How much black humour does it take to defy the horror? “The Masturbator – The Adventures of Edgar Hilsenrath” delves into the radical world of the writer and Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath – one of the first who dared to face the trauma with grotesque wit and unrestrained laughter. In a mixture of animation and historical archive material, the film follows Hilsenrath’s alter ego from his novel “Fuck America”: a penniless, sex-obsessed writer in 1950s New York who is desperately trying to publish his memories of the ghetto under the title “The Masturbator”. Writing becomes an obsession, a provocation and an act of survival. Born in Leipzig in 1926, Hilsenrath’s path took him through Nazi Germany, Bukovina and a Transnistrian ghetto via Palestine and France to America and back to Europe. A journey through places of loss, hope and disappointment. A journey through a century in which the ghosts of fascism keep returning. Burlesque animations collide with raw, real-life images. This friction gives rise to the portrait of an artist whose books are international successes but who fell into obscurity in Germany. “The Masturbator” combines biography, memory and the present to create a film that is as unsettling as it is liberating, about the power of satire and the necessity to speak out against forgetting.

Ola Staszel