Your shower routine? Someone died for that. History's grossest power grab.
Hygienic habits are as old as the various human civilizations; but each era establishes its own customs: whether private or public, everywhere and at all times, methods of personal cleanliness have depended on cultural conventions, religious morals, political ideologies and economic interests; because the control of basic hygiene has also been and is one more tool in the infinite exercise of power over the masses.
Production
Gleaming reenactments make plague look almost aspirational.
Writing
Narrator treats bathhouse politics like a thriller.
Director
Claudia Spoden
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, featured prominently, was founded in 1912 and later co-opted by Nazi eugenics programs — its complicated rehabilitation mirrors the film's central tension.
The directors deliberately echo COVID-era visual language (empty streets, masked crowds) when depicting historical plagues, forcing uncomfortable contemporary recognition.
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