The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century 081433377X, 9780814333778

Citation preview

Cinema and television studies

“The Collapse of the Conventional offers a comprehensive introduction to contemporary German cinema and is bound to stimulate new debates about the legacies of New German Cinema and its politics of the aesthetic. A must for everyone interested in German cinema and contemporary culture.” —Sabine Hake, Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin “Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape.” —Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds

Jaimey Fisher is associate professor of German at the University of California–Davis. He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Wayne State University Press, 2007). He is also co-editor (with Peter Uwe Hohendahl) of Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects and (with Barbara Mennel) of Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Brad Prager is associate professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. He is also co-editor (with David Bathrick and Michael D. Richardson) of Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Contributors: Marco Abel, Roger F. Cook, John E. Davidson, Jaimey Fisher, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, Elisabeth Krimmer, Barbara Mennel, Johannes von Moltke, Anna M. Parkinson, Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson, Wilfried Wilms

The Collapse of the Conventional

—Marc Silberman, chair of the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

On cover: Yella (Nina Hoss) suddenly awakens on the shore following a car crash in Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007). (Photo courtesy Christian Shulz) / Cover design by Maya Rhodes

“Fisher and Prager have assembled a significant group of essays by the emerging generation of German cinema experts in the US. The anthology is the first serious attempt to retell the history of the New German Cinema and the ‘consensus’ cinema of the 1900s through the lens of contemporary, post-2000 films in all their diversity. Film scholars, students of the German cinema, and the general reading public will discover here why ‘Deutsches Kino’ is once again in the limelight.”

Fisher and Prager

The Collapse of the Conventional

German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series

Wayne State University Press / Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager

The Collapse of the Conventional

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Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne Wayne State University

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Thomas Leitch University of Delaware

Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Anna McCarthy New York University

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

Lisa Parks University of California–Santa Barbara

Frances Gateward Ursinus College

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The Collapse of the Conventional German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager

wayne state university press detroit

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2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

©

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54321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The collapse of the conventional : German film and its politics at the turn of the twenty-first century / edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager. p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3377-8 EISBN 978-0-8143-3688-5 1. Motion pictures—Germany—History—21st century. 2. Politics in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures—Political aspects—Germany. I. Fisher, Jaimey. II. Prager, Brad, 1971– PN1993.5.G3C645 2010 792.0943’09051 2010005704

Typeset by Maya Rhodes Composed in Minion Pro and Myriad Pro

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Contents

Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager Introduction 1 Jennifer M. Kapczynski Imitation of Life: The Aesthetics of Agfacolor in Recent Historical Cinema 39 Lutz Koepnick Public Viewing: Soccer Patriotism and Post-Cinema 63 Elisabeth Krimmer More War Stories: Stalingrad and Downfall 81 Anna M. Parkinson Neo-feminist Mütterfilm? The Emotional Politics of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse 109 Wilfried Wilms Dresden: The Return of History as Soap 136 Johannes von Moltke Terrains Vagues: Landscapes of Unification in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go 157 Jaimey Fisher German Historical Film as Production Trend: European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others 186 Michael D. Richardson A World of Objects: Consumer Culture in Filmic Reconstructions of the GDR 216 v

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contents

John E. Davidson Playing Hide-and-Seek with Tradition: Games, Aesthetic Form, and Social Critique in German Cinema following the Wende 238 Marco Abel Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold 258 Kristin Kopp Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment: The Berlin School and the Politics of Spatial Aesthetics in the German-Polish Borderlands 285 Roger F. Cook Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei: Edukating the Post-Left Generation 309 Barbara Mennel The Global Elsewhere: Ursula Biemann’s Multimedia Countergeography 333 Brad Prager Glimpses of Freedom: The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema 360 Works Cited 387 Filmography 411 Contributors 419 Index 423

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Introduction

Since the turn of the millennium German cinema has been hailed as having “returned”—it has again captured the world’s attention and is again vital, dynamic, and engaged. Many see in it an aesthetic and substantive quality that had apparently diminished in the two decades before 2000. In light of renewed attention, filmmakers and critics find themselves embroiled in debates about the priorities and goals of that cinema, especially as concerns its politics. One striking example is Ulrich Köhler’s essay “Why I Don’t Make Political Films.” The director of Bungalow (2002) and Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday, 2006) positions himself against the demand that his films have a more political emphasis. He argues that politically motivated screenplays— ones guided by agendas—tend toward monocausal lines of argument that fail to capture the world’s complexity. Without ever referring to him, Köhler’s argument rehearses aspects of Theodor W. Adorno’s position on aesthetic autonomy: Art, insofar as film can be understood as art, is not an appropriate tool through which to express a political aim. Its strength, Köhler argues, lies in its autonomy (ihre Stärke liegt in ihrer Autonomie).1 That Köhler poses the question of political and artistic film at all is, at this particular historical moment, symptomatic of a tectonic shift in German cinema since the late 1990s. Over the past decade German cinema has aroused interest based on its international acclaim and on a widespread acknowledgment of its artistic merits. However, Köhler’s invective also reverberates like an echo. It speaks to old issues, ones raised decades ago by Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fass1

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binder, and others, who addressed the question of whether cinema that concerns itself with “vision”—with the artistic project of scrutinizing the veil through which we see the world—can be politically engaged and the extent to which films about Hitler and Nazis force a truly critical processing of the past.2 Köhler’s position and others like it are taken as provocations to which the essays in this volume respond. German film is in rare form— it is engaged—and much in today’s German cinema recalls the old days, either directly or indirectly. But because the times have changed, any assessment must be critical and account for new contexts. There is surely a link that connects the aesthetics and politics of key contemporary filmmakers such as Oskar Roehler, Fatih Akın, and Christian Petzold with Fassbinder, Kluge, and others, but those last two filmmakers would have been among the first to hold their own cinema up for critical scrutiny. Moreover, the success of big-budgeted German films such as Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005), and Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) likewise calls for critical assessment. When films are so heartily affirmed, they must themselves be affirmative. In these and other respects, German cinema’s old questions are new again. This volume examines the past and explores the links where they arise. To do that, however, one has to look back and take stock of a narrative that generally begins with the Oberhausen Manifesto (signed on February 28, 1962), frequently referred to as the inaugural document of Young German Cinema, the movement that then paved the way for New German Cinema. Though the status of the Oberhausen Manifesto as an “origin” has been rethought and contested, it can still be constructively regarded as a watershed on the way to the politically engaged German filmmaking generally associated with the 1970s.3 The Manifesto is similar to other manifestos insofar as it begins with the proclamation that all that preceded it has definitively come to an end: its authors write of “the collapse of the conventional German film” (Der Zusammenbruch des konventionellen deutschen Films), and it subsequently concludes with a statement reaffirming this demise and asserting that something new has been born (“The old film is dead. We believe in the new one” [Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen]). Many have suggested that the Manifesto helped usher in two decades of German film production rivaled only by the Weimar era as a cinematic heyday. What was most distinctive about this “new” movement, however, lay not in its effacement of the old 2

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(although the old was constantly denigrated in the form of an assault on that which had been oedipally termed “Papa’s Cinema”) but rather in its pronounced turn toward explicit political engagement, a turn that grew in intensity over the course of the years that followed. Although the Oberhausen Manifesto calls for a new language and for taking economic risks—precisely that which bound many of its authors’ films to one another—what garnered for them their international audience was a struggle for political relevance. The era that followed the one defined by that movement and its political engagements has been described as a period in which a “cinema of consensus” prevailed. Politically incisive filmmaking was generally restrained during those years. In his examination of German cinema of the late 1980s and 1990s, Eric Rentschler, who coined that now much cited phrase, notes, “The most prominent directors of the post-Wall era aim to please, which is to say that they consciously solicit a new German consensus. In this sense the cinema they champion is one with a decidedly affirmative calling.”4 This consensus, in which German cinema of that era participated and which it helped to produce, can be understood both as an abreaction to New German Cinema and as a symptom of a period in which the Cold War had drawn to a close and a politics of German national unity—over and above the apparently polarizing Leftist projects of the past—seemed desirable. Although there were certainly some “auteurist” films produced over the course of those years—films by Andreas Dresen, Andreas Kleinert, Christoph Schlingensief, and Monika Treut, are examples—the most widely distributed and most successful films from that period, such as Doris Dörrie’s Männer (Men, 1985) and Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not, 1994), indeed tended toward the kind of affirmative, consensus-oriented themes Rentschler describes.5 Because the Berlin Wall had only recently fallen, there were, for example, relatively few mainstream cinematic depictions of nostalgia for East Germany produced in 1990, when the wounds were still fresh and Germany was still waiting to see whether the recent past would be worked through or simply set aside and forgotten.

The Collapse of the “Consensual” The present volume explores how many of the films made in Germany since the turn of the millennium represent another transformation in cinematic conventions. To be sure, this period has seen the collapse of 3

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consensual filmmaking, which is to say that the consensus building and politically affirmative cinema pervasive in the late 1980s and 1990s is no longer dominant. Despite the wishful thinking of some German producers and audiences, German cinema did not succeed in wholly exorcising difficult political and historical themes. Regardless of their apolitical aims or even, paradoxically, owing to their insistence on aesthetic autonomy, many of today’s German films are discussed in political terms, and today’s debates are the same ones that attended West German film in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, the period defined by the politics of New German Cinema’s most significant works. The issues that were important then are important now as well, and like ghosts they have returned to Germany’s screens. For this reason, the door has been opened for a commensurately political mode of inquiry to return to criticism. Before turning to today’s German cinema it is important to outline clearly what is meant by the older model of politics, because the term returns as a motif in every contribution to this volume. Engaged political filmmaking was traditionally associated with students of the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (The German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, or dffb). The dffb was founded in 1966, and at the time Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, and Helke Sander were all connected with it. The school has a continued relevance: directors discussed in this volume, including Wolfgang Becker and Christian Petzold, studied there. Although work of New German Cinema’s well-known auteurs shares commonalities with the political work of its predecessors, the Young German filmmakers, the former term is a mostly foreign invention resulting from the high-profile distribution of the feature films of Fassbinder, Wenders, and Werner Herzog. Young German Cinema was explicitly against the war in Vietnam and was mostly Marxist, and its representatives wrote essays such as “Filmkritik und Klassenkampf ” (“Film Critique and Class Struggle”).6 They concerned themselves with political agitation and the so-called consciousness industry. New German Cinema certainly retained the political cachet of that earlier group, even though the “political” label does not fully suit its diverse representatives. There is, of course, no film that does not have politics, just as there is no entertainment that does not collude with ideology. Even Ulrich Köhler’s own Bungalow, which begins with a soldier abandoning his unit, is in many respects a political film. It would be outlandish to contend that New German Cinema has a politics while Hollywood films, Heimat 4

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films, and even Nazi films do not, but to state the point more specifically: many prominent New German Cinema filmmakers deliberately engaged with a particular and explicitly stated Leftist politics. The collectively made film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978) is a key part of that legacy and is an example of the political side of New German Cinema that serves as a touchstone for this volume. That film presented a series of sympathetic responses to the activities of the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, or RAF), specifically to the events of October 1977 when the Faction’s charismatic leaders Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their prison cells in Stammheim. Filmmakers such as Alexander Kluge, Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, and Katja Rupé alongside others each made contributions. In speaking of Germany in Autumn, it becomes quickly evident that politically engaged German filmmaking of the 1970s was defined by aesthetic and formal variation as well as a willingness to take up challenges to hegemonic political ideologies. This is to say little of the films of the late 1960s that depicted the student movement, films that worked from documentary footage and from which Germany in Autumn inherits much. However, the task at hand—and the aim of the present volume—is to view this development more broadly and, in considering the legacy of this type of filmmaking, to allow New German Cinema’s more aesthetic and praxis-oriented “politics” to inform our understanding of today’s German cinema. Holding contemporary German film up in the light of the past and asking how it takes on older burdens or closes the gap opened by the ostensibly less political modes of popular filmmaking that dominated throughout the 1990s is doubtless symptomatic of our own nostalgia for the political cinema of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Eric Rentschler also avows his interest in making that past present, and although nostalgia may be a trap—we by no means intend to adopt a wholly uncritical stance toward the Autorenkino of the New German Cinema—it may also be the impetus and motor for inquiry.7 In navigating this terrain and raising these questions, we may identify at least three key political characteristics of the New German Cinema, ones that share common ground and connections with German filmmaking today8: First, many directors associated with West Germany’s Young German and New German Cinemas harbored formal and/ or stylistic ambitions. Films such as Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966), Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder than Death, 1969), and 5

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Warum läuft Herr R. Amok? (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? 1970) deliberately do not resemble or sound like the films that preceded them. In defining themselves aesthetically against what came before, many of these auteurs embraced low production values and relied on a vérité style. Despite the well-documented facts, for instance, that Wenders learned from Nicholas Ray and that Fassbinder learned from Douglas Sirk, one is not likely to mistake the work of these German students for that of their Hollywood forebears. The “collapse” that was introduced by the Oberhauseners—by Fassbinder, Kluge, Reitz, and others—was, however, not purely formal. A second key element that differentiated those films from the “conventional” ones against which they meant to define themselves—the so-called Sissi films, the Heimat films directed by Hans Deppe, and, somewhat later, the semipornographic Schoolgirl Report films—concerned their critical and demystifying engagement with the past, especially with Nazism and World War II. Their cinema evinces an increasingly explicit engagement with the problem of “working out” or “working through” the past. As has often been pointed out, the films that ultimately garnered most of the international acclaim and that were taken to epitomize New German Cinema’s positions were Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979) and Volker Schlöndorff ’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979), both of which dealt in provocative ways with the German past. There are also provocations of this sort in the postwar “rubble film,” yet Fassbinder’s positions tend to converge more closely with the captious ones of critics such as Adorno or social psychologists such as Alexander and Magarethe Mitscherlich. Fassbinder had a gift for pointing an accusatory finger at contemporary Germany. In a conversation with his mother that he filmed as part of his contribution to Germany in Autumn, for example, he shows that she, like many members of her generation, may indeed be made more comfortable by the prospect of living in an autocratic society. In this way Fassbinder meant to prove to audiences that the story of the Third Reich had yet to be concluded. Finally, and perhaps most important, this engagement with the past had distinctly Leftist political valences insofar as the most effective engagements with the problems of the past were typified by those expressed in Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, which suggested that Germans of the late 1970s were not free from the danger of falling back into fascism. Fassbinder’s film, which is set just after the war, closes with a series of images of German chancellors from Adenauer to Helmut 6

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Schmidt—with the notable exception of Willy Brandt—a sequence that suggests that the legacy of fascism still threatens German democracy.9 Closely related to these concerns about a recurrence of fascism, issues taken up by filmmakers of New German Cinema related both to German terror and to the future of a divided Germany. They repeatedly raised questions concerning whether East Germany was a viable source of critique for the Federal Republic and, as a corollary question, whether violence could serve as an appropriate means to make that critique known. The question was evoked in Germany in Autumn (which was directed by a host of German filmmakers, including Fassbinder, Kluge, Reitz, and Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus) as well as in Fassbinder’s Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation, 1979) and even in Klaus Lemke’s made-fortelevision film Brandstifter (Arsonist, 1969), in which a student (played by Margarethe von Trotta) plants a bomb in a coffeehouse to protest the Vietnam War. Filmmakers wrestled with the connections between violence and political critique from a position that tried to comprehend the sources of the criticism rather than from the conventional position that German terror was a priori unacceptable. The international attention garnered by such films thus stemmed both from formal innovations and from a willingness on the part of writers and directors to confront audiences with serious questions about the past, about West German reconstruction, and about German terrorism, among other matters. In being confrontational, however, many of these filmmakers set aside the question of box office revenue, and (as the story subsequently came to be told) their perceived indifference to the public produced a backlash in the late 1980s and 1990s against dry, formal stylization and a call to replace it with a cinema that was every bit as entertaining as that of Hollywood and every bit as consumer friendly as that of Steven Spielberg. This historical narrative, a story of a tide that turned and has now turned again (or re-turned), is not one of simple beginnings and endings, but must instead be viewed with respect to the many continuities, elaborations, and renewed, or rather recurring, engagements. The aim of the present volume is to offer a broad, comprehensive portrait of the linkages and to explore the connections with German cinema’s past, both its implicit and explicit ones, to illuminate what aspects of this legacy continue and what precisely about this newer German cinema can be regarded as truly new.

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The Third Generation Most of the international interest accorded contemporary German film has arisen because of its high-profile productions, such as The Lives of Others, Downfall, and Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), works that generally look to the German past, are successful at the box office, and attract the attention of the Academy Awards. At the same time, other postmillennial German filmmakers have been labeled a “Third Wave” of German cinema, following Weimar and New German Cinema. This new movement has been described by Sight and Sound, who averred, with reference to the “dogma” films, that Germany is on the verge of becoming the new Denmark.10 Although such declarations are problematic insofar as labels of this sort diminish, for example, early postwar films (the “rubble films”) not to mention all East German film history, both of which are historically important and certainly entitled to be considered “waves,” a pendulum of sorts has in this respect swung and something new has now emerged as an answer to the cinema of consensus. Filmmakers such as Thomas Arslan, Christoph Hochhäusler, Christian Petzold, and Valeska Grisebach have all been directly or indirectly associated with the so-called Berlin School (analyzed in detail in chapters by Marco Abel and Kristin Kopp in the present volume). The term “Berlin School” has been used before to refer to the dffb, although there is presently enthusiasm for considering this group of filmmakers part of a broader movement.11 Is it true then that, as Marco Abel declares (citing Werner Herzog), there is “legitimate film culture” in Germany again?12 Both of the terms, “legitimate” and “film culture,” merit scrutiny. Legitimacy may refer to the cachet to which literature is, especially in Germany, traditionally entitled, and Herzog perhaps had this in mind when he congratulated himself and his contemporaries for having received Lotte Eisner’s approbation. He compares receiving approval from the great film historian to receiving the authority from the Pope to reign as emperor.13 Herzog further explained to the New York Times that he and other young German filmmakers were “the exponents of ‘legitimate’ German culture—‘in the sense that Kleist, Büchner, and Kafka are legitimate.’  ”14 This type of “legitimacy” came not only from Eisner but also from receiving international recognition at the Cannes Film Festival. Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974) was awarded a prize in 1974; Wenders’s Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road, 1976) won one in 1976; and Herzog’s Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar 8

