Claes Bang Stars as Himmler's Masseur in 'I Is Another' — SkimNews
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- Felix Randau directed "I Is Another," a psychological thriller set aboard a night train traveling from Stockholm to Oslo in autumn 1952 as the Nobel Committee prepares to announce its Peace Prize winner.
- Claes Bang stars as Felix Kersten (1898–1960), a Baltic German massage therapist to SS Reich leader Heinrich Himmler who claimed to have obtained the freedom of thousands of concentration camp prisoners.
- Valerie Pachner plays fictional journalist Hedda Wohmann, who ambushes Kersten onboard and uses archival detective work to challenge his self-proclaimed heroism, with both characters traveling alongside their spouses Susanne Wuest and Timocin Ziegler.
- Director Randau was approached by French producers developing a Kersten miniseries that cast him as a hero, but his own research led him to conclude Kersten was fabricating his past to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
- Finnish filmmaker Arto Koskinen previously explored the same murky history in the 1998 documentary "Who was Felix Kersten?" and a 2019 twelve-episode podcast.
- Technical credits include cinematographer Sebastian Thaler, production designer Stephan von Tresckow, costume designer Mara Helml, composer Bernhard Fleischmann, and editor Joana Scrinzi, with Martin Müller cast as Himmler in claustrophobic wartime flashbacks.
Why it matters: By reframing a figure long celebrated in some accounts as a Holocaust-era savior as a self-aggrandizing fabulist, Randau's film directly contests a specific historical narrative — the 1952 Nobel context underscores that Kersten's rehabilitation campaign was already underway in real time, making the debunking not academic but contemporaneous with the reputation he was trying to secure.
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