The Last Hole

Admittedly, any respect that I once had for Charlie Chaplin as both a man and comedian was virtually all but totally annihilated when I witnessed his lame ass Fremdscham-enducing speech at the conclusion of The Great Dictator (1940) where he acts like a slave-morality-ridden and Adderall-addled bleeding heart autist suffering from an acute social justice seizure. Indeed, it was no so much Chaplin’s plastic left-wing politics that I found revolting, but his pathetic pseudo-humanistic American-politican-esque pandering, as if he would eat the rotten kosher cunt of Emma Lazarus's corpse to prove that he is the kind of super duper morally righteous humanist hero that was born to wear a nice and shiny Zio-approved ‘good guy badge.’  While Chaplin might have once proudly stated, “I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician,” he certainly demonstrated with his fairly philo-Semitic Uncle Adolf satire, which was heavily influenced by his viewing of Leni Rienfenstahl's Triumph des Willens (1935) aka Triumph des Willens and unsettling personal obsession with the fact that he and the Führer has many personal similarities (aside from their superficial physical similarities and being born four days apart in April 1889, both men were self-made individuals that had risen to international fame from abject poverty), that he would have made for a most successful democratic political prostitute due to his unrivaled groveling prowess (though I must admit that both politicians and comedians need to be fairly proficient at self-degradation and self-exploitation if they hope to be even remotely successful). While anarchistic kraut clown Herbert Achternbusch (Bierkampf aka Beer Chase, Hick’s Last Stand) might have (meta)political beliefs and ideals that I find to be somewhat dubious, I have nothing but total respect for him as an artist and filmmaker, as he is a true iconoclast that would never degrade himself to the level of doing some super sentimental speech like some cheap Baptist preacher. Arguably the greatest example of both Achternbusch’s uncompromising transgressiveness and incendiary idiosyncrasy as a filmmaker is his rather grim black-and-white ‘holocaust comedy’ Das letzte Loch (1981) aka The Last Hole where the truly audacious auteur portrays a psychosis-ridden professional dipsomaniac, fiancee-killer, and private detective who incessantly drinks schnapps in the hope of forgetting about the Jews that were killed in the so-called shoah and who ultimately decides commit his own one-man-holocaust by jumping into a guido volcano after realizing that he will never be able to escape the Hebraic phantoms that haunt his malevolently morbid mind.  A killer with a curious conscience, Achternbusch's character is so horrifyingly confounded and bizarrely nihilistic that, despite the fact he kills his fiancee for showing him love, he is deeply emotionally invested with and totally traumatized by the miserable fate of millions of Jews.

 A vocal enemy of kosher commie Theodor Adorno’s famously insane statement, “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Achternbusch notably once rightly declared, “It must have been then [during the early 1960s] that a German philosopher claimed that one could not write poetry after Auschwitz—which I thought was outrageous, and I replied that after Auschwitz one could only write poetry.” Undoubtedly, The Last Hole is Achternbusch’s most blatant celluloid assault against Adorno’s patently absurd statement as an exceedingly eccentric piece of esoteric post-Nazi ethno-masochism where the auteur eventually commits suicide by throwing himself into a volcano because, to quote the character's rather preposterously poetic suicide letter, he wants to “…belong to the death mound of the victims. I do not want to belong to the death mound of the self-righteous Germans.” Like virtually all of Achternbusch’s cinematic works, the film belongs to the ‘anti-Heimat’ subgenre, which was somewhat popular during the late-1960s through late-1980s among filmmakers of the New German Cinema movement because it ruthlessly mocked the once highly popular ‘Heimatfilm’ (aka ‘homeland-film’) genre.  Since Heimat films romanticized sentimental Germanic rural living, many filmmakers of Achternbusch’s generation saw it as ‘fascistic’ and thus deconstructed and defiled the genre for there own purposes, with The Last Hole representing one of the most extreme, ruthless, and unforgiving assaults against ‘cinéma de papa.’ Of course, not unlike Volker Schlöndorff with his anti-Heimat piece Der plötzliche Reichtum der armen Leute von Kombach (1971) aka The Sudden Wealth of the Poor People of Kombach, albeit in a more scandalous and scathing fashion, Achternbusch’s film dares to pour salt on old wounds by reintroducing the Jewish question in an obnoxiously ironic way. Needless to say, as a work that mediates on Teutonic alcoholism and the infamy of the Nazi holocaust, Achternbusch’s film is hardly endearing towards the Aryan homeland, especially the director’s southeastern German state of Bavaria, which is portrayed as a grotesquely gothic anti-fairytale realm full of boorish beer-chugging buffoons, sexually-repressed waitresses, and cheap and emotionally dead whores. 

