Bro Nation
Toxic Masculinity, Patriarchy and Neo-Fascism
When Germany's official, industry-run agency responsible for rating films, series, and audiovisual content — FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft) — refused to classify Uwe Boll's Citizen Vigilante in a six-to-two vote, it did something more revealing than censorship: it made visible precisely what the film only claims to show. A white man mowing down migrant criminals and corrupt judges — this is not a new story. This is the Männerbund. Not as metaphor, but as a historically verifiable structure of the German political imagination, painstakingly excavated by Claudia Bruns in her 2008 study Politik des Eros (The Politics of Eros): that entanglement of virile self-justice, homoerotic solidarity among equals, and the exclusion of what the Männerbund constructs as threat — "the woman," "the Jew," today "the migrant" — as a constitutive act of state order. What Boll is making is not a bad film about a fringe phenomenon. It is the AfD's unconscious, finally dreaming out loud.
Culture is always the battlefield when the state renegotiates the boundaries of the sayable — and it usually loses that fight, because it fails to understand that bans do not erase meaning. They produce martyrs. When the FSK refused to classify Citizen Vigilante, it did not create silence. It created a document. Because anyone who bans a film for being too dangerous thereby confirms precisely what that film claims: that the system fears the truth. That is not a logic I share. But it is a logic that works.
Anyone who doubts this should watch the video posted by German YouTuber Radical Living on 9 April — 36 minutes, 1.8 million views within weeks, by now a viral document of German unease. Radical Living does not endorse any party; he does not even name one as the solution. But he says that a country which surrounds its second-largest party with a democratic firewall while simultaneously attempting to ban it has stopped convincing him that it is a democracy. He now lives in Cyprus. He is not a far-right extremist. He is a symptom. And symptoms do not disappear when you censor them — they migrate inward.
This is the paradox of every state cultural policy that defends freedom through restriction: it aesthetically reproduces the very thing it is fighting against. The FSK decision against Citizen Vigilante vindicates the vigilante. The ban proceedings against the AfD vindicate the narrative that the established parties are afraid of the people. I do not consider Uwe Boll's film to be art — not in any way, shape or form. And I consider the AfD to be what it is: a party that runs the Männerbund as its electoral platform. But the question of whether a cultural product is dangerous cannot be answered by administrative act. It can only be answered through counter-publicity — through analysis, through naming, through precisely what is being attempted here.
That presupposes, however, that the analysis reaches for the right tool — and German public discourse has been reaching for the wrong one for years. Anyone who writes about the New Right sooner or later ends up invoking occultism. The AfD as an esoteric sect, Björn Höcke as a shaman in a pinstripe suit — this is a popular interpretive framework that says more about the helplessness of its critics than about its object. Because what drives political movements like the AfD is not spiritual longing, not a search for truth, not syncretic openness toward the Other — but simply the will to power. This is not occultism. This is sociology. The sociologist of religion Colin Campbell described as early as 1972 precisely what a cultic milieu consists of: epistemic tolerance, permeability between traditions, the primacy of individual meaning-seeking. Political ideologies that organise exclusion, hierarchy and violence fall structurally outside this framework — they are the opposite of cultic. They are Männerbund.
The analytical gain of Claudia Bruns' Politik des Eros lies precisely here: her concept allows us to read xenophobia and vigilante justice not as pathological deviation from the democratic norm, but as its historically sedimented underside. The Männerbund does not constitute itself in spite of the exclusion of the Other, but through it — "the woman," "the Jew," "the migrant" are not incidental enemies but constitutive outsiders, whose threat is what first produces the community's cohesion. Citizen Vigilante operates according to exactly this logic. But Boll does not stand alone. Already in 2018, Peppermint with Jennifer Garner delivered the same ideological skeleton in feminine disguise: a mother who experiences the legal system as corrupt, the state as impotent — and vigilante justice as the only possible response to Hispanic cartel criminals. The vigilante film of the Trump era is not a genre of rage. It is a genre of order — of the restoration of a community that defines itself through external threat. That it is precisely Armie Hammer — the "cancelled" man, who through a campaign of social ostracism went from star to outcast — who now returns as Sanders, as a self-administered justice figure wronged by the system, is not a biographical footnote. It is casting as political statement.
What remains when you hold all of this together — the banned film, the German YouTuber in Cyprus, the AfD as the strongest force in the polls, a federal government with whose work only 13 percent of the population is satisfied, according to the ARD-DeutschlandTrend of May 2026. That is the worst rating for a federal government after its first year in office since this survey began in 1997. What remains is not a puzzle but a diagnosis. Friedrich Merz, whose approval ratings have fallen continuously since taking office and who has become the most unpopular chancellor in recent German history, is leading a country through its fourth economic contraction in as many years, through an energy price shock triggered by the war in the Middle East, and through export declines that no stimulus package will compensate for in the short term. Four recessions in four years — that would be a development without postwar precedent. In this vacuum, democracy does not grow. In this vacuum, the Männerbund grows.
Not because people are evil. But because the Männerbund offers precisely what an exhausted society demands in times of crisis: a community that constitutes itself through exclusion, a narrative of external threat that overlays internal fragmentation, and an aesthetic of strength that reframes powerlessness as virtue. Citizen Vigilante is not the cause of this desire. It is its mirror. The numbers confirm it: as of June 30th, the film had made $600,000 on a $2 million budget and sat at number one on both Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video digitally — not because Musk promoted it, but because an audience was already waiting for exactly this fantasy. The FSK has banned this mirror — and in doing so has made the image it shows immortal.
I write this as someone who comes from Brazil. A country that knew Bolsonaro before Europe understood Trump. A country that learned — in the hardest way possible — that the Männerbund aesthetic does not die through bans, but through naming: through the persistent, public, loud insistence on what these images really show and what order they want to produce. Germany stands at a crossroads it has not known in this form before: with a government that has lost the trust of the people, an opposition no one is willing to engage with, and a cultural policy that confuses counter-publicity with danger. Vigilante cinema did not create this situation. But it names it — in its brutal, dishonest, ideologically poisoned way — more precisely than many op-eds I have read in recent months.
The question is not whether one may show Uwe Boll. The question is whether one is willing to look at what he shows — and call it by its name.
Photo credit: © Axel Stock