CIVILIZED DISDAIN
A PORTRAIT OF CARLO STRENGER
A documentary essay film about the late Israeli-Swiss philosopher who proposed civilized disdain as democracy's answer to the strategic exploitation of fear and ignorance.
Exposé
The Israeli-Swiss psychoanalyst and philosopher Carlo Strenger spent his life defending the liberal order — not as an abstract ideal, but as a personal necessity. His grandmother survived the Nazis in Antwerp on falsified papers — on his mother's side, most of the family perished in the Holocaust. At 17, he broke away from Jewish Orthodoxy. He became a professor in Tel Aviv, a columnist for Haaretz, an advisor on terrorism — and a practicing psychoanalyst who, by his own count, spent 30,000 hours of his life listening to people and helping them find their own voice.
In his books, he formulated a diagnosis that sounds sharper today than ever before: The liberal world has forgotten how to defend its own values — out of fear of appearing intolerant. His concept of "Civilized Disdain" demands: respect for every person, but not for every belief. Clear judgments based on the best available evidence. Rigor in argument, not exclusion of the other. The concept is directed against every form of irrationality and manipulation in public discourse — against religious fundamentalism as much as against right-wing populists who exploit the insecurity of entire populations, and against a political correctness that has stripped the liberal camp of its capacity for critique.
In 2017, we filmed Carlo Strenger in Vienna, Berlin, and Amsterdam — in interviews, panel discussions, and during a tour of the Sigmund Freud Museum at Berggasse 19, where he was a member of the scientific advisory board. Two years later, he died. Since then, everything he warned about has come to pass: Trump, the rise of the European right, the erosion of democratic institutions, the destruction of public discourse through disinformation.
The film does not tell a biography. It shows a human being who thinks and worries — in five acts that lead from personal liberation through political diagnosis to an intellectual tool, ending in a charge: This freedom is a miracle. To defend it is the task of every generation. For us and for our children.
No outside voice-over. Only Strenger's voice. Two languages (German and English), five locations, approximately 10.5 hours of raw material from seven sources.
Format: Documentary essay film, approx. 90 minutes
Material: 7 sources, approx. 10.5 hours, shot in 2017, plus B-roll and archive
Director: Dirk Wilutzky
Production: BOULEDOR Film Production, Dirk Wilutky and Mathilde Bonnefoy
Markets: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, Israel, international festivals.
© Bouledor Filmproduktion 2017 / 2026
CIVILIZED DISDAIN
A PORTRAIT OF CARLO STRENGER
(Paper Edit as Narrative, based on original footage)
PROLOGUE: THE PLACE
The film begins without words. We see Berggasse 19 in Vienna, from outside. Autumn light. We walk through the door, up the staircase. Footsteps, silence.
Then a man sits before the camera and says:
"We are here in Sigmund Freud's Museum at Berggasse 19. This is an almost mythical address in the history of Western culture of the 20th century."
"I come here at least once a year and make sure I have an hour or two of quality time alone in these rooms."
"To this day, when I'm here — a shiver runs down my spine, but I feel such a deep joy that I am connected to this institution."
We see what he sees. The rooms, the pictures, Freud's books, the window to the street. No explanation. The viewer does not yet know who this man is.
Title: CIVILIZED DISDAIN — A Film About Carlo Strenger.
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ACT 1: THE WAY OUT
The first act tells us who this man is, where he comes from, and what drives him.
We are on a park bench in Berlin's Tiergarten. Autumn, leaves falling. Strenger says:
"The Tiergarten here is a paradise. When you come from Israel, you simply don't know this kind of green."
In between: images of Strenger with his dog in the park. No dialogue, just movement and light.
Then a cut to Amsterdam. Strenger stands on a stage and says:
"I'm worried. And that's not a manner of speaking. It's a state of mind that's been with me for a long time."
And he tells the story of his family. His grandfather was born in Holland, not far from Amsterdam. He married his grandmother, who came from Vienna. They lived in Antwerp. When the Nazis took over Antwerp, they interned his grandfather. His grandmother survived on falsified papers.
