It is only a matter of time before reality finds its way into the cinema. The “New Right” has been present in the media for a number of years, as extra-parliamentary, young movements like the Identitarians or, under the increasingly holey cloak of democratic legitimation, in the German parliament. Director Christian Schwochow and screenwriter Thomas Wendrich bring these highly dangerous groups with them I am Karl now on the canvas. Immediately following current developments, your film unfolds a tapering dystopia that comes frighteningly close to reality. To this end, he establishes a new type in the cinema: the hip academic Nazi who packs his right-wing ideological content “nicely” among the people or, better: brings it to the so-called center of society.
Explicitly folk-incendiary
At first glance he seems very likeable, this Karl played by Jannis Niewöhner: a gentle smile, white teeth, tastefully dressed. An engaging, down-to-earth young man, behind whose facade, however, the grimace of an ultra-right demagogue lurks. Karl is the showcase face of the “Re / Generation Europe” movement, a new rights association with an affinity for social media, like Schwochow’s film interpretation of the identities. They meet in various European cities for series of workshops and discussions, for example at the “Summer Academy” in Prague. There are gin tastings there, hoodies and T-shirts printed with the association logo, and in the evenings there is dancing and partying at concerts to harmless music. The lyrics speak a different language, are sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly völkisch-incendiary: “Everything must change”, a band sings, “A la guerre” (“to war”), the fans shout: inside the lines of one Rappers in a Prague club with. I am Karl is the cinematic answer to the fact that times have also changed in many right-wing groups. When a supporter shouts “Sieg Heil!” At Karl’s opening speech in Prague, he replies: “That was yesterday, accept that.”
Marked with a view to the German cinema of the past few years I am Karl a new section in the cinematic examination of right-wing radical structures. In the 2010s in particular, it was above all the radicalizing post-war generation in East Germany that filmmakers were interested in. Many films dealt with how loss of identity, economic fallow, unemployment and boredom in the east German provinces or in the cities formed the breeding ground for right-wing violence.
Like in We are young. We are strong from 2015, in which director Burhan Qurbani captured a central historical event: the riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen on August 24, 1992. Qurbani spans a broader range and tells from multiple perspectives of victims in the sunflower house, of the failure of politics and of the hatred that flared up all in one Group of young people. “Here and today the national revolution begins,” roars the only guy among them who can also be identified as a Nazi. At the moment when the fellow travelers in the roaring crowd stand in front of the central reception point for asylum seekers and let their hatred run free, Qurbani changes from black and white to color and brings history into the here and now.
We are young. We are strong is, also in its formal aesthetic design, a solitaire in a genre in which (budding) radicals are mostly told in a very pointed way. In David Wnendt’s debut Warrior The focus of 2012 is on a “Nazi bride”, as can be read on Marisa’s T-shirt (outstanding between violence and emotion: Alina Levshin). She has an eagle’s wing tattooed with a swastika along the length of her collarbones, she is with a violent bald head, at parties people watch propaganda films like the old Nazi The Eternal Jew at. At the core is Warrior however, a dropout story.
Since the mid-2010s, the greatest right-wing radical turning point in recent German history has caught up with the feature film: the National Socialist Underground (NSU). A cinematic processing based on historical facts provided this I-am-Karl-Duo Schwochow / Wendrich 2016 in The perpetrators – Today is not every day, the first part of a three-part television series about the NSU. The first episode of the miniseries took the perspective of Beate Zschäpe and showed how she gets into the right wing scene in Jena and how ideological zest for action leads to the formation of the Zwickau terror cell that builds bombs in a garage in preparation for “Day X”.
At home with the perpetrators
In 2017, Fatih Akin shared the anger of the bereaved – the NSU killed eight small entrepreneurs of Turkish origin and one small entrepreneur of Greek origin Out of nowhere poured into a revenge thriller. Akin tells how a woman (Diane Kruger) loses her family in a nail bomb attack and finally goes on a campaign of revenge. The right-wing extremist perpetrators deliberately appear here only in passing.
Jan Bonny, in turn, delivered in 2019 Winter fairy tale a hard-to-bear introspective into a fictional version of the NSU terror cell. Two hours with three broken, instinct-controlled rights, a woman, two men (intensive: Ricarda Seifried, Thomas Schubert, Jean-Luc Bubert) who are constantly freaking out, who are drinking, fucking and killing people in between. Bonny’s film is radical cinema on the edge with an immediacy that hurts, that should hurt.
In I am Karl now the flogging rights with their bomber jackets and combat boots are being replaced by the posh new rights; the East German post-reunification vacuum also no longer plays a role. “Re / Generation Europe”, the association in film, appears modern and terrifyingly realistic with its staging strategies, intellectual behavior, its demarcation from National Socialism in propagating ethnopluralism, the radical rejection of Islam and its tendency towards victim narratives.
The film shows a movement that shoots videos at their festival-like meetings in which members tearfully tell of fake personal fates as a result of Islamist acts. The fact that a French politician appears in the film as the younger alter ego of National Rassemblement boss Marine Le Pen seems only logical.
In general, consistency is a driving force behind I am Karl, Christian Schwochow builds, just like with his investment banker series Bad Banks, on authenticity and research, in order to then overdrive them a bit in terms of film dramaturgical. Maxi, played by Luna Wedler, is the victim: first her mother and her two brothers are killed in a bomb attack, then she is tracked down and instrumentalized by Karl, the mastermind behind the attack. Through him, the young woman, who is socialized in a more left-wing milieu, gets into the right-wing circles and virtually changes sides.
Certainly: You have to accept that Maxi’s way into the right-wing scene seems a bit naive and that she only understands quite late what’s going on with “Re / Generation Europe”. Some will also criticize Maxi for not only letting Karl wrap her around his finger ideologically: Beauty and the Beast. Maxi is a victim in several ways.
I am Karl deliberately wants to show what many still do not want to see: the danger posed by the New Right is immense, as has been seen live and in color in recent years. Just think of the storming of a staircase on the German Reichstag building by right-wing lateral thinkers in Corona summer 2020 or the storming of the US Capitol at the beginning of this year: violent, historical images for the right-wing attack on democracy.
I am Karl is supported by a precise analytical look at the mechanisms and strategies of the New Right – and by the actors: in particular Wedler, Niewöhner and Milan Peschel as a widowed father. In the end, Schwochow and Wendrich even go their heads through the wall and show a Europe on the verge of a coup, including armed street battles. That’s a lot, maybe too much of a good thing, but the duo are not looking for a compromise.
I am Karl Christian Schwochow Germany 2021, 128 minutes
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