𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙿𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚆𝚎 𝚁𝚎𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝙾𝚛𝚍𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚘 𝙻𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝙸𝚝

𝙸 𝙸𝚜 𝙰𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙵𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚡 𝚁𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚊𝚞

𝙻𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚗𝚘 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

I Is Another (Ich ist ein Anderer), directed by Felix Randau, takes us to 1952 and aboard a night train bound for Oslo, where Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler’s personal masseur, is confronted with a past he has spent years shaping into his own narrative.

Kersten, played by Claes Bang, was a real and still controversial figure in the history of the Second World War. He became known for his close relationship with Himmler, head of the SS and one of the central figures in Nazi Germany’s machinery of power and mass murder. After the war, Kersten claimed that he had used the trust he gained through this relationship, and the influence that came with it, to save large numbers of Jews and other prisoners. These claims also appeared in his memoirs and later became the subject of considerable debate over their extent and historical accuracy.

Randau builds his film precisely within this space between evidence and claim.

The main events unfold over the course of a single night. Kersten is travelling to Norway with his wife, Irmgard, played by Susanne Wuest, hoping that his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize will finally lead to the award itself. But the arrival of Hedda, a journalist played by Valerie Pachner, changes the direction of the journey. Hedda has ostensibly come to interview Kersten, but it soon becomes clear that she is not there to listen to his story. She wants to test it, expose its contradictions, and perhaps uncover the man behind the narrative.

From this point on, the interview gradually begins to resemble an interrogation. At the same time, the train changes from a means of transportation into an enclosed space in which the past must be confronted.

For me, this is one of the film’s notable formal choices. Physically, the train moves relentlessly forward, while psychologically, the people inside it are constantly travelling in the opposite direction: back towards war, guilt, marriages, historical documents, and memories from which they have never entirely separated themselves.

The compartment itself slowly begins to resemble an interrogation room, even a temporary prison. Hedda is no longer simply a journalist asking questions. The more determined she becomes to uncover contradictions in Kersten’s account, the more we sense that she entered the conversation carrying a suspicion that had already taken shape.

The cinematography also uses the confined space of the train to intensify this confrontation. The frequent close-ups reduce the physical distance between us and the characters, but they do not necessarily bring us any closer to the truth about them. The camera repeatedly lingers on Kersten’s face, as if we, together with Hedda, are trying to read a movement of the eyes, a brief pause, or a subtle change in expression to determine when he is telling the truth and when he is constructing his own version of it. Yet the closer the camera moves toward him, the less simple judgment becomes. This tension reflects one of the film’s central ideas: we can move very close to a face without necessarily moving closer to the truth of the person behind it. By contrast, the flashbacks feel more open and less visually fixed, as if the past becomes more fluid and uncertain precisely at the moment when it is supposed to clarify things.

But the question the film raised for me was this: if we prove that Kersten lied about part of his past, or exaggerated it, what exactly changes?

Does that erase what he actually did? Does it alter the lives of those who may have survived because of his intervention? Or does it merely destroy the image of the “hero” we have constructed around him?

This is where I Is Another, for me, begins to move away from being simply a historical drama about Felix Kersten and becomes a film about memory and the instability of truth within the human mind.

Memory is not a camera. It does not record our lives and return the same untouched images to us years later. Each time we remember something, we reconstruct it to some degree. Time, desire, love, guilt, fear, suffering, and our need to continue living with ourselves all enter into that reconstruction.

And reconstruction is not always the same thing as lying.

Sometimes we soften parts of the past, push other parts aside, and transform certain memories into narratives that are easier to live with. After many years, perhaps even the boundary between what actually happened and what we have repeatedly told ourselves happened is no longer entirely clear to us.

For this reason, after a while I became less interested in deciding whether Kersten was truthful or dishonest. Another question took its place: if he spent years telling a particular version of his own life, is it possible that eventually he came to believe that version himself?

Randau does not leave this idea within the dialogue. He incorporates it into the film’s form.

The flashbacks are not presented as visual documents of the past—the past changes according to the person remembering or narrating it. Details shift; even the clothes are not the same.

It is as though what we are watching is not the past itself, but the image each character has constructed of it: not necessarily what happened, but what each person needs to believe happened.

