Oliver Czeslik

“When student and SA-leader Horst Wessel died from a gunshot wound on 23 February 1930 at the age of 22, no one anticipated the legends that would be built around the deceased. The humming of the Horst Wessel melody can be punished by up to five years in prison. Even though it originally was part of an opera. The brown comradeships still worship Wessel in an almost cult-like manner as a martyr of the movement. And the left is still building a legend depicting Wessel as a simple Nazi pimp.
Wessel synchron comes a bit closer to the truth. Czeslik’s reality theatre combines documentary and drama and is composed of partially undiscovered files, films and documents. Three young people meet coincidentally: Erna, the prostitute; Horst, the SA-hotshot and wannabe poet; and Ali, the tattooed Berlin pirate, KPD-member, ruffian and pimp. It’s about everything: revolution, nation, drugs, prostitutes, violence. The transition from the free, anarchistic life in the Weimar republic to the Nazi Reich, hostile to any imagination, will make all of them losers. In the beginning, fascist beater Horst is chatted up by prostitute Erna in the red “Mexiko Diele”. In the end, he is lying in his own blood with a bullet in his mouth, shot by Ali. Wessel synchron talks about the creation of false hero myths, serving the mighty. And about the banality of truth. The framework for this documentary stationary drama is a cinematic drive through Berlin. The first chief of the Gestapo and eventual friend of Rudolf Augustein drives Ali to his execution. Like undead, they travel through past and present simultaneously. The synchronity of events. The real is subversive. The end of the story is its beginning.” (Oliver Czeslik)