"And somehow she survived. And that meant that my mother survived."
Then he quotes Hannah Arendt: "Human beings have the right to have rights."
Back on the park bench in Berlin:
"For me, as a person of Jewish descent, the liberal order is something like a miracle. My family suffered greatly in the Holocaust. For me, the liberal order is not just the abstract Kantian idea of eternal peace, but the idea that human beings have the right to have human rights."
"On the one hand a miracle, and on the other an absolute necessity."
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Then the break. Strenger tells us on the park bench:
"I was born into an Orthodox family and grew up that way."
In puberty, increasing problems. At 17, 18, he finally broke away. For the family, it was tragic.
"I was convinced that I was living a dilemma: my own life, or I live my entire life a false life."
Cut to Vienna, into Freud's rooms. Strenger stands before a bookshelf:
"Freud accompanied me on my way out of Jewish Orthodoxy into modern, open Enlightenment culture. There it is — the study edition I bought as a 16-year-old, in red. From my pocket money."
Back on the park bench. Strenger speaks about Kant — humanity must free itself from self-imposed immaturity. And about Hannah Arendt, who said her basic principle was: thinking for oneself.
"That's what I felt — this is my home, this is where I belong."
"I believe it was an inner drive. If I hadn't followed it, I would have become a person who lived a completely inauthentic life."
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Then comes one of the most beautiful moments of the film. Strenger is asked whether he has a bad conscience about betraying his parents' religion. He answers with a scene from Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose.
In the film, the neurotic Jew sits with a blonde non-Jew who has just shot a mafioso. He asks her: Don't feel guilty? She says: Nah, he was an asshole, he deserved it. And he stares at her in disbelief and says: I can't believe it. I don't even have to do anything, I feel guilty.
Strenger laughs. And then:
"In that regard, I have remained faithful to the Jewish tradition insofar as I always fundamentally feel guilty. Not just towards my parents. By now it's clear to me that it's not solvable. I will live with this until the end of my life."
---
Back to the Berggasse. Strenger on Freud:
"For me, Freud is above all someone who did something truly extraordinary: He used the language of the Enlightenment in such a way that he didn't simply rehash the sometimes rather shallow Enlightenment optimism, but used that same language of Western modernity to explore the irrational elements we have inherited through evolution."
"Even in a secular culture, people need dialogue situations in which someone listens with sympathy and concentration, and gives space."
"I have spent 30,000 hours of my life listening to people in this way, trying to help them find their own voice."
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ACT 2: THE MIRACLE UNDER SIEGE
The second act shows Strenger's diagnosis: What is the liberal order, and why is it failing?
We are now in the candlelight interview. Strenger speaks English. It is his opening statement, the most compact version of his entire body of work:
"Every civilization we know lived with a utopia, whether it's in this world or in the next life. And so did the liberal world that emerged from the 18th century onwards. And it seemed from 1989 onwards, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet block disintegrated, that indeed the values of the liberal world would be accepted without any violence, without any war, by the rest of the world."
"And then it turned out that our utopia was as false and vulnerable as any other one."
"The Islamic world is very far away from moving towards liberal democracy. Putin's Russia has turned into a dictatorship. China — 1.4 billion people."
"And so now we that live in the free world have to live without a utopia. We have to live with the idea that the world will never turn into the harmonious universe that we dreamt of."
"How can we live in a situation like this — without breaking down?"
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Back on the park bench:
"Right now, when the liberal order is coming under enormous attack in Europe and across the entire world — a miracle that we must never take for granted, because it is terribly fragile and can disappear again at any moment."
Strenger describes his intellectual journey: from psychoanalysis through globalization into the political sphere. Ten books. Columns for Haaretz.
"With Adventure Freedom, I feel as if a cycle has been completed."
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Then the insecurity and populism. Park bench:
"Globalization has thrust very many segments of the population into terrible insecurity. They no longer feel at home, they feel that their jobs are being taken away."
