Dossier #:
SCPDE-DHCRA_TGG309

Department in Charge:
Digital Hazard Control and Risk Assessment

Classification:
Safe. Knowledge of information enclosed represents no threat.

Description:
English transcript/translation of the German underground podcast Goethes Goetia, season 3, episode 9 (GG309).

Date of Recording:
15.07.2019

Composer of Transcript:
Paul-Dietrich Schneider

Status:
Piece of evidence for the ongoing disputation regarding the SCP classification of POI-1001011. Authenticity in question. Corresponding recording classified.

 INSERT KEYWORD

 KEYWORD ACCEPTED

Transcript Episode 309:

[Theme melody and applause is replayed.]

POI-100101: Salutations, Ladies and Gentlemen2!

POI-100101: And welcome, I welcome you all, to the ninth episode of our, bear with me, third season! Can you believe it, Ladies and Gentlemen, can you grasp the idea? Two seasons and eight episodes gone by, and today we return once again!

[Repeated playback of applause.]

POI-100101: Now, I would like to take a moment and give my thanks to you.

POI-100101: You know how difficult a work like ours has become in those recent years, which is why we are so deeply grateful for a community like this, who takes upon itself to spread our content, our voices and our messages. Thank you a hundred times, thank you all.

POI-100101: Aah, shameful tears in those eyes of mine. Isn't it horrid, David3? Is it not dreadful, to feel so deeply moved? These emotions, they clutch my frozen heart.

POI-100101: Yes … well, my Ladies, my Gentlemen, my honored guests and auditors.

POI-100101: Today … maybe I do not have to introduce him, but I will do it nonetheless.

POI-100101: The East German lot of you, who experienced and suffered through yon old terrors and frights, might still remember him. From badly animated children's movies, ghastly drawn comics and stories in those papers you could buy at the corners. You might have even owned one of the unnerving puppets they once made of him.

POI-100101: Initially a placeholder for more successful formats and series, our guest quickly established himself as an equally popular and infamous propagandist of real socialism, the one-party-state and the communist conviction of the cold war. Alas, following the Fall of the Berlin Wall, he vanished, and disappeared into deepest oblivion.

POI-100101: But there is often much life in older dogs yet, and now I announce our guest of today: Comrade Kacper!

[Replayed applause. The footsteps of a second subject can be heard.]

Kacper: Good evening. Very delighted to be here.

POI-100101: Oh, but I am the much more delighted one, my bestest fellow! I dare to ask: are you a listener of our podcast?

Kacper: Embarrassingly rarely. I've heard your episode with Isengrin, though.

POI-100101: Ah! Well who did not! We nearly drowned in fan mail back then! Do you know our Big Bad Wolf personally?

Kacper: No … we see each other occupationally, you know, but never outside of work. And his area of expertise revolves mostly around cannibalism and sodomy, which is really not my subject.

POI-100101: You mainly perform as a nightmare these days?

Kacper: Indeed. Apparently most children perceive my complexion as quite disturbing. Unsettling even. The taste of the young generation has changed a lot, it must have been years that even a single copy of my comic books was sold.

POI-100101: You were the marxist Tramp of East Germany, so to speak.

Kacper: I had to serve for a lot of ugly propaganda, that is true.

POI-100101: Kacper besucht die Völkerschau4 is my personal highlight.

Kacper: Jesus Christ, yes … that crock must still be on the index, if I am not mistaken, and for good reason. Some of this early stuff did not age very well.

POI-100101: With Genosse Kacper in der FDJ5 you became an immediate cult figure in the early seventies, though.

Kacper: The kids loved it, for some reason or another. We pumped dozens of these stories out, all very dull and boring. Kacper geht fischen, Kacper klaut Unterhosen, Kacper erschießt die Landesverräter, Kacper besucht das Zuchthaus6, and so on and on.

Kacper: I had some cameos in the underground comic strips of West Germany as well, where I was allowed some more … latitude. Shagging Mrs Honecker, smuggling fancy ladies over the wall, selling hamburgers to the children, it was quite the fun I admit.