 Following in the footsteps of the director’s first feature Das Andechser Gefühl (1974) aka The Andechs Feeling, which depicts a schoolteacher portrayed by Achternbusch who slowly drinks himself to death whilst flies drown in his mug of lager, The Last Hole is indubitably the most morbid and vulgarly melancholic comedy that I have ever seen as a seriously sick celluloid work about a perniciously passive-aggressive monster who lacks the capacity to love and instead kills his lover while obsessively dwelling on dead Jews. Rather fittingly, Achternbusch, not unlike the late great belated auteur Christoph Schlingensief, has been oftentimes described as a comedic heir to avant-garde comedian Karl Valentin—a fellow Bavarian who has been called the “Charlie Chaplin of Germany” and whose preternatural brand of humor has been loosely linked to Dadaism, social expressionism and the degenerate modern art movement known as ‘New Objectivity’ (aka Neue Sachlichkeit)—though his work is ultimately much more extreme and iconoclastic, albeit in a sort of insanely ironical fashion that will have the viewer questioning whether they should laugh or put a bullet in their brain. Indeed, despite incessantly mocking and satirizing Germany and especially Bavaria, Achternbusch’s films are shamelessly Bavarian to the core to the point where he was ridiculed by Australian novelist and sometimes filmmaker Peter Handke (Chronicle of Current Events, The Left-Handed Woman) due to the patently peasant oriented essence of his work, or as the writer wrote himself: “Achternbusch ought to know better than any other writer. Why then does he content himself with fantasies taken from the pages of the local paper? The result: slavish – or in Achternbusch’s case, simulating slavish – adherence to the culture cliché that nobody can be represented as an individual anymore, that we have all become damaged, perforated foils for anything and everything already illustrated and pictured: formless beings, ventriloquist existences. Does Achternbusch offer more than merely rhetorical, literally ‘sub’-cultural challenge to the world of the newspaper . . . ? Or are his travesties of plastic mythologies a kind of resistance?” 

 To answer Handke’s question, I would describe Achternbusch’s films as Grosz-esque anti-folk flicks directed by a man that—whether consciously or subconsciously—seems to realize that he is a very product of the culture and people that he so absurdly loathes, like a schizophrenic Jewish neo-Nazi who likes to spend his free time chowing down on lox and watching David Duke videos on YouTube while sporting a yarmulke on his freshly shaven head. Indeed, a film where Achternbusch puts on a Wehrmacht helmet only moments before committing suicide in solidarity with the Hebrews that were killed by his family members and countrymen during the Second World War, The Last Hole is arguably the most preposterously potent expression of the singularly nihilistic and self-destructive absurdity that is the post-WWII German Volksgeist. Like a putrid post-Auschwitz motion picture mockery of the pastoral Aryan utopias dreamed up by Symbolist artist Fidus in his paintings and illustrations, Achternbusch’s grotesque anti-folk gothic might technically be a comedy, but it is ultimately more haunting and disturbing than humorous, as if the auteur merely uses his keenly passive-aggressive form of comedy as a therapeutic means to attempt to expel some of the metaphysical poison from his seemingly forlorn soul. Indeed, while I would not exactly call myself a shoah movie connoisseur, I must admit that The Last Hole is easily the most disturbing, dejecting, and debasing holocaust film that I have ever seen.  In other words, I certainly experienced more pain and discomfort from 5-minutes of Achternbusch’s film than in over ten hours of Claude Lanzmann's anti-polak doc Shoah (1985). If there is any film that could make a Jew feel sorry for the German persecutor (and I doubt there is), it is most certainly Achternbusch’s film, which ultimately demonstrates that German comedy is no less ruthless than the interrogating tactics of SS-Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie. In short, if Schlingensief once candidly stated in the doc Christoph Schlingensief und seine Filme (2005) aka Christoph Schlingensief and His Films directed by Frieder Schlaich that he thought he would make a great concentration camp guard, The Last Hole demonstrates that Achternbusch is the Josef Mengele of clowns, albeit with more bizarre fetishes. 

