Kassbach - Ein Portrait (1979)

Fifty-four-year-old greengrocer Kassbach is the very embodiment of the sanctimonious, reactionary petit bourgeois, with his grumbling Viennese patter: an emotionally stunted pseudo-moralist who sees his homeland as under threat constantly and everywhere, and believes that only an iron fist and authoritarian leadership can protect “Western civilization,” as he understands it, from the “Reds” and from foreigners, whom he always perceives as a threat. He carries himself like a meek tyrant, fawning upward and kicking downward, and hating anyone and everyone who does not fit into his narrow-minded worldview. His family—the long-suffering wife and their eighteen-year-old son—are bullied and oppressed; the apprentice Liesi is coerced into sex, which takes on sadistic and brutal qualities when he is with her. Kassbach’s aggression and fascistoid outlook lead him to divide the world into black and white: on one side are the good people—himself and the neo-Nazi “Initiative,” which he has joined and which is resisting foreign influence and the alleged collapse of decency and morality—and on the other are the enemies of his own set of values: the foreignness and liberalism he despises, the Social Democrats, and a weak Austrian Republic which, in his view, does not take a sufficiently clear stand against society’s depravity. The unruly allotment-garden petit bourgeois thus becomes an aging neo-Nazi, ranting contemptuously about the “Tschuschen” (guest workers), all of whom should be thrown out or, alternatively, “eliminated,” or sneering about the “do-gooders” in the newspapers, who supposedly sympathize with everyone and everything but are really nothing more than spineless wimps. His view of women, too, belongs more to the era before 1945: the “weaker” sex is supposed to serve men and, for the rest, keep quiet. It is only a small step from Karl Kassbach’s wild, vicious tirades to the day when, in keeping with the “Initiative,” he takes up a weapon. At last, his curses are to be followed by action, and Karl Kassbach steps into Charles Bronson’s shoes …