Niklashauser Fart (1970)

Three friends—the farmer Antonio, a “black monk” in a black leather jacket, and Johanna—consider how they can get the people to revolt when they have only three or four people available to influence them. They conclude that agitation, education, and their own fighting example are needed, but that theatrical effects are also permissible if they make their agitation more effective. They meet Hans, a cattle herder who preaches against indifference while beating a drum. They cannot help noticing that the preacher has a very special charisma that makes people listen to him. A wealthy woman named Margarete is fascinated by and attracted to the preacher. She lets him and his friends stay with her, ingratiates herself with them, and eventually, to please them, kills her terminally ill husband. The preacher says that the Virgin Mary gave him a sign that people should no longer accept social injustice. The Church counters the preacher with a sermon of its own: every revolutionary uprising upsets the balance; one must not drive out an evil with an even greater one. Humanism means that the poor peacefully choose from what the rich offer them. The preacher, however, is not dissuaded from his ideas and calls for expropriation, the formation of action committees, and cooperative organization. Some farmers follow him as he sings “The Blood-Red Flag”; other farmers also come to Niklashausen when they hear that land is to be redistributed there. After some time spent agitating, however, the friends realize that the followers do not understand the message of a popular uprising, so they instruct Johanna to speak to the people as the Virgin Mary. But that does no good either. Although they realize they are going astray, the preacher believes the time has come to call for an armed popular uprising. A citizen of Niklashausen, however, has slandered the preacher to the bishop, who lives decadently. The bishop has four uniformed men arrest him, two dressed as German police officers and two as American military police. During the arrest at a campground, they carry out a massacre. The preacher, Antonio, and the black monk are hung on crosses to be executed, with pyres piled up beneath them. The crosses stand in the middle of a car graveyard, where the bishop arrives in a luxury limousine to give the order to burn them. From the background, one of the preacher’s followers shoots the police officers guarding them. A new member of the group reads a text proclaiming world revolution and quoting the Ton Steine Scherben song title “Destroy What Destroys You.” The group is then seen in a bloody firefight in front of a burning house. At the end, the black monk’s voice says, apparently alluding to the story of Fidel Castro: “One man wanted to directly attack the tyranny with others. Many died in the storming of the police barracks in the capital. He did not yet know that there are many ways to fight. When he returned three years later with more than 80 others on a boat, almost everyone fell during the landing. But he and his comrades had learned from their mistakes. They went into the mountains. Two years later, the revolution triumphed.”