Teppich von Bayeux

The near 1000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry is a masterpiece of European art history enveloped in mystery. Like an early-medieval comic strip, the oldest, almost entirely preserved embroidered work of art tells the story of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 over 68 meters of textile. Yet it's far more than an action-packed work of visual art or a dull history lesson; it's a medieval movie-on-wheels and a work of mythical storytelling.

The Bayeux Tapestry is a fetish to which Napoleon and the Nazis were later to lay claim. Did they hope to discover in it the secret code for the planned conquest of England or even for world domination? The story of its creation and the 'true' message of the Bayeux Tapestry have remained enigmatic to this day.

This first TV documentary on the epic story of the medieval origins of the Bayeux Tapestry, and its near loss during World War II, offers profound, content-and-image-driven insight into the historical and cultural turmoil of modern Europe and the ideology and hubris of Nazi Ancestral Heritage research in Germany from 1933 on. The film, made in international co-production with ARTE, ZDF and France 3, takes viewers to picturesque locations in Normandy, the battlefield of Hastings in southern England, to London and the former Viking metropolis of Hebedy/Haithabu in northern Germany…