 Beginning in just as an abrupt fashion as any Achternbusch flick, The Last Hole starts with a woman with a fairly unflattering physique named Susn (Achternbusch regular Gabi Geist) watering her attic (!) while wearing nothing but panties and a bra. Susn is terribly sexually repressed and trying in vain to appeal to her seemingly spiritually castrated fiancé ‘The Nile’ (Achternbusch), who merely stares at her in a less than admiring fashion while sitting in a chair like a tired elderly grandfather who cannot be bothered to get off of his old crusty diabetes-ridden ass. While Susn yells, “Get your clothes off, I can’t wait any longer! Always waiting…Let’s wait afterwards if we can do it a second time!,” the Nile—an emotional cripple that seems to enjoy nothing about life, including sex and romance—is hardly impressed by her salacious nagging and proceeds to ruthlessly berate his fiancée every chance he gets. Indeed, when Susn demonstrates that she is a proud peasant by bragging that she works with her hands, the Nile rather rudely replies, “Don’t talk rubbish…you’re a waitress, and you live so poorly because you drink 20 cognacs a day.” Of course, flattery also fails to work with the Nile, as he is only agitated when sex-starved Susn pseudo-seductively states to him, “Without you I live in the desert. Without you I am a desert! A piece of desert […] Flow through me.” In fact, the Nile cannot even tolerate having Susn anywhere near him as indicated by his misanthropic remark to her, “I can’t understand people who always have to be so close to one another, when there’s so much room in the world! People who have to be so close to one another remind me of car drivers.” After curiously cleaning his fingernails with a knife in a fairly menacing fashion, the Nile threatens to stab Susn if she dares to try to kiss him (according to him, “When some Jews were making drawings in Auschwitz, that is a kiss for me!”). Needless to say, the Nile eventually makes good on his perverse promise and stabs and kills Susn when she desperately attempts to kiss him. Of course, he is hardly heartbroken about his fiancée’s death because, as he states to her regarding their engagement before mindlessly killing her, “Everyone knows it’s just for show. All except the ones I am engaged with.”  Indeed, as the film eventually reveals, the Nile has started various sexless romances with a number of beat-up bar whores around Bavaria.

 The Nile loves playing word games, especially ones involving the timeless phrase “6 million.” Indeed, when the quasi-protagonist mentions that he has “6 million” during a flashback scene, Susn assumes that he has “six million marks” and brags to a male co-worker at the bar she works at about her beloved’s imaginary wealth. While the Nile “lives on beer” and is a self-described drinker by trade, he is also a highly specialized private detective that investigates cases of treacherous Jews screwing over their Jewish friends during the holocaust, as if it is a source of solace for him to know that not all Jews killed during WWII were killed by Germans. While the Nile drinks to forget about dead Hebrews, he also believes that after having four drinks he will develop the capacity to feel some sort of sexual arousal for Susn. When Susn begs for the Nile to slit her throat in a flashback scene, he replies, “Your blood may come upon me some other time. I will retire for today. I live in the last hole with my 6 million. And I hope I will not dream of 6 million dead Jews again tonight.” Indeed, the Nile lives in an eponymous hole in the ground in the middle of a grassy hill and after emerging from said hole one morning after killing his fiancée, he is given somewhat of a shock while shaving by a lake when Susn’s ghost appears, declares she is pregnant, and then states, “I’m dead. I bequeath you my art: a bloodstained dress.” Like with the Jews, the Nile clearly does not want to remember Susn’s death, so he immediately decides to dig a hole like a dog with her bare hands and bury the bloodstained dress. Luckily for the Nile, he has more than one Susn in his life. 

