Einer gegen alle (One against all)

Georg Löffler, a farmer’s son from the Inntal, deserts not only from the battlefields of the First World War, but also from his pervious life. His new beginning turns into an odyssey through the early Weimar Republic, where he is unable to find a place for himself: as an unemployed vagrant in Upper Bavaria, as an anonymous flaneur in Munich and as a jewel thief and bank robber in the Vogtland he attempts to leave his identity and background behind him – brutally murdering anyone who blocks his escape. Is «Girgl» a victim of circumstances, traumatised by war: an early, lone precursor of the marauding National Socialists, or the alleged left-wing revolutionary who is wanted by the police?

«They say that when the twenties unravel from someone’s life then the friction between natural thinking and dark instincts begins», wrote Oskar Maria Graf in one of his short stories. In many of his works he described the political confusions of one hundred years ago, linking personal, biographical experiences with the objective injustices of social reality like no one else. The director and author Alexander Eisenach takes this novel as a point of departure for an expedition through Graf’s work, observing from a contemporary perspective a time in which political extremists broke fresh ground in wrestling over a new normality.