Florian Felix Weyh

Outside, the battle is raging around Brokdorf – and inside, a group of leftist intellectuals are making themselves comfortable between their four walls. Theory and practice – two principles that rarely meet.
Five men and women – epigones of the APO from the 80s and all left of the centre, but each with a different political focus – get together to spend an evening with fondue and good conversation. But it proves hard to have fun. Everything is heavy-loaded: the meat, because a cow had to die for it; the salad, because it is has been fortified with caesium 137 since Chernobyl; the literature, because it was written by “our fathers’ gods”; even relationships. There is no end to the moral dilemmas: “Trivial Pursuit” comes from the United States, “Risk” is too military, and feminism is just the science of ruining punchlines.
They are waiting for Eduart, the sixth member of their group, and the only one that is actually politically active. He arrives, soaking wet from water cannons and tear gas. In his plastic bag, there are three pairs of chopped-off ears. He retells the act in the form of a police report: as an agent provocateur, he disguised himself as a member of the SEK and cut his accomplices' ears off. The film material should fuel public opinion against state authority. But did he do it? Or is the truth the only thing he has dismembered?
Fondue is an ironic and resigned swansong to a Republic in which political action was still on the agenda. Ironic in the amusing stocktake of their sensitivities, resigned because aspiration and reality have drifted so far apart.