 As an assumed result of the fact that he has murdered Susn, two cops that resemble burly beatnik bikers, ‘Stupid Cloud’ (Franz Baumgartner) and ‘Green Asshole,’ begin a manhunt for the Nile and opt to start a literal “scorched earth” operation to burn him out of his hole. Rather absurdly, Stupid Cloud opts to shoot and kill his comrade when they are in the middle of hatching their scorched earth campaign. Indeed, for whatever reason, Stupid Cloud has decided to betray Green Asshole and join up with the Nile.  Of course, both men, like virtually all of the characters in the film, have a tragic haunted essence about them, as if they are possessed by the accursed ghosts of their ancestors who froze to death on the Eastern Front during the Battle of Stalingrad (incidentally, in his film Heilt Hitler! (1986), Achternbusch would portray a German soldier who thinks he is still fighting in Stalingrad after randomly waking up from a long slumber 40 years after WWII has ended). While awkwardly carrying Green Asshole’s lifeless corpse, Stupid Cloud spots the Nile, so he decides to drop his friend’s body and pick up the protagonist instead, even though said protagonist has no problem walking on his own. While carrying the Nile across a field, Stupid Cloud mentions to him how his grade school teacher forced him to learn “six million foreign words.” When the Nile remarks that it is “six million Jews” and not “six million foreign words,” Stupid Cloud humorously replies, “Sure… but what’s the difference? Of those 6 million foreign words I remember only three. But I couldn’t tell you if I still know three Jews.” Stupid Cloud also informs the Nile that his teacher used to pass by Auschwitz concentration camp every single day during WWII and noticed that it was always quiet there, thus leading the educator to come to the natural conclusion that no Jews could have been killed there. Despite their minor disputes, Stupid Cloud and the Nile ultimately decide to make a “getaway” together since they are both murderers that are evading justice.  Naturally, being fugitives of the law does not stop the Nile and Stupid Cloud from hanging around Bavaria for another day while getting good and drunk at various local bars.  Of course, before leaving, the Nile must be reunited with the woman that might be described as his one true love.

 Upon going to a doctor (Wolfgang Ebert of Uwe Brandner’s Ich liebe dich, ich töte dich (1971) aka I Love You, I Kill You) with a fetish for Buddhist religious icons and being informed that he has diabetes, the Nile replies, “I need beer. With one pint of beer I forget 500,000 Jews. But at night they all come back. And when I had 12 pints then 6 million Jews come to me. But the 40 pints I have to drink each day bring me 20 million at night. And that’s not even half of those who met their death in the last war. That’s just the Russians slaughtered by the Germans.” While the Nile then proceeds to beg the doctor to kill him, the physician replies, “Drink schnapps. Beer confuses the memory. On schnapps, you can forget. I’ll prescribe schnapps for you.” Unfortunately, things get a little nasty between the protagonist and doc when the latter reveals that his father admitted to him on his deathbed that he spared a Jew during the holocaust after coercing the Hebrew into attacking his kosher comrade. Indeed, at this point, the Nile reveals that he is a private detective that looks into the “murders of Jews that had been friends.” After the Nile calls the doctor’s dead father a “German pig,” the physician tears up his prescription for schnapps and throws him out of his office. Unfortunately, it seems that the Nile will have to stick to bars if he wants to forget about kosher corpses.  Notably, before being kicked out of the doctor's office, the Nile expresses minor interest in killing a Jewish barber so that his alcohol intake will match up with the number of murdered Israelites that he has on his conscience.

