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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Thank you for this wonderful piece. I didn’t know about this guy and I’ve now found his channel. The Germans really had it bad in the pandemic. It was depressing to see how willingly they embraced tyranny and repression.
Merkel had been inflecting tyranny and repression on Germany for years, one should note. Which suggests that Germany is incapable of learning from history, and defaults to authoritarian regimes (at best)
Well, she grew up under Erich Honecker and others in the East, after all.
Her family was one of the rare cases of people voluntarily immigrating into the GDR.
The lesson these people learnt from history is We must always imitate what the democrats are currently pushing in the USA, preferably 150% of it as we need to prove our compliance harder than others. This obviously includes We must always blindly defer to the UN or any of its suborganisations.
A lesson I learnt from history is that this is pointless even when neither the US democrats nor the extended UN are currently pushing something that’s outright evil, which probably occasionally happens, although likely by accident only.
Interesting how the UN closed down the Trusteeship council in 1994 to help ex colonies become sovereign. Is all their work done or maybe sovereignty is a dirty word in the UN.
Yes, the British establishment is far more subtle in its employment of tyranny of its people.
Yes I’m surprised I haven’t heard of him, but they had many guests in The Court Of Public Opinion that he could’ve been interviewed. There were two German Doctors that I know of without remembering their names, one was dragged off the stage talking at an anti lockdown protest in London 2020, and the other Dr was the one who got Police raided during a Livestream. He died a few months later of what seems a heart attack though his distraught girlfriend thought he was somehow murdered in an online video shortly after it happened. It is hard to know the truth of his death, it’s possible he was murdered by the state but also his girlfriends emotions were running high so confusion set in. The death of Brandy Vaugan in the US is more suspicious to me.
Let’s face it, they have form when it comes to embracing tyranny and repression.
I have had a lot of German friends over the years, since acquiring a German pen-friend as a child in the early ’70s. They have all been very pleasant, welcoming people …. but they are all conformists.
Two particular German friends I currently have were both brought up in East Germany (but now live in the West). Despite experiencing East German Communism as children/ teenagers, so well-placed to recognise tyranny when they see it, they still meekly conformed to the Covid authoritarianism.
I like this phrase. I have a feeling many of us who read the DS can relate to experiencing “intellectual development…that the escalation of lockdown seemed to demand.”
The covid terror has forced many of us to think about things that we might never have and in doing so we can consider ourselves to be somewhat wiser.
The great shame is how many people have squandered the opportunity. If they hadn’t I am certain we could now be looking forward to a much brighter future.
I agree, I found myself focusing on entirely new things all of a sudden. Not entirely happy with what I know, but I’d rather know. Forewarned is forearmed as they used to say.
Jordan Petersen referred to it as the ‘Orienting Reflex’ a sudden alarm caused by a change in your surroundings, causing a full re-evaluation of core aspects of your thinking. A useful survival trait. This seems to fit nicely with how I felt.
He sounds really interesting – shame I can’t understand German. It’s frustrating he didn’t upload his You Tube videos with English subtitles – I can’t seem to find a way to translate them … if anyone knows how to do that, please do let us all know.
Search for “youtube translation subtitles”. Loads of gadgets on offer there – I haven’t tried any though, so no idea of it’s any good, or free to use.
Thank you JK for responding, by searching as you suggested I came across this video which explains how to do it on You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZz03myFuWA
Listen to the CJ Hopkins interview on YouTube. It starts off in German but then they converse in English.
Thank you so much – will look at that.
That was a good recommendation – enjoyed seeing C J Hopkins talk, having read his stuff on Off Guardian.
Thanks for this. Always good to have original material rather than recycled MSM articles. More of this please DS.
Yep. Gunnar was one of the beacons of hope and enlightenment during this madness in Germany, from the start.
Thank you for remembering and introducing him to the English speaking critical thinkers here.
Clemens Arvay (who later committed suicide because of the mobbing he had to endure) and Raphael Bonelli from Austria also come to mind as influential soft spoken German speaking intellectual leaders.
I think his piece and video that had the most influence, reached and moved a lot of people in Germany was ‘Ich mach da nicht mit.’- I won’t participate, which was launched on 1.4.21 in response to the intensification of the vaxx shaming campaign et.al., which most Germans enthusiastically embraced and participated in.
https://gunnarkaiser.substack.com/p/ich-mach-da-nicht-mit
https://gunnarkaiser.substack.com/p/ichmachdanichtmit
https://kaisertv.de/2021/04/15/ich-mach-da-nicht-mit-martin/
The text is specifically about ‘voluntary’ mass testing of pupils in the class room enforced by authority pressure and subsequent punishment of pupils with positive test results: Round them all up in the school yard and sent them into ‘voluntary home isolation’ from there despite this use of COVID tests was (at that time) both against their usage instructions (supposed to be used to confirm Sars-CoV2 infection of people with symptoms) and the recommendations of the RKI (which had stated that mass testing healthy people would just lead to loads of false positives).
Later on, this testing was legally mandated and the RKI changed its tune (as far as I know this) accordingly. That’s was when false positives disappeared from the official conversation and made way for false negatives: If the test result was positive, you’re 100% to have the lurgi and are a deathly risk to all people around you, however, if the result negative, this doesn’t mean anything at all. Please do another test NOW. Thankfully, the latter never really gained traction but that was not for want of trying by the pandemic mongers.
As a MetalHead without googling, I wonder what the German Industrial Metal Band Rammstein made of 2020, considering their edgy videos and reflection of history in their music. One of their older videos had English & German and was called ‘We’re all living in America’, how most countries are westernised.
That’s from 2020 (attached due to links to images usually getting messed up). I’m not aware of anyhing beyond that, though.
Dear dear!
RIP, Herr Kaiser, a star which blazed brightly and too briefly
” “there are wolves hiding in the grey flock”…..That could also be a reference to the Globalist power grab.