Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure
Documentary / Ger 1967/68 / 16 mm / b/w
48 min / 4:3 / mono

It was thanks to the student movement that Helke Sander came to realise that what is published in the papers is not simply objective information, but serves various interests and may be used to manipulate people. At the time of 1968, the student movement was pursuing the “Springer Campaign”, the prime aim of which was to prove that the extensive Springer Press network was representing the official US version about the Vietnam War and propagating this notion in its publications without giving column space to any other viewpoint. All texts used in the feature film scenes are original quotations from Springer papers: “Die Welt” and “Bild”. The readers of “Die Welt”, representatives of West German business corporations, form a work group in order to save Berlin. In exchange they make political demands; the political establishment of Berlin should put down the nascent protest movement. The scenes relating to the non-parliamentary opposition are based on archive material, and the feature film scenes with representatives of the business world are reconstructed.