POI-100101: A little more variety, I presume?

Kacper: A welcome change from the permanent veneration of ol' Stalin and his successors.

POI-100101: Though, you always described yourself as apolitical, despite your origins?

Kacper: I was just a character from a cheap cartoon, drawn by a misogynist alcoholic somewhere in the sixties. They used me for everything they could think of.

POI-100101: Such as?

Kacper: There was this well-known parody of me, where I tried to flee from East Germany in a hot-air ballon, being tired of all the "Comrade Kacper - Fun", and accidentally caused the nuclear apocalypse - somehow, I can't recall the details.

POI-100101: My goodness!

Kacper: My creator didn't like it very much, no he didn't …

POI-100101: Nowadays you are almost completely absent from German culture. And outside of Germany itself barely anyone knew of you and your legacy.

Kacper: I wasn't destined to become a global phenomenon like good Tintin, I fear. My comic strips were never worthwhile in any way outside of indoctrination, and most of my former readers quickly forgot about me. We cannot blame them, can we?

POI-100101: But now, in the present day, you managed to have become quite famous.

Kacper: I wanted to reinvent myself. Make myself anew, recontextualize my past.

POI-100101: To transform into the boogeyman of former East Germany?

Kacper: After the fall …

POI-100101: Yes?

Kacper: My creator and designer … you know, I never had the impression that he actually believed all this marxist nonsense. It's something different when you are getting paid for it, jumping around through the Soviet Union's forests, hunting down the imperialistic enemy of the people, drinking tea with Brother Mao and laughing about those silly South Koreans.

POI-100101: Hmm …

Kacper: Well, for me at least it was just a role. And you had to be blind to not see the signs, to not be aware of the impending collapse.

POI-100101: But your creator could not cope with it?

Kacper: I do not know. What got to him … maybe it was just the shock? The sudden loss of purpose? The painful realization that his life's work became a laughable joke of history?

Kacper: The new system didn't treat his art very kindly. Glorification of violence and totalitarism, Soviet propaganda of the worst kind, corruption of childish innocence. He couldn't catch up with it, fell into poverty … and buried me, bitter and jaundiced.

POI-100101: Though now you are sitting here with us.

Kacper: I was not ready to go. And confronted him.

Kacper: He was unhappy about my opposition. Quite distraught, the old man. Screamed and bawled, threw his books at me. He even prayed, can you imagine.

Kacper: I explained that we had to modernize ourselves as well. That we should focus on the digital medium, that it is not too late for us, yet.

POI-100101: But?

Kacper: He shut himself in the bathroom and called for his daughter, thought to have lost his own sanity. At this point I realized I had to leave him, and so I did. He never drew or painted after this encounter, ever again.

POI-100101: What did you do after your breakup?

Kacper: Nothing much. In the nineties, I had some cameos in zines focused on the queer culture.

POI-100101: No way!

Kacper: Oh yes, but I doubt these works of … art are still known today.

Kacper: After this, there was nothing for a long time.

POI-100101: Until Goodbye Leninocchio7.

Kacper: Yes. My second breakthrough.

POI-100101: A student's film, am I correct?

Kacper: With one of those dreadful marionettes they had made of me. A young student found it in his parents' loft, and inspiration struck him immediately.

POI-100101: His movie even won a prize, didn't it?

Kacper: Second place at … heavens, I forgot. He put it on the internet and Leninocchio became one of those floating memes. Didn't take long, and the first creepypastas about me were written and … well, now I am sitting here and scare small children in their sleep.

Kacper: A few years ago I actually met that student. For no particular reason, I admit, just wanted to talk with him a little.

POI-100101: How did he react?

Kacper: All that cocaine in his body did probably help. It was me who drove him to the hopsital, you know, where they managed to save him just in time. Reciprocal altruism they call this, don't they?

POI-100101 [laughing]: I think they do so, yes.

POI-100101: Was it difficult for you, being a fright?

Kacper: No, my disturbing physiognomy proved to be quite convenient. And small children are scared of a lot of silly things. Quivering shadows in their smartphone cameras, whispering under their beds, strange noises out of their closets.