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Hauser, 1974) was honored with the Grand Jury Prize in 1975. They at that time acquired a degree of legitimacy just as Fatih Akın, whose 2007 Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven), which won the prize at Cannes for best screenplay, was also entitled to international “legitimacy.” Herzog thus means to refer to culture as legitimate in the way that great literature is legitimate, yet there are problems associated with this legitimacy insofar as there is a troublesome inheritance connected with German culture itself: artists do not always aspire to have the authorization of the German state when it comes to the production of culture.15 Where Young German Cinema and New German Cinema are concerned, the concept of “film culture” may be said to refer to the culture around film, where film is discussed and becomes a catalytic element in the public sphere. To take one example, Young German Cinema lobbied for and helped achieve the establishment of schools and academies for film production: according to Thomas Elsaessser, “One consequence of the Oberhausen initiative was to draw attention to the problem of training and education.”16 Starting in 1962, when Kluge, Reitz, and Detten Schleiermacher established the Institut für Filmgestaltung in Ulm— West Germany’s first film school—a wave not of films but of film schools emerged. In fairly short order, the abovementioned Berlin dffb (1966) and the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (1967) followed. Elsaesser also outlines how, besides these film schools, there was the founding of archives, including the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek as well as of a Berlin public cinémathèque (the Arsenal Kino). Along with these institutional advances was the emergence, at various (local, regional, and federal) levels, of critical venues for writings about cinema. Taken together, these developments helped create a new kind of public sphere, including a savvier and more engaged audience for the cinema. Elsaesser concludes that “the legacy of Oberhausen was thus to set in motion the development of a film culture, whose diverse manifestation and activities only incidentally required a particular kind of product as its material support.”17 Film schools are again playing a part in the development and maintenance of German “film culture.” Contemporary filmmakers who have been associated with the dffb include Thomas Arslan and Christian Petzold, the latter of whom even co-wrote Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000) and Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005), his most widely known films, with Farocki, who was his former professor at the dffb. Moreover, the journal Revolver was founded by Christoph Hochhäusler and Benjamin Hei9

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senberg, both of whom trained at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München.18 Seen in terms of this skepticism about “legitimacy” but with an openness to a broader based notion of “culture,” there is far more to post–turn-of-the-century film production than art house fare. Before declaring any kind of watershed moment, a survey of the diverse body of work is called for. Contemporary German film studies has to contend with the fact that Germany has produced major international successes one after the other, films that have garnered attention and awards for being sweeping historical melodramas, rather than for being obscure and ostensibly avant-garde films. Despite the fact that many of these have sought to excavate the German past, these films have little formal connection to the work of Fassbinder, let alone that of Kluge or Wenders. To give a few examples, such films include the aforementioned Nowhere in Africa, about a German—and partly Jewish-German—family who evades the Third Reich by moving to Africa; Downfall, which notoriously broke taboos by being a somewhat sympathetic representation of Hitler’s final hours in the Führerbunker (analyzed in this volume by Elisabeth Krimmer); and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, which presented the events leading to the execution of members of the White Rose. This last film highlights its protagonist’s Christian sources of inspiration, and its melodramatic narrative, akin to Schlöndorff ’s Der neunte Tag (The Ninth Day, 2004), dwells on those whose conscience gave them the strength to resist the Nazis’ pressure and tactics. There are, therefore, many tendencies in today’s German cinema, and even attentively studying so-called historical films at one end of a spectrum and the Berlin School at the other still excludes the films of major new filmmakers such as Dani Levy and Tom Tykwer, whose work falls somewhere between the worlds of the art house and the Academy Awards. Tendencies vary, yet the films’ politics—their orientation toward Germany’s divided past, their working out of wartime guilt, and their willingness to challenge audiences with formal innovation—serve as a key basis for comparison and are the starting point for each of the essays in this volume. As one example, Petzold’s Yella (2007; explored in this volume by Abel) contrasts sharply with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, which was a huge international success (one that is analyzed here by Jaimey Fisher).19 Whereas the latter film looks back and cathartically rejects the age of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and its Stasi, Yella—a film that takes place in the present 10

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and deals with a working woman’s move from the former East to Hannover—laments the oppressive anomie that accompanies contemporary Western (German) business practices. Yella by no means participates in the Ostalgie that typifies Wolfgang Becker’s Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003), yet Petzold’s film is careful to present the contemporary West as a spiritual wasteland, hardly a positive alternative to the past. Even though the character Rita in Volker Schlöndorff ’s Die Stille nach dem Schuß (The Legend of Rita, 2000) tells us, speaking to her GDR colleagues at the moment the Wall comes down, “You have no idea what you’re letting in here,” it is Petzold’s Yella that takes up Rita’s warning. That later film can be understood as a depiction of the dull and deadening aspects of life in postreunification Germany. These prevailing tendencies are not two sides of a coin but rather adjacent peaks on the same topographical surface, contiguous but distinct. Some suggest that contemporary German film productivity be divided into productions either from Berlin or from Munich, where one group can be said to observe and narrate Germany’s history, while the other casts a critical eye on Germany’s present.20 Though Constantin Film is located in Munich and smaller production companies such as 23/5 Filmproduktion—not to mention the dffb—are housed in Berlin, this geographical shoe hardly fits. Companies such as ZDF and Bavaria Film, for example, have funded both sorts of work. Moreover, how would one address the fact that Hochhäusler and Heisenberg studied in the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München and that Hochhäusler’s work bears close formal resemblance to that of Petzold, Grisebach, and others? It is surely best to refrain from viewing postmillennial German filmmaking as a dichotomy between historical and ideological work, coming in part out of Munich, and critical new wave filmmaking, coming in part out of Berlin. This volume does not aspire to separate out the two (or three or four) major tendencies but rather to shine the same critical light on all contemporary German film. It might be convenient to divide the volume’s readings into bad ideological films and good cultural-critical films (ones that aspire to the condition of art), yet this dichotomy is as unsatisfying as it is false, much like the familiar but now outdated distinction between high and low culture. Such superficially differentiating approaches hardly tell the whole, or even a convincing, story. Most films have both and simultaneously affirmative and critical tendencies and resolve contradictions just as they enact them. Film producer Günter 11

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Rohrbach makes a related point in his invective against German film critics, who, he suggests, valorize art house films above works such as Tom Tykwer’s Das Parfum—Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 2006), which he considers a well-crafted film intended for mass audiences. Tykwer’s films are frequently the flashpoint for such debates, and Rohrbach, who sees them straddling and even transcending the spaces of the commercial and art house cinemas, thinks that their search for a large audience should in no way disqualify them from critical accolades.21 We would underscore—perhaps less stridently than Rohrbach but emphatically nonetheless—that high versus low art, especially within the context of cinema, suggests a false dichotomy, not least because all films, whether popular and commercially viable or headed directly for the art house (and possibly even for the gallery space) have a politics, and high and low culture—however they might be defined— must be approached with the same analytic acumen. In light of our deliberate departure from the binary distinctions that define good versus bad, high versus low, and art versus commercial, the essays in this volume examine films of the “Berlin School,” German historical films that attempt to depict the past “as it really was,” and even a made-for-television miniseries such as Dresden (2006). To pursue yet another example, the production company X-Filme, which originated in 1994, was founded by Tykwer and Stefan Arndt, who later brought in Dani Levy and Wolfgang Becker. This company has been cast by its founders as a successor to the production company Filmverlag der Autoren, started by Wenders, Laurens Straub, and others in 1971, and has thus been interpreted as part of a movement toward overall cinematic or auteurist freedom from the studio system.22 But work is not politically engaged simply because it is financially independent. No clear political agenda emerges from either Tykwer’s or Levy’s films, to say nothing of Good-Bye, Lenin!, which, despite its metonymic connection to the concept of Ostalgie, also comfortably closed the history of the GDR, wished it well, and bid it a fond adieu.23 Following these lines of comparison (that X-Filme and the Filmverlag der Autoren share something in common), conflicts and connections emerge when the politics of filmmakers such as Levy, Tykwer, and Becker are viewed alongside those of von Trotta, Fassbinder, and Kluge. Levy is clearly a provocateur, as made evident by Mein Führer—Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, 2007), yet the role of provocateur has to be differentiated from that of politically 12

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engaged filmmaker.24 Moreover, that which has distinguished Tykwer’s work has less to do with any explicitly understood political position than it does with his style—his highly saturated colors, his use of slow motion, and his preference, in some cases, for MTV-style editing.25 For these reasons we intend for the category of politics, understood in terms of German cinema’s recent past, to serve as an optic, one that allows the new mapping of this vital and contested terrain.

(Trans-)National German Cinema Another important dimension of New German Cinema was its struggle to be recognized internationally and its desire to avoid being seen as parochial or provincial.26 This was perhaps another abreaction to Heimat films, from both before and after the war, which by the 1970s seemed distressingly limited in their subject matter. Two of the three most famous filmmakers of the New German Cinema, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, went deliberately and repeatedly beyond German borders, although in remarkably different ways. Whereas Herzog (mimetically, some would say) took up the grim history of European colonialism, Wenders explored the expansion and migration of cinema images around the globe, including the United States—as in Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1974), Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1977), and Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things, 1982)—and Japan—as in Lightning over Water (1980) and Tokyo-Ga (1985). This was a question not only of depicting the global exchange of images (Wenders’s particular fascination) but also of helping German film gain an international reception and reputation by way of dealing with non-German issues. The very possibility or sustainability of a “national” cinema has, of course, become troubled in recent academic inquiry. Even if achieving an internationally recognized national cinema was a goal of German filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s, it is now important to explore whether having a privileged place among national cinemas is something desirable or even possible. As someone concerned with whether the category of the national is maintained in such discussions, Jennifer M. Kapczynski notes that the German cinematic landscape is presently dominated by two types of films—nostalgic works of displacement and postmodern narratives of dislocation—and that “these groups of films, despite their surface differences, represent a response to a common concern: 13

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the ever-increasing pressures of globalization in a country that, perhaps more than any other, has had cause to rethink the category of the national.”27 In The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present, a volume that pushes German cinema studies beyond the national framework, the editors historicize the once paramount emphasis on narratives of national production. As Stephan Schindler and Lutz Koepnick recount, this sort of cinema has come under “revision” because of the “reconsideration of the category of national cinema.”28 An example of such reconsideration in German studies is Randall Halle’s German Film after Germany, a study of transnationalism that considers the means of production as well as the structures responsible for funding contemporary German films and that agrees that changes in German film production indeed challenge conventional understandings of national cinema. Yet Halle makes a distinction—one that we are here appropriating—between the transnational and the postnational. He acknowledges that globalization has unleashed renewed debate on the concept of national cinema and that “within the context of this debate, some critics, maintaining what could be described as a “postnationalist” position, have argued forcefully against the label of national cinema altogether.” However, he is concerned that such a position “concedes too much” insofar as “transnationalism is not automatically postnationalism.”29 Halle’s goal is to properly assess the role of transnationalism in contemporary German cinema, and he, for this reason, proposes retaining the concept of national cinema as a corollary to a discourse of transnationalism. He then adds the cautionary remark that we should avoid “romantic nationalist essentialism” and focus instead on the interrelated structures that mediate national filmmaking practices.30 All this debate on the globalized, transnational, and even postnational aspects of German cinema unquestionably offers an important corrective to prior trajectories of German film studies: as many of these scholars observe, films made in Germany have long been transnationally oriented, something that goes too frequently unobserved. Yet, as one surveys the topographies of German cinema since 2000, one cannot help but wonder if reports of the death of the national have been somewhat exaggerated: the entire designation “Germany’s new wave,” to take one example, is predicated on the influence of and relationship to the history of French cinema. Many of today’s younger, avant-garde filmmakers obtain not only influence but also “legitimacy” from their association with 14

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discourses that emerged in connection with that earlier national tradition. More evident, however, is that if the phenomenal success of GoodBye, Lenin!, Downfall, and The Lives of Others—not to mention films of the late 1990s such as Aimée & Jaguar (1998) and Nowhere in Africa— demonstrates anything, it is that many of Germany’s most acclaimed films, both at home and abroad, are still engaged with national, indeed, singularly national, discourses. If one understands nations discursively, these films manifest and above all address the “German nation” in the sense explained by Philip Rosen: though there is not some super, single national subject producing films, there are, to greater and lesser degrees, the discourses of nation in and around its cultural products, which in turn help constitute the nation.31 An example of the continued interest among “prominent” filmmakers in addressing and refiguring Germany is the recent Deutschland 09—13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation (Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation, 2009), which consists of thirteen short contributions from many of Germany’s best known and most critically acclaimed directors, including Fatih Akın, Wolfgang Becker, Angela Schanelec, Tom Tykwer, and Hans Weingartner.32 Certainly, the language(s) of a film are a central aspect of this discussion, not only because language is, of course, central to discourse, but also because the languages spoken in a film serve as a gesture of recognition from the filmmakers toward their addressees, their presumed audiences. Finally, with some of the greatest critical successes of recent years (for example, Die Unberührbare [No Place to Go, 2000], written about here by Johannes von Moltke, and other recent films that concern themselves with the restrictiveness of Germany’s borders, such as Milchwald [This Very Moment, 2004] and Fremde Haut [Unveiled, 2005]), national discourses abide even as the nation’s boundaries are overrun; in fact it is precisely that issue that moves to the foreground of these films. Even in the case of Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2003)—taken up at greater length below—one clearly has to speak not only of global engagements and cosmopolitan orientations but also of the persistence of national discourse and address in a film that features an ethnic Turkish protagonist who prefers to speak German. Many films from Germany still manifest specific national and historical discourses that recur, even if inflected variably, with surprising consistency. In light of such a discursive constitution of the nation and the nation in films—rather than a totalizing “national cinema”—we 15

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would rather speak of the end of the homogeneously or reductively national, while emphasizing that the forms of both national and sub- or transnational discursive engagements remain to be ferreted out in accord with individual films. Besides the German language, such national and historical discourses in the framework of cinema might include the world wars, the economic miracle, and the RAF, in addition to—for filmmakers from Fassbinder to Akın and Petzold—the symbolic functions of places like Babelsberg, Berlin, and Hamburg. Many of Germany’s best known films are associated via such discourses with Germany the nation, itself a discursive construct whose unity and stability has long been dynamic and unfolding. In the present volume, analysis of the politics of the films in question underscores the hybrid and even dialectically national as well as transnational political character of those films.

Closing the Gap: Roehler and Akın Engaging with the question of national film traditions raises another important question about the return of the past in today’s German cinema, namely, the issue of cinematic citation and precisely how these films return to earlier ones. Does Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 1998), the hit that may have even inaugurated this new season of German film, deliberately pick up on motifs from Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987) and Schlöndorff ’s The Tin Drum?33 The appropriation—the use of a particular legacy—is in some cases merely inadvertent, but in others it is conscious and intentional. A paradigmatic case of that latter strain is that of Herzog’s 1979 remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). The story of its production and why he chose that film are well known: Herzog meant to close the gap, or wound, that had opened up between Weimar cinema and emerging New German Cinema to undo some of the damage that the war generation “fathers” had done to the evolution of German cinema. However many Herzogian touches there are to the film, it is meant as a remake and even an homage more than as a confrontation with or rejection of Murnau’s style. Although there are differences—new elements are emphasized, directions that Murnau had left underexplored—Herzog aimed to present that gap as closed. It was a self-conscious and explicit mode of citation. This volume now explores how recent German filmmaking also attempts to close that gap and cross a bridge to the past. Germany 09, for example, clearly and deliberately attempts to dialogue with New 16

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German Cinema, or at least to use the image of New German Cinema to engage contemporary audiences. The inspiration for this collectively made film is Germany in Autumn: using discourse and language that sounds familiar to New German Cinema, Tykwer describes the film not as a manifesto but rather as “a political-poetic-personal reflection of the complex contemporary state of the nation.”34 Although the film does not pack the same punch as its predecessor, the desire to reproduce and rework Germany in Autumn underscores the filmmakers’ drive to return to politically charged discourse. These linkages to the past, however, need to be elaborated so that they avoid leveling key differences—so that they take account of the influences of the past as well as the specificities of the present. It is important to examine these bridges between the old and the new not only because the filmmakers in question authorize such comparisons through inscribing themselves into this history—because Roehler, for example, makes it clear that he has been influenced by Fassbinder35—but also because looking at filmmakers like Roehler and Akın without taking account of the German cinematic heritage would deny much that is deliberate and explicit in their work. The long shadow cast by Fassbinder forms the basis for an exemplary case study. Fassbinder’s work was referred to as both the calling card and the guilty conscience of New German Cinema.36 Of his oeuvre, Eric Rentschler writes, “Taken as a body, his films serve as a psychological history of the Federal Republic from Adenauer to Schmidt. Hardly one to use the past as a mere trapping for nostalgic evocation, Fassbinder envisioned his life’s work as eventually leading to a sweeping chronicle depicting the German middle class from 1848 to the present.”37 In engaging with the legacy of Fassbinder, one is well served by turning to the films of Oskar Roehler. Roehler’s Agnes und seine Brüder (Agnes and His Brothers, 2004) deliberately invokes and reworks Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons, 1978). Some might even describe the latter as a remake of Fassbinder’s film, though the term “remake” would reductively mislead. Roehler reflects upon and transforms rather than remakes Fassbinder. The two films are linked mainly through the presence of a transsexual protagonist, though other evocations of Fassbinder’s film are at times self-conscious and explicit. The earlier film was made in the same year as Germany in Autumn, and it is a film that Fassbinder generated more independently than many of his other works in that he did the writing and even much of the ed17

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iting on his own. In a Year with 13 Moons emerges from a period of personal tragedy for Fassbinder, and all readings of the film point to the fact that it was made shortly after the suicide of his partner, Armin Meier. That tragedy is thus often read into the suicide that concludes his film, which tells the story of a man named Erwin Weisshaupt, who has become a woman named Elvira because she once wanted to please her lover, Anton Saitz. Saitz, who is apparently now wealthy and powerful, was a survivor of German concentration camps (he may have been a perpetrator, though it is never explained in precisely what capacity), and he appears to have moved somewhat opportunistically from the camps into the brothel business, then moved to the meat packing business, and finally ascended to become a captain of industry. The past is ever present in that the code word for admission to visit Saitz (who is always surrounded by bodyguards) is “Bergen-Belsen.” The “a” in his last name, viewers are also informed, “stands for Auschwitz.” Fassbinder’s transgender protagonist, who presently feels herself to be comfortably neither a man nor a woman, wanders the face of an irrational postwar world, one that evokes Kafka’s Castle (a novel that Elvira’s daughter is seen reading) and that expresses itself in the apparent dreamworld in which the film’s action transpires. Throughout the work Fassbinder enacts social critique while employing the tropes of melodrama. By not shying away from more difficult and sometimes graphic motifs, both his film and Roehler’s pull in a direction opposite to that of melodrama, at once embracing and rejecting the genre. Evidently Fassbinder wants viewers to be disquieted by their own emotional response. As Christian Braad Thomsen points out, “In the melodrama we would be invited to share in Elvira’s fate, to weep with her, to invest our emotions in a pity, which, for the duration of the film, is unlimited and provokes a purifying flood of tears, so that we would leave the cinema with an uplifting feeling. Fassbinder, on the other hand, makes us experience our frustration, our impotence; he doesn’t give us a chance to feel ennobling sympathy because he knows that everyday life would not allow us that if we met Elvira outside the cinema. So why should we pretend?”38 It is perhaps for this reason that Fassbinder elected to make a film that was unusually graphic; it is tough to watch, especially an early scene in which we hear portions of Goethe’s play Tasso (1790) declaimed while we see cattle killed and skinned at a slaughterhouse. Of this sequence, Thomsen adds, “The pictures of the slaughtered beasts are just as terrible as the story of Elvira’s slaughtered 18

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soul, but these combinations of image and sound do not complement one another and amplify the horror. Rather Fassbinder achieves the opposite: he distracts the viewer’s attention. . . . [W]e lean back with something of a bad conscience because we can give neither the image nor the soundtrack our full attention.”39 Another form of distraction arises from Fassbinder’s explicit engagement with sexual dissatisfaction and its deployment as a metaphor for wider social disintegration, something also typical of Roehler, who likewise does not shy away from challenging scenes. We watch Elvira masturbate at home as we also see Hans-Jörg, a protagonist in Roehler’s film, masturbate (on several occasions). Even during a quiet moment of In a Year with 13 Moons, a previously unknown character enters the scene with the sole purpose of hanging himself. Roehler’s film is not quite as dark as Fassbinder’s, although his previous film No Place to Go might be. And that film too ends with a suicide. Although there is humor in Agnes and His Brothers, it is less comic than it is disquieting, and it thus strikes notes similar to those found in Fassbinder’s film. It, too, may defamiliarize, if not altogether alienate, audiences from conventional melodrama. Agnes and His Brothers begins with Agnes Tschirner (formerly Martin Tschirner) sharing the story of her childhood, explaining how she did not know who her mother was. She is being filmed, and this opening seems to pick up precisely where In a Year with 13 Moons left off, with its tape recording of an interview with Elvira. On the tape, Elvira describes her own unhappiness, and this recording accompanies the discovery of her body. There is, in Roehler’s film, however, much more than merely Agnes. Hans-Jörg, one of her brothers, works in a library and is both sexually frustrated and sex obsessed: his voyeurism ultimately costs him his job. Agnes’s other brother is Werner, a family man and apparently successful Green Party politician, who, it is suggested, may become the next minister of the environment. Werner seems happy, yet we quickly discover that he is grossly alienated from his wife, Signe, and his son. Roehler’s various pieces come together when the three siblings go visit their father (a man who likely would have been of Fassbinder’s own generation). It is implied that there may have been some sexual abuse, but the truth of the family’s history is never entirely settled. The first of Roehler’s three main narrative threads, that of Agnes, overtly evokes Fassbinder. The scenes between Agnes and her lover Rudi unambiguously recall those between Elvira and her partner Christoph. 19

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Agnes Tschirner (Martin Weiß) stands in a doorframe in Oskar Roehler’s Agnes and His Brothers (2004). The shot resembles one from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons (1978).

