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Violent scene in »Furia«: right-wing terror between Norwegian fjords and Berlin government district
Photo: Trygve Indrelid / ZDF
In this series, the trail of right-wing terror stretches from the picturesque fjord landscape in Grindheim, Norway, to the high-rise ravines around the Berlinale Palace.
Bearded people meet in a hunting lodge in Norway to read the American neo-Nazi thought leader James Mason and to plan attacks across Europe.
In Berlin, the TV duel is being prepared for an upcoming federal election, which is to be broadcast as a major media event from the famous festival cinema.
Among other things, the brown assassins want to strike here: Faschoterror at television prime time.
Right-wing terrorism is presented in »Furia« as a pan-European panorama, that is the great claim of the series, which will be broadcast four times 90 minutes in the ZDF main program from Sunday and eight times 45 minutes in the media library. Various production companies and broadcasters have come together to implement this, a prestigious European project.
Also involved, for example, is the company X Films Creative Pool, which has presented a state-of-the-art terror thriller about sniper murders and fake news for the Munich "Tatort" area, as well as Keshet International, the global production company of the Israeli television station of the same name. In 2010, Keshet gave the new epic series narration a central impetus with the production "Hatufim - in the hand of the enemy", which was adapted a little later by Hollywood under the title "Homeland". Anyone who, as a television producer, has since made complex political contexts the subject of a thriller is focusing on a figure who is infiltrating the hostile camp on the verge of giving up one's own identity.
In the ZDF series, this is the undercover agent Ragna (Ine Marie Wilmann), who has built a legend for herself as a supposed right-wing extremist blogger under the name Furia and is now involved with the Nordmann neo-Nazis.
To camouflage, she spreads identity ideas on her blog, which is so flamingly written that the men in the Norwegian cell immediately catch fire.
She has to have sex with one of them in the course of the preparations for the attack so that her deception is not exposed.
The shadow of Utøya
The »In the Hand of the Enemy« formula, which is common in series of conspiracies, is taken to extremes here by giving Ragna a highly personal motivation for her commitment: Her younger sister was killed in the attack by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011, Ragna feels responsible for her death. The act of terrorism by Utøya is shown in »Furia« only in sparse hints and fragmentary flashbacks from the perspective of the little sister, but it lies like a shadow over the entire plot.
Breivik is not a benchmark for the assassins, just a sick weirdo who has rather damaged their cause. They see themselves as part of a larger, ideologically established context. In fact, the extreme right is internationally networked. The Norwegian cell in "Furia" receives logistical and propaganda support from a German pegidist (Ulrich Noethen) who finances his network with Russian cryptocurrency. Pegida is everywhere.
So the action of the plot (head author: Gjermund Stenberg Eriksen, director: Magnus Martens, Lars Kraume) shifts to Berlin - where a right-wing populist party is threatened with victory in the federal elections, which has many similarities with the real AfD. The attackers want to stir up anti-Muslim resentment with their attack and thus cause a shift to the right in the population that would bring the right-wing populists to power. The Pegida and her backers in bourgeois society apparently have access to decisive political positions for the implementation of their plans.
Nazi moles in the Ministry of the Interior, double agents at the Federal Criminal Police Office, Russian support for the new European fascist terrorism, right-wing bullying on roaring enduro bikes - in the second half of "Furia", the underlying real threats from right-wing violence in the Berlin Republic are inflated into an unleashed paranoia setting.
Europe as a brown dystopia?
If the series creators had reduced the conspiracy scenario to a plausible size in some important places, the disturbing effect would have been even greater.
»Furia«,
from Sunday, 10.15 p.m., in four parts on ZDF.
Available at the same time in the media library as an eight-part edition.