 While Susn is dead, the Nile has another fiancée named ‘Last Susn’ (Annamirl Bierbichler) that works at a strip club called ‘Pee Piss’ that he can confide in. Unfortunately, when the Nile goes to see Last Susn, she is being mechanically fucked by a random guy, so the protagonist picks up the man during mid-coitus and tosses out of a window. Before defenestrating the stranger, the Nile calmly states to him, “If you can screw, you can also fly.” Naturally, the two lovers decide to catch up with each other and Last Susn reminds the Nile how he once said to her, “… I will be your Nile. The Nile that refreshes you in the middle of the wasteland.” Last Susn also describes to the Nile how her co-worker Wurmin is regularly held upside down by two men while five others “pour beer into her pussy.” Needless to say, as a man that is regularly haunted by six million dead Jews, the Nile seems hardly effected by Last Susn’s bizarre sex stories. Ultimately, Last Susn joins the Nile and Stupid Cloud for a pilgrimage to Stromboli Volcano, Italy that they take via train. During the train ride, Stupid Cloud becomes deeply offended when a waiter attempts to serve him a bowl of spaghetti, so he dumps the food on the goofy server’s head and then proceeds to trim the noodles that are lying on the man's head with scissors as if he were giving the poor fellow a haircut. While the Nile drinks shot after shot of schnapps on the train, Last Susn exposes her broken heart to him by somberly stating, “I do accept your right not to love me. It’s even my duty to accept it.” Last Susn also reveals that she does not want forgiveness from the protagonist for whatever reason, stating “Forgiveness? Why should you forgive me? I’m dead to you. But because you didn’t kill me I wished a little Hitler on you for two days, who would send you through the chimney.”  Indeed, it seems that the Nile's lack of love and incapacity for affection haunts Last Susn in a fashion not unlike how the dead Jews haunt the perennially perturbed protagonist.  Somehow, the train ends up in the ocean, thus inspiring Stupid Cloud to state, “Dammit, now the rails have ended! And what now? And what now?” 

 Upon arriving at beaches of Stromboli, the Nile states to himself, “Now I see the lily pad again and the frog on it and the water lily at it. The water lily is the Last Susn and the frog is me.” The Nile is wearing a necklace with a flesh-like medallion that looks like a mold of a rectum that he describes as a letter, which he ultimately has Last Susn read. As the viewer soon discovers, it is actually a suicide letter and the Nile has come to Stromboli to jump into the volcano to sacrifice himself to the glorious six million. While on the beach, the three friends encounter a fat elderly woman named Barbara who seems disturbed by the fact that the Nile randomly puts on a German helmet. As Last Susn tells Barbara, the Nile wears the helmet, “Because he’s afraid […] Of the Germans.” When Last Susn reads an excerpt from the Nile’s letter that reads, “Panzer after Panzer drove over my mind’s eye. Teachers and masters hated me minding my mind’s eye,” Barbara remarks that the protagonist has, “a tumor inside his head instead of brains.” Ultimately, Last Susn decides she “can’t go on” with finishing the letter after reading the Nile’s words to her, “I ate jam only out of sympathy for you. Without hope for you I wouldn’t have opened any can […] That’s why I had become a private detective after all, because I was searching for you, everywhere and in everything. Under the pretense of fornication and infidelity, which to investigate someone had give me the assignment, I snooped around in the houses that had been torn open by the war and blocked up again too quickly, or in others that regrettably had been spared by the war, or in those that were misguidedly built after the war, expecting you behind every door. In the thirty-year-long brutality of post-war Germany, I searched for you, you, the tenderness, the insight, the effortlessness, the modesty, and the pride to endure this life with dignity.”  Of course, Last Susn eventually opts to finish reading the rest of the suicide letter.

 When Stupid Cloud asks the Nile why he is carrying around two tennis rackets, the protagonist astonishes his friends by proceeding to use the preppie sports instruments to dig up a Jewish skull that is hidden under some rocks near the volcano. After the Nile unearths the Hebraic skull, Last Susn proceeds to read more of the protagonist’s suicide letter, stating out loud in a somber yet monotone fashion, “every German has his own example [of Nazism] in his family, even the still unborn. And the Jews? Everybody was against the Jews, and they’re still against them today, they just don’t dare to say it anymore, because back then they were allowed to kill the Jews. Susn, I had to find out what’s inside the Germans, and I’m telling you: Murder. Most diligent murder. But this murder made them the most famous people of all mankind.” At the very end of the Nile’s letter, Last Susn reads, “I commit suicide, for as a suicide I belong to the death mound of the victims. I do not want to belong to the death mound of the self-righteous Germans. Farewell . . . I'll jump into the volcano.”  Clearly, self-loathing kraut the Nile did not see the irony in his self-righteous declaration against “self-righteous Germans.”  As an assumed result of the flattery that she receives in part of her beau’s letter where he alludes to Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan's poem Todesfuge (1948) aka Death Fugue and describes her hair as being pretzel-colored, Last Susn decides to follow the Nile’s lead and jump into the volcano too.  Of course, it is rather revealing that the suicide letter alludes to Celan's anti-German poem (which notably features the line, “Death is a master from Germany, his eyes are blue”), which features the line, “you'll rise to the sky like smoke, you'll have a grave in the clouds,” and thus foretells the Nile's pathetic self-prophesying fate of self-slaughter via virtual one-mensch-holocaust.