They serve as an almost direct quotation: in both cases, the apparently straight lovers are dressed similarly, and the scenes in which Elvira and Agnes are each rejected are shot through multiple doorframes—one of Fassbinder’s well-known auteurist touches. In both Roehler’s and Fassbinder’s films, when the protagonist is depressed, they go to visit the children that they fathered in their earlier incarnation. Although Roehler takes numerous stylistic, narrative, and thematic elements from Fassbinder, his film is neither an attempt to reconstruct an earlier film (as is Herzog’s Nosferatu) nor an outright rejection. As a politically provocative filmmaker taking cues from Fassbinder, Roehler expresses his political standpoint by way of the melodrama, following in Fassbinder’s generic footsteps. Ultimately, by citing Fassbinder and his In a Year with 13 Moons, Roehler is doubtlessly reproducing, but also commenting on, the themes, style, and politics of his New German Cinema forebears. Roehler’s critical commentary on Fassbinder becomes clear in the film’s most noteworthy stylistic choice, that which is indicated by its title, namely, the parallel and intercut narrative threads of Agnes and her two brothers. If the first plot line, that of Agnes, invokes and almost faithfully observes Fassbinder, the other two offer deliberate reflection on Agnes and the wider constellation of New German Cinema that she comes to signify. In this engagement with New German Cinema in the new millennium, Hans-Jörg’s trajectory also invokes, via citation, another of the most prominent New German Cinema auteurs, namely, Wim Wenders, 20

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and his Wings of Desire, a film that appeared subsequent to the heyday of New German Cinema but one that is marked by tendencies inherited from that older movement. Although Roehler’s film is set in Cologne, Hans-Jörg’s place of work is very conspicuously the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, which serves as such a central and memorable location in Wings of Desire. In Wenders’s film, the angel Damiel (played by Bruno Ganz) spends, like many other angels, copious time hovering over and listening to the interior monologues of the many and diverse readers in the library built next to the (still, in 1987) vacant Potsdamer Platz with all its inevitable historical associations. Although Agnes and His Brothers is primarily a reworking of Fassbinder’s film, it picks up here on Wenders’s film as well, and in this respect “desire” is indeed the operative term, even though the desire Roehler depicts is of a decidedly different sort: unlike Damiel, who mused and posed melancholically at the internal voices of the library patrons, HansJörg’s desire is focused entirely on the young women in the stacks—and his interest in them is overtly lustful. Set against a melancholic engagement with Germany’s historical past, Wings of Desire sentimentally traces Damiel’s fall into romantic love. His amorous interest in Marion remains tastefully, if unconvincingly, restrained, especially in light of Damiel’s “angelic” ability to see and visit anyone in their most private moments and spaces. Set in the same location of the Staatsbibliothek, Hans-Jörg’s interest is manifested by following women into the bathroom, surreptitiously watching them, and then masturbating. Although Hans-Jörg is eventually fired for this behavior—disapproval of their desires concludes both his and Damiel’s time in the library—Roehler provides his character with a partly, though improbably, happy ending: sublimating his sex obsession to paying work, Hans-Jörg takes a position acting in a sex film and meets the loving porn star of his dreams. Roehler’s crass fairy-tale resolution to Hans-Jörg’s sex obsession—coupled, one must add, with an ill-conceived act of patricide—parodies the kind of fairy-tale romantic ending Wenders offers in Wings of Desire. The third narrative line with which the film concludes, that of Werner’s loveless, bourgeois marriage to Signe (played by Katja Riemann, one of the biggest stars of the 1990s cinema of consensus), is deliberately staged as the most distant from the world associated with New German Cinema. It seems to indicate, like Agnes’s death and the trajectory of Hans-Jörg’s desires, what has become of a bygone era of political engagement. At one distraught moment, Werner seems to flirt with a gratifying 21

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resolution straight out of Fassbinder’s early films: much like Fassbinder’s Herr R., who runs amok, Werner desires to play the part of the bourgeois paterfamilias but fantasizes about killing his annoying family in a gruesome fashion. In the reality of the new millennium, however, his merely imagined multiple murders are portrayed as yet another symptom of the protagonist’s overall malaise, disappointment, and depression. The film does not seek to understand the causes of violence but instead to portray the unhappiness that accompanies Werner’s lack of fulfillment and the corrosions occasioned by his conformity. These three narrative threads overlap but also unfold in a teleological trajectory moving from Agnes’s Fassbinder, through Hans-Jörg’s Wenders, and toward Werner, who stands less for any film-historical tendency than for the compromised and humbled political dreams of the 1968 generation, including an implied association with well-known Green politicians such as Joschka Fischer, who once took to the streets in the name of revolution alongside the group “Proletarian Union for Terror and Destruction” (Proletarische Union für Terror und Zerstörung) and who was himself photographed in 1973 beating a policeman. Fischer later renounced violence and went on to become Germany’s foreign minister. In this manner the film’s tripartite narrative passes judgment on the fate of the Leftist political past, not only in terms of the now sublimated political ambitions of the 1968 generation but also in connection with contemporary German screens: the age of Agnes and the Fassbinderian provocation she represents passes away; the age of Damiel has been cheapened by Hans-Jörg’s banal sexual fantasies; and the age of Werner, the villa-inhabiting Green politician with his mundane European bottle deposit legislation, now dominates. In light of this critical engagement with Fassbinder and Fischer, the film seems to underscore that times have changed. Viewed in this way, Agnes is out of place—as her twice-discontinued relationship with her former lover Henry indicates—and the film ultimately evacuates her from the narrative. From the opening camera-addressing interview that cites In a Year with 13 Moons to the 8 mm flashback, Agnes’s trajectory rings like an elegy to Fassbinder’s radical engagements. In her dying moments, that 8 mm flashback to childhood might be understood as a farewell to New German Cinema, a mode of cinema that has now been replaced both technologically and historically. In this variety of ways, the film straddles modes of national address: by alluding to well-known figures of New German Cinema, the film ref22

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erences a national legacy, but also, with its third narrative thread, it sets its questions in a transnational register. Werner’s fixation on European bottle deposit legislation paints a portrait of a Germany that has become passionless in the age of European integration. In stepping back, however, to weigh Roehler’s aesthetic and political approach, it goes without saying that to engage Fassbinder, Wenders, and the New German Cinema in this overt and sustained manner underscores both the legacy of that cinema and its continued relevance. Fassbinder and Wenders are simply, after all this, still pivotal for Roehler’s film and central to his approach. To critique today’s compromised politics and hopes by invoking the New German Cinema is to engage and thus foreground that legacy, both politically and aesthetically. A still more complex foil for Fassbinder can be seen in the films of the Hamburg-born director Fatih Akın. Akın’s Head-On, to take one example, is far less stylized than Fassbinder’s work tends to be, and one could thus hardly suggest an equivalence between the two. However, where Roehler’s work imitates Fassbinder’s style, Akın tends to evoke his content. As Akın himself recounts, comparisons to Fassbinder have been made since his first film Kurz und Schmerzlos (Short Sharp Shock, 1998), which, in its focus on a criminal just let out of prison, was said to recall Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980).40 In Head-On, the protagonist Cahit, who self-destructively drives his own car into a wall at the film’s onset—arguably an attempt to break through the wall rather than to crash into it—meets Sibel, a woman who has recently tried to slit her wrists. Sibel proposes that the two of them, who are both conspicuously self-destructive, get married so that she can get out from under her parents’ thumb. Cahit will profit financially from the arrangement, and he develops an interest in Sibel. Though the two do not intend for the relationship to become romantic, their amorous entanglement seems inevitable. As is the case in Roehler’s film, that which could be comic, a standard romantic comedy premise, turns serious. Social violence, the isolation felt by the film’s protagonists, is literalized in the form of damage to the selves in question; cultural wounds are turned into violence against the self. Out of anger both protagonists try to destroy themselves and the things around them: she thrice cuts her wrists; he destroys his car and, with an air rifle, his own apartment. Although the film is to some extent simply about managing domestic space insofar as Cahit and Sibel cannot deal with living in the same apartment and being attracted

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to one another, the film ultimately is more concerned with their social wounds than their individual psychologies. The two perform the role of the married couple before they realize that they have inadvertently become one. At the same time, however, it is worth pointing out that every bit of the protagonists’ eroticism, when they are in Germany at least, is tied to violence. Their first real physical encounter comes after Cahit is beaten up while defending Sibel, and, when he announces that he is in love with her, he breaks a glass on the bar and rubs his hands on the broken shards. A crucial moment comes when Cahit is taken away: Sibel, alone in the apartment, turns up the music and reopens the wounds on her wrists. She stares at herself in the mirror before doing it, and then, after falling to the bathroom floor, slaps herself five times in the face, a gesture that strongly parallels a sequence in Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, one that has a similar ambiguity about whether the protagonist is angry with him- or herself or is trying to wake up from an unpleasant dream. The slapping of one’s own face can here be seen as a starting point for a comparison. There are enormous differences between the two films, and one must be extraordinarily careful making a connection between this film of Akın’s and that of Fassbinder. Whereas Ali, the protagonist of Fassbinder’s film, is Moroccan, Sibel’s family comes from Zonguldak, and Cahit, a Turkish-German, seems more at home in the German language than he does speaking Turkish. Most prominently, Head-On is a Turkish-German story, whereas Ali: Fear Eats the Soul explicitly contends with an inability on the part of many ethnic Germans to integrate with nonnative Germans. There are, however, a number of parallels worth pointing out: Both films can be said to deal with the complicated legacy of German immigration as well as Germany’s confrontation with difference. For both filmmakers, sexual desire, degradation, and masochism become the means with which to explore social issues. And in both Head-On and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, there is the depiction of inlaws as an impasse for integrating a new partner (i.e., the clash of new world values against old ones). To be sure, quite a lot has changed, both culturally and cinematically. Akın is keen on not being reduced to a singular ethnic identity and makes it clear that he does not want to be thought of as a Turkish-German filmmaker and would rather be thought of as a filmmaker in the auteurist tradition.41 Yet comparisons with the films from the past—from Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin’s Wedding, 24

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1976)—seem inevitable. Whether it suits Akın or not, his film appears at a moment when Turkish-German filmmakers are “liberating themselves from the prison of a subnational paternalism” and—viewed in optimistic terms—“the German discussion about multi-culturalism and minority cultures is gradually growing beyond its provinciality toward a stage of mutual reflection.”42 A film such as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul may indeed be seen as paternalistic when compared with the nuanced portraits presented in films such as Head-On, Brudermord (Fratricide, 2005), and Kleine Freiheit (A Little Bit of Freedom, 2002, written about here by Brad Prager). Akın notes that 1973 was a different time and that “now we tell our stories no longer from the margins, but from the middle of society.”43 Greater numbers of films about Turkish-German experience and about minority cultures in Germany have been taking as their starting point the assumption that the minority culture or cultures depicted in the film are more or less “indigenous factor[s] in contemporary German identity and no longer something alien to be at best tolerated by the dominant native culture.”44 Emergence from “toleration” and “paternalism” are key to distinguishing the film historical moments, but the fact that a visual bridge can be built between Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Head-On allows us to see what it means to reproduce Fassbinder with a difference and thus forces a reflection on the extent to which German culture has changed in the intervening time. Head-On is meant as the first part of a trilogy. The second part is Akın’s The Edge of Heaven, which serves as a final example of the complex construction of the linkages between yesterday and today. Akın’s trilogy, of course, evokes not only self-stylized auteurs like Fassbinder— whose The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola (1981), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1982) constitute the so-called BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) trilogy about West Germany’s postwar development—but other auteurs as well, such as Kieślowski, who in his Three Colors trilogy commented on national identity by working across more than one film. Akın views himself as part of this lineage.45 His trilogy has been known by the name “Love, Death, and the Devil,” and presumably these first two films represent “love” and “death.” In an interview with Die Welt, Akın confirms his intent to become a relevant, world filmmaker: “The two places in which I was socialized, Germany and Turkey, represent globalization. Whoever understands both systems grasps the worldwide connections. In this way, what I do becomes world cinema.”46 Many compare the narrative style of The Edge of Heaven—with its 25

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three major locations and six main characters—to recent films from the United States and Mexico, such as Traffic (2000) and Babel (2006). To tell this complex story briefly, the plot begins in Bremen where an older man named Ali invites a prostitute, Yeter, to live with him. Yeter decides this may be a good option for her but quickly finds out that Ali is more jealous and domineering than she had initially thought. One day, Ali slaps Yeter in anger and she dies, from either the blow or the fall. Ali’s son, Nejat, who is a professor of German literature in Hamburg, goes to find Yeter’s daughter, Ayten, in Istanbul in hopes of making restitution for his father’s crime. Although Nejat cannot locate Ayten, he decides to move from Germany to Istanbul. Ayten has been on the run from the police because of her political activities and has gone to Germany in search of her mother. While in Germany, Ayten befriends a German student, Lotte, and goes to stay with her and her mother, Susanne. Once Ayten is discovered by the police and denied asylum in Germany, she is sent back to Turkey and imprisoned. Lotte travels to Turkey to try to help Ayten but is herself inadvertently shot with a handgun tied to Ayten’s subversive political group. Susanne comes to Istanbul to retrieve her daughter’s belongings. There she meets Nejat and decides to help Ayten, as her daughter would likely have wanted. This story is linked with Fassbinder not only through its sympathetic presentation of a prostitute—prostitutes are treated sympathetically throughout Fassbinder’s work, as in In a Year with 13 Moons—but above all through the presence of Hanna Schygulla as Susanne. Schygulla is associated almost metonymically with Fassbinder’s oeuvre: having played the lead in Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun—a film Akın has called a masterpiece47—she became New German Cinema’s most recognizable face around the world. Given the extrafilmic discourse about her stardom, one otherwise unmatched in German cinema of the 1970s, the presence of Schygulla in The Edge of Heaven underscores Akın’s global auteurist ambitions as well as his engagement with New German Cinema’s internationalist legacy (which is here rendered emphatically transnationalist). His invocation of Fassbinder also includes the citation of other auteurist visual and narrative touches, including his depiction of the bordello bedroom in which Yeter entertains Ali (much of which is shot through doorframes, as Fassbinder often did) and the interethnic lesbian relationship between Ayten and Lotte. For the present purpose, the most important aspect of Akın’s citation of the 1970s, and a considerable development from his Head-On, is the 26

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Fatih Akın’s casting for The Edge of Heaven (2007) includes Fassbinder’s “muse” Hanna Schygulla as Susanne Staub, here standing with Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak).

film’s open engagement with activist politics, political violence, and the police and prisons in their wake—all, as noted above, trademarks of New German Cinema. As in Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004; analyzed in this volume by Roger Cook), the relevance of 1970s radicalism for the era of EU integration and globalism is thematically significant here. In the generational story of The Edge of Heaven, however, these radical politics of the 1970s are invoked only to be sublated: the film does not side with Ayten’s revolutionary tendencies, as Susanne delegitimizes Ayten’s radicalism by asserting that it stems simply from her desire for conflict. In this way, the wisdom garnered in a more radical past is passed on to present-day struggles. Ultimately, in the film’s multigenerational lessons, the politics of the past and present are mutually illuminating: late in the film, Susanne sees Lotte’s ghost, a scene that functions allegorically. With this vision, Susanne commits herself to helping Ayten, so that the daughter’s political inclinations rejuvenate her mother’s more engaged past and in so doing make that past present or relevant. Akın himself says that the revolutionary character Ayten comes to recognize over the course of the film that she has believed in something false.48 Ayten’s mother Yeter is tied early in the film to the 1978 massacre of (Left-leaning) Turkish Alevis in Maras, a massacre usually regarded 27

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as a crucial step toward the 1980 military coup and the crackdowns it brought. This massacre widowed Yeter and, in a manner reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden, 2005), set the film’s violent, belated events into motion. Ayten seems to act out the long repressed, bloody oppression of her parents’ generation, but, for the film, she does so too unreflectively, in a manner that conflates political oppression at home with EU integration and globalization. In its final instance, the film is less politically revolutionary than it is metaphysical: it has opened a Pandora’s box of political radicalism only to close it with generational reconciliation and an argument in favor of forgiveness. Akın has expressed concern about extreme nationalism and objections to Kemalism, which he sees as intolerant of minorities.49 Moderation thus has the day. The positions of Goethe, as held by Nejat, the film’s professor of German, advocate a conservative approach to revolution; for Goethe (about whom Akın wrote his own secondary school thesis [Abitur]), revolution is not the solution. Goethe’s somewhat conservative ideas on violent revolution are well known, and the film, which is less concerned with explicitly unsettling Goethe’s status than Fassbinder had been when he put Tasso together with images of the slaughterhouse, tentatively adopts this position. As pointed out by Schindler and Koepnick, one reason Akın’s films are significant is they are neither the “light urban comedies that flooded German cinemas in the first half of the 1990s” nor “the sweeping historical melodramas and heritage films that have come to engross German audiences since the final years of the last millennium.”50 The director’s trajectory from Head-On to The Edge of Heaven, with its open invocation of New German Cinema, its internationalist ambitions, and its political conundrums, clearly enforces this sense of a turn to the serious in a deliberately auteurist vein. Despite stylistic differences, his work is part of today’s different and newer wave, a set of films including Agnes and His Brothers, Falscher Bekenner (I am Guilty, 2005), Unveiled, and a host of others that return to engaged filmmaking and that call to be evaluated in light of Germany’s cinematic past. The present volume approaches the question of German cinema’s politics from multiple directions: historically, ideologically, and formally. Its first set of essays take their cues from Wim Wenders’s essay “That’s Entertainment: Hitler,” which charges German cinema with placing obstacles in the way of serious historical reflection and with failing to ex28