This is not limited to Kersten. In the differing accounts given by Christian and his wife, the same event becomes two different images. In one version, Christian returns after his wife falls and is shot. In the other, she appears formally dressed, wearing a striking red hat, confronting a man who has hidden parts of himself from her for years.

It is as if each of them is directing their own version of the same marriage.

A marriage, a political event, a psychological wound, or even a childhood can become two entirely different films for two people who were present at the same moment. The film therefore does not simply ask which account is true. It raises a more difficult question: who has the right to narrate a shared past?

Alongside memory, the relationship between Kersten and Himmler opens another layer of the film—a relationship that begins not with politics, but with the body.

Pain, touch, massage, and relief become Kersten’s route into the world of one of the most powerful men in the Nazi apparatus. In the massage room, the conventional structure of power momentarily shifts. A man with enormous power over the fate of thousands becomes vulnerable within his own body. He is in pain. He needs another person. His physical relief becomes dependent upon someone else’s presence.

Kersten enters through this vulnerability.

He does not initially challenge Himmler through politics or ideology. He approaches him through bodily trust. Touch becomes communication, communication becomes trust, and trust creates the possibility of influence.

This is why, for me, Kersten’s real ability is not simply massage. His real ability is access.

At times, the relationship even approaches a form of physical and psychological codependency. Himmler needs Kersten to relieve his pain, while Kersten needs continued access to Himmler to preserve the influence and position that allow him to intervene.

At the same time, the film refuses to give us a simple moral portrait of Kersten. His conversation about hunting, and the pleasure he describes in killing animals, is part of this complexity. A person capable of trying to save human lives does not necessarily have to be gentle or free of violence. Someone capable of manipulating others may use that very same ability to achieve a humane outcome.

Good and evil do not always inhabit separate bodies.

Perhaps Kersten can enter Himmler’s world precisely because he himself understands something of the language of power, desire, and control.

Seen from this perspective, the massage scenes acquire a meaning far beyond physical treatment. Touch can simultaneously become care, communication, negotiation, and manipulation.

But there is another, more unsettling dimension. For brief moments, behind the uniform, the ideology, and the immense machinery of violence, we see a human being in pain.

To see Himmler as human is not to absolve or forgive him. On the contrary, perhaps this is precisely what makes the reality so disturbing: the perpetrators of historical atrocities were not creatures outside the human species. They were human beings who experienced pain, dependency and fear, while remaining capable of participating in immense violence.

Kersten does not need to turn Himmler into a good man to influence him. He only needs to locate the remaining human vulnerability through which he can still reach him.

Hedda, meanwhile, does not remain merely an instrument for uncovering historical truth. She actively seeks confrontation and friction, as though she needs this encounter to reach a truth of her own. Her investigation of Kersten therefore gradually becomes a mirror for another investigation: an examination of the characters themselves.

Everyone is examining someone else, until eventually they are forced to examine their own narratives as well.

It is here that the title acquires another meaning. Ich ist ein Anderer refers to Arthur Rimbaud’s famous phrase, “Je est un autre” — “I is another” — written in 1871 in the letters now known as the Letters of the Seer.

In Randau’s film, this “other” may describe the distance between the historical Kersten and the Kersten he constructed in his memoirs; between the man who lived through those events and the character he later created from his own life.

But perhaps that distance does not belong to Kersten alone.

We remember our past from the position of the person we are today. Someone recounting an event twenty years later is no longer the same person who originally experienced it. The “I” of today speaks about the “other” of yesterday, and it is within this distance that memory, desire, and the need to create meaning enter the narrative.

The film ultimately refuses to establish itself as the final authority on truth. Even its flashbacks offer no assurance that what we have seen is “reality.”

For me, the ending is less about solving a historical mystery than about the moment when the characters begin to set aside some of the roles through which they have defined themselves and one another: hero, liar, journalist, spouse, manipulator, victim, judge.

What remains are imperfect human beings, standing before one another with their memories, lies, wounds, desires, and contradictions.

Not forgiveness. Not historical absolution. Simply the act of seeing the human being.

History requires evidence and documentation. Cinema, however, can enter another space: the uncertain distance between what happened, what we remember, what we tell others, and what we ultimately need to believe about ourselves to continue living.

And perhaps the question I am left with is not whether Felix Kersten told the truth, but something more personal:

Can any of us tell the story of our own past without consciously or unconsciously rewriting part of it?