"And then comes the terrible moment when populist politicians offer terribly simplified schemes for terribly complex problems."
Cut to Berlin, Dussmann cultural center. Strenger cites the Inglehart research:
"The drive toward right-wing populism is not primarily predicted by financial difficulties, but by the feeling of no longer feeling at home and no longer feeling respected."
The fear of insignificance. Having no respectable place in society.
Park bench: The rise of the AfD. Marine Le Pen at 34 percent. Poland and Hungary already no longer liberal democracies.
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Strenger goes deeper. Park bench:
"Fear of Insignificance — the fear of meaninglessness." The constant competition with global success stories pumped through the media. Building a stable sense of self becomes ever more difficult.
"The liberal world order no longer offers any great meaning. There is an insatiable longing for meaning."
Vienna, in Freud's rooms:
"We humans are the impossible animal that knows of its own finitude. For 150,000 years we have not been able to cope with this."
"Three generations raised in a comfortable relativism of political correctness: You have to be nice to each other, listen to each other, and then everything will be fine."
---
Then political correctness as a weapon. Park bench:
"How is it possible, in this total cultural relativism, that people in the West can still defend their culture and not simply remain stuck in a relativistic pose in which everything is roughly of equal value?"
Vienna — happiness as a consumer good: "Then we can go back to the manufacturer and demand what didn't arrive under warranty conditions."
Amsterdam, in conversation with the journalist:
"The political right realized that political correctness and relativism was a fabulous weapon for them."
"When it comes to empirical questions, political correctness is a catastrophe."
Vienna, Fleischhacker as moderator describes the double threat: On one side Islamist fundamentalism, on the other right-wing populists posing as defenders of freedom.
"And caught in the middle, bourgeois liberalism goes under."
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ACT 3: THE ABC
The third act is the heart of the film. Here Strenger formulates his concept — precise, differentiated, applicable.
Amsterdam, on stage:
"So what can we do about this?"
"When I formulated the idea of civilized disdain, it was supposed to be an instrument. A cultural, intellectual instrument, that was supposed to maintain a certain minimal standard of discourse, of humanity and rationality in our public sphere."
"I want to give a very precise definition of what civilized disdain is."
"A — Civilized disdain is directed towards ideas, beliefs, cultural practices and political systems. Not towards human beings."
"B — Civilized disdain never denies people's basic human rights — including the right to hold beliefs we disdain."
"C — Civilized disdain is to be held only if it is based on factual assessments that correspond to the best available evidence, after very careful fact-checking. There is no such thing as certainty. What we have is the best available evidence."
Pause. Then the sentence that pulls everything together:
"Those who do not have the right to criticize other cultures cannot defend their own."
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And he supports it with concrete examples. From his own background.
The Iranian regime hangs roughly 900 homosexuals a year, in public places, simply for being homosexual. "If I do not have the right to condemn that, then I cannot defend my own belief that people are supposed to have the right to free choice of sexual orientation."
Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy: Women may not hold public office, are considered too lightheaded to give testimony. "I come from an Orthodox Jewish home." He criticizes his own origins — not out of disdain for the people, but for the idea.
"The idea of political correctness is deeply, deeply corrosive. The idea of civilized disdain is to allow us to criticize sharply — not on the basis of ethnicity or skin color, but only on the basis of the content of the ideas."
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Then the crucial differentiation. Who deserves disdain, and who does not? Amsterdam, in conversation with the journalist:
"I don't think you should disdain those who are genuinely humiliated, feel genuinely disenfranchised, and often don't have the knowledge to defend themselves."
"The ones I disdain from the bottom of my heart are those who sense this vulnerability in a large part of the population and manipulate it."
"People who are disadvantaged should be listened to. We should do everything we can to educate them."
And then the example that goes deepest: A grandmother in Sub-Saharan Africa who performs a clitorectomy on her granddaughter because she grew up with only one single conception of femininity. "I can't feel civilized disdain for her. There, disdain is not going to help. It's not morally justified."