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amine its own past properly.51 It begins with two essays that examine German national identity with an eye to its national pastime: Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Lutz Koepnick examine the immensely popular “soccer films” of Sönke Wortmann. In “Imitation of Life: The Aesthetics of Agfacolor in Recent Historical Cinema,” Kapczynski analyzes Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2004) as one example of a recent trend in contemporary German historical films that, among other commonalities, have become preoccupied with replicating the color aesthetics of the past. She argues that this particular return to German film history marks a clear break with the self-reflexivity of New German Cinema and instead inaugurates an era in which the past is rendered as a kind of pleasant tourist destination. Arguing that the deployment of color transcends a purely aesthetic exercise in Wortmann’s film, Kapczynski underscores how his formal choice colludes with the film’s construction of masculinity after the war and thereby enunciates a key moment in the discourse of postwar German normalization. Similarly addressing the persistence of national and nationalist discourses, Koepnick’s “Public Viewing: Soccer Patriotism and Post-Cinema” examines Wortmann’s Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale (Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen, 2006) and studies how the strategic displacements of time and space enable the film’s director to “put a frame around what was wrong about German soccer prior to 2006.” Koepnick’s reading highlights how Wortmann grafts a narrative onto a putative outsider, German head coach Jürgen Klinsmann, who becomes an insider, thereby steering—for better and/or for worse—German filmmaking away from some of its preoccupations with the past, much as Klinsmann steered German soccer away from its alleged traditions. Continuing to examine how recent German film has dealt with (or has avoided dealing with) history, Elisabeth Krimmer’s “More War Stories: Stalingrad and Downfall” employs Joseph Vilsmaier’s 1994 film about the battle of Stalingrad as a foil for looking at Oliver Hirschbiegel’s recent award-winning Hitler film. Krimmer’s reading calls attention to the ideological shortcomings of both, arguing that the earlier work conflates different kinds of victims, a tendency that ultimately undercuts any antiwar intent on the part of the director. At the same time Hirschbiegel’s film—when viewed critically with respect to its construction of gender—diminishes the role of women to leave plenty of room for its peculiar male fantasies. Along similar lines, in her “Neofeminist Mütterfilm? The Emotional Politics of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse” Anna 29

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M. Parkinson explores the film Rosenstraße (Rosenstrasse, 2003) in conjunction with the cinematic paradigm of the German mother-daughter relationship. She considers how Rosenstrasse extends von Trotta’s feminist politics while marking a departure from the director’s earlier, socalled sister films. Wilfried Wilms also turns his attention to historical films, specifically to Roland Suso Richter’s Dresden. Wilms asks whether made-for-television historical films of this sort, which deal with German wartime victimization, problematically weigh and even balance the suffering of one group of victims with another. If Richter’s film delivers a fantastical historical consensus and reconciliation, Dresden may be seen as a logical endpoint of the German “heritage film” and as a low point in outright political engagement with the German past. The volume then turns to films that seem to revisit New German Cinema’s fascination with East Germany as a potential source of critique. One should note that suggesting that this legacy be read through New German Cinema is not to exclude the history of GDR film production from consideration. Indeed, this thread is examined (especially by John E. Davidson). At the same time, however, the question this section means to answer is whether East Germany, socialism, and utopian thinking can still be turned to in German cinema—that is, whether they can still be the source of critique. In this section, one of the most prominent directors of the New German Cinema, Alexander Kluge, comes under critical scrutiny. Johannes von Moltke’s “Terrains Vagues: Landscapes of Unification in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go” contextualizes Roehler’s postunification film in a tradition stretching from the Autorenfilm of the mid-1960s to the celebrated 1970s’ successes of the New German Cinema. He looks closely at the film in relation to Kluge’s Yesterday Girl and, without claiming any direct influence of Kluge’s work on Roehler’s film, suggests that the earlier work constitutes a significant kind of intertext for understanding the later one. Jaimey Fisher’s “German Historical Film as Production Trend: European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others” argues that it is important to acknowledge and analyze the film’s popularity in addition to its much discussed production history. The essay considers the film within the debate about heritage cinema after Andrew Higson’s original work on the topic and argues that neither Higson nor that subsequent debate adequately attends to the role of genre in heritage cinema. An attendance to genre, especially its consistent melodrama, helps clarify The Lives of Others’ place in the

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production trend of post-1989 films about East Germany as well as some of the specifically cinematic effects that even its critics admire. Taking up the now popular notion of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former East Germany), Michael D. Richardson’s “A World of Objects: Consumer Culture in Filmic Reconstructions of the GDR” argues that this concept can be best understood as one part of a larger tendency to redefine the topography of a unified Germany. Richardson suggests that, in light of an East German identity that has been largely sublated since 1989, films such as Good-Bye, Lenin! and Sonnenallee (1999) deliberately resurrect East Germany via its quotidian objects to recoup the possibility of such an identity. Richardson then inquires into the ideological trajectories of these “recuperative” narratives. Looking directly at the legacy of East German film, John E. Davidson’s “Playing Hide-and-Seek with Tradition: Games, Aesthetic Form, and Social Critique in German Cinema following the Wende” explores the connection between social realities and film traditions and asks what it means—in the tradition of GDR realism—for aesthetic embedding of social representation to create a totalizing world before the camera. The volume then turns its attention to films engaging the present moment and its most contemporary trends, starting with films of the so-called Berlin School. Marco Abel’s “Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold” places the term “political” in parentheses because Petzold has, in some respects, refused to make explicitly political films. Abel argues that Petzold enacts political critique by refiguring the nature of the image itself. In Petzold’s Yella, Abel finds that the director offers not so much images of capitalism as an “imaging of capitalism on its own terms, heeding its affective modulations of speed and weight, of force.” Abel means to persuade us that Petzold’s films, for this reason, assume a singular place in contemporary German cinema. In a related vein—attempting to introduce and comprehend the work of the Berlin School—Kristin Kopp’s essay, “Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment: The Berlin School and the Politics of Spatial Aesthetics in the German-Polish Borderlands,” connects Hochhäusler’s work with contemporary attempts to define Germany against what it understands as Polish identity. She asserts that Poland, in Hochhäusler’s film This Very Moment, is a nonspace that becomes the projection screen for a childlike fantasyscape of adventure and enchantment. Taking This Very Moment as a point of departure, Kopp examines the aesthetic strategies of the so-called Berlin School, particularly in relation to Hollywood. She 31

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introduces a means of analyzing the film’s form and views it in terms of “a critical appraisal of German identity in the second decade of unification.” Similarly, assessing how the politics of contemporary Germany exceed the nation’s borders, and how global and local politics are everywhere intertwined, Roger F. Cook’s “Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei: Edukating the Post-Left Generation” pays close attention to the role German terrorism plays in recent German film. Examining The Edukators, Cook explores how that history of representation informs the perspective of the film’s protagonists toward global capitalism and resistance. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Cook examines the philosophies put into practice by the group known as “the Edukators” and how this perspective alternately affirms and contradicts the film’s own aesthetics. Aiming to come to terms with how a “countergeography” to an idealized image of a global world can be represented, Barbara Mennel’s “The Global Elsewhere: Ursula Biemann’s Multimedia Countergeography” looks at the work of Ursula Biemann, particularly the video Remote Sensing (2001). Mennel regards Remote Sensing as suggestive for a feminist intervention in the sundry processes of globalization, including, within an increasingly globalized economy, both the gendered character of migration and the sexualized character of much exploitation. Of particular relevance for the present inquiry, Mennel notes that Biemann’s work both departs from and extends the parameters of New German Cinema, especially the entwinement of voice and image as they transcend the national for the transnational. Casting another glance backward, at the historical discourse of New German Cinema, Brad Prager’s “Glimpses of Freedom: The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema” asks what is meant when one speaks of utopia or of utopian moments— terms that were significant for New German Cinema—in recent German films. Studying the “heaven” envisioned in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven, Prager inquires into the politics of a refuge, one where “love takes place beyond the law.” As concerns both that film and Yüksel Yavuz’s A Little Bit of Freedom, his essay considers how contemporary filmmakers work though cinematic images of violence to reveal utopian impulses. This volume argues that German cinema at the turn of the century can be best approached as a politically charged polyvocal arena and that this new phase is substantially different from the era of “consensus” that preceded it. Subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the end 32

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of the last century, German directors and audiences increasingly regarded political provocation as part and parcel of a failed filmic project, a cinematic past that was rapidly receding. Politics of the kind found in the German cinema of the 1970s was long seen to produce films that few wished to see. We would, of course, not long for a simple return to the 1970s, but at the same time, owing in large measure to the growing historical distance from 1989, old questions have returned in a multiplicity of forms, both critically and affirmatively. The Collapse of the Conventional explores contemporary German film in this transformed and transformative historical light.

Notes 1. See Ulrich Köhler, “Warum ich keine ‘politischen’ Filme mache,” http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-04/warum-ich-keine-„politischen“-filme-mache. Also published in English as “Why I Don’t Make ‘Political’ Films,” trans. Bettina Steinbrugge, Cinema Scope 38 (2009): 10–13. 2. Köhler asks, for example, “Wasn’t the real Hitler bad enough already? Why do we need his fictive doubles?” (“War der reale Hitler nicht schlimm genug? Wofür brauchen wir seine fiktiven Doppelgänger?”). See Köhler, “   ‘Political’ Films,” 11. 3. Sabine Hake provides a nuanced account of this transitional period. She also questions whether the Oberhausen Manifesto and the films that followed should be seen as a decisive break from the past, writing, “The radicalization of film form and the aestheticization of the political would not have been possible without earlier developments in German film and literature. The myth of a new beginning served only to distract from the considerable continuities between the 1950s and the 1960s.” Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), 148. With respect to filmmakers working in the wake of Oberhausen, Hake adds, “The Young German Cinema profited . . . from the intense interest in modernist experimentation cultivated by many postwar writers, including those involved with literary groups such as Gruppe 47. The ongoing politicization of cinema built directly on the example of the public intellectual personified by Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass” (ibid., 149). Hake is correct. We do not mean to suggest that the Manifesto represented a wholesale rupture, nor is it equivalent to New German Cinema, which came later, but rather to argue that it marked a moment at which open political engagement in cinema was championed and foregrounded. It is, in this sense, a useful starting point. On using the term similarly, as a point of departure, see also John E. Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 1–2. Using the concept of New German Cinema as a starting point, he self-consciously argues that it constitutes “something like a film genre” (ibid., 2) 4. Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of 33

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Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 264 (New York: Routledge, 2000). To this description, Rentschler adds, “Rather than intervening or speaking out, self-avowed professionals like Dörrie, Graf and Wortmann engross and accommodate. They want the cinema to be a site of mass diversion, not a moral institution or a political forum” (ibid.). 5. Rentschler’s argument leaves room for other cinemas that were emerging, at least in the latter half of the 1990s. He notes that “there are many other forces at work in [Germany’s] film culture” and mentions, among others, Tom Tykwer, Hans-Christian Schmid, and Fatih Akın (Rentschler, “Post-Wall Cinema,” 275). The category of Autorenkino has been rightly and repeatedly problematized. See Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992), 61– 63. On other critical discussions of the term, see Johannes von Moltke, “Home Again: Revisiting the New German Cinema in Edgar Reitz’s Die Zweite Heimat (1993),” Cinema Journal 42, no. 3 (2003): 142–43, n. 68. 6. See Klaus Kreimeier, “Filmkritik und Klassenkampf,” Film 7, no. 4 (1969): 1–2, 5, as well as the section “Film in der Opposition,” Film 7, no. 3 (1969): 42– 52, which includes commentaries by Bitomsky and Farocki. On the role of the dffb, see Tilman Baumgärtel, “Die Rolle der dffb-Studenten bei der Revolte von 1967/68,” http://www.infopartisan.net/archive/1967/266705.html. 7. In “Post-Wall Cinema,” Rentschler remarks that he is looking “back at the alternative cinema of Fassbinder, Herzog, Kluge, Wenders, von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms and others with an ardent nostalgia, regarding the popular cinema that has replaced it with a marked disdain and a bitter sense of loss” (261). Von Moltke notes Rentschler’s self-conscious sense of nostalgia and also warns against efforts to use “a mythologized past as a stick to beat the present” (“Home Again,” 115). 8. Rentschler likewise suggests three political tendencies that critics identified with New German Cinema: “Critical discussions about New German Cinema in the main privileged three central preoccupations: (1) America and Hollywood as objects of post-war German love/hatred; (2) National Socialism and its legacy of shame; and (3) the political malaise of the Federal Republic as experienced by the post-war generation” (“Post-Wall Cinema,” 271). Though there are parallels, the present account has a slightly different emphasis. 9. Willy Brandt was a Social Democrat (SPD) who was chancellor of Germany from 1969 to 1974. Writing about the end of The Marriage of Maria Braun and Fassbinder’s idealization of Willy Brandt, Anton Kaes explains, “The antifascist resistance fighter Willy Brandt stood in the eyes of Fassbinder and his generation as a symbol of this new direction in German politics and he became the rallying point of a younger generation’s hopes.” From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 99. 10. See Katja Hofmann, “Refound Selves,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 2 (2006): 28. More prominently this new wave has been christened by Cahiers du Cinema, the journal that played a significant role in defining the French new wave, as noted by Daniel Sander in “Fassbinders Erben. Die Welle,” KulturSPIEGEL, http://www. spiegel.de/kultur/kulturspiegel/0,1518,463372,00.html. For an example of this in 34

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Introduction the French press, see Pascal Mérigeau, “La Nouvelle Vague allemande,” Le Nouvel Observateur, January 25, 2007, http://hebdo.nouvelobs.com/p2203/articles/ a331174.html. 11. Marco Abel cautions, “The Berlin School label is somewhat misleading when its scope is widened to a second generation of filmmakers such as Köhler and Henner Winckler, graduates of the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Maren Ade, graduates of the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, Maria Speth, who honed her skills at the HFF ‘Konrad Wolf ’ in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Valeska Grisebach, who studied film in Vienna, or Aysum Bademsoy, who studied theater at the Freie Universität Berlin and is, like Arslan, a child of Turkish immigrants who came to Germany in the 1960s.” (“Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the ‘Berlin School,’  ” Cineaste, http:// www.cineaste.com/articles/the-berlin-school.htm). 12. Abel references the remark in “The State of Things Part Two: More Images for a Post-Wall German Reality—The 56th Berlin Film Festival,” Senses of Cinema 39 (April–June, 2006), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/festivals/06/39/ berlin2006.html. Herzog originally remarked that thanks to the critic Lotte Eisner, “we have legitimate film culture in Germany once again.” The remark can be found in context in “Tribute to Lotte Eisner (1982)” in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler, 117 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988). A version of the comment can also be found in Leticia Kent, “Werner Herzog: ‘Film Is Not the Art of Scholars, but of Illiterates,’  ” New York Times, September 11, 1977: Arts 19, 30. 13. See Herzog, “Tribute to Lotte Eisner,” 117. 14. Kent, “Werner Herzog,” 19. 15. See Elsaesser’s discussion of this dilemma in New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), esp. 46–48. 16. Ibid., 27. 17. Ibid., 27. There are parallels with simultaneous developments in France as well: Sylvia Harvey writes about the film groups and their efforts to “develop new film distribution circuits to disseminate their work” and how they planned to create a “parallel, marginal or alternative cinema.” Harvey adds, “The existing system of film production and distribution was criticized on the grounds that it operated only to market film-commodities to alienated spectators and that, further, the consumption of these spectacles contributed to the maintenance of that alienation.” May ’68 and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, [1978] 1980), 27. 18. When it comes to Revolver, Hochhäusler remarks, “Our model was, of course, Cahiers du Cinéma, especially the fact that, at least in the 1960s, they did not make a big difference between making films and reflecting on them.” “Tender Speaking: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler,” by Marco Abel, Senses of Cinema 42 (January–March 2007), http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/42/christoph-hochhausler.html. 19. This comparison is made by Matt Bochenski, who writes, “Yella could be read as a spiritual repost to The Lives of Others, re-visiting the legacy of West Germany’s great triumph and finding a deep-seated moral ambivalence in the free 35

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market forces that filled the void of Communism.” “Germany’s 2 Waves,” Curzon Cinemas 4 (September/October 2007): 25. 20. Bochenski notes, “Perhaps what really defines the Berlin school in opposition to Munich, then, is their insistence on looking at the present rather than the past” (ibid.). 21. Günter Rohrbach, “Das Schmollen der Autisten: Hat die deutsche Filmkritik ausgedient?” Der Spiegel 4 (January 22, 2007), 156–57. Reprinted at http:// www.deutsche-filmakademie.de/744.0.html. Rohrbach produced popular films, such as Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), Stalingrad (1993), and Aimée & Jaguar. 22. Paul Cooke makes this connection in “Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema,” in German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, ed. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, 228 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006). 23. For critical comments on Good-Bye, Lenin! along these lines, see Jennifer M. Kapczynski’s reading of Good-Bye, Lenin! in “Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin Is in Germany and Good-Bye, Lenin!” Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007): 78–100. 24. Levy himself addresses the issue of whether he is a provocateur and the political potential of laughter in his article, “Lachen ist ein Politikum,” Die Welt, January 20, 2007, http://www.welt.de/kultur/article710386/Lachen_ist_ein_Politikum.html. 25. David Clarke reiterates the curious status of Tykwer in his introduction to German Cinema since Unification, ed. David Clarke, 1–9 (New York: Continuum, 2006). Clarke writes, “The division between the auteurist film (Autorenfilm) and commercial cinema is further eroded by a director like Tom Tykwer, whose boxoffice success with Run, Lola, Run (Lola rennt, 1998), one of the most internationally renowned German films of the last ten years, must be seen in the context of a career producing idiosyncratic, non-mainstream films” (ibid., 4). He adds that “with distinctively more commercial sensibilities, X-Filme seeks to bridge the gap between popular cinema and intelligent and original filmmaking. So far this strategy seems to be paying off, given the phenomenal success not only of Run, Lola, Run, but also more recently with Becker’s Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003), and the less spectacular but nonetheless healthy audience figures for many of its other films” (ibid., 5). 26. On this, see especially Davidson, Deterritorializing, 62–63 and throughout. 27. See Jennifer M. Kapczynski, “Introduction: Newer German Cinema: From Nostalgia to Nowhere,” Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007): 3. 28. See Lutz Koepnick and Stephan Schindler, eds., The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 3. 29. See Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 25. 30. Ibid., 28. 31. Philip Rosen, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch, and Some Problems in the Study of National Cinemas,” iris 2, no. 2 (1984): 81–83. 36

