My first impression is the brightness of the colours, a technicolour, Disneyesque presentation of reality. There is none of the faded lustre of Ashram in Poona (thanks, Parmartha, for posting the link for this), let alone the dark shadows in which take place the shocking denouement – the encounter group – of that documentary. This is a feel-good entertainment, a nostalgic fiction, and this in itself I find interesting.

Sannyas in Germany had a far greater impact on society at large than it ever did in Britain. It was part of the national psychodrama, as the postwar generation sought to extract itself from the nightmares still clouding their parents’ memories. Thanks to the high profile of the Far Out discos in all the major German cities – generally recognized as the best night clubs around – Bhagwan played an active role in the lives of ordinary folks, via the collective intensity of Friday nights. The Far Out offered an exotic taste of release from the humdrum, even for those who baulked at the further reaches of cultish behaviour.

So this movie seems to me to be nostalgia for a time when Germany started to fall back in love with itself. Significantly, the plot concerns the confrontation between inner city bohemians – communards – decamping to deepest conservative, catholic Bavaria. With my less than fluent understanding of German, I could at least appreciate that there is fun to be had in the confrontation between two very different modes of expression. There are tensions to be worked out, but, to be sure, it will all end happily, in an idyllic, Brahmanic, vision of elephants grazing alongside the bayerische cattle. Perhaps also, there is something prelapsarian in this, set in the time before the urgent re-examination of national identity demanded by German reunification.

It’s an evocation of lost innocence, but not the tortured navel gazing of My Life in Orange – even though the plot might invoke similar themes (the absentee parent, too distracted by the glamour of therapy and spiritual development to properly look after the emotional needs of her child).

you are not a friend to others. You are an enemy and others are your enemies. The competitive mind lives in an inimical way, lives in hatred, lives in jealousy; its whole function is out of jealousy. And because of this kind of life man suffers, he remains in misery.