1972: Das Unheil

Whether this is a promise or a threat, the film refuses to say. That is its genius. That is Das Unheil . Author’s note: No film by the name “Das Unheil 1972” currently exists in official German archives. This article is a work of speculative fiction.

For fifty years, it existed only as a rumour: a grainy still in a defunct magazine, a single mention in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s letters, a 16mm canister labelled simply Das Unheil (The Calamity) in the basement of a boarded-up Munich cinematheque. In 2023, that canister was opened. What emerged is not merely a film, but a time bomb— Das Unheil 1972 is the most unsettling cinematic document of West Germany’s anxious decade. Directed by the enigmatic and short-lived Lutz Reinhardt (1944–1975), Das Unheil was commissioned by ZDF in late 1971 as a television play about a mundane ecological crisis. Reinhardt, a former assistant to Werner Herzog, instead delivered 94 minutes of creeping dread. The plot, such as it is: In a small Black Forest village, the local water supply turns a faint milky blue. No one dies. No monster appears. Instead, the townsfolk—a schoolteacher (played by the haunted Margit Carstensen), a mayor (Kurt Raab in his most grotesque performance), and a teenage outsider (a debuting Udo Kier)—begin to lose the ability to distinguish memory from premonition. They speak of events that have not yet happened as if they were history. By the third act, time itself seems to be bleeding. das unheil 1972

ZDF rejected the film outright. Their internal memo, discovered in 2018, reads: “Unshowable. The audience will not sit through a catastrophe that never arrives.” Reinhardt reportedly laughed, then said, “But that is the catastrophe.” Why 1972 ? The year is crucial. The Munich Olympics—a spectacle of “cheerful” post-Nazi Germany—lay six months ahead. Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik was fraying conservative nerves. The Baader-Meinhof group had turned urban guerrilla war into nightly news. Against this backdrop, Das Unheil offered no Molotov cocktails or terrorists. Instead, it proposed a more insidious fear: that modernity itself had broken chronology. As one character whispers into a dead telephone, “The future is leaking into us. We are drowning in tomorrow.” Whether this is a promise or a threat,

By Klaus Vogler, Special to Cinema Obscura Author’s note: No film by the name “Das

Reinhardt’s final on-screen title card, erased from the ZDF master but present on the rediscovered print, reads: “Für die, die nach 1972 kamen — ihr seid schon hier gewesen.” (“For those who came after 1972 — you have already been here.”)