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Introduction 32. See Johannes von Moltke (“Briefly Noted: The (Inter)national: Notes from the Berlinale,” Germanic Review 84, no. 2 [2009]: 181–82), who, in reviewing Deutschland 09, writes that “Angela Schanelec’s opening short Erster Tag is particularly impressive for the way its series of immobile long takes in different locales at dawn refuses to submit to any literal interpretation of those locales as ‘Germany.’ And yet, the project as a whole illustrates the force of the nation as an interpretive category.” 33. On the connection to Wings of Desire, see Muriel Cormican, “Good-Bye Wenders: Lola rennt as German Film Manifesto,” German Studies Review 30, no. 1 (2007): 121–40. On the connection to The Tin Drum, see Paul Cooke, “Abnormal Consensus?” 226. 34. The German reads “Kein Postulat, kein Pamphlet, kein Manifest–sondern ein politisch-poetisch-persönlicher Reflex auf die komplexe aktuelle Lage der Nation.” See “Zur Lage der Nation,” http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/kino/KinoTom-Tykwer-Fatih-Akin;art137,2635297. See also “Deutschland 09-Tykwer und Akın drehen Episodenfilm,” Spiegel Online (Deutsch). July 8, 2008, http://www. spiegel.de/kultur/kino/0,1518,564539,00.html. 35. Oskar Roehler praises Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons in “Schöne Seelen,” Die Zeit 23, June 2, 2005, http://www.zeit.de/2005/23/D-Filmklassiker_23. In the short essay, he praises Fassbinder’s genius but also the auteurist signature found throughout the film in which “Jede einzelen Sekunde trägt seine Handschrift” (Every single second bears the mark of his hand). 36. Rentschler also notes the importance of Fassbinder, quoting first from Manfred Etten: “Fassbinder’s life and work was a model which seemed to embody and ‘realize’ the founding myths of New German Film. The loss of this model makes it poignantly clear that these myths no longer are in effect. By dint of his mere presence he constantly reminded people what New German Film as a whole (perhaps) might have become. In this sense Fassbinder was not only the calling card of New German Film, but also its guilty conscience.” See Etten, “Der lange Abschied: Fassbinder und die Mythen des neuen deutschen Films,” film-dienst 45, no. 11 (1992): 5, cited in Rentschler, “Post-Wall Cinema,” 265. 37. See “American Friends and the New German Cinema” in Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, NY: Redgrave, 1984), 84 38. See Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 257. 39. Ibid. And for a close reading of the sequence, see also Brigitte Peucker, “The Castrato’s Voices: Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons,” in The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 116–26, esp. 118. 40. See the interview with Fatih Akın conducted by Lars-Olav Beier and Matthias Matussek, “Erst mit zwei Frauen wurde die Geschichte sexy,” Spiegel Online, September 26, 2007, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/0,1518,507996,00.html. 41. “Ich bin kein tuerkischer Filmemacher. Ich bin einfach nur Filmemacher,” 37

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quoted in Malte Hagener, “Hexenkessel Altona,” taz, die tageszeitung (September 19, 1998): 33. Also cited in Stan Jones, “Turkish-German Cinema Today: A Case Study of Fatih Akın’s kurz und schmerzlos (1998) and Im Juli (2000),” in European Cinema: Inside Out. Images of the Self and Other in Postcolonial European Film, ed. Guido Rings and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas, 77 (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2003). On Akın’s self-image as an auteur, Akın tells the New York Times, “I come from this European auteur thing . . . I’m producing the stuff I’m doing, I’m writing the stuff I’m doing, I’m directing the stuff I’m doing. In the end, it’s me on the front line, you know?” Nicholas Kulish, “A Hand That Links Germans and Turks,” New York Times, January 6, 2008: The Oscars, 9. 42. See Deniz Göktürk, “Beyond Paternalism: Turkish German Traffic in Cinema,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, 255 (London: BFI, 2002). 43. See Beier and Matussek, “Erst mit zwei Frauen.” 44. See Jones, “Turkish-German Cinema Today,” 89. For a similarly complex account of the transnationality of Akın’s films, see also Barbara Mennel’s “Bruce Lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in Altona: Transnational Auteurism and Ghettocentrism in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Fatih Akın’s Short Sharp Shock,” New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002): 133–56. 45. See comments in Kulish, “Hand That Links.” Petzold has likewise made a trilogy: The State I Am In, Ghosts, and Yella are referred to as his “Ghost Trilogy” (Gespenster-Trilogie). 46. See Hanns-Georg Rodek’s interview with Fatih Akın, “Ich hatte sogar Zweifel an meinem Talent,” Die Welt, September 20, 2007: Feuilleton 27. 47. See Beier and Matussek, “Erst mit zwei Frauen.” 48. See R. Gansera and F. Göttler’s interview with Akın, “Ein Champion und mehr: Fatih Akın über Revolution bei Goethe, die Zyklen, der Türkei, den Müll und das Paradies,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 27, 2007. 49. See Andreas Kilb and Peter Körte’s interview with Fatih Akın, “Der Islamismus in der Türkei macht mir keine Angst. Gefährlich ist es, an Atatürk festzuhalten,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 2, 2007. 50. Schindler and Koepnick, Cosmopolitan Screen, 7. 51. See Wim Wenders, “That’s Entertainment: Hitler (1977)” in Rentschler, West German Filmmakers, 126–31. .

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Jennifer M. Kapczynski

Imitation of Life The Aesthetics of Agfacolor in Recent Historical Cinema

A New German Cinema? In recent years, critics have begun to speak of a rebirth of German cinema. In 2003, the Internationales Filmfest Braunschweig, citing the audience and critical acclaim garnered by Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 2001), Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), and Wolfgang Becker’s Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003), declared in its publicity materials that “the new German cinema is headed on the path to success.”1 Then in 2005 the venerable Cahiers du Cinema announced the arrival of a German “new wave”—a notable event, as the journal also played a foundational role in the 1950s in the establishment of the French nouvelle vague. Cahiers was following the lead of French distributor ASC, which that same year began marketing German productions under the rubric of a “nouvelle vague allemande.”2 Soon even the German government began touting the wave. As two December 2006 foreign office press releases noted, “A renaissance of German film” is underway,3 and although New German Cinema cast a long shadow over German filmmaking in the final decades of the twentieth century, now, with the aging of the 68er generation, “hip young filmmakers” (among them Ulrich Köhler, Matthias Luthardt, Angelina Maccarone, and Christoph Hochhäusler) have begun taking their inspiration from the French new wave.4 Regardless of which cinematic ancestors are invoked, however, one thing remains clear: there is a growing sense that German cinema has finally produced a viable heir. In turn, that progeny is viewed as having given rise to another sort of fruitful multiplication: German film 39

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viewership increased by 7.4 percent in 2006, and more importantly, German productions drew a sensationally large portion of those viewers. At 25.8 percent, this portion represents the largest percentage recorded since the inception of the German Federal Film Board (Deutsche Filmförderungsanstalt, or FFA) in 1991.5 The question is, then, if there has been a birth, or rebirth, of German film, what sort of offspring has it produced? The examples cited above catalog very different notions of the “newest” German cinema—ranging from popular works to independent fare. Although much recent critical attention has focused on those films associated with the so-called new wave, that is, on the films of the “Berlin School,” these works have thus far achieved greater success with critics than audiences; as director Oskar Roehler remarks with palpable disdain, “They’re always brittle, always stern. Nothing really happens in the films. They are slow, dismal and nothing is ever really said—that then is the ‘Berlin School.’ They always get good [reviews] and then have audiences of about 5,000 to 10,000.”6 And although these Berlin films have crossed the border into France, they have not yet made it into the full U.S. art house circuit. Indeed, when we look at those films that have traveled well in this country, we find that they are often quite a different sort—namely, historical dramas that revisit the traumatic sites of the German past, like Nowhere in Africa or Good-Bye, Lenin! or, more recently, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Hitler opus, Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004). Thus German “national cinema” finds itself constituted along radically different lines, depending upon the site of its reception. This latter group of films has seen some singular successes on the domestic market and abroad, and more importantly for the present analysis, they have consistently foregrounded their preoccupation with reconstructing national history—leading some scholars to dub them “heritage films.”7 As such, they provide particularly fertile ground for examining present-day cinematic efforts to represent the past and for considering how the politics of that representation has transformed since the heyday of New German Cinema. The historical turn (or, more properly, return) in contemporary cinema has been perceptible for roughly fifteen years and links a diverse group of films—from World War II dramas to post-Wall comedies. Despite their narrative diversity, these period pieces are bound by a similar set of aesthetic preoccupations.8 Most notably, a quest for authenticity drives the formal projects of these works. Consumed with reduplicating the bygone moments that they represent, recent German historical films 40

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employ strategies targeted at conjuring past worlds with a maximum of accuracy. Overwhelmingly, these films craft their antiqued appearance by imitating the visual styles of the period they represent. Indeed, there seems to be something of an unspoken rule that reviving past formal traditions has become a prerequisite for representing “history.” One of the best-loved means of achieving this is the mimicry of earlier color conventions. In the case of dramas set in the war and postwar periods, we witness the “Agfacolor effect.” The look of Agfacolor is quite unmistakable: it comprises a palette of graying greens, darkly saturated reds, and wan blues that contrasts sharply with the bright tones of American Technicolor, Agfacolor’s principal competitor before the invention of Eastmancolor.9 Contemporary films do not literally use Agfacolor film but must create their Agfacolor effect first through their choices in mise-en-scène and then at the postproduction stage via digital manipulation of the image (or “color correction”). It is this duplication of past color conventions that prompts the title of this essay; for in this gesture, do we not find an imitation of life, that is, an attempt to animate the past through the act of aesthetic restoration? The contemporary invocation of Agfacolor clearly relates to the realist thrust of current historical films: their referencing of older color conventions is part and parcel of a broader attempt at authenticity. But this citational practice necessarily brings with it a longer history, calling forth a legacy of color conventions that intersects with the central events of twentieth-century Germany. Agfacolor provided the look for the color cinema of three instantiations of the German state, and in doing so, it played a key role in visualizing national culture, politics, and identity. Tracing the close connection of Agfacolor to national self-imaginings, this article examines the importance of color re-creation in contemporary historical cinema, focusing on the case of Sönke Wortmann’s 2003 Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern)—a film that exemplifies the “faux finish” trend and its ties to the politics of the present and the past. The use of color in Wortmann’s film represents far more than an aesthetic conceit. Hearkening back to a long national legacy of color imagery, the imitation of Agfacolor is a form of nostalgic remembrance, closely bound up with questions of trauma as well as normalization. Indeed, the visual strategies of The Miracle of Bern, which form a central part of the film’s explicit project to restore a national myth, ultimately aim to make nostalgia normal again, that is, to overcome the postwar legacy of German guilt and the discrediting of the national ideal and to 41

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reactivate structures of positive national sentiment (or in more common parlance, “patriotism”). As critic A. O. Scott has written, current cinema at times evinces a curious new form of nostalgia—for a lost feeling, more than a lost age.10 Just such a sense of longing—for the emotional and visual textures of a bygone era, rather than its politics—permeates recent German historical films. In the wake of unification and its many troubling aftereffects, these films provide a moment of aesthetic return, of respite from the present and celebration of the nation’s visual pasts. For in their efforts to re-create earlier eras for contemporary audiences, these lush historical dramas formally bracket off German history—simultaneously relishing in the very pastness of the past (through a kind of historical excess) and rendering that past a kind of sensory destination, ripe for the revisiting. In the process, these films often evince a curious air of longing, even for the darkest moments of the German past; their retro look renders the past a “consumable set of images,” constructing a national history comprising objects and surfaces, all the while belying any connection between aesthetics and politics.11 Writing on 1950s West German war films, Erica Carter has characterized their frequent citation of documentary footage in terms of hysterical repetition.12 Carter’s analysis, without collapsing the distinctions between these two historical moments and cinemas, can provide insight into the contemporary situation. Following Carter, the presentday politics of citing Agfacolor may be read as a similar sort of traumatic reworking—one that, in recalling the aesthetic worlds of the war and postwar years, not only restages the foundational moment of both postwar Germanys but also makes available once more the pleasures attending earlier cinematic modes.13 The past becomes a pleasant place to visit—discretely cordoned off from today (by the many markers of its pastness) and yet imminently available. Of course, the very idea of return is a fiction, the constructed worlds of these films being just that: constructions. Thus a film like The Miracle of Bern does not present the 1950s so much as they were as how contemporary audiences might like to think they were. In this regard, contemporary historical cinema marks a decided shift away from the aesthetic politics espoused by New German Cinema. The current emphasis on authenticity contrasts sharply with the formal strategies of these earlier directors, who foregrounded the very process of historical reconstruction and framed the past as a moment always 42

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in dialogue with the present and subject to the decisive stylistic manipulations of the directorial auteur. This is not to say that New German Cinema shied away from crafting a period look—numerous examples do just this, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy (Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun], 1979; Lola, 1981; and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss [Veronika Voss], 1982), and Helma SandersBrahms’s Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1980). But these films wed their effects of certain historical accuracy with stylistic practices that regularly remind audiences they are witnessing the unfolding of a highly mediated past—one to which they do not have direct access but rather must work to perceive.14 Conversely, contemporary historical films tend to encourage a feeling of total visual return, with little implication of the present. If the idea of the “presence of the past” dominated New German Cinema, the motto of contemporary German historical cinema is the “absence of the present.”

Color Blindness To understand the use of color in The Miracle of Bern and other historical films, we need to examine the politics and history of the medium. This task is complicated by the fact that questions of color constitute nothing less than a blind spot in film studies. Writing in 1976, Edward Branigan noted, “Criticism of film to the present day has largely proceeded as if all films were made in black and white. Few theorists or filmmakers even comment on the use of color in a film much less consider the structural possibilities that color opens for the filmic text.”15 And as the introductory essay for the anthology Color: The Film Reader asserts, Branigan’s critique remains relevant, for the “situation has changed very little in the past 30 years. . . . [D]espite the centrality of color to the experience and technology of cinema, it has most often been no more than the occasional subject of the theorist, historian, or practitioner; a source more of fleeting observation than of rigorous conceptualization.”16 Indeed, color frequently appears as a touch of excess, “seen as peripheral to questions of narrative comprehension, . . . as . . . a source of visual abstract pleasure and perceptual play that resides somewhere above questions about the film’s meaning.”17 Thus although the development of color technology has been fairly well documented, much remains to be said about the semiotics of color. For, of course, despite the relative lack of critical focus

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on the subject, the use of color in film has almost since its inception been carefully controlled for various effects. Consider the words of Natalie M. Kalmus, who until 1947 advised all Technicolor film productions. As part of the company’s required service, Kalmus created individual color schemes according to character, mood, or action. Kalmus called for audiences to “become color conscious”18 and espoused a strict palette, in which reds signify, among other things, “danger” and “warning,” yellow symbolizes “wisdom” as well as “riches,” and magenta, as a combination of purple and red, “is very distinctly materialistic, . . . showy, arrogant, and vain.”19 Yet despite these and other related iterations, scholars have remained reluctant to address the matter of color—perhaps driven by what David Batchelor has identified as a culture of “chromophobia,” that is, a long-standing intellectual suspicion of color.20 Batchelor traces two central discourses in Western culture concerning color, which hold it to be either “alien and therefore dangerous” or “merely . . . a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of consideration,” resulting in the view that “color is dangerous, it is trivial, or it is both.”21 And indeed, when we look to film writings on color, frequent traces of this discourse surface. Embedded in Kalmus’s own embrace of color consciousness, for example, we find just such a notion of color as a site of potential excess; thus Kalmus cautions that filmmakers “must constantly practice color restraint” to avoid “unnatural and disastrous results.”22 Film theorist Rudolf Arnheim, although not sharing Kalmus’s rigid sense of color symbolism, evinces a similar distaste for excessive use of color, recalling in a 1935 essay that his first color film viewing experience had ended terribly: “I saw the world as a color film . . . [E]verything was blatant in its poisonous color, and presented a chaotic, fiendish, discordant picture.”23 Key for Arnheim, and central to the historical debates about the development of color technology, is the question of the “real.” Arnheim took the view that color film was problematic precisely because of its propensity to imitate the “inharmonious” hues of the natural world,24 so that he saw in color film a “lack of form,” that is, inadequate evidence of the artist’s shaping hand.25 In other words, color was all too real and entailed altogether too little artistry. But more common in discussions of early color film was the conception that color film lacked sufficient reality or gravitas, and hence, until the popularization of television, color film remained largely a medium for comedies and musicals, that is, generic forms not seen as relying a great deal upon realism for their 44

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success. Although the technology was in place by the 1930s and both the American and German militaries employed some color film during World War II, it was not until the 1950s that color film began making substantial inroads into the commercial film industry, and it only became the dominant convention for the cinema after the introduction of color television in the 1960s.26 For this reason, we still experience something of a shock effect when we encounter filmed material from earlier periods—like the startling color footage documenting the damage to Jewish businesses after Kristallnacht featured in Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (2000). We are accustomed as viewers to witnessing World War II as a black-and-white affair, and this color film, though bearing all the flickering and faded markers that we associate with old footage, seems at once incontrovertibly real and strangely false. In Schindler’s List (1993), director Steven Spielberg elicits a similar emotional charge when he sets the colorized image of a little girl in a red coat wandering amid the black-and-white hell of the Jewish ghetto. There is a long, if erratic, tradition in filmmaking that plays upon this tension between color and the real, employing sudden shifts between color and black and white as a means of marking changes in power relations, geographical location, and psychological states. Before color became the norm for film production, these transitions to color almost universally denoted a move to a state of unreality—most famously, in the case of Dorothy’s arrival in Oz, which, as Salman Rushdie remarks, signals her departure from “the gathering, cumulative greyness” of Kansas and entry into to the riotously Technicolor land of the Munchkins.27 With the complete conversion to color technology in both film and television, however, and particularly with the emergence of color news programming, color gradually became associated with realism.28 In contemporary films, we now find a clear inversion of the earlier formula. Thus Pleasantville (1998) represents the black-and-white world of the 1950s television program into which the film’s protagonists are accidentally transported as rigid and artificial. Only after the protagonists set about to modernize and revolutionize the stultifying world of Pleasantville does color begin to enter the picture and wreak some positive havoc on the social order. Perhaps because color has become the norm, associated with the real, it does not strike us as particularly odd that contemporary historical films present worlds in color that we would expect actual historical footage to render only in gray tones. Indeed, these days, choosing

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to film in black and white appears distinctively “arty”—as in the case of Joel Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), which, in point of fact, was filmed in color and then simply printed in black and white. In the German context, the politics of color film and the current fashion for replicating old color conventions takes on a particularly weighty significance, because the history of German color processes are bound up with the most tumultuous and bloody years of the country’s history. Thus the story of Agfacolor emerges not simply as a narrow narrative of technological and industrial advancement but rather as a tale that is closely linked to the broader trajectories of German national cinema and the national past—and makes patently clear the connections between political and aesthetic practices. Agfa (or the AktienGesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrikation), a division of IG Farben, had been working since the early twentieth century to develop a color process for photography and cinematography. In 1930, the company turned its efforts to the creation of a two-color cinematographic process—eventually known as “Ufacolor”—since the studio secured exclusive rights to the technology for the first year.29 The first Ufacolor film premiered in 1931: Bunte Tierwelt (The Colorful Animal Kingdom), a short film featuring scenes from the Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg. All the while, however, there was a recognition that only a three-stage process could achieve true color reproduction. The breakthrough moment came with the introduction of the Agfacolor process (known at the time as the “Agfacolor Neuverfahren” or “New Agfacolor Process”), announced to members of the trade and general press at a Berlin press conference on October 17, 1936.30 The stock was revolutionary for the way in which it simplified the filming, exposure, and developing process, and in 1937, the process was awarded a grand prize at the Paris World Exposition. The emergence of Agfacolor thus coincided with Hitler’s rise to power and the subsequent alignment of all German political and cultural institutions with a National Socialist agenda through the process of so-called Gleichschaltung or “coordination.”31 Working at the forefront of film technology of this period, Agfa inevitably played an important role in Nazi efforts to create visual spectacles that would help showcase the new state. It is hardly surprising that some of the earliest test footage of Agfa film stock recorded images from the 1936 Berlin Olympics; how better to represent the emergence of German greatness than by means of the latest color technologies?32 This trend continued as the state-controlled film industry began implementing Agfa’s color stock for feature 46

