Gray-brown hills, eternal haze. The Upper Palatinate is not a beautiful place at the beginning of the eighties, as every region that lives on lignite lives. But eventually there will be no more coal and thus no work, and then it will be really ugly. The district of Schwandorf breaks all records of the Federal Republic with an unemployment rate of 20 percent, the community Wackersdorf is facing collapse. People are looking at their district administrator. Do something, they say. But what should he do except hope for a miracle?

In fact, the miracle is knocking on its door soon. A DWK man is there, the German Nuclear Fuel Recycling Company. He wants to set up a nuclear reprocessing plant (WAA) in Wackersdorf, super-clean, super-secure, all white smock, never again sooty faces, at least 3000 jobs. Wow.

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"Wackersdorf": Almost like in the civil war

But how do you get rid of such a miracle? Moreover, if it has been prescribed by the Bavarian state government?

The story of the failure of the Wackersdorfer WAA has been told so many times that one wonders why a feature film has just become of it. Everyone who switched on the television in the eighties knows the pictures: the protest camps between the trees, as today in the Hambach Forest, which wanted to protect the forest from being cleared. The crowds on Sundays at the fence, up to 100,000 protesters against 10,000 police officers. The helicopters, the water cannons, the tear gas clouds. Injured, dead, state of emergency, for almost ten years.

"Wackersdorf" by Oliver Haffner tells this great story as a hero story on a small scale, from the point of view of the former SPD district administrator Hans Schuierer (Johannes Zeiler). In the beginning, this man stumbles through his world of town hall meetings, smoky offices and taciturn family dinners. And he does not know how to save her.

Noble, lonely, honorable

His friends, neighbors and voters are desperately looking for a perspective. But a nuclear factory in the middle of his district, with a 200-meter-high chimney - so that the radioactive pollutants distribute better - that Schuierer can not approve. Even if that means that friends, neighbors and voters will soon have nothing to do with him.

"Wackersdorf"
Germany 2018
Director: Oliver Haffner
Screenplay: Oliver Haffner, Gernot Krää
Performers: Johannes Zeiler, Peter Jordan, Florian Brückner, Anna Maria Sturm
Distribution: Alamode Film
Length: 122 minutes
FSK: from 6 years
Start: 20th September 2018

The mayor, an old friend and SPD colleague, breaks with him; his son is thrown out of the football team. But for anyone who turns away, a hundred others declare him a hero. The resistance movement is growing, especially in the quiet, brave Upper Palatinate. And a man like Schuierer is your perfect leader.

At the same time, he is besieged by sleazy atomic lobbyists and fat CSU grandees who want to lull him in white sausage in parsley sauce and threaten him later blatantly with the end of career. Just as the villains in "Wackersdorf" are almost drawn as cartoon villains, the lonely hero is also a bit too noble and honorable.

As in the civil war

Haffner states that Schuierer's deputy Dietmar Zierer has fought equally vehemently against the WAA; that Zierer had refused the building permit when Schuierer was in the hospital. In addition, the district council has often appeared at demos, but there have never been any strategy talks with the citizens' initiatives. In fact, Schuierer has attracted a lot of environmental activists when he approved a monstrous waste incinerator at the same time.

Although the film may not reveal the whole truth, it never twists the facts and tells its charged story with admirable restraint. Instead of staging the violence on the fence to the cinematographic spectacle, Haffner repeatedly scatters real film footage that leaves you as speechless in their civil war similarity today as it was then.

The film ends in April 1986, when the Chernobyl disaster heralds the end of the Wackersdorfer WAA, three years before the official construction freeze. Where the plant should stand, other companies have settled and brought thousands of jobs with classical industry in the Upper Palatinate, the lignite mines have become bathing lakes. It came after all, the miracle.

In the video: The trailer for "Wackersdorf"

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