Can the spring of 2020 be more succinctly described than as a period of confected panic? For months, news coverage was dominated by rolling death counts, hysterical statistics and the most portentous images. Who can forget that picture from Wuhan of a man lying flat on his back, apparently dead, surrounded by immaculately placed health workers in hazmats? In contrast to previous national crises – one thinks of the war-time slogan “keep calm and carry on” – mortal dread was practically compulsory. It was the pre-condition for the inversion of society customarily referred to as the Pandemic.
Nevertheless, from the haze of fear there emerged countless, if isolated cool heads and dissident voices. In the U.K., these names are well known to us. But across the Channel, the situation was no different. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, German politician Wolfgang Wodarg and Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell number among the continent’s most prominent critics and naysayers – a typically disparate group united by their concern not for death, but for tyranny. In the Anglosphere, however, other such figures remain almost entirely unknown. From the whole of Europe there can hardly be a better example than the German philosopher and podcaster, Gunnar Kaiser – a figure for whom there is simply no English-speaking equivalent.
A teacher of German at a grammar school in Cologne, Kaiser uploaded the first of over a thousand videos to YouTube in 2016, inaugurating the institution that became known as KaiserTV. The content was overwhelmingly philosophical in nature, grappling with the greats of the German cultural tradition – Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Hermann Hesse. With a sharp eye for contemporary conditions, the channel’s output was punctuated by a satirical cultural criticism, which took aim at a rotating cast of Germany’s most self-important public intellectuals. It was during this early period that Kaiser’s novel was published, Beneath the Skin (2018), which has since been translated into six languages (though not yet into English).
Kaiser’s first commentary on the pandemic arrived on February 2nd 2020, in a video discussing Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard: “This whole thing with the corona virus,” he remarked, “is a serious inconvenience to me. I mean, whatever the case may be, we’ll either all die, or… we’ll all die.” Subsequent videos from those first weeks included a “suppressed” recipe for an anti-viral tea, accompanied by a miniature Nietzsche perched on a toilet roll, and an audio drama about a future world in which house arrest had become an established social norm. The satirical style of such sketches was not indicative of callousness on Kaiser’s part, but rather critical distance and ironic detachment. It was a sign of the intellectual sovereignty that rendered him so resistant to the collective panic. “Where an outsized consensus reigns,” he later explained, “one runs the risk of galloping with the entire herd into the abyss.”
Kaiser’s position as a lightning rod for all things lockdown critical kept him largely outside of mainstream German discourse, which, as in the U.K., was at best impatient and at worst defamatory towards all fundamental opposition. At the same time, it also gained him a rapidly expanding following, with his channel amassing over 250,000 subscribers and over 55 million total views. For an almost exclusively German-language production, these are especially impressive figures. On the one hand, Kaiser’s success reflected the dearth of intelligent discussion in the traditional media, for which the wisdom of lockdown remains an article of faith. On the other, it reflected his openness and integrity – his ability to probe at the most difficult questions in a spirit of genuine exploration. To cite the title of one of his more recent publications, How Did it Ever Come to This? (2021).
Despite the standard regimen of soft censorship, including YouTube’s demonetisation programme and Wikipedia’s brazen political editing, Kaiser also twice made it onto Der Spiegel’s bestseller list – with The Cult: On the Virality of Evil (2021) and The Ethics of Vaccinating: On the Reclamation of Autonomy (2022). Among other things, the books document his intellectual development during the course of the pandemic, as his critique gained a clarity and forcefulness that the escalation of lockdown seemed to demand. Recorded in August 2021, his discussion with the American playwright C. J. Hopkins, one of Kaiser’s few English-language interviews, provides only too many reminders of just how far it went. Equally, however, his increased defiance was born of the role, as a school teacher, that he was forced to adopt: enforcing both mask mandates and the “structural violence” of mass testing. It was a role that led him to abandon the profession, from which he resigned in early 2021.
Kaiser’s refusal to transgress his conscience, his willingness to ‘Leap into the Unknown‘, as his most cinematic video puts it, shows exactly why, for so many people, his death leaves such a hole. In times of confusion, anxiety and state intimidation, he was a “rock”, a “ray of light” and a “kind-hearted soul”, as the comment section beneath his videos repeatedly attests. Diagnosed with cancer in early 2022, it was precisely these qualities that came to the fore, as he turned with characteristic composure not just to questions of politics and tyranny, but God and redemption. “To philosophise,” he reminds us in one of his most painfully sober recordings, “is to learn how to die.”
It was ultimately this combination of philosophical reflection, political intervention and human courage that made Kaiser so effective – and so unique. Whether in his weekly live-streams, his books, interviews or dramatic monologues, his work variously invited and exhorted his audience to make sense of a radically altered world – to question elite dogma and take seriously the possibility of change. Although the overt authoritarianism of the pandemic may have passed, these latter points have surely lost none of their urgency. The conditions that enabled that period are naturally still with us; the desire to examine them is largely absent. It is now an intellectual truism that the only real failing of pandemic-era Government was not the ruthless suspension of democratic norms, but that this suspension did not come sooner – and still more ruthlessly.
In such circumstances, it falls to the cultural outsiders – to the Gallic Villagers, as Kaiser was himself fond of invoking – to right the ship. It falls to the scattered yet dignified truth-tellers on whom the health and vitality of society secretly depends. Their emergence over the past few years is proof of Ernst Jünger’s claim that “there are wolves hiding in the grey flock – that is, people who still know what freedom is”. May their influence, and Kaiser’s memory, shine long and bright.