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film production. In 1939, the company determined that “Agfacolor,” as it came to be known, represented the future of color cinematography and abandoned its various two-color processes. That same year, director Georg Jacoby began filming the first full-length feature to employ Agfacolor: the Marika Rökk vehicle Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women Are Better Diplomats, 1941)—although, because numerous sequences were reshot as improved film stock became available, the film was not completed and released until 1941 and the final product was still beset by numerous technical problems, most notably poor sound quality. Nevertheless, the premiere represented a decisive date in national film politics. One contemporary headline proclaimed, “The New German Color Film. The American Monopoly is Broken.”33 Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels closely followed the development of Agfa’s process and made clear that the representational stakes for these first color films were high; reportedly, he refused to allow Jacoby’s film to be released to theaters until the filming of Germany’s second color feature, Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942), began using improved stock.34 The successful The Golden City was soon followed by Josef von Baky’s Münchhausen (1942/1943) and then in 1945 by the most infamous of the Nazi-era color productions, Veit Harlan’s epic celebration of national sacrifice, Kolberg—a film that has entered the annals of film history as one of the most contradictory works ever shot, as it required enormous expenditures of cash and manpower at a time when Germany’s defeat was imminent. It highlights the centrality of filmmaking—and color filmmaking more precisely—for the Nazi propaganda machine. This is not to argue that the aesthetic properties of Agfacolor were somehow inherently nationalistic but rather that the Agfacolor “look” took a formative role in the visual iteration of National Socialism. It was no accident that Goebbels appealed to German film executives in 1945 with the words “Gentlemen, in a hundred years’ time they will be showing another fine color film describing the terrible days we are living through. Don’t you want to play a part in this film, to be brought back to life in a hundred years’ time?”35 With the war’s end, Agfacolor ceased to serve the interests of National Socialist filmmaking, but its importance in the crafting of a German cinematic aesthetic was undiminished—if rather more complicated. With the division of Germany, the Agfa concern was itself broken up. Soviet forces occupied not only the former Babelsberg studios in Berlin but also the principal Agfa manufacturing plant in Wolfen and 47

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by way of reparations seized the available raw material and much of the equipment—in the process coincidentally ensuring the continuity of the working relationship that had existed between UFA (Universum Film AG) and Agfa.36 Production of color film resumed as early as September 1945, and by March 1946, the factory had reached 80 percent of its prewar output despite shortages of raw material and trained staff (who had been removed by the Americans when they first captured the region).37 Initially, although DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) film production began almost immediately after the war’s end, DEFA directors had to settle for making black-and-white films: the color stock produced in Wolfen, by then renamed “Sovcolor” (or “Sowcolor”) although it was identical to Agfacolor, was reserved for Soviet and other Eastern Bloc productions, like the 1946 fairy-tale film The Stone Flower. Eventually, however, DEFA would issue a lengthy series of films shot in Agfacolor, including Frauenschicksale (Destinies of Women, 1952), Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck (The Story of Little Muck, 1953), and, perhaps most significantly, the famous Thälmann series, Ernst Thälmann—Sohn seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann: Son of the Working Class, 1954) and Ernst Thälmann—Führer seiner Klasse (Ernst Thälmann: Leader of the Working Class, 1955). Although DEFA continued to make black-and-white films, Agfacolor productions represented a substantial segment of the studio’s output, and thus Agfacolor took on a special importance as the color aesthetic for East German film and, by extension, the new socialist state. In one of the more curious twists in the Agfacolor story, however, the company’s process also emerged as the dominant West German color convention for the early 1950s. The company retained offices in the Federal Republic, and these eventually took over the role of the former Wolfen plant and began producing film stock. The very first postwar color feature, Schwarzwaldmädel (The Black Forest Girl, 1950), which became a box office hit and launched the 1950s Heimatfilm wave, took full advantage of Agfacolor’s tones in its showcasing of the attractions of rural communities, namely, blue skies, green hills, and the rosy lips of “real” women. Other titles soon followed, including Hanna Amon (1951), Ferien vom Ich (Vacation from Myself, 1952), Das tanzene Herz (The Dancing Heart, 1953), Waldwinter (Winter in the Woods, 1956), and Rose Bernd (The Sins of Rose Bernd, 1956/1957). And if postwar West German directors did not film with Agfacolor, they frequently chose Gevacolor— a stock produced by the Belgian Gevaert company but based upon the Agfacolor process—in films like Grün ist die Heide (Green Is the Heath, 48

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1951) and Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht (When the White Lilacs Bloom Again, 1953). By the mid-1950s, as in the United States, the more affordable Eastmancolor gained prominence (finding use in such films as Ich denke oft an Piroschka [I Often Think of Piroschka, 1955], and Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s series Die Trapp-Familie [The Trapp Family, 1956], and Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika [The Trapp Family in America, 1958]). But at the beginning of the decade, Agfacolor dominated the West German market and, as in the East, played a central role in shaping the aesthetic of postwar cinema and, by extension, in the effort to envision a new West German identity after the devastations of the war.

The Wonders of Agfacolor: Sönke Wortmann’s The Miracle of Bern Reviewing Sönke Wortmann’s The Miracle of Bern, columnist Iris Hanike quipped, “The film presents our present day notion of how people might have dealt with their problems in the fifties. This is a feature of historical films, that they apply the present to the past . . . [T]he film would be better suited to teach the history of 2003 than that of the 1950s.”38 Indeed, although the modus operandi of contemporary historical cinema is the absence of explicit dialogue between past and present, the import of these films for their current moment can hardly be overlooked. Wortmann’s film was timed to capitalize on enthusiasm for the impending 2006 World Cup competition in Germany (and to help Wortmann secure the rights to film the national team for his next production, the documentary Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen [Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale, 2006], discussed in this volume by Lutz Koepnick). But in retelling the foundational myth of the Federal Republic, The Miracle of Bern also speaks to a contemporary moment that is suffering its own unification pangs. The film constructs a fantasy of German visual unity that plays to contemporary desires for cohesive national sentiment without nationalism. The Miracle of Bern presents a portrait of German restoration through myth that looks not only back to the historical moment of the World Cup but also forward to its present—neatly repackaging a legend of national consensus to serve the needs of a highly disunified contemporary culture. The Miracle of Bern represents one of the greatest audience and critical successes among the recent spate of historical films: according to statistics from the FFA, the film was the second top grossing German 49

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production of 2003 (after Good-Bye, Lenin!), drawing 3,253,216 visitors. Of those viewers, more than 20,000 attended during the opening weekend (including then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder), earning the film the top spot at the box office.39 At the 2004 German Film Awards, the film received multiple nominations and won the Award in Silver for Outstanding Feature Film and the Audience Award for German Film of the Year.40 The film interweaves the story of Germany’s legendary upset of the Hungarian national team in the final match of the 1954 soccer World Cup with the fictional tale of a Ruhr family, the Lubanskis. Although the official end of the war is long past, the family is still missing its head. The father served in the Wehrmacht and was subsequently imprisoned for many years in a Russian prisoner of war (POW) camp. When the father (Richard Lubanski, played by Peter Lohmeyer) is finally released, the family must reconstitute itself. This proves most challenging in the relationship between the father and his youngest son, Matthias (Louis Klamroth), born nine months after the father’s last wartime furlough. From the outset, the film makes explicit its goal to narrate the reconstruction of family, father, and fatherland: as the tagline declares, “Every child needs a father. Every person needs a dream. Every country needs a legend.” The rebirth of the family, the father, and the fatherland would be impossible, according to The Miracle of Bern, without the unifying force of the World Cup victory and soccer more generally. Wortmann, of course, follows a long tradition of viewing the 1954 win as the defining moment for the creation of postwar West German identity—an idea already promoted by contemporary commentators.41 Nevertheless, the manner in which Wortmann stages this “myth of origins” bears comment. At various points, the film shows how the game brings together father and son, brothers, husband and wife, local communities, and even East and West Germany. It is on the makeshift local playing field, for example, that we see Richard Lubanski rediscover his passion for the game and for life. Following a sequence in which he asks the local priest for help reconnecting with his family, Richard leaves the church and walks past the provisional soccer field that serves the town’s children. The field stands before a building, and the light falling on the crossbars of its windows creates the effect of a very different field—of crosses, evoking the image of a military cemetery. But taking careful aim, Richard chooses life instead. He kicks the ball and scores a perfect goal, and the next morning he begins his journey to Bern with Matthias to catch the final game. 50

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Wortmann construes the match itself as a true rallying point. A montage sequence shows shot after shot of German audiences gathered together around television sets to witness the moment of national victory—a moment that is explicitly framed on numerous occasions in the film as a redemption of the country’s recent military defeat.42 Even Richard’s eldest son, Bruno (Mirko Lang), who by this point in the film has run away to East Berlin in search of a “truly equal” state, sits glued to the screen, surrounded by fellow members of the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend or “Free German Youth,” the official GDR youth organization). The film further stages the colorful fantasy space of Switzerland, and the Bern stadium more specifically, as an arena for German redemption and rebirth. Wortmann makes this not just figurative but also literal: back home awaiting the arrival of the team’s victory train, the wife of the German sports reporter covering the event reveals that she is pregnant. Central to the film’s larger project to capture the spirit of the World Cup and redeem the idea of the national myth are its multiple aesthetic strategies of reproduction—a point that the filmmakers’ commentary included on the special edition DVD greatly emphasizes. Cinematographer Tom Fährmann discusses at length the challenges posed by Wortmann’s insistence upon authenticity—in choosing the actors to play the members of the German World Cup team, who were supposed to combine a resemblance to the original players with soccer and acting skills; in costuming the film’s actors and many extras in period-appropriate dress and hair styles (“a monumental undertaking by German standards,” as Fährmann notes); and in designing and constructing the set, like the life-size replica of the World Cup stadium. This is not to say that the film remains entirely faithful to historical accounts of the World Cup. Although the film carefully reconstructs the match and the setting for the event, it also edits out certain of the less pleasant aspects of its history, offering up a decidedly selective memory for contemporary consumption. Most notably, Wortmann’s film omits the detail that, at the 1954 ceremony honoring the team’s victory, German fans sang the first, banned strophe of the national anthem, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” rather than the officially approved third verse.43 The omission suggests that Wortmann calibrated his film to appeal to current desires for a sense of national unity—through the myth that the film expressly aims to promote—while avoiding overt alignments of this feeling with the catastrophic history of German nationalism.

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To produce its visual effects, the film team carefully researched its look by, for example, watching weekly newsreels for the period 1950–55. To complement this historical accuracy, the filmmakers aimed to achieve specific color effects through choices in set design, costuming, and, in the postproduction phase, color correction. Although Fährmann never uses the term “Agfacolor,” his discussions of the film’s visual spectrum— “cool, green, blueish”—clearly recall the tones of the earlier convention.44 His illustration of the creation of these effects drives this point home: Fährmann leads viewers through the process as he uses computer technology to deepen the red areas and gray out the greens of a particular shot, resulting in an end product that appears distinctly antique, that is, like an old color movie from the war or postwar years. The playing with color does not stop here, however, and the film employs a complicated range of tints to stage in visual terms the various “shades” of German postwar recovery. The film’s opening shot establishes this color aesthetic, literally and figuratively setting the tone for the narrative that follows. Following the credits, the camera fades into a long shot of a smoking factory set atop an otherwise desolate hill. The picture is dominated by dingy hues: a gray-blue sky, the steely mass of the factory, the dim green of the hill and its few trees. A small title appears, identifying this location as the Ruhr region in spring 1954, and then the camera introduces us to our first constellation of human figures: a group of children perched in a tree as they await the return of a messenger pigeon, carrying, as we will soon discover, news that the local soccer team of Rot-Weiss Essen has just lost its match. Following a brief scene of the children as they gather to hear this disappointing report in an attic that is every bit as gray as the factory, the film then cuts to an interior shot of a family home that, like the preceding spaces, appears almost entirely drained of color. The camera first focuses on a black-and-white military portrait that hangs on the living room wall, cuing the centrality of the absent father, and then tracks sideways and forward to reveal the residual Lubanski family gathered around the dinner table, illuminated by dim but warm light: mother Christa (Johanna Gastdorf), Bruno, daughter Ingrid (Birthe Wolter), and a decidedly dejected Matthias. Christa says grace, and then the family begins to eat and argue—about whether Bruno must work or, as he would rather, play “negro music” in his band and whether Matthias should mope over a team that loses “all the time.” Although the scene stages a certain conflict, it also fosters a sense of togetherness: these 52

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characters know and care about each other, and their interaction and the small bit of color with which they are graced provide both a real and symbolic bright spot. The near black-and-white look of the opening scenes in The Miracle of Bern seems appropriate for the sooty industrial setting of the Ruhr region. But the stark landscape and gray tones also recall the very first postwar films produced in Germany before the return of Agfacolor: the rubble films. Although periodic shots of color—a boy’s red pullover, the pale blush of a youthful cheek, the coral stripes of Ingrid’s sweater—lend a hint of liveliness to the pallid setting, the overall effect is of a world that has not yet returned to life despite the fact that almost a decade has passed since the end of the war. This community still lives under the sign of the war and postwar years: the children’s clothing looks cheap and worn, rubble litters the roadside, and the father’s wartime portrait serves a surrogate function, necessary to mark his position within the family while he is still absent. Although the film brightens in subsequent scenes, this grayed-out effect will resurface in the moment when Richard Lubanski finally returns after eleven years as a POW—as though the war experience adheres to his body and comes home with him, in the process leeching color from the world and its representation. By comparison, sports reporter Paul Ackermann (Lucas Gregorowicz) and his wife Annette (Katharina Wackernagel) inhabit a vibrant setting that evokes considerably more life. Their home, appointed with every cliché of 1950s home decorating, and Annette’s wardrobe, which is substantial and features a good deal of red, indicate that the two are part of a postwar generation that is oriented toward a—literally—brighter future. By 1954, of course, color has made a comeback on the German screen. But according to the logic of this opening, vast segments of the nation have yet to be revived by the “economic miracle” or, more important for Wortmann, the resurrective power of a World Cup victory. The gray nature of life in postwar Germany comes into particularly sharp focus in the sequence that shows the national team’s travels to Switzerland. It comes on the heels of a scene in which Richard and Matthias talk soccer while Richard, in an early sign of industry and hence resumption of his proper masculine role, chops wood. Green and gray tones strongly dominate the scene, like numerous others set in the Ruhr. A sound bridge signals the transition to the next sequence, as we hear the national players singing a personalized version of “Frère Jacques” for teammate Werner Liebrich. From a medium shot of Matthias look53

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ing pensive, the film cuts to an extreme long shot of a riotously colorful Swiss landscape redolent with brilliant green, red, and blue tones. The shift in spectrum produces a visual shock effect and, despite their auditory connection, highlights the lack of continuity between the two spaces. Tom Fährmann explains in his DVD commentary that the team studied old postcards to re-create a certain image of Switzerland as “another world . . . warmer, sunnier [and] . . . with a warm, pleasing and pleasant atmosphere . . . a Technicolor look.”45 Transitioning from the washed-out space of the Ruhr to the gaudy Swiss setting, the film marks the journey as an “Oz moment,” coding Switzerland as a fantasy space of infinite possibility.46 But unlike The Wizard of Oz (1939), which ends with Dorothy’s return to the solidly gray world of Kansas, Wortmann’s film seeks to unite these two spaces. Each border crossing into Swiss territory—first by the team, then the Ackermanns, and finally Richard and Matthias—literally puts color into the protagonists’ cheeks. And just as Richard initially appeared to bring the grayness of war and captivity back with him, following the World Cup win he will partake in transporting color back to German soil, along with everyone else who was touched by the national victory. Wortmann’s use of color shifts to encode the German transformation parallels Richard Lubanski’s own rehabilitation process throughout the film. He arrives home a shattered man—able to perform neither in the workplace, where the sounds of coal excavation prompt a traumatic flashback to his wartime experiences, nor in the marital bed, where Christa’s tentative attempt to reconnect is met with the phrase “just give me a little more time.” Richard’s condition, moreover, represents one part of the film’s more general emphasis on the war’s emasculating effect upon a certain generation of German men, embodied perhaps most succinctly by the Lubanskis’ neighbor, an amputee who cannot pay his bar tab and generally evinces an air of utter defeat.47 The grayness that Richard initially brings with him signals his continued trauma: he is visibly connected to a black-and-white aesthetic of the past.48 But gradually, the audience sees Richard begin to overcome his POW experience and resume a functional role within the family (and gain some color). He learns to shed his ties to the fascist past, implied by such details as his multiple attempts to assert an authoritarian control over his children, particularly his insistence to Matthias that “a German boy doesn’t cry.” By the end of the film, Richard has experienced his own “miracle”: he has reconnected with his son, learned to shed tears without shame (as 54

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Matthias reassures him in the film’s penultimate scene, “I think it’s okay for a German boy to cry every now and then”), and generally embraced a kinder and gentler way of being. The film stages the emergence of a new and improved postwar masculinity, effectively resuscitating the father and transforming him from a returnee to a returning hero.49 With the help of a found press pass, Richard finagles a seat on the national team’s returning train and joins in their “victory tour.”50 The film concludes with an outside shot of the train literally heading off into the sunset—no doubt toward a rosier personal and national future. As Fredric Jameson argues, mass culture functions through the repression of social anxieties and concerns “by the narrative constructions of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony.”51 This is particularly true in the manner in which the film invokes soccer as a force that can overcome the East-West divide. Although Wortmann’s work does not dwell extensively on a narrative level on the East German reception of the 1954 match—referencing popular GDR support for a West German win only once, in the shot mentioned earlier of Bruno perched tensely before a television set—its extensive citation of Agfacolor functions to construct a unifying aesthetic. Referencing the color convention of 1950s East and West Germany, the film subtly calls upon the collective visual memories of both countries and rejoins them for contemporary audiences—an “optical illusion of social harmony” in the truest sense. The marketing of the film speaks to such a reading: under the heading of genre, the German DVD lists simply “Feelings.” It is tempting to think of this generic category (whatever it may mean exactly!) as perhaps the contemporary corollary to “Heimat,” that is, a form that portrays the management of the disruptive elements in a “post”-society (postwar, post-Wall) to marshal, in the end, a sense of collective community through sentiment and, I would argue, collective aesthetic memories. Shared emotion—created through the representation of a historical moment in terms that are legible for contemporary Germans East and West as a part of “their” history—provides the grounds for a contemporary feeling of unity. There can be no doubt that Wortmann’s film evoked “feelings.” Most famously, then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder confessed to having shed tears when he saw a preview of the film—prompting at least one writer to comment upon the function of the soccer game, and Wortmann’s soccer film more specifically, to promote greater flexibility in gender roles (since male weeping is sanctioned within their parameters). Although 55

