Für den Ernstfall

In The Penultimate Truth, Philip K. Dick imagines that the population, after spending fifteen years holed up in atomic bunkers, resurface to discover that the war had never happened and that they had been manipulated at will by a power practising falsehood as its governing principle. The film conveys the opposite scenario: during the Cold War, and still today, normal life continues for West Germans above a hidden, underground world, their society’s opaque double. This is the parallel world of civil defence. It is hard to say which of these two gigantic simulacra is the crazier. One is nothing more than fiction, the other a reality that must be managed day in day out, just in case… (Yann Lardeau)