Feuerteufel

A pyrotechnic fever-dream unfurls inside a crumbling Mittel-European spa town where the air itself tastes of phosphorus: aging firework-maker Feuerteufel—half titan, half ghost—clutches the scarred hands of his grand-daughter Lou Seitz while reciting incantations over gunpowder recipes older than the Habsburg crypts. Into this sulfurous sanctuary stumbles Holmes Zimmermann, an insurance adjuster armed with ledgers instead of faith, dispatched to audit a warehouse that vanished in a green flash. His arrival detonates a chain of private combustions: Mizzi Ship’s cabaret starlet, once ignited by applause, now burns for oblivion; Carl Becker’s one-armed photographer snaps portraits that develop into premonitions; Emmi Carl’s mute laundress wrings out sheets embroidered with alchemical sigils. Every character carries a fuse buried in the ribcage, and the narrative matches their pulse—montage of magnesium flares, nitrate memories, and orchestral thunder—until a midsummer night explodes into a cathedral of sparks above the town square. What survives is not plot but phosphor: faces half-lit by the after-glow of vanished futures, a child’s shoe still smoldering, and the lingering suspicion that cinema itself has been set alight, leaving only the smell of cordite and the echo of a lullaby sung in the key of gun-cotton.