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the vision of a red-eyed Schröder accords with the film’s own construction of a new and improved postwar masculinity, it also speaks to a curious confluence between the moment in the film and the moment of the film.52 Representing the 1950s for an audience in the 2000s, Wortmann’s film doubly enunciates a moment of German normalization. Schröder’s term of office coincided with marked shifts in German self-understanding, as the country began to see itself as just another nation among many others (and no longer marked exclusively by its history as a “land of perpetrators”). Wortmann creates a film for this culture, about a moment in the country’s history in which, as Lutz Niethammer has written, the notion of “normalization” dominated both “self-understandings and contemporary historical characterizations of that decade.”53 Effectively exploiting the parallels between two moments, The Miracle of Bern offers a rehabilitative view of the past and present nation—a view made possible, as noted earlier, by the elimination of those aspects of the World Cup history that today appear untenable (although the debate over the preponderance of flag-waving at the 2006 event shows striking similarities to the anthem controversy of 1954). Just as Schröder’s Red-Green coalition—which saw Germany’s first military engagement since World War II—marked the end of a certain exceptionalism, the World Cup win of 1954 struck observers at the time as a sign of German recovery: “That people in Germany can let themselves get more excited about a game than about military marches actually reveals something natural and healthy at heart.”54 In constructing the dialogue between 1954 and 2003, it seems perhaps curious that the film director Wortmann should choose to privilege an event that is remembered for having heralded the dawn of the television age and a subsequent decline in moviegoing. As a contemporary article reports, “The exciting World Cup coverage provoked a run on television sets. Three companies (Telefunken, Saba, and Mende) sold their entire stock, and Philips sold a thousand tabletop units in fourteen days. The people at NWDR, thrilled with this unanticipated bounty, announced: ‘The era of the television has arrived.’  ”55 Wortmann’s film does not shy away from this fact, and the film makes a point of highlighting the central role of the television as a mediator of the World Cup events and, by extension, postwar recovery. Christa has the foresight to purchase a small set for the family pub, and this guarantees her a record crowd during the games, even though she charges an entrance fee. But although there is no doubt that the set serves as a community rallying 56

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point, it is small and black and white and thus no match for the sensational soccer sequences that Wortmann re-creates for his film. Indeed, we might read Wortmann’s strategic use of color throughout the film as a visual reminder of a moment when film could still outdo the small screen in the arena of special effects. Citing Agfacolor, The Miracle of Bern privileges a 1950s aesthetic of the cinematic over the televisual while pointing to film’s relevance for contemporary times as a medium that can stage historical spectacle on a grand scale and in the process revive national myths that may serve present needs for unification. It is thus almost certainly unintentional that the match footage also illustrates the fantastical nature of the realism integral to nostalgia. Despite all the film’s efforts at authenticity, Wortmann stops short of representing the World Cup event as most Germans of the time would have seen it—in black and white—and instead crafts an “updated” visual memory. The push for normalization in Wortmann’s mythic revival of Germany’s 1954 victory becomes all the more evident if we consider it against the best known previous cinematic representation of the event: Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. Where Wortmann’s film aims to conjure a perfect and discrete replica of 1950s Germany, Fassbinder offers constant reminders to his audience that his film, myriad historic touches notwithstanding, remains in steady dialogue with the present. The film uses a host of formal devices that draw our attention to its status as representation, which in turn serve to jolt the viewer out of the historical fiction. Perhaps most famously, Fassbinder employs historical radio broadcasts as part of the diegetic sound, often played at a disconcertingly loud volume that frustrates the viewer’s attempts to follow the “main” action and instead points to the formative influence of the media for German wartime and postwar consciousness. This constant stream of disembodied audio commentary serves to underscore the centrality of radio for the formation of a national(ist) community, while at the same time undercutting the cinematic illusion, reminding audiences of the film’s own status as a manufactured work of art. This is never more explicit than in the film’s closing sequence, when Fassbinder uses the original broadcast of the World Cup win to comment ironically upon the main protagonists’ fiery deaths: “It’s over! It’s over! Germany is world champion!” Concluding with a series of images of German postwar leaders, Fassbinder makes evident his work’s relationship to the moment of its release and connects the sensation of joy at being “world champions” to a desire for world domination and a larger trajectory of problem57

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atic restorative politics. Germany’s rise visibly unfolds over the bodies of the film’s two central characters, and their demise recalls not only the destruction of the war years but also the powerful and dangerous reverberations of that past that continue to shape contemporary Germany. In contrast, Wortmann leaves his audience with the sentimental reminder that “the Bern Eleven never played together again,” soliciting not critical reflection but rather emotional investment—a nostalgic longing for sensations of victory and national pride. Although this somber note interjects a kind of “reality check” at the end of an otherwise thoroughly triumphant film (reminding us that these sorts of victories really are rare, even fantastic in nature), this closing title, following on the heels of the shot of the team’s victory train headed off into the sunset, interjects a sense of remorse over the loss of this moment of national cohesion. Unlike Fassbinder’s treatment of the World Cup, then, which interrogates the collective sense of triumph that accompanied Germany’s surprise win in 1954 and thereby calls into question the very idea of a healthy patriotism, Wortmann’s film seems targeted to resuscitate these very emotions for contemporary delectation. In the process, The Miracle of Bern suggests that the real tragedy is not that German nationalist politics reaped unprecedented death and destruction but rather that those politics for so long made it so hard to feel good about being German. The film ultimately offers a performative illustration of why the question of national pride remains so vexing, however. For Wortmann can only conjure his feel-good conclusion by means of a series of strategic fictions: his crowds do not sing the banned strophe of the national anthem, the cinematic father learns the error of his authoritarian ways, and, brought together by a sense of shared victory, the diegetic German community of 1954 looks and feels, well, normal.

Notes 1. Filmfest Braunschweig, “Programm,” http://www.filmfest-braunschweig.de/ programme/2003/german/ndf.php. 2. Daniel Sander, “Fassbinders Erben. Die Welle,” KulturSPIEGEL, http://www. spiegel.de/kultur/kulturspiegel/0,1518,463372,00.html. Sander, too, refers to the wave of new German films as a nouvelle vague, although he also notes that the wave has not yet swept up mass audiences. 3. German Foreign Office, “Die kreativen Künstler der deutschen Filmszene,” Web site of the German Foreign Office, http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/diplo/ de/WillkommeninD/Kultur/Film/DeutscherFilm2.html. 58

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The Aesthetics of Agfacolor in Recent Historical Cinema 4. German Foreign Office, “Die selbstbewussten Nachkommen des deutschen Autorenkinos,” Web site of the German Foreign Office, http://www.auswaertigesamt.de/diplo/de/WillkommeninD/Kultur/Film/DeutscherFilm.html. 5. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Die Deutschen gehen wieder mehr ins Kino,” Die Welt, February 7, 2007; ibid. 6. Cited in Cathy Rohnke, “The School That Isn’t One—Reflections on the ‘Berlin School,’  ” Goethe Institute Australia, http://www.goethe.de/ins/au/lp/prj/ ff07/fge/en1932607.htm. Rohnke is among those critics who remain skeptical about the designation, since, as she views it, the films grouped under the rubric of “Berlin School” sometimes share little more than an aesthetic sensibility. 7. See Lutz Koepnick, “Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and Holocaust in the 1990s,” New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002) and Lutz Koepnick, “   ‘Honor Your German Masters’: History, Memory and National Identity in Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1997),” in Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 349–75 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). 8. Jennifer M. Kapczynski, “Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin Is in Germany and Good Bye, Lenin!” Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007): 78–100; ibid., “Introduction: Newer German Cinema,” 3–6. 9. For a useful overview of the history of Technicolor, see Steve Neale, “Technicolor,” in Color: The Film Reader, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price, 13– 23. In Focus Film Readers (New York: Routledge, 2006). 10. A. O. Scott, “Pinned under the Weight of Skyscrapers and History in ‘World Trade Center,’  ” New York Times, August 9, 2006. Thanks to Johannes von Moltke for sharing this reference with me. 11. Fredric Jameson, “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998, 129 (New York: Verso, 1998). 12. Erica Carter, “Men in Cardigans: Canaris (1954) and the 1950s West German Good Soldier,” in War-Torn Tales. Representing Gender and World War II in Literature and Film, ed. Danielle Hipkins and Gill Plain, 195–222 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007). 13. Carter makes a similar argument regarding 1950s war films. Referring to the insertion of documentary footage, she remarks that “those wartime narratives which do surface through the war genre . . . deliver visions of National Socialism as a resource for male historical agency, male dynamism, consumer modernity and visual pleasure.” Ibid., 199. 14. Examples include Sanders-Brahms’s voiceover narration in Germany, Pale Mother and Fassbinder’s use of more and less audible sound in The Marriage of Maria Braun. 15. Edward Branigan, “The Articulation of Color in a Filmic System: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle,” in Dalle Vacche and Price, Color: The Film Reader, 170. 16. Brian Price, “Introduction,” in Dalle Vacche and Price, Color: The Film Reader, 1. 59

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17. Ibid., 6. 18. Natalie M. Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” in Dalle Vacche and Price, Color: The Film Reader, 25. 19. Ibid., 26–27. 20. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000). 21. Ibid., 23. 22. Kalmus, “Color Consciousness,” 29. 23. Rudolf Arnheim, “Remarks on Color Film,” in Dalle Vacche and Price, Color: The Film Reader, 55. 24. Ibid., 55. 25. Ibid., 56. 26. Neale, “Technicolor,” 22. 27. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI, 1992), 26. 28. Neale, “Technicolor,” 23. 29. Erhard Finger, “Zum Geburtstag des deutschen Farbkinofilms: Die Filmfabrik Wolfen und der Farbfilm,” in Die Filmfabrik Wolfen: Aus der Geschichte. Vol. 11. 14–21 (Wolfen: Industrie-und Filmmuseum Wolfen, 2002). 30. Erhard Finger, “Das Agfacolor Neu-Verfahren,” in Die Filmfabrik Wolfen: Aus der Geschichte. Vol. 8. 12–16 (Wolfen: Industrie-und Filmmuseum Wolfen, 2001). 31. The politics of the Agfa company itself, a Jewish-owned business, are something of a different matter. Research indicates that the company initially tried to protect Jews in its employ. After the company was forced to dismiss these employees after 1938, company director F. Gajewski, against party policy, assisted Jewish former workers in emigrating from Germany and retained employees who were married to Jews. See Peter Löhnert and Manfred Gill, “The Relationship of IG Farben’s Agfa Filmfabrik Wolfen to Its Jewish Scientists and to the Scientists Married to Jews between 1933 and 1939” (working paper, Center for German and European Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1997), http://www.ciaonet. org/wps/gim01/index.html. 32. Finger, “Das Agfacolor Neu-Verfahren,” 13. 33. The headline refers to Technicolor, of course, which was developed in the United States in the 1930s and was used with great success in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939). Cited in Finger, “Das Agfacolor Neu-Verfahren,” 20. 34. Ibid. 35. My emphasis. Cited in Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 35. 36. Gert Koshofer, “Die DEFA Und Agfacolor,” in Die Filmfabrik Wolfen: Aus der Geschichte. Vol. 4. 38 (Wolfen: Industrie-und Filmmuseum Wolfen, 1999). 37. Ibid., 38. 38. Iris Hanika, “Der Kanzler Hat Geweint,” Die Welt, October 25, 2003. 39. “Kinobesucher,” Die Welt, October 21, 2003. 40. The film also received international recognition, winning, among others, the Locarno International Film Festival Audience Award in 2003 and the San 60

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The Aesthetics of Agfacolor in Recent Historical Cinema Francisco International Film Festival Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature in 2004. 41. As a writer for the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel wrote just days after the decisive match: “The little guys in Germany, who were having a particularly rough time of it, rose up with a cry before their television sets and on the soccer fields of the World Cup. Before all the world, they gave the impression that, finally at the end of June 1954, after two hundred years of historical missteps, they had discovered the only truly promising meaning and destiny for their national existence. Germany rose up, and Europe quaked.” “3:2,” Der Spiegel, July 1, 1954, 21. 42. There are numerous examples of this in the film. Talking to the cleaning woman, Herberger insists that although the team has lost one match, they are not out of the running: “We’ve lost a battle. Not the war.” During the final match, after the Hungarian team scores two quick goals, one German observer declared despairingly, “We lost the war—we’re going to lose the final, too.” 43. Sönke Wortmann, Das Wunder von Bern (Little Shark Entertainment, 2003), special edition DVD. See the segment on “Bildgestaltung und visuelle Effekte.” For more on this, see Arthur Heinrich, “The 1954 Soccer World Cup and the Federal Republic of Germany’s Self-Discovery,” The American Behavioral Scientist 46, no. 11 (2003): 1495. Thanks to Stephan Schindler for this reference. 44. Fährmann asserts that this color scale sets the film apart from most historical films, which he argues employ sepia tinting to imitate the look of badly fixed black-and-white photographs. One wonders to which films he is referring here, however, since the Agfacolor look that he creates may be found in abundance in recent German historical dramas. Wortmann, Das Wunder von Bern. 45. Wortmann, Das Wunder von Bern. 46. It is probably no coincidence that Fährmann refers to this as a Technicolor look, since The Wizard of Oz was one of the first to successfully exploit the color technology. 47. Highlighting the differences in generational virility, the film cuts from the moment of Richard’s impotence to a scene in which the young reporter Ackermann is asked if his wife is pregnant yet. He replies, “No, but we’re practicing a lot.” 48. There is much more to say about how the film frames the father’s POW experience. Most significantly, the film sets up the camp as the key source of the father’s postwar difficulties—eliding altogether the war itself as a cause. Although the film makes some attempt to complicate the question of Richard’s prison experience, as when Richard explains to Matthias that the German POWs had too little to eat because “the Russians themselves had nothing—we had destroyed it all,” the film ultimately leaves us to contemplate the spectacle of German suffering and recovery and omits any memory of the other “camps,” i.e., the concentration camps. This generally accords with the postwar West German reception of POWs, which tended to emphasize the camps as the source of soldiers’ difficulties readjusting to postwar life. See Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For more on the absence of the Jewish wartime experience in Das Wunder von Bern, see Stuart Taberner, “Philo-Semitism in Recent German Film: Aimée und 61

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Jaguar, Rosenstraße and Das Wunder von Bern,” German Life and Letters 58, no. 3 (2005): 357–72. Elizabeth Heineman has also written on the film’s foregrounding of German suffering over that of the suffering caused by Germany. See Elizabeth Heineman, “Gender, Sexuality, and Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Central European History 38, no. 1 (2005): 41–74. 49. For an account of the historical reception of POWs, see Biess, Homecomings. 50. Here Wortmann draws on a longer tradition of cinematic refigurings of masculine identity to suit the demands of a democratic Federal Republic. See Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), especially chapter 5; and Carter, “Men in Cardigans.” It is also noteworthy that the film portrays Sepp Herberger, German national team coach and hence something of a father for the nation, as undergoing a similar transformation in his relationship with Helmut Rahn: after much conflict concerning Rahn’s unorthodox behavior, Herberger finally accepts the advice doled out by an unusually pithy cleaning woman, who urges him not to penalize Rahn: “You’re not in Germany any more— you don’t always have to be punishing someone.” 51. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 141. 52. On the subject of Schröder’s tears, see Heineman, “Nazi Past.” 53. Lutz Niethammer, “   ‘Normalization’ in the West: Traces of Memory Leading Back into the 1950s” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler, 238 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 54. “Begeisterung,” Schweizer National-Zeitung, July 7, 1954, 5. Cited in Heinrich, “1954 Soccer World Cup,” 1501. 55. “3:2,” 21.

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Public Viewing Soccer Patriotism and Post-Cinema

Sönke Wortmann’s 2006 Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen (Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale) begins with images of despair, melancholy, and mourning of truly Heinean proportions. The camera first shows a pile of soccer jerseys, pants, and socks heaped up on the floor as if meant to become part of an act of ritual cleansing. Next, it offers a medium shot of Philipp Lahm, crouched over, arrested, and burdened by a load no single body can shoulder. This shot is followed by a somewhat oblique close-up of Michael Ballack as he seeks shelter behind a white towel. His face could not be further drained of whatever one may call expressiveness, even though we can still detect the remainder of tears in his eyes. We briefly see Jens Lehmann; his mouth twitches in what appears to be a bodily motion encoding the utter impossibility of finding any appropriate motion, gesture, or posture to encode his disappointment. In the next shot, the focus is on a whole series of players as they sit next to each other on the locker room bench, their eyes blank and empty, their elbows resting on their thighs and knees, not one of them trying or being able to say anything. The camera finally comes to rest on what is the most desolate and loneliest man around: Torsten Frings, kept from playing the game because of a controversial intervention by the opponent, now situated in a detached niche and—no doubt—pondering how things could have turned out had he been allowed to tighten his team’s defensive lines and drive the ball forward. What we see is a sight of tragic dimensions, given that a moment’s blindness—Frings’s brief skirmish at the end of the Argentina game—potentially has led to his team’s downfall.

