The essence of counterfeiting seems to be deception. The lie. So what is the significance of fake art, whose masterfully crafted exhibits are sometimes originals themselves, in the age of fake news? What is the relationship between manipulated news - or rather, reports that are always suspected of not being true, such as the coronavirus pandemic - and a fake Picasso or a published interview that never took place? Every interview is a fake, says actor Lars Eidinger in our interview format FFQ&A. If you don't believe him, here's the, well, proof:
Perhaps he is right, at least it is difficult to reproduce a conversation authentically, especially from a journalistic point of view. After all, there is already a bit of drama in every text and every film cut, in every well-considered answer and in every arrangement of a certain conversation situation. Outstanding actors like Eidinger must know this better than anyone else. He can currently be seen in the role of the journalist responsible for the biggest media scandal in German history. In the RTL+ mini-series FAKING HITLER, Eidinger plays Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann, to whom the art forger Konrad Kujau handed over his Hitler diaries in 1983.
Late-borns of all ages, right up to today's Tik-Tok teenagers, might think: "Hitler diaries? You can't make that up!" But this adventurous story in particular proves that the nature of forgery is such that, alongside lies and deception, there is always a trace of truth. The hype surrounding the Fuhrer's alleged notes also revealed the Germans' obsession with their favourite Hitler and all Nazi memorabilia. This fact is certainly a German original. Charlie Chaplin knew this early on, and to this day he is the truest interpreter of Hitler Germany, precisely because he is so much more original than the real thing.
It's no coincidence that Tom Kummer, a true action journalist, was responsible for the second biggest fraud scandal in the local media in the 1990s. Someone who wanted to report authentically, come hell or high water, but with a certain staged pop appeal. Former tennis star Kummer, for example, was locked in the basement for weeks for an article on solitary confinement in the trendy magazine Tempo. If only they had never let him out of there again, those feature editors who were affected by his (ingenious) pranks might have thought later.
An ingenious forger, Kummer probably saw himself as a cross between Einstein and Hemingway. But part of the truth of forgery is the willingness of those who are only too happy to buy the lie to believe it. This applies to the audience of a film in which actors pretend to be actors - as the famous film critic Enno Patalas aptly put it in a discussion of piracy in the noughties, film is essentially a pirated copy of reality - and it applies to the galleries that pay cash for fake images and legends. Be that as it may, Kummer's methods seem old-fashioned compared to today's deep fakes. Fake digital realities have long since become worlds of their own.
There have always been copyists and forgers. Take the painter Wolfgang Beltracchi. Although his paintings were in fixed frames, they began to move after he was exposed in Arne Birkenstock's film portrait of him and his wife Helene. After all, a film like this promises to approach the truth step by step. This may also be the reason for the many misunderstandings caused by videos on the Internet. Some forgers, such as Beltracchi's fellow painter Tony Tetro or Bruno Wilkomirski, who became famous as the author of a fake autobiography, even believe their lies. This is known as self-deception - or, more lyrically, confabulation.
In their originality, the Kujaus, Kummers and Beltracchis were, of course, much easier to expose than the digital fakes that are now commonplace. Didn't Böhmermann have a brilliant idea back in 2015, when he used the scandal over Varoufkis' stinky finger at the height of the financial bashing of Greece to show us how easy it is to create digital forgeries using the latest technology? After all, who can say today that the original video of the stinky finger wasn't fake? Well, conspiracy theory, we can hear you singing ... At the time, the viral clip sent out an unmistakable message, which we have chosen as the guiding principle for our work on the subject in FAST FORWARD: no fake means no original, no original means no fake.
Can we still trust digital images? Artist Arne Vogelgesang answers this question in another FFQ&A, whose authenticity we vouch for.
Everything else is probably best expressed in a song:
