The Good Column | Fight to Victory

In times when the neo-Nazi party, which officially doesn't want to be one, is the second-largest faction in the German Bundestag, and when this fact is accepted by most German citizens as naturally as the changing seasons, what is commonly called cultural life is also changing: In the so-called bourgeois media, from "Spiegel" to "Welt," a tone is already openly prevailing that cozys up to a future government with the AfD (as a journalist, you have to plan your career a bit); places of so-called counterculture are going bankrupt or disappearing altogether; opera houses would rather put Wagner back on their programs than Schoenberg; and the proportion of folksy trash on television is increasing rapidly. The relevant tendencies, however, are most clearly evident in advertising, which constantly produces new images.

An example: In the gym I occasionally visit, new cross trainers were recently installed. They are equipped with computer screens that play advertising clips on a continuous loop, showing happily beaming people hiking or cycling through light-filled landscapes against sunrise and sunset panoramas. These clips are excerpts from 20- to 30-minute films commissioned by a fitness company that apparently sells these films alongside its training equipment. The cross trainers offer anyone who wants to use one of the machines an immense number of so-called workout programs from which they can choose. Accompanying all the "workouts" (hiking in northern Italy, jogging on a Thai beach) are the aforementioned films.

The profession of landscape gardener is one that has not necessarily been associated with German heroism, masculinist big-ball behavior, homeland kitsch, and fighting until victory.

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The aesthetic is always the same. A brief example of the style of these ideal-world films is outlined here: stimulating, pathetic fanfares or soothing, lulling Muzak, panning shots over rolling grain fields and a bright blue sky. The camera zooms in on a tall, muscular, bearded white man in his mid-30s, dressed in fitness attire, who completely conforms to the current ideal of beauty. The man's face is constantly beaming and he utters nonsense in standard motivational speaker jargon ("You have to believe in yourself, the journey is the destination, you can do it, every day brings a new opportunity, success is the result of determination," and so on). He makes motivating gestures as he walks, repeatedly turning toward the camera (i.e., the viewer) that follows him.

The visual language and style of these roughly half-hour-long films fluctuate between breakfast margarine commercials, hardcore nature kitsch, and Leni Riefenstahl's 1936 Nazi Olympic film. They all display numerous characteristics of fascist aesthetics: from the idolization and heroization of the trainer figure and the glorification of certain body shapes and standardized "women" and "men" types (women: trophy wife, men: sexy lumberjacks), to the monumentalizing staging of an idealized nature purified of all irritation and filth, which is glorified via music and optics, to the usual one-dimensional messages that seek to integrate the viewer into an imagined, consistent collective (creating a "we" feeling, "you are part of a greater whole").

A second example is the current advertising campaign by the Training Support Association for Garden, Landscape and Sports Field Construction (AuGaLa), which aims to inspire young people to pursue a career in landscape gardening. The campaign's main motif, which borrows its imagery from action blockbuster movie posters, depicts three young people (one woman, two men) approaching the viewer with a serious expression that conveys their determination to do anything, even if it means life or death. They act as a kind of harmonious trio of friends, an inseparable team, a task force. They are dressed like the working-class action heroes we know from films with Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone: ​​Carhartt-style workwear, lumberjack shirts, sweatshirts or hoodies with highlighted sweat stains.

They carry or hold their tools proudly and confidently, like elite soldiers holding their large-caliber weapons. In the background of the picture, the hated urban juggernaut can be seen (anonymous gray high-rise buildings meant to symbolize asphalt culture, decadence, and the dissolution of boundaries), while in the foreground, our three heroes are standing between green trees on a flowering meadow, in the midst of the "source of nature," the German homeland, to which they bravely and boldly dedicate their work and their lives.

The slogan on the image reads: "Someone like you brings order to the urban jungle." Other motifs in this poster series also depict the young people, dressed like nature lovers, in heroic poses, as always-ready, active citizens, hard workers, cleaners, and organizers. And similar to the fitness videos mentioned above, nature is portrayed as both "wholesome and pure" and "wild and adventurous."

I'm not sure whether, in a better future, advertising films and images shouldn't be fundamentally and completely abolished. One thing is certain: the profession of landscape gardener is one that hasn't necessarily been associated with German heroism, masculinist bravado, patriotic kitsch, and fighting to victory. But what can you do? Times are what they are.