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Hell or Hades cannot be much worse than all this. Nothing is left of what once energized these men and allowed them to perform as an astonishingly flexible and inspiring team. With the dream of grandeur busted, there is no future, no language to communicate anything, no Teamgeist. Only anguished solitude. So anguished that it completely eats up these players’ status as public celebrities. No one has ever seen a more intimate shot of stars such as Ballack or Frings, and yet their mute agony—their creaturely void of expressiveness—here seems to deny us a view of them as heroic individuals, as celebrities, as stars; their disappointment and despair instead swallows up what would allow us to consider them integrated subjects and individuals in the first place. Heine would certainly have set such a scene of grief and gloom in the sad month of November. Wortmann, however, tells us otherwise. Subtitles in the film’s very first shot announce the date as “dortmund 4. juli 23:50,” the bleakest of all German hours during that remarkable summer of 2006, the hour after Germany’s hopes for winning the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cup were dramatically crushed by an Italian team playing very un-Italian soccer—the hour when nothing appeared left to show, look at, and feel anymore. Sönke Wortmann’s 2006 FIFA World Cup diary, published as a companion to the film and largely following the film’s trajectory of events, begins with what was one of the German team’s finest moments: June 30, 2006, 7:42 p.m., Berlin Olympic Stadium. We are in the middle of the penalty shootout between Argentina and Germany, almost three hours into the game. The score is 4:3. Tim Borowski is about to sink yet another ball into the Argentinean goal and Jens Lehmann, a few seconds later, will do his greatest deed during the entire tournament, namely fish Esteban Cambiasso’s shot out of the goal’s lower right corner and thus secure Germany’s march into the semifinal. Officially allowed to accompany the German team anywhere throughout the entire tournament, Wortmann himself is standing at the field’s sidelines along with the rest of the players and the coaching staff. His arms are resting on the shoulders of other team members; he is one of them, entirely affected by everyone’s nailbiting anxiety. For a brief moment, he recalls his actual task, asking himself where his camera might be at this point, but instantly he also realizes that his role right now is not that of a documentary filmmaker but of a team member and fan; that his obligation is to focus his energy, not on how to record—soberly, with a distant eye—the dream unfolding on the pitch but—empathetically, as it were—on how his team’s penalty shots 64

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might find the net while the Argentineans’ do not. When Lehmann holds Cambiasso’s shot and thus seals the German victory, Wortmann joins the celebrations on the field and—somewhat to his own surprise—finds himself “in the middle of the dream that millions of people in Germany dream at this moment.”1 It is only when he, in all this, looks at Lehmann’s apathetic face, at the goalie’s inability to rejoice after the psychological terror of the penalty shootout that Wortmann suddenly recalls his function, runs back to the bench, grabs his camera, and captures whatever can still be captured. Lehmann, by then, has long withdrawn himself from the crowd, from public visibility. The moment of greatest athletic triumph and emotional intensity is one displacing the cold eye of camera and documentary filmmaker. It is a heavenly moment that refuses to be captured and recorded, a moment in which mechanical reproduction cannot but fail to show all the things that are worth showing, looking at, and feeling. Both Wortmann’s film and his published diary start out with a climactic moment—one of utter despair, one of exuberant triumph—only to then chronicle the story of the FIFA World Cup along a similar narrative trajectory, beginning with the German team’s preparations in early spring and ending with the team’s spectacular final celebration in front of the Brandenburg Gate and 500,000 fans on July 9, 2006. As he thus deliberately upsets the chronology of events, Wortmann in both works indicates a profound and no doubt overdetermined need, not simply to tell a good story but also to fabricate a legend, to tell a moral tale of devastation and recovery, downfall and recuperation, fragmentation and reintegration. Whether we start in heaven or hell, Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen—as book or film—is meant to continue the task Wortmann set himself when filming Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) in 2003: to picture soccer as a site where powerful passions reroute the course of national history and shape new forms of collective identification. But the choice of opening in both works does not merely operate as a rhetorical strategy—astonishing viewers and readers alike with the story of how a cast of diverse players with multiethnic backgrounds helped redefine the parameters of German patriotism and selfidentification—equally important, what is at stake in both openings is of course the role of the camera and spectatorship itself, the curious dialectic between the wondrous and the documentary. Whereas the film, in its opening, explores a highly intimate moment of crisis in which there is nothing left to see and cathect anymore, the book commences with a 65

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public surfeit of visibility and affect, whose intensity displaces the work of the filmmaker’s camera. Not only do both openings track crucial turning points for Jürgen Klinsmann’s squad but they also involve the viewer and reader in a self-reflexive rumination about the scope and limits of cinematic documentation. What we encounter in both opening scenes is a profound crisis of vision and cinematic reproducibility, a dazzling blind spot at the very heart of the reveries of German soccer, caused either by a devastating drainage of affect or by a quasi-Dionysian excess of emotional identification. In both openings, the focus is on how cameras and filmmakers participate in the curious renegotiation of the boundaries between the public and the private, between seeing and feeling, between individual affect and the patriotic sentiment that animated Germany throughout the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The summer of 2006 no doubt marks a decisive moment in the course of post-Wall German culture and history.2 Klinsmann’s squad did not merely change the terms of German soccer, promoting energetic and inspiring forward action rather than continuing a long tradition of defensive blockage and mere physical endurance. As it—contrary to expectation—displayed the tournament’s arguably most pleasing and innovative soccer, Klinsmann’s team also took center stage in an unprecedented tale of German cultural and political renewal, the symptoms and results of which are well known: Germans proudly waving their flags again and adorning their houses, public buildings, and individual faces in black, red, and gold; foreign journalists being astonished and enthused about the affective excess and relaxed party mood of German fans, the apparent presence of fun and joy where one had expected stubborn rationalism, emotional coldness, physical rigidity, and an anal and isolating work ethic; German cities becoming festive sites of cultural encounters and international mingling at an unparalleled level; German media fanning the sparks of national identification and German retail stores turning patriotic items into first-rate commodities; fans flocking to public viewing areas in unforeseen numbers to see games, not in their private living rooms but on enormous digital screens; the weather gods’ blessing all this with four consecutive weeks of sunshine, a kind of weather earlier generations had called “Kaiserwetter” because it had provided the best opportunity for early filming equipment to capture moving images of Emperor Wilhelm II; and a curious alliance of old-Leftist German and zealous American intellectuals denouncing this unfamiliar sight of pa-

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triotic affect and public enthusiasm as a potentially dangerous reemergence of authoritarian nationalism. Although the 2006 FIFA World Cup certainly gave rise to other notable stories as well—the tale of Zinédine Zidane’s at once tragic and foolish final performance, the tale of Brazilian aging and lethargy, the tale of continuing English underachievement, the tale of Italian cunning and tenacity—for most Germans, the summer of 2006 will be remembered for its peculiarly German story, namely the tale of how Germans on and off the pitch, under the eyes of more than a billion international onlookers, and in front of a diversity of private and public screens learned how to say “we” again; how Germans, precisely by opening their gates to teams and fans from all over the world, learned how to shake off the burdens of their violent past and managed to develop highly positive self-images again; how global attention and media coverage as much as athletic optimism and pleasure helped redefine what it might mean to be German in an increasingly transnational time; and how to see one’s own gestures of national identification in relation to those of individuals of other nations. A small documentary with large ambitions, Sönke Wortmann’s Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale seeks to capture the spirit of this highly overdetermined summer of 2006 and thus expose what connects 1954 and 2006, Germany’s mythic and completely surprising triumph nine years after the end of World War II and the way in which Klinsmann’s squad, against all odds, became “world champions of the heart” sixteen years after reunification. German film critics largely agreed that Wortmann’s project failed this ambitious task, that Wortmann overburdened his images with too much weight and thus obscured the extraordinary lightness of German soccer and patriotism during the FIFA World Cup. And yet, as I argue in the pages to follow, Wortmann’s Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale has an intriguing story to tell, one that ties fundamental changes in the constitution of German national identity and patriotism to significant changes in the production and consumption of moving images. Though it would be foolish to situate Wortmann and his project as part of a self-reflexive cinema of auteurist experimentation and intervention, his film proposes the interdependence of postnationalist forms of German patriotism and postcinematic forms of digital filmmaking and exhibition. As Wortmann’s handheld camera draws our attention to scenes, thoughts, and images that remained beyond a hyped-up public’s

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purview, not only does the filmmaker trace a profound shift in the relation between the private and the public, the physical and the mediated, but he also, and as importantly, directs our focus on how newer technologies of capturing and displaying moving images, despite the impermanence and malleability of the digital, can produce the very affects, spectatorial bonds, and modes of identification necessary to move German viewers beyond the terrain of exclusionary and combative nationalism. It is Wortmann’s calibration of the postnational and the postcinematic, of authenticity and affect, and of publicity and the intimate to which I turn in the following considerations. About thirty minutes into Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale, Wortmann’s camera fast fowards to August 2006, a month after the end of the FIFA World Cup, and positions itself in Jürgen Klinsmann’s villa in Huntington Beach, California, almost 6,000 miles west of Klinsmann’s last grand public appearance in Germany yet only a few miles away from where Wortmann, a few years earlier in his career, had unsuccessfully sought to rekindle his professional hopes: Hollywood. The point of Wortmann’s Californian journey in August 2006 is first of all to have Klinsmann, after his resignation as the team’s head coach, comment on the hype of the FIFA World Cup, an invitation Klinsmann eagerly embraces as he scolds German soccer’s former conservatism, its lack of offensive creativity, its lack of movement, its zeal of “holding on” to the ball and prescripted positions, and most of all its tendency to lament its own lack of innovation. With Germany’s unexpected success at the FIFA World Cup in hand, Klinsmann—whose Californian residence had been quite controversial among German soccer officials in the months leading up to the tournament—beats his new host country’s proverbial optimism at its own game. His voice, gaze, and posture resemble that of a local surfer, ready to join the next wave while unwilling to be burdened by the stubborn weight of the past and the futility of physical or emotional standstill. Klinsmann’s comments, on one level, thus serve the function of infusing the fairy tale of German soccer in 2006 with historical perspective and validity. Strategies of temporal and spatial displacement here help Wortmann to put a frame around what was wrong with German soccer before 2006 and to underscore the extent to which it needed an emigrant’s vigor to free German athleticism from its past. But more is at stake in Wortmann’s brief Californian interlude. Though he is a filmmaker quite proficient in delivering polished images 68

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and emotionally engrossing mise-en-scènes, Wortmann’s choice of camera angle and lighting conditions in this sequence cannot but surprise. The scene begins with Klinsmann closing the glass door of his beach house to shut out unwanted noises, the camera situated inside the house, the ocean and beach quite visible on the other side of the window and doorframe. Klinsmann then speaks directly to the camera with the window and beach at his back, the result of which—in the absence of an additional lighting source—is both an extremely grainy and an unevenly lit image that leaves Klinsmann’s face barely visible. We are unsure whether we should look at Klinsmann’s murky contours or look past him and try to enjoy the sight of Huntington Beach—or perhaps stop watching altogether and simply focus on listening to the former head coach’s voice. Whatever viewing strategy we choose, Wortmann here clearly does not deliver images glamorizing the person behind Germany’s stunning soccer revolution. Though Klinsmann’s Californian displacement is presented as an essential moment of his success, Wortmann in this scene does everything at his disposal to stay away from whatever could look like glossy Hollywood filmmaking. At home in Klinsmann’s distant house, Wortmann’s film presents itself as an intimate home movie even more than many of the film’s other handheld and therefore shaky images of German locker and hotel rooms, of player and coach conferences. The hegemony and standardizing power of Hollywood filmmaking is not as people make it out to be. Inspired by German soccer’s unexpected triumphs, Wortmann goes America yet triumphantly hangs on to his project’s rhetoric of unscripted, artisanal, and unglamorous authenticity, his ambition to replay the FIFA World Cup’s fairy tale, not as a Hollywood spectacle but as a homegrown narrative about a bunch of underdogs shaking off the burdens of the past and allowing Germans to develop some sense of patriotic pride again. In 1996, Wortmann informs the reader in his film book, the director moved for professional reasons to the United States for four years, only to experience from afar the end of the Kohl era in 1998 as a period relaxing what he considered his strained relationship with Germany. In the face of the Schröder-Fischer government, Wortmann offers, he discovered that “Germany might be a good place to live after all.” For Wortmann, the FIFA World Cup of 2006 confirmed this new view of things German, propagating the idea that Germany was “much better than the world thought—and the Germans themselves too.”3 In the California sequence of Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale, Wortmann seems to 69

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graft his own story of displacement and transformation in a somewhat twisted way onto the figure of Jürgen Klinsmann or, conversely, to use Klinsmann’s role as the outsider-as-insider for the sake of reinvigorating Wortmann’s own position as a filmmaker and steering German filmmaking away from its preoccupations of the past. Filmmaker and former head coach thus appear as curious alter egos, one needing the other, both casting light onto each other. Similar to the way in which Klinsmann in the weeks leading up to the FIFA World Cup explored his Californian displacement to remake German soccer and identity from within, Wortmann returns to California to prove that German filmmaking circa 2006 can put to rest the specters of its past, namely, the equally dominant expectation of addressing the traumas of Germany’s violent history and somehow either to match or to challenge the norms of commercial Hollywood cinema. Born only five years apart (Wortmann in 1959, Klinsmann in 1964), filmmaker and soccer coach in the film’s California sequence appear as part of a generational turnover that deposes of how postwar and early post-Wall German culture tended to situate itself uneasily between the dual shadow of the Nazi past and the expansive grasp of Americanization, between Hitler and Hollywood. Unlike the finale of Wim Wenders’s 1982 Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things), in which the shaky images of Friedrich Munro’s handheld camera articulate a desperate, albeit heroic, protest against the imperial sheen of Hollywood filmmaking, Wortmann’s deliberately sloppy Californian cinematography defines the present as one in which German filmmakers can selfconfidently pursue their own projects as much as former German soccer stars can shake off the sterile orders of the past. In Wortmann’s eyes, what is decisive about this dual act of rejuvenation is the fact that it mimics nothing other than the dynamic of the soccer pitch and therefore presents itself, not as the intervention of a central authorial position but as a team effort, a flexible regrouping of diverse elements. Though Klinsmann relied on a host of scientific, psychological, and athletic measures to improve the strength of individual players, his largest success was to inspire a disparate cast of individuals to act like a team without giving up their distinct personalities. The fairy tale of German soccer in 2006 was not about numeric success largely exceeding expectation, it was about seeing a new generation of players simply enjoying the game, playing attractive soccer rather than simply shutting down the opponent’s drive, moving and passing the ball forward instead of merely trying to keep it out of one’s own goal. Wortmann’s own vision 70

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of contemporary filmmaking clearly hopes to follow this formula. His film does not want to be that of an auteur filmmaker strictly controlling each and every aspect of the process and product. On the contrary, Wortmann aims at understanding his presence and activity as part of the team effort itself—the production of moving images as an integral moment of how team members produce ephemeral spatial figures on the field.4 To underscore the transformation of director into team member and player, Wortmann does not even hesitate either to pass his camera on to some of the players or—more rarely—to assume the point of view of key players and thus suture the viewer into their perspective. Right after the final victory over Portugal, it is, for instance, Lukas Podolski who slips into the role of cinematographer and gathers images of his colleagues as they face the enthused crowds in Stuttgart’s stadium and celebrate themselves, a move indicated by the blinking word “Poldicam” in the lower corner of the image. The boundaries between the filmed and the act of filming, between image and the real, between observing and rejoicing are thus effectively erased. To film is to participate in the game; to play is to film. Likewise, when Klinsmann’s squad returns to the Berlin hotel after the dramatic triumph over Argentina, Wortmann’s camera situates itself so closely behind Jens Lehmann’s shoulder that film and viewer seem to take on Lehmann’s own view of cheering crowds as they applaud his spectacular performance. The camera thus seems to serve as a substitute for Lehmann himself and do what the team’s goalie, because of his psychological exhaustion, initially was unable to do: participate in the joy. To film here is to expose one’s affect to view, to express and communicate what holds the team together. Filmmaking, as it emerges in the wake of and contributes to the process of postnationalist German patriotism, no longer subscribes to an artisanal or minor mode of cinematic expression because it—like the previous generation of new German filmmakers—seeks to plow through a traumatic past or articulate rigid structures of disidentification in the present. Nor is the deliberately rough and unpolished nature of Wortmann’s images meant to launch a direct attack on what used to agonize German filmmakers in earlier decades, namely, the hegemony of Hollywood over the global market. Instead, artisanal filmmaking, for the Hollywood returnee Wortmann, at once taps into and energizes the remaking of both German soccer and the German nation into an open network of flexible relationships, a team of mobile and diverse play71

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ers eager to take on other teams, not to establish exclusionary forms of group identity but to use encounters with others to find what is new and other in oneself and thus engage in unrestrained festivals of decentered mutuality. Wortmann’s handheld camera wants to do to German cinema what the national squad has done to the German public in the summer of 2006: inscribe cinema in an elated and indeterminate present, emancipate it from the past’s combative and ultimately immobilizing selfdefinitions, teach it how to play—for only they who know how to play with and recognize the other know how to be at ease with and recognize themselves. One day after Germany’s last-minute victory over Poland, on June 15, 2006, visitors of the Art Basel fair in Switzerland could witness the screening of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) on a giant screen in Basel’s St. Jakob-Park soccer stadium. The film was the product of highly elaborate editing maneuvers, carefully controlled design—a “work” eager to sublate the very conditions of chance and unpredictability to which the film’s footage initially owed its existence. On April 24, 2005, Gordon and Parreno had trained seventeen camera’s on Zidane during a regular La Liga match between Real Madrid and Villareal CF at Bernabéu Stadium. The parameters of their project had been simultaneously simple and utterly complex: to record Zidane’s actions throughout one entire game from seventeen different angles and then retell the match’s ninety minutes in real time focusing solely on Zidane’s position within that match, whether he had a good day or not. Some of the most advanced camera technologies had been put to work to capture desired close-ups of Zidane: his feet tipping and dragging across the grass during empty moments, profuse sweat on his neck and forehead, and, of course, Zidane’s relentless stare. The final product might have been disappointing to ardent soccer fans and stargazers: not one shot tells us anything about Zidane’s life beyond this particular game; hardly any shot even provides information about the course and outcome of the match we follow. And yet, because of their sophisticated reframing and editing strategies, Gordon and Parreno draw a stunningly authentic and realistic picture of what it means to participate in the relational dynamic of contemporary soccer, that is, the extent to which we must see modern soccer as the actualization of aleatoric spatial figures and transitory relational patterns—a passing instantiation of something that exceeds one central and predictable plan, will, and consciousness. 72

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Though his technological setup could not be more different than Gordon and Parreno’s, Wortmann’s film also eagerly grasps for the authentic and realistic, so eagerly in fact that the film appears haunted by a specter it cannot fully subdue. In the 2003 epic The Miracle of Bern, Wortmann relied on substantial digital interventions to conjure the crowd cheering the German team to its victory—special effects cloning and multiplying individual spectators into one huge collective body whose artificiality is quite obvious even to the untrained eye. Wortmann’s 2006 project does everything at its disposal to alleviate possible concerns that its images of players and crowds, of enthusiasm and sadness could be the product of mere special effects and digital sampling—that his attempt at capturing the moment’s affect, the transformation of reality into fairy tale, could potentially be seen as fake. In his published production diary, Wortmann ruminates on whether the German public’s unexpected euphoria during the FIFA World Cup could simply be a clever fiction of the news media, reminiscent of how, in Peter Hyams’s 1978 Capricorn One, a whole country cheers to what, in the end, turns out to be nothing more than an invented media story. Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale’s task is to work against such an impression. But how can one truthfully represent the turning of reality into fiction? How can film stay authentic and realistic when reality seems to borrow from film and fiction? Two strategies are of particular importance in Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale for responding to these questions, one seeking to ground and thus authenticate the film’s mode of representation outside the film’s very circulation of mediated images, and the other seeking to do so from within. Strategy one concerns Wortmann’s repeated references in both the film and the accompanying book to Klinsmann’s scientific approach to coaching, his highly sophisticated embrace of the latest methods, practices, and technologies to bring bodies into shape and study the tactics of opposing teams. Klinsmann’s staff, with the help of the American fitness expert Marc Verstegen, does not merely expose the players to unconventional, albeit—as soundtrack and book are eager to emphasize—scientifically proven, methods of training. During the immediate preparation for certain games, the coaching staff also relies on the help of academically trained experts analyzing another team’s tactics by situating their play within larger cultural patterns, traditions, and habits and thus conducting in front of the camera what resembles a Cultural Studies 101 lecture. In this way, Klinsmann’s soccer revolution is shown as something by no means limited to the physical or visceral. It is presented 73

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as being in lockstep with advanced science, thought, and critical analysis; as a matter of the mind as much as of the body; as an athletic exercise that—according to Wortmann—fascinates our intellect as much as it appeals to our sensory modes of perception, that fascinates because it involves embodied science and thought, and that for precisely that reason infuses soccer with a certain sense of reality exceeding and dismantling whatever could cast an inauthentic spell over the viewer’s senses. As he brings science, technology, and rationality to soccer, Klinsmann not only emancipates the German