Better Science

In 2017, we were location scouting for a film about Bayer at Carl-Duisberg- Park, a lush green park behind the company’s headquarters in Leverkusen, Germany. While shooting an empty fountain, an older lady approached us and revealed the previous existence of statues that had been stolen from the park. The old lady had worked for Bayer’s subsidiary AGFA for decades, and had been trained as an expert of micropaleontology. The mystery went on further, as some of the statues had not been stolen but rather removed by the company itself. The park, which hosts the mausoleum of former Bayer CEO Carl Duisberg, has an ambiguous relationship to public and private space, as shooting there is not always allowed, and sometimes Bayer security will stop film crews and ask for permits. Carl Duisberg had been responsible for Bayer’s 1920s merger with its rivals in Germany’s chemical sector, forming the conglomerate IG Farben, which was the largest chemical company of its time and would participate in the Holocaust by producing Zyklon B, the gas used in the gas chambers, as well as operate slave labor camps in Auschwitz.
In our film, we follow traces of Bayer’s history that are still accessible in contemporary Germany: newspaper articles, demonstration by activists, statements by Bayer’s CEO at the annual shareholders meeting, legal opinions by lawyers, interviews with university employees at former IG Farben headquarters and even a bomb disposal expert, who happened to be defusing a World War 2 bomb at the day of our shoot. As these ghosts of Germany’s totalitarian past emerge to the surface, they also remind us that they have never left. Connecting present, past and future, our film aims to question the unchecked power given to individual companies in our globalized times.