At night, gastronomy crouches here, surrounded by glaring advertisements, partly American ("Coca Cola"), partly local ("Frankfurter Rundschau"), anxious on the asphalt and expecting blows, shots or a bright red Porsche that is about to crash into a house wall. because a US secret agent fiddled with the steering wheel and brakes. The CIA is spying on the Federal Intelligence Service from the main guard, what the mistress of a foreign spy has found out, who wants to blackmail him into marriage with this knowledge. You own the car; she is a model (a typical female job in the west) and is hopelessly addicted to the bastard, but who hardly has time for her because he tries to manipulate a Leipzig foreign trade expert (typical female job in the east) because he doesn't knowthat she contacted the Ministry of State Security after the first attempt to poach her. Since then, the MfS has been feeding the transatlantic people with drowning and lying material until it gets to their ears.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the features section.

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Harry Thürk (including the author of the anti-dissident classic “The Juggler”, 1978) and the director came up with this complex plot for the GDR television feature film production “Pygmalion XII” (1971) Ingrid Sander gets the most poisonous out of Thürk's villains, especially the overwhelmingly lousy Jack Recknitz as the assassin Jack Treets, who only wears tinted glasses even in the pitch dark night.

A decadent hellhole

The strongest part of the crazy thing is the vision of Frankfurt am Main that it offers: A decadent hellhole, in which old resident monsters and monsters who have been snowed in from outside in plush-infested basement clubs have sleazy quiz masters put on fashion shows so that they can buy their women all sorts of paint and leather can almost strangle them with every hug in mansions where new, even more expensive color televisions are being installed all the time. Half-silk intellectuality (Adorno!) Hypnotizes the young people in this city, who then stumble around disoriented on dance ships in the Main, while next door corrupt lawyers hawk letters with wax seals to grinning killers.

The GDR film thrillers of the seventies evidently had a deep love-hate thing going on with the international hub of Hesse, as is not only shown by this hit. You even encounter the phenomenon at the peak of the genre, in the series “The Invisible Visor” (1973 to 1979). In it, Armin Müller-Stahl is allowed to work as an intelligence specialist Werner Bredebusch ("James Bond of the East") with his colleague Winnie Winkelmann, embodied by Jessy Rameik and installed as an alleged photo studio freelancer in a Frankfurt version that differs from the one in "Pygmalion XII "Shown formally, but not in terms of content: In the" visor "American money and vulgar filth does not penetrate the city to the core, but is just a facade like the Coca-Cola sign,that you put on a traditional German snack bar as a dressing apron for modernization. But behind almost everything that happens here are old Nazis, no less sinful than the cowboys.

So whether the NATO alliance is a trick used by the Germans to harness the Americans for their revanchism, or, conversely, a trick by the guys from Washington to burn off gullible Central Europeans in a positional war against socialism, remains the same, if only it becomes clear that all of this is evident really terrible people are - it's a shame that you won't get to see the completely crazy crime thriller that the GDR talents in question would have whirled up from the punchline “the NSA is listening to Merkel”; What is certain, however, for everyone who is familiar with the history of this type of entertainment is that some trail of blood would have led to the Zeil or to Bockenheim.

In the “invisible visor” even a leisurely stroll between Winkelmann and Bredebusch in the palm garden cannot distract the two of them from the fact that a city in which the personal advisers of a Wehrmacht criminal invite unsuspecting people into the station district with the words “nothing human is alien to us” (to messes, of course ), a center of the hideous, which the Western powers did not want as the FRG capital only because otherwise word would soon have got around the globe that it stinks of bad luck and sulfur in this state.

Looking back on such delightful horror tears from the era of the systemic conflict, one has to agree with those Western powers: one should really rather engage in administrative mischief in Bonn, Berlin and Brussels;

Paperwork and political backdrops.

One must not bother the devil with it;

he prefers to drink his Ebbelwoi in the red light (and in peace).