A plane crash during the war. Nomadic Tatars rescue the sole survivor, smearing him with grease and wrapping him in felt. From this mythical scene, Joseph Beuys is born: artist, activist, provocateur, wearing a felt hat and a fisherman's vest. Is art the only thing that can still save our world? Joseph Beuys was convinced of this. All his life, he fought for his vision of a society in which every human being is an artist.
Forty years after Beuys's death, his ideas and concepts are still alive. Lenz Mosbacher paints a complex portrait that goes beyond classic biography, and traces the stories that Joseph Beuys himself brought to life. In condensed fictional episodes, Beuys meets the intellectual Susan Sontag, is challenged by radical female figures such as Ulrike Meinhof and finally encounters, in the present, a new generation of activists reinterpreting his ideas on art and change in the occupied forest of Hambach.
Beuys – Die Erfindung der Wahrheit is a visual portrait - poetic, controversial, topical. A book for all those who are not content to contemplate art, but wish to question and rethink it. (Editor)