Herrmann

Somewhat understandably considering most white males don’t even have the testicular fortitude to stop their countries from being colonized by the global south and turned into third world shitholes, let alone stop their sisters and daughters from being defiled by the untermenschen, cuckoldry and submissiveness has become quite vogue in the United States and especially Europe over the past decade or so, so it  certainly does not surprise me that a German filmmaker would make a film featuring a dude being raped in the ass and mouth by members of a decidedly deranged feminist terrorist cult sporting strap-on dildos and fetishistic white vinyl suits. Indeed, such is the unsavory scenario that plays out in the 13-minute German ‘torture-art-porn’ short Herrmann (2013) directed by film critic turned filmmaker Gerd Reda, who writes for a film review site called Splatting Image and has worked on numerous films by Teutonic splatter anti-maestro Olaf Ittenbach (Legion of the Dead, Garden of Love) and other directors in various capacities, including as a lighting technician, key grip, and gaffer. A sort of spin-off film for the director’s dream project, the short and its history were described by Reda in 2013 as follows: “In 2011, I wrote the screenplay for a feature film called FRAU MUSTERMANN. Kommando Frau Mustermann is a terrorist organization comprised of four women who kidnap, rape, and then free the men they have captured. The feature is set on the day of the kidnapping of the last victim. Cabin fever has grown amongst the women and thus conflicts ensue. The short HERRMANN is not a truncated version of the feature, but a spin-off. The story concerns the kidnapping of the third victim, Herrmann.” While normally I would question the sanity and sexuality of a mensch who makes films featuring men being anally and orally pillaged by crazed cunts who probably fried their brains after one-too-many communal readings of Warhol’s failed assassin Valerie Solanas’ hilarious SCUM Manifesto (1968) and the hysterical scribbling of morbidly obese Hebraic dyke Andrea Dworkin, Herrmann is notable for the fact that the male rape victim is an over-the-hill far-leftist family man and armchair revolutionary who apparently sexually ravaged a couple of girls in between ‘raging against the machine’ (i.e. handing out pointless pamphlets to people that don’t give a shit about them and holding impotent protests against an imagined fascist super-state). While auteur Reda devotes most of his film writings to marvelously misogynistic S&M-themed Japanese films, especially of the ‘Pinku eiga’ variety, his debut short is certainly of a more masochistically misandristic nature to the point of aesthetic terrorism as a work that would certainly traumatize more faint of heart viewers while at the same time being the ultimate delight to the male cuckold.  Indeed, as much as I hate psychopathic Zionist hack Eli Roth and his innately anti-European post-Auschwitz Hostel swill, Herrmann is certainly not the answer to his work as far as so-called ‘torture porn’ is concerned, though it is not a complete waste.

 Opening with a seemingly nostalgic and sentimental credit sequence montage featuring stylized vintage still photographs of punk concerts and punks, including the eponymous protagonist (Andreas Berg) sporting a Black Flag t-shirt, juxtaposed with a melodically melancholy song by superlatively wimpy American experimental post-punk group Xiu Xiu, Herrmann initially seems like it is going to be some sort of intolerably generic punk drama made for pseudo-rebellious middle schoolers and stupid little girls that worship punk rock star cock, but of course the film eventually changes its tone fairly quickly and quite dramatically after a couple minutes of banal bourgeois drama. After the opening credit sequence, the viewer is transported to ‘protagonist’ Herrmann’s home where he and his wife Tina (Martina Ysker) tuck their small son into bed. Herrmann and Tina seem to have a nice little bourgeois family, but for whatever reason, the husband cannot seem to get over his love of the punk scene and ‘revolutionary’ left-wing politics despite the fact that he is bordering on middle-age and has quite the conspicuous receding hairline and is nowhere near as cool as a Andreas Baader or even a Holger Meins. When Herrmann declares, “I have to go now. ‘Revolution’ is calling,” to let his wifey know that he is leaving to hang out with his fellow far-left man-child comrades, Tina complains, “Can’t your group save the world without you? Not even once?” in a half-serious fashion. When Herrmann asks her why he should not go, Tina reminds him that she is ovulating, as the two assumedly plan to have another child together. Of course, little does Tina realize that her husband is the only one that will be buggered that night. After promising to be back home that night at 11pm, Herrmann leaves his home to meet with his comrades, but after only walking a couple dozen feet or so, he is knocked unconscious with a stun gun and kidnapped by two masked young women with uniquely unsavory intentions. 

