German Film That Foresaw The Plandemic
German Film That Foresaw The Plandemic
Peter Fleischmann captured medical tyranny in a Seventies blend of thriller and satire
State-corporate media withholds information, like a dam or a castle keep
Of the films that ginned up fear of contagion, the press skipped the most telling
The Hamburg Syndrome reveals more about motive than panic
See also: Timeless Voice Bids Us 'Come And See' - A film with lessons from Byelorussia to Gaza (Jan 14, 2024)
Sci-Fi Icon Saw Plague Heist Coming 60 Yrs Ago: Philip K Dick on the profit motive behind the cult of preparedness (Feb 3, 2020)
Naming The Names: Who gets the right to destroy you anonymously? (Oct 2021)
NAZI Bargain And The Post-War Order: Did the WW2 settlement cloak plans to revive the fascist project? (Oct 2021)
(1,500 words or six minutes of your company.)
Mar 23, 2022
When the pandemic struck, the media was quick to offer some lockdown viewing.
For all the films it proffered, it overlooked the most revealing.
Pandemic movies can be categorised by the stage of crisis: a chase for the biological agent or infected individual; invasion of zombies or aliens; the aftermath of societal breakdown and the quest for survival.
Of all sub-genres, the zombie plugs into the public psyche. Biopsychologists have found that xenophobia may have its origin in a rational fear of plague: neighbours tend to share immunity.
Tyrannies historically play on fear of parasites and infectious individuals — making doctors their ally to paint scapegoats and unite the people under the fasces.
Yet each of these sub-genres misses the act of intent. When Congreswoman Ilhan Omar referred to 9/11 as “some people did something,” for all the criticism she received she did us a service. Whatever her intent, she raised the question of identity and motive.
Whether a movie is the wild-eyed imaginings of Stephen King, the medically-trained Michael Crichton or made with the assistance of the Pentagon, CIA and World Health Organization, we are familiar with all the “extras” — not the walk-on parts but the cultural programming of compliance and surveillance, bio-security, medical tyranny and the overriding of constitutional rights in the name of “keeping us safe.”
Invasion movies of the survival genre predate nuclear war, for example H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898/1938). This is distinct from the movie that resulted from The Shape Of Things to Come (1933). It posits the invasion scenario, in which the focus is fear —as the psychological manipulation of the population.
This was true not just of the movie but of the Rockefeller-funded live exercise on CBS. A now deleted entry from the Rockefeller Archive Center:
Did you know that Orson Welles broadcast “The War of the Worlds” on October 31, 1938? The General Education Board, a Rockefeller-funded philanthropy, supported the Princeton Radio Project, a study of the hysteria created by the broadcast. For more information, check out the Rockefeller Archive Center’s lesson plan on the project: “Understanding Mass Media News – The 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ Broadcast and the Power of Radio in the 1930s.”
By contrast Things to Come embeds the fear of invasion or war within the broader plot — the examination by a diplomat of the 22nd century of the collapse of society: hyperinflation and little advancement save for the technology of war.
Without an archly academic “filmic” investigation, it seems plain on the surface that such movies aim for emotional response; and plague movies above all reflect this. The product treats the audience on an emotional level while its messaging, subliminal or overt, reflects the efforts of manipulators — whether their objective reflects an individual’s torture of a butterfly or a concerted effort by government agencies.
If this is too much for some readers, see the research of Tom Secker at Spy Culture. He documents for a living the involvement of the Pentagon, Navy, Air Force and CIA in shaping movies for popular consumption. [1]
The Hamburg Syndrome
The Omega Man remains a favourite, and rekindles our love for action man Charlton Heston thorugh its near numbskull entertainment — zombies can never be over the top.
These past two years, however, one film that received less attention was The Hamburg Syndrome (1979). [2]
It is a remarkable oversight given the far more evident parallels with Event Covid. The film is a trailblazer for its use of the natural, almost un-actor Carline Seiser — and for the cinematic Helmut Griem, reminding us how short life is.
The first scene begins with a great soundtrack by John Michel Jarre and a conference dicussing the burden of the elderly.
There is none of the crass Divergent uber-rich killing off the population or stealing the gold à la Ian Fleming. This is a movie made in the mid-1970s, when the Nazi project was more than a folk memory. Many of the actors in the movie had lived through its deathly eugenics.
When the professors joke that people are dumping the elderly at gas stations like abandoned pets, that would have struck a very particular cord.
The scientific elite hope to find the secret to extending life —Verlaengerung des lebens — yet in the same breath they say there are too many people in the world.
Moeglichkeit oder utopie?, they ask: opportunity or utopia?
Against this background two specialists in virology meet again. They last worked together a decade before at the Marburg institute. You may have heard the World Health Organization speak recently of the Marburg Virus.
There are parallels with the Covid-19 narrative by the shovel load. (Spoiler alert.)