Strenger quotes: "Facts are sacred, comment is free." Orwell. The destruction of language is the destruction of democracy. "If we are able to distort language and truth, public discourse goes to the pits. And then there is no such thing as responsibly making up your mind."
Vienna:
"I'm in favor of being much harder in dialogue with them, but that doesn't mean going to exclusion."
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ACT 4: THE TRAINING
The fourth act asks: What is to be done? And it hits limits.
Candlelight interview: Freedom as physical training. "If you don't train yourself, if you don't make the effort — it becomes an empty formula."
"Liberty is not a given."
Berlin, Dussmann. Strenger speaks about his students — the top five percent of Israeli society:
"How little they know at the end about liberal culture — this fascinating history that begins with Greek antiquity, through the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, through an extremely complex process. In the end, freedom means: having the opportunity to get a good job."
Berggasse 19:
"From Spinoza to John Locke, to Kant, John Stuart Mill, to John Rawls. Freedom, human dignity is an inviolable value."
---
Then the defense of elitism. Berlin:
"First of all, I'm not afraid of the word elitism. Nobody has a problem with the fact that we have strict criteria for who can become a surgeon and who cannot."
"Only when it comes to political questions and questions of taste do we say: We must not apply quality criteria. I believe there are quality criteria."
"I am not prepared to give up my quality judgments in political or any other regard. That is why — civilized disdain."
In Amsterdam, a young man from the audience asks: How does civilized disdain work concretely against Wilders? How should a politician respond?
Strenger answers:
"I have no illusions about how powerful emotions and needs for identity are in politics. I'm not selling the idea of the platonic philosopher king who purely rationally governs. But if we're not going to try to stop the derailments that we're beginning to see in our democratic space, we might soon end up in a place that we don't want to be in."
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And then the limits. In Berlin, a woman from the Office of the Federal President asks about the dialectic of the Enlightenment — whether the counter-reaction, Romanticism, the need for identity, doesn't inevitably belong to the process.
Strenger laughs:
"If I already had the solution, I'd be in Stockholm in three years."
Berggasse 19:
"I believe that every generation must rethink these ideas in its own language and in its own context."
"The problem of freedom begins with the realization that we must die."
Park bench:
"I need a regeneration phase. I need a phase in which I can reconsider what I actually want to say and whether I even still have anything to say."
Image: Strenger with his dog. Autumn light. Silence. A man who does not know whether he still has something to say.
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ACT 5: THE CHARGE
Fade to black.
Title card: Carlo Strenger died on — insert date — in Tel Aviv.
Then images from the present. Without commentary. News fragments, demonstrations, parliaments, social media feeds. Silent montage. What he predicted. Brief, not overwhelming.
Then back to Vienna. Berggasse 19. The rooms. Empty. Without him.
And then his voice returns. Not as a ghost, not as sentimentality — but as a charge. Cut together from his strongest sentences, over the empty rooms, over the autumn images, over our present:
"For me, the liberal order is something like a miracle."
"Terribly fragile. And it can disappear again at any moment."
"We humans are the impossible animal that knows of its own finitude."
"Those who do not have the right to criticize other cultures cannot defend their own."
"I don't think you should disdain those who are genuinely humiliated."
"The ones I disdain from the bottom of my heart are those who manipulate it."
A breath.
"Every generation must rethink these ideas in its own language."
"I believe there are quality criteria."
"We must stand on our hind legs today. We must work to make people understand what an enormous cultural treasure we have."
"30,000 hours of my life spent listening to people, trying to help them find their own voice."
Image: Berggasse 19, the view from the window onto the street. Vienna today. People walking by.
"If we're not going to try to stop the derailments that we're beginning to see in our democratic space, we might soon end up in a place that we don't want to be in."
Black.
For our children.
The end.
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That is the film. 80 minutes. Five acts. Seven sources. A man who defended the liberal order, who is no longer alive, and whose words cut sharper today than ever before. No outside voice-over. Only him. His thinking carries the film alone.
. © Bouledor Filmproduktion 2026
IN PRODUCTION 2026