 A sort of culturally apocalyptic Teutonic Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) where there protagonist actually goes through with his morbidly zany plan of self-obliteration via volcano, The Last Hole is the rare sort of film that offers the viewer the sort of insight as to why contemporary Germans are so gleefully suicidal and inordinately ethno-masochistic that they would actually welcome hostile towelheads from the world's worst Islamic desert shitholes to come into their country and establish Dhimmitude so that thoroughly brainwashed self-loathing and self-flagellating kraut automatons can begin paying penance for the supposed crimes of their long dead Nazi ancestors.  Considering the recent New Year's Eve untermenschen rape epidemic committed by swarthy so-called migrants that occurred in every single major German city in late 2015 (not surprisingly, the German police and media attempted to cover up what happened up), it seems that Achternbusch's dream of collective German punishment is finally well under way as it seems none of those “self-righteous Germans” that value self-preservation and self-determination that he mocked in his film are alive anymore.  Of course, the great irony behind Achternbusch’s film is that it is so thoroughly, intricately, bizarrely, and fanatically Germanophobic that it could have only been directed by an actual German, which is an identity that the auteur even attempts to reject in the film, even though his cinematic works are so radically regional in persuasion that he has had very little success outside of his native Bavaria (in fact, Achternbusch once mocked his Bavarian comrade Werner Herzog for being successful outside of Germany, stating that he is, “the best detergent salesman Germany has ever had, because he is the only one who believes in his product”). Indeed, while Achternbusch’s character even pathetically declares in his suicide letter, “Unfortunately, I am too stupid to be a Jew, but I don’t include myself among the Germans,” he practically bleeds of archetypical Bavarian buffoonery, just like Woody Allen and Todd Solondz reek of Jewish neuroticism and Spike Lee stinks of American negro resentment. Notably, Achternbusch would later wrote in his novel Hundstage (1995), “My sympathy for Jews is only sentimentality, only compassion. I don't want to be a Jew, and I have rid myself of their belief in one God without, however, being able to cope with the consequences,” thus confirming that he is thankfully not as racially schizophrenic as degenerate German artist Anselm Kiefer, who seems to have dedicated his life to shitting on German culture and transforming himself into a sort of spiritual holocaust survivor. In his later color feature Heilt Hitler! (1986) aka Heal Hitler!—a sort of anti-Heimat Back to the Future where Achternbusch portrays a German soldier who wakes up 40 years after WWII believing that he is still fighting in Stalingrad—the auteur would present a somewhat more personalized and nuanced take on his thoughts regarding the legacy of National Socialism. 

 Oftentimes feeling like a sort of ‘Southern Kraut Gothic’ as a starkly and grotesquely yet oftentimes beauteously shot feature that owes much of its strikingly look to cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein—a man responsible for a number of Werner Herzog’s pre-Hollywood masterpieces, including The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1976), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)—The Last Hole is probably best looked at as a piece of modernist absurdist folklore that does for Bavaria what Flannery O'Connor’s writings did for the American South. Indeed, in that sense, Achternbusch’s film, despite seeming so hopelessly bizarre and absurdly alienating, is not all that different from John Huston’s underrated O'Connor adaptation Wise Blood (1979) starring Brad Dourif, which was incidentally released in West Germany under the names Der Ketzer and Die Weisheit des Blutes.  As someone that has suffered more holocaust-themed films than I care to admit, the Achternbuschian cinematic realm strangely seems to be the most fitting setting for six million Ashkenazi phantoms.  Quite unlike Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), which more or less uses black-and-white cinematography as a cheap pseudo-poetic gimmick to remind stupid Americans of vintage American WWII propaganda newsreels in the hope that they will eventually not be able to differentiate between Hollywood fiction and carefully contrived wartime nonfiction, the lack of color in The Last Hole ultimately compliments the film's unwavering doom and gloom as a cinematic work with a protagonist that is so terminally lifeless that he could only be properly portrayed in a completely colorless world.