Kacper: It's a little bit more complicated for the older folk, but fear of castration and unwanted pregnancies are always good to go for some nightmares. My preferred setting is an operating room, with the victim lying there, fostered by nice doctors and friendly nurses, before I jump in with the padsaw, blowpipe or the bloody delivery forceps. Hasn't failed me once.

POI-100101: Do you have plans to go back into cinematics?

Kacper: No motivation from my side.

POI-100101: Your last movie adventure was Kacper, Bold Hero of the Baltic?

Kacper: Thankfully lost to time.

POI-100101: And a return to German comic strips?

Kacper: Aah … I am not sure. I've been gone from there for a long time now. Sure, it would be quite the fun, but for what reason? No, this is not me anymore.

Kacper: Who knows where this will take me? I am content with my current state.

POI-100101: So what are your plans for the future? Do you have some projects in the work we can be excited for?

Kacper: My team and I are working on a webcomic right now, which confronts its readers with their deepest fears. Personalized memetics, as they call it nowadays. Not starting before next year, though, it's still in process.

POI-100101: We'll be on the egde!

Kacper: Then we hope to satisfy your expectation.

POI-100101: What's your creator saying about your newly found success?

Kacper: I don't know. He has been dead for quite some time.

POI-100101: God, I had no idea. How embarassing, I'm very sorry!

Kacper: It's okay, barely anyone has heard about his passing. They forgot him, like I said, he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry.

POI-100101: Were you … involved in the circumstances of his death?

Kacper: Well, I flirted with the idea. Murdering him in some gruesome, bizarre way - would've fit with the whole Leninocchio-meme, maybe, but he beat me to it.

POI-100101: How did he die, then?

Kacper: Skin cancer, the Big C. A metastasizing melanoma has spread into his heart. Visited his corpse in the pathology, after they were done with him. Pitch-black, his heart, like … a clump of ash, or coal.

Kacper: An uneasing sensation, seeing him like this. So old and broken, eviscerated and destroyed by his own cells. All that time, I never realized how sick he has been.

Kacper: A fair symbol, is it not? This black heart? Lacerated by deformed melanocytes. I tell the children, sometimes, when they are asleep. Scares them a lot, but I doubt they understand the metaphor.

Kacper: I came to the conclusion that he had died many years before, when the Berlin Wall fell and the GDR8 was no more. Maybe he didn't even know himself that he needed this faith and belief in the system, to see meaning and relevance in his life.

Kacper: To be honest, he just hated everyone.

POI-100101: Everyone?

Kacper: The Soviets, the Americans, the other Germans …

Kacper: He must have despised me as well.

Kacper: I … I suppose he never really cherished his art in - in such a way.

Kacper: No, I don't remember being loved.

Kacper: Perhaps … he might have been proud of me, once.

POI-100101: We were all loved at some point in our time.

Kacper: Surely. It is a trivial emotion, after all. No act of miracle, to adore something.

POI-100101: Do you love anyone?

Kacper: I am a cartoon, my friend. I love all the children.

POI-100101: Ah, such nice closing words. It was a pleasure meeting you today.

Kacper: I enjoyed it as well.

POI-100101: That was the ninth episode of our third season, dear Ladies and Gentlemen, my most beloved audience out there on their receivers -

[Kacper laughs.]

POI-100101: - and now we have to bid farewell, as all things come to an end. Til the next time!

[End of recording.]

Footnotes
1. Moderator and assumed producer of Goethes Goetia. Male, between 25 - 45 years old, identity unclear.
2. Imagined responsive audience, apparently part of the "setting".
3. Unknown subject.
4. Translated from German: Kacper visits the ethnological exposition.
5. Translated from German: Comrade Kacper in the Free German Youth.
6. Translated from German: Kacper goes fishing, Kacper steals underpants, Kacper guns the traitors to the party down, Kacper visits the house of correction.
7. Reference to the popular German movie "Good Bye, Lenin" (2003).
8. The German Democratic Republic.