No more letting people do what they want. The regime will ban marriage. You will no longer be able to DoorDash McDonald’s at 3 AM. Therapy jargon will be made illegal under hate speech legislation. Psychiatrists will be forced to work in glue factories. Positive thinking will be outlawed with an iron fist.
I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you’ll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.
The Laughing Man - Confessions of a Murderer (GDR, 1966)
Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk. Müller fought in Congo’s civil war in the 1960s, and the more Pernod he imbibes, the more fascinating this interview becomes. He asserts that blacks are no better than animals and shares his dream of enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight communism in Vietnam and beyond. He flaunts his military paraphernalia, including the Iron Cross he was awarded in Germany in 1945, and proceeds to deny his earlier statements about civil killings, the ethics of war, and the defense of Western libertarian values. This documentary tour-de-force is interspersed with pictures of Müller and his comrades proudly posing with severed skulls, and it touches on other Nazis who are active in Africa as well as American world dominance.
I lived in a country called Song: Countless singing women made me a citizen, and musicians from the four corners composed cities for me with mornings and nights, and I roamed through my country like a man roams through the world.
My country is a song, and as soon as it ends, I go back to being a refugee.
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert… . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