 I have to admit that, for at least partially personal reasons, The Last Hole probably had a bigger impact on me than it would probably have on most American cinephiles, who would probably find it totally inexplicable and hopelessly arcane for more than just a couple reasons. For instance, one of my ex-girlfriend’s had two paternal grandparents that had emigrated from Germany to the United States and both of them were horrible alcoholics that sired a number of equally self-destructive alcoholic children and grandchildren. While my ex-girlfriend’s dipsomaniac German grandfather resembled a sort of alcoholic troll when I first met him, I once received the shock of a lifetime when I encountered an old black-and-white photograph of him from when he was in his 20s and discovered that he used to be a strikingly handsome Aryan man with sharp features that clearly totally destroyed his looks and health as a result of his undying weakness for cheap beer. Aside from my ex-girlfriend’s family, I know no less than two other German-American families, including a friend whose Danube Swabian grandfather was killed on the Eastern Front during WWII, that are accursed with cross-generational alcoholism, which is clearly a direct result of World War II.  Of course, my own Dutch grandfather, whose country was at least partially destroyed by Germany during the war, also succumbed to alcoholism as a result of his decidedly dejecting wartime experiences, thus I think the collective dipsomania among Germans has less to do with the dead Jews than the misery of WWII in general.  While The Last Hole engages in shameless heeb humoring and shoah-saluting, it is also ultimately a film that appeals to people like myself who enjoy tasteless holocaust jokes.  In other words, for a completely humorless and obnoxiously anally retentive Judaic culture-distorter like Mark Potok or Barbara Lerner Spectre, viewing Achternbusch’s film would probably be like attending a screening of Kurt Gerron's The Führer Gives the Jews a City (1944) at Auschwitz with Herr Döktor Mengele behind the projector.  Indeed, after watching The Last Hole, I could not help but feel that the collective plague of Bavarian alcoholism was much more tragic than the holocaust.  After all, six million dead Jews seems like nothing more than the faint ghost of an abstract idea in the film, yet Bavarian dipsomania, lechery, and ethno-masochism seem like a very real nightmare that become all the more perturbing and penetrating as a result of Achternbusch’s uniquely unnerving passive-aggressive approach to angst and Weltschmerz.  While The Last Hole might be an exceedingly eccentrically esoteric cinematic work that takes provincial filmmaking to ungodly extremes, no one can watch it without feeling like they have been imprisoned in some sort of highly personal pandemonium where all hope for the future has been squashed under the heel of Sturmabteilung jackboots. In Achternbusch’s singularly morbid mind, there is not chance for Vergangenheitsbewältigung, thus one must accept death and self-destruction lest they belong to the ostensible “death mound of the self-righteous Germans.”  Of course, what Achternbusch and many other white people fail to realize due to decades of brainwashing is that empathy only works when it is mutual and reciprocal and that it is insane and self-destructive to invest emotions in people that are hostile to you, hence the steady moral, cultural, and economic decline of the Occidental as a result of so-called multiculturalism where groups of hostile aliens (e.g. ‘Syrian migrants’) that lack empathy for their hosts strategically use emotional blackmail as a parasitic means to get infidels to subsidize their pathetic existences and primitive vices (e.g. rape).  Indeed, the protagonist of The Last Hole should have been more dejected with the fact that he was so obsessed with dead Jews than the dead Jews themselves.  If Achternbusch actually cared to understand Jews, he would realize that they owe their survival and perseverance to the fact they have nil empathy for their enemies to the point where they literally celebrate the destruction of said enemies via holidays, but I digress.  In the end, The Last Hole ultimately demonstrates that there are few things that are more humorous in the contemporary Occidental world than the phrase “six million” being repeated over and over again in a deadpan fashion by an artsy fartsy kraut who seems so emotionally comatose that one might suspect he was the victim of a multicultural gang-rape.

-Ty E