 When Herrmann awakes from his temporarily artificially-induced slumber, he finds himself unclad and strapped to a table in an awkward position in a small bright white room that seems like a prison cell in some kind of dystopian Teutonic nuthouse straight out of Fassbinder's Welt am Draht (1973) aka World on a Wire. Herrmann’s mouth has also been forced open via a metal dental device as if someone plans to shove something large inside of it. Before Herrmann knows it, two lanky long-legged women (Katinka Maché and Stephanie Reinhardt) sporting featureless white masks, black bob haircut style wigs, large black strap-on dildos, white vinyl dominatrix-like outfits, and black high heels walk into the room and one of the women proceeds to brutally swing a baseball bat at his rather bony bitch boy arm. From there, one of the sinister she-bitches shoves her strap-on in Herrmann’s mouth and the other sticks hers in his seemingly virginal bunghole and the two proceed to hatefully defile the protagonist’s fleshy orifices while staring at each other in a knowing fashion of crazed cuntcentric camaraderie. While being mouth and ass fucked into oblivion, Herrmann thinks of his sleeping and son and past fragments from that night as they flash in his mind in an ADD-esque collage. When the two loony ladies finish hate-fucking the unlucky fellow, one of them knocks the protagonist out after injecting something into his back in a rather forceful fashion. When Herrmann finally wakes up, he finds one of his hands handcuffed to the same table he was just fucked on in front of a camcorder on a tripod. From there, the girls film him reading the following agitprop script: “Enough is enough. No forgiving! No forgetting! There is no statute of limitations for sexual violence. Men shall no longer feel safe: Neither at work, nor at home, and certainly not within their family environment. From now on they also have the right to lifelong fear and trauma. And I am not here by coincidence. I am an offender. I am well-known, but have never been punished.” Indeed, as it turns out, despite being some sort of old school far-leftist ‘social justice warrior,’ Herrmann is some sort of pernicious pussy pillager and the girls have decided to take out their pernicious post-Solanas brand of penis envy on him. After taking a Polaroid of their prisoner, the girls drop off Herrmann in an abandoned park. In the end, one of the girls makes the following threat to the viewer: “You will hear from us. Those who don’t will get to feel. Don’t be afraid: You will survive. So did we.” Somewhat humorously, the end credits of the film feature another song by Xiu Xiu. 

 Somewhat notably, the introduction page for the official website for Herrmann reads: “Drawing a thick red line from Art House to Exploitation.” Indeed, in its curious combining of of highly stylized artsy fartsy aesthetics with violent hate-filled (anti)sexual imagery, the film certainly qualifies as artsploitation in the spirit of Nacho Cerdà’s “Trilogy of Death” (Awakening, Aftermath, Genesis), Mitch Davis' Divided Into Zero (1999), Karim Hussain’s Subconscious Cruelty (2000), Andrey Iskanov’s Philosophy of a Knife (2008), and Marian’s Dora’s Cannibal (2006), but it certainly lacks the dark and distinctly Teutonic romanticism of aberrant-garde maestro Jörg Buttgereit (NEKRomantik, Der Todesking), which is somewhat odd considering a reproduction poster of the great 1890 painting “Lucifer” by German Symbolist painter Franz von Stuck is featured on the wall of the home of the titular protagonist (it might just me, but from my experience, I see it as rather unlikely that a nearly middle-aged far-leftist punk poser would be a fan of von Stuck’s work). Needless to say, I was not surprised to discover that director Gerd Reda has written extensively on the work of Spanish artsploitation auteur Agustí Villaronga (In a Glass Cage, El mar aka The Sea) after watching Herrmann. In terms of socio-political messages, you would have to be somewhat unhinged to take the film seriously, as it is about as subtextually intricate and sophisticated as a Pussy Riot PR stunt or an American Hebraic businessman-backed pseudo-feminist Femen titty show.  In short, Herrmann is about as subtle as Andrea Dworkin's farts after an all-nighter at a non-kosher Mexican buffet. Indeed, as much as I like seeing poser left-wing revolutionaries being gang-raped by unhinged feminist sexual terrorists who make old Germanic feminist filmmaker hags like Margarethe von Trotta, Helke Sander, and Valie Export seem sane by comparison, I have my doubts about auteur Gerd Reda’s proposed feature Frau Mustermann, as the last place I want to be is around a sect of psychotic misandrists who somehow think buggering beta-males with fake dicks will help them get over their deep-seated daddy issues. Undoubtedly, the last thing the film world needs is more Lisbeth Salanders. Indeed, maybe Reda should re-watch some of those Jap pink films he likes so much and reconsider the ‘gender equality’ of his films.  Of course, like with most of the rest of Europe, rapes, like most other violent crimes, are overwhelming committed by foreigners, especially of the brown Muslim sort, but I will give Herrmann credit in that it exposes the fact that many beta-males join punk scenes (rather unfortunately, I know this from experience), as well as left-wing and feminist groups, as a pathetic means to procure pussy, with the eponymous protagonist of the short probably taking advantage of naive teenage girls after getting them good and drunk at shitty punk shows.  Indeed, if one learns anything from watching Reda's  film aside from the the director seeming to have female-on-male rape and strap-on dildo fetishes and that women make fairly pathetic rapists (indeed, the two latex ladies' thrusts make those of Michael Jackson seem like the height of rampantly heterosexual masculinity), it is that weak left-wing punk pansies are just as likely to rape chicks as drunken frat boys.

-Ty E