It is no surprise that the virus is seen as arriving from outside the country — by ship, no less! “Health police” are raiding every vessel. The first measures are a ban on private transport and restrictions on personal freedom.
The radio warns that those who fail to comply will be taken to central health camps. Individuals who endanger the common welfare cannot expect consideration from the community. “Only our strong combined will can create effective strength.”
Cut to a scene where police in plastic suits are rounding up foreigners, in this case Turks gastarbeiters.
The natural or laboratory origins are discussed from the start, zoonotic or synthetic: “It could be a virulent germ. That we've not yet had a positive finding doesn't contradict my thesis.”
Statisticians go on to model the spread of the virus across contacts, spouses, prostitutes and seafarers.
The opportunity…
“The public demands immediate measures to fight the epidemic” or so we are told, second-hand, by bureaucrats. The agenda becomes clear: “We can't wait to find the cause,” says a regional politician.
Virologists object: how will they fight it if they don't know what it is? Simple: inject the whole population of Hamburg with “broad-spectrum virostatic agents.”
The hero, a gerontologist named Sebastian, played by Helmut Griem, objects that by arbitrarily injecting healthy people, the authorities lose the opportunity to find if and where there is a disease.
When he sees a man drop dead in the street, Wuhan-style, and touches the victim, he is taken to a quarantine center.
There is a big show of corpses... “Corpse carrier coming,” the loudspeaker blares. Apartments are sealed: “mortal danger.” Emergency services are clearing towns of the dead — hints of depopulation and land clearance.
… for a Reset
Do you begin to see why The Hamburg Syndrome was not among the movies the state corporatist media so urgently pressed upon us in 2020?
The movie begins with ambulances blaring their sirens. It ends with quarantine. The talking points are the same:
“The healthy are evil, who mistreat the ill. The terror of the doctors, and the official prosecutors, too, combine to sound the trumpets and society inverts: the healthy are now the sick."
Our heroes find a village where all residents died at the same time. One lies at the crossroads, his shoes placed by his side.
Sebastian opines: “Feelings and passion brought more death to humanity than the Black Plague.”
This Masonic observation comes precisely halfway through the movie, just as we learn that the people fell sick after they were vaccinated, when they became aggressive and attacked others.
The injection releases adrenaline which could explain agression and death. But just to make sure, poison is sprayed from the air.
Eventually the logic of the Covid vaccine is revealed, 40 years before its time:
"This weapon won't do wonders but we want to give the disease as hard a time as possible."
"But I'm not ill."
"How do you want to prove that, my dear. Nobody knows whether he's healthy or not. That's why we have to treat everyone in order to win this war."
Protestors march against the profiteers. A new government attempts to seize power:
“Only if we continue to face the threat, we sense the attacks of corruption, destruction and anarchy, and nip them in the bud…. will we keep our beautiful city from being destroyed by this plague.”
“You have destroyed everything, the good times have gone,” shouts a protestor.
“Crisis is the winner of the quarantine” says one placard: "The rich splurge and our bellies are empty,” says another.
The new normal
Just as in lockdown the rich can be found celebrating in house parties, congratulating each other that the virus has given a pretext to reset society, to the financial profit of the elite:
“At one stroke the crisis loosened the Gordian Knot, that the people with liberal views until yesterday — of co-determination, environmentalism, the whole lot of rubbish — all went down the Rhine of the German soul.”
“Soon we'll have an unimagined backlog of demand for goods.”
“Limitless growth. Paradise.”
And like that, the disease is declared defeated.
The radio declares the lifting of Covid restrictions plague laws, and yet….
In the next scene we see the unvaccinated are still hunted down. The plague may have gone but the emergency powers have not been lifted.
The radio declares: “Be cautious. Look into every suspicion. In this case carelessness can be a crime.”
Finis
Half black comedy, half social satire, the leading lady dances with death at the masked ball; and while the rich and their totalitarian accomplices melt into the forest, she herself is arrested by the authorities, lifted by helicopter into the ether.
Made with the help of:
Das Deutschen Roten Kreuz
The British Army
Dem Katastrophenschutz des Landkreises Munchen
One comment by a viewer remarks that before the pandemic he would have laughed at plot's unreality.
Another observes that people like us, who recognise “what really happened” are catching on too late. The satisfaction of understanding places us out of time. We remain vulnerable to the next state of deception.
Perhaps we perceive the connection with the Davos-based World Economic Forum founded just eight years before the film was made, but sharing a common insight into the possibilities of technocracy going back to the 1930s.
See Moneycircus, Oct 2021 — Naming The Names: Who gets the right to destroy you anonymously?
See Moneycircus, Oct 2021 — NAZI Bargain And The Post-War Order: Did the WW2 settlement cloak plans to revive the fascist project?
[1] Tom Secker — Spy Culture