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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