At the end of the year, in December 2019, the Franco-German channel Arte premiered two newly produced documentaries by Zeitenspiegel reporter Carsten Stormer. Both can be accessed in the media library until March.
In Search of Meaning in Siberia: Jesus from the Taiga and His Disciples.
A former Russian policeman claims to be the reborn Jesus Christ. In the Siberian forests, he has gathered a few thousand followers, including two dozen Germans. Their goal is to create a new society.
In 1991, former police officer Sergei Torop had an epiphany. Since then, he has called himself Vissarion and claims to be the resurrected Christ. In the forests of Siberia, he founded the Church of the Last Testament. As the Soviet Union collapsed, and with it the fundamental order of many Russians, more and more people gathered around the Siberian Jesus and his ecological-spiritual teachings. His followers call themselves the „One Family,“ founded villages, and are largely self-sufficient.
The fundamental principle of this community is to help each other and „become better people.“ They want to create a new society on Earth and thereby a rebirth into a better world. Currently, about 4,000 people live in this community.
The Germans Siegfried Werning and Anais Spätgens have also followed the spiritual call and exchanged their comfortable lives in Germany for a life of hardship in the taiga. But they all claim that a lifelong spiritual quest has come to an end in the forests of Siberia. For them, it is clear: Wissarion is the reborn Jesus Christ. A spiritual community that seems to live happily in harmony with themselves and the environment.
The documentary was first broadcast on December 6, 2019. The video is available online until March 4, 2020:
The Dead of Stalingrad: In Search of Fallen Soldiers
An estimated two million Red Army soldiers and one million German Wehrmacht soldiers are still missing. Russian volunteers are excavating former battlefields searching for their remains. This has become a nationwide movement. They call themselves: the Seekers.
To this day, the war has not ended for many families, as they do not know what has become of their fathers or brothers. They wonder what fate befell their loved ones. In a swampy forest, a hundred kilometers from Saint Petersburg, a sociology professor and his team dig for the missing. For the academic, the search for and identification of missing soldiers has become a lifelong mission.
On the former battlefield of Stalingrad, a group of Tatars are unearthing fallen soldiers from the sandy soil. A French pathologist has also joined the Russian searchers, spending his holidays for years in the Russian steppe with a metal detector and spade. „Re:“ witnesses the search teams finding missing soldiers and other volunteers leading the grandson of a fallen soldier to the place where his grandfather died, and whose mortal remains, along with a thousand other unknown soldiers, are buried in a mass grave in a solemn ceremony. More than seven decades after the end of World War II, the wounds left by the battles of Stalingrad or Myasnoi Bor have still not healed.
The documentary was first broadcast on December 18, 2019. The video will be available online until March 16, 2020: