Opinion: The patriarch of Hechingen

Zurich - In 2013 a small German film foresaw the slow afternoon of an entire European industry. It is now mid-afternoon.

There is a film few people outside Germany have ever heard of. It came out in 2013, ran in a handful of cinemas, and disappeared with the discretion of most central-European tragicomedies. Its title, in the gentle absurdity of Swabian dialect, translates roughly as ‘Wherever we are, we are at the front’.