Dr. Thomas Crew is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick.
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Good Luck to Accenture. Working for TfL with that little squirt as Mayor must be a nightmare, at the best of times.
Accenture are probably quite glad. Any excuse to not have to work with that pipsqueak.
Traitorous squirt.
I know it’s a very easy one and I apologise in advance;
But what an apocalyptic Khant. I hope he gets eternal, painful anal fissures and IBS.
Why is this even on your agenda it is sick and absurd. The rise in knife crime is talked about in the Apocalypse of John in regard to the opening of the second seal. When you perceive these matters correctly then that is the first stage of overcoming the darkness.
This is the knife-king, the stabbaman, a scrotum full of old needles and razorblades. This is the filth that you allow to grow. No explanation save the money was good and it was worth it at the time. Now you reap the bitter harvest of your ignorance and cupidity.
The real purpose of DIE is the promotion of the Great Replacement. Good to see Khanage-the-Vile showing his true colours.
Khan needs to learn that no human empire has ever survived. His will fall in due course.
We’re an SME, on the small end of the spectrum, and we got badgered into creating CSR and DIE policies by a big prospective client, though they say precisely nothing and have the same effect- we actually removed the “DIE” phrase itself from the template policy we started with
Loads of footage of these incidents floating about. Lowlife scallies get right behind somebody as they go through the ticket barrier so that they get to go through too and avoid paying the fare. And by all accounts they get away with it, but sometimes you see members of the public challenging them, but never the staff. It’s similar to how a certain demographic appear to be entitled to a 100% discount when they go ‘shopping’ because the security staff just stand there watching while the thieving gits leisurely take their time filling their haversacks with booty, like they know they’re not going to get caught. Apparently police respond to only 40% of calls about shoplifting, so not much deterrent there, then. I presume security are told not to touch the thieves in case they’re carrying a knife, in which case shops may as well just have a cardboard cut-out of a security guard instead of employing an actual person. But what happened to ‘citizens arrests’, like the British guy in Amsterdam?
”Transport for London admits to instructing staff not to pursue those who break through ticket barriers to evade fares.
Jokes about never needing to pay for trains again aside:
Everyone with working eyes knows they aren’t doing this because “it’s racist.”
The majority of fare evaders I see every week in London are black men in their teens and twenties, with chunky trainers and matching tracksuits, who can afford the fare but know there are no consequences for them if they break the social contract.
Happened just yesterday in London Bridge: a hoodlum dashed through the barriers behind a woman who paid, and ran down the escalator to the tube. Staff did nothing.
Enforcing the law results in large numbers of non-white males receiving fines and getting in trouble with Transport Police — so they just stop enforcing the rules, for fear of being called racist.
Yet another example of two-tier Britain.”
https://x.com/Con_Tomlinson/status/1910294980985233639
This lady speaks truth. The Khant must be so proud of his crime-ridden dump of a capital city;
”Blackheath fun fair was closed down because, allegedly, a bunch of kids were running around with knives.
This local woman had some choice words for the parents… (expletives aside) she’s 100% spot on.”
https://x.com/alexharmstrong/status/1910315576171315442
I used to commute into London daily. Every now and then I’d be aware of some pillock trying to tailgate me through the barriers. A brief hesitation on taking the ticket would usually prevent it. Contactless tickets put the kibosh on that idea though.
By allowing the small crimes, we’re permitting the big ones.
I’ve had a few confrontations with people tailgating me on the tube. Pretty regular occurrence.
I used to take a lot of London buses. I remember a day when some scrote in front of us sauntered on past the driver without touching in. No challenge. I did the same and the driver stopped me. I pointed this out to him. Basically I looked normal and the bloke in front of me looked mad enough to get into it if challenged. I also remember a hard-arse bus driver at Turnpike Lane refusing entry to a bunch of black kids who were not paying. They were outraged that the driver, also a black man, had prioritised doing his job over “racial solidarity”.
As a private sector business, Accenture has ditched DIE for the load of cobblers it is, whereas public-sector TfL indulges Kommissar Khan’s ulterior motive of pandering to his voting base.
The little Kommissar Must Fall.
Will that save TfL some money?
I really despise management teams that hire so many consultants to avoid making decisions and cover their arses. If they’re hiring ‘consultants’ it means they don’t have the expertise to do the job that needs doing. Sack them.
Once in a while a management team will run across an unusual problem and will need help from a consultant. Next time they meet the same problem they should have learned how to manage it.
As you say, it’s to avoid having to make decisions and ultimately do the work they are actually paid to do. Generally the more expensive the consultants, the better these people think they are…
This is the problem with taxes.
That little tyrant Khan derives his power to bestow his grace on those he considers worthy from the money he steals from me.
I don’t agree with his way of spending my money. He is using g money he steals from me to promote ideology that I find repulsive
It’s hard to get people to reconsider their fixed idea that there’s no alternative
Could be time to buy shares in ‘Accenture”.
They should do well without being tainted…
Khan is proving he isn’t interested in creativity, just compliance to his views. Every time I think I have bottomed out in my disgust toward that man, he lowers the bar again!
I don’t mean to be contentious here but I do wonder if Khan has ever visited Heathrow Airport, or indeed had his car taken away by one of the “valet” companies servicing the clients there. There doesn’t appear to be much in the way of Diversity or inclusion going on there.
How much longer can this obnoxious smarmy pip squeak be allowed to preside over the uk,s Capital City ? The enjoyment & self satisfaction he gets from London,s demise actually ooze’s from him like a curried fart !