The call of Anastasia

安娜斯塔西亚的召唤

The Documentary Podcast

社会与文化

2025-04-24

26 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Members of the new age Anastasia movement espouse strong family values, farm small plots of land and try to educate their own children outside the public school system. Originating in Russia, the quasi-religious group has now spread to Germany, where there are more than a dozen ‘Anastasia’ rural settlements. But are they more than just a harmless fringe group? Reporter Johannes Dell goes back to his native Germany to discover what the group stands for. He speaks to a former Anastasia member and to a German journalist who spent two years tracking the group. A government intelligence officer tells him why three German states have designated the group as extremist.
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单集文稿 ...

  • They wear old-fashioned clothing, embrace traditional family values,

  • grow their own food on small plots of land and promote themselves in music videos like this one.

  • This is Anastasia, a new-age semi-religious movement that has taken hold in Germany.

  • The song, in Russian...

  • tells of a man turning his back on the modern world and finding his destiny in nature,

  • a kind of Slavic fairy tale.

  • But look beyond this eco-friendly exterior and you find something very sinister.

  • So there was one person who basically said that Jewish people don't have a soul and that they return to hell where they came from after they die.

  • One main idea is that the government, The media, science, medicine,

  • that's part of bad power, working in the background, working in the dark.

  • But what or who is Anastasia, sometimes also called Anastasia?

  • Where does the movement come from?

  • Is it something more than a harmless, if unpalatable, fringe sect?

  • I'm Johannes Dell, and for this edition of the documentary from the BBC World Service...

  • I'm back in my native Germany to try to find out.

  • Welcome to the Call of Anastasia.

  • I'm on a suburban train in former West Germany, not that far from where I grew up.

  • I'm on my way to meet a young woman who for three years was part of the Anastasia movement.

  • She's asked us not to say where she now lives.

  • Let's check in the house number.