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.
Critic Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, who may have seen a private screening, wrote in a letter: “Reinhardt has made a film about German guilt without mentioning the past once. It is all about the past, of course. And about 1972 as the year when the past learned to wear a digital watch.” Visually, Das Unheil is a fever dream. Reinhardt shot on expired Agfa stock, giving the image a jaundiced, shifting tint. The sound design—by a young Can member, Holger Czukay—features subsonic hums and reversed cassette tapes of village festivals. There are no jump scares. Instead, a single shot lasts seven minutes: the schoolteacher staring into the blue-tinged water of her kitchen tap, as her reflection slowly smiles five seconds before she does. The Rediscovery The sole print was found inside a steel drum behind the ruins of Reinhardt’s last known address. He died in 1975—officially a car accident, though friends whispered of paranoia and a “blue liquid” he kept drinking. The film has been restored by the Deutsche Kinemathek. It will screen once, on December 31, 2024—New Year’s Eve, the exact midpoint between 1972 and the present. The Warning Das Unheil 1972 is not entertainment. It is a diagnostic tool. Watching it, you feel time slip its leash. You check your watch. You remember something that hasn’t happened yet. Then the film ends, and you realize: The calamity was never the water. It was the certainty that the world makes sense. das unheil 1972
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
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.”) Directed by the enigmatic and short-lived Lutz Reinhardt
By Klaus Vogler, Special to Cinema Obscura