USA, 1916: David Wark Griffith’s "Intolerance" is released. The film tells the story of four separate instances of intolerance in human history (the invasion of Babylon of 538 B.C., the crucifixion of Jesus in Judea, St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572 A.D., and the recent story of a wife trying to save her husband from being hung after a false conviction for murder). These separate stories are told in such a way so that they turn into one epic of perennial intolerance. The individual sequences of each story are broken up and then sown back together so that the viewer follows all the stories’ thematic development simultaneously. As the film progresses, the sequences get shorter and shorter and the drama faster and faster with the result that suspense is built up just as the stories are beginning to become indistinguishable from one another. This story-telling technique of crosscutting inspired a generation of directors. I was also inspired; my project "Das anatomische theater" has a subtitle: "The Simultaneous Games of the 20th Century". The simultaneity of the events is my favourite way of classifying historical events. In that way I can memorise them easier. For example: in 1953 Stalin died, "Playboy" magazine was born, and Ray Bradbury’s "Fahrenheit 451" was published. Now we can imagine a picture (pages of "Playboy", with naked Stalin as a model, in flame) that will keep all three events connected forever in our memory.