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Fascinating fascism turns out to be extra fascinating to self-pitying youth, impressionable adolescence makes for a void quickly filled. "An empty future, jobless and bored to death." The scrawny, 15-year-old shutterbug (Nikolas Vogel) has a cawing gargoyle of a mother, a henpecked businessman father, and a cello-playing brother last seen dangling from a noose in the attic. Withdrawn and directionless, he and his working-class friend (Roger Schauer) are catnip for Neo-Nazi recruiters looking to rewrite the horrors of the "war generation." Pastimes include whooping at footage of swastikas, gawking at Lugers, deflowering groupies, bombing statues and beating up grannies. The Holocaust is denied in public, then bragged about proudly behind closed doors. ("I bet it was a woman's, it's so smooth," smirks an old timer about the skin from an Auschwitz casualty now adorning his living-room lamp.) The new Right, same as the old Right, the festering residue isn't easily washed off. The parliamentary candidate (Wolfgang Gasser) insists that nostalgia for a purefied Fatherland is about old-fashioned values ("First of all, I am a simple family man..."), meanwhile at the training camp mock-executions feature bare-assed kids with Stars of David painted on their backs. A blunt, prurient version of Santayana's dictum by Walter Bannert, not Fuller's Werewolves (Verboten!) but eager zombies. Idle hands put to terrorizing means, a spreading oil slick, "in Kentucky our cause was well-received." Bad families in Austria, marking time until Professor Haneke comes along. "At least I have a political opinion," pouts the teenaged brown-shirt in the classroom, which of course goes into a joke in The Big Lebowski. With Anneliese Stöeckl-Eberhard, Jaromir Borek, Klaus Novak, and Frank Dietrich.
--- Fernando F. Croce |