Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider on the White Horse)

Twenty years before Max Weber’s epochal analysis of how the spirit of capitalism originated in Protestant ethics, Theodor Storm had already exemplified this development in the character of the pioneering dyke builder, Hauke Haien. In a maelstrom of social, superstitious and natural violence, Storm demonstrates that transitions between eras are rarely glittering success stories, but instead detachment processes entailing brutal consequences. Johan Simons’ dark and repetitive interpretation focuses on this incompatibility between two ideologies: The traditional security of permanently repeated life-cycles and the technical optimism of an entrepreneur who has liberated his personal ambition grind each other down like mental millstones, until the decelerator breaks the accelerator. With a cast of brilliant actors, Simons sketches a world with no touch or colour – a review of a time which, like our present days, was shaped by the conflict between those who profit from modernisation and those who lose.

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