminating the family of her friend Anna (played by an actress who in all seriousness describes herself as “non-binary”).

It is only very late into the movie when the idea arises that only the voluntary sacrifice of a woman can destroy the vampire (and thus end the plague). It is not discovered by Ellen, but by Dr. von Franz in an ancient demonological book.

But since Ellen has longed to be consumed by the vampire anyway, and has actually been obsessed with him since she was a child, her act of sacrifice loses all purity and tragedy and thus also romantic beauty. She sacrifices herself in the end only because she cannot and will not do otherwise, because it is the fulfillment of her most secret, deepest, darkest desires (even worse, in fact she has “solved” a problem she herself has caused.)

Self-sacrifice and self-destructive surrender to death-and-sex lust just don’t go together. The script trips over itself here. In 2024, 102 years after Murnau, it is apparently no longer possible to show a virtuous or “sinless” woman who sacrifices her life out of pure selflessness. It would be perceived as ridiculous, outdated and corny, and probably criticized as reactionary and misogynistic. Isn’t it cowardice on the part of the director to avoid this risk?

The movie ends with a final, bloody death-sex, which comes to an end when daylight finally destroys the undead creature. The last shot shows the naked, dead couple still entwined, Ellen with the (now hopefully really deceased) count’s massive, decomposing corpse between her open legs, bathed in warm sunlight. Redemption, happy end?

Why did we have to watch all of this? Impaled humans and vampires vomiting blood, necrophilic sex acts, doves having their heads bitten off, and, worst of all, screaming toddlers being torn apart by the vampire and thrown away like dolls? (I can’t see any artistic justification for the latter. It is utterly disgusting. Like Hitchcock and Truffaut, I consider killing children in films an “abuse of the cinema”.)

It seems that nowadays horror movies can’t go below this level of crassness, but it doesn’t really shock anyone any more either (I just feel nauseous). It’s amazing what we’ve come to accept as “normal” or at least acceptable in the movies. But did we really need another “Nosferatu” to dish out this kind of fare?

I’ve already mentioned that some right-wingers in the Anglosphere appreciate Robert Eggers as a director who has a penchant for “European” aesthetics and “white” subjects. That may well be. However, they overlook the fact that the worlds he creates are consistently bleak and nightmarish and, as already mentioned, death, madness, destruction and evil always triumph in them (The Northman, which contains some positive elements, may be his least unsettling film). They are works of art from a late, hollowed-out, dying civilization.

However, it is not only the nihilism and bad taste for the morbid and extreme that make Nosferatu a rather unpleasant und unsatisfactory experience.

Even though Eggers is one of the better contemporary directors and one of the last standard-bearers of the “arthouse” tradition, his films are almost as derivative as Tarantino’s are and suffer from the same syndrome as all of today’s cinema: on one hand, there is the compulsion to incessantly bomb the tired and jaded senses of the viewer with stimuli, and on the other creative stagnation, non-stop recycling and re-working of old scripts and images, without producing anything truly new, while at the same time the technical possibilities for realizing the boldest visions are greater and cheaper than ever before.

Nosferatu is yet another stale fruit of the age of remakes, reboots, franchises, sequels and prequels, despite its high aspirations and technical mastery. This revenant will not become a classic, but at best a footnote to the films it has vampirized.

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More from Lichtmesz about Dracula and his film adaptations in this conversation with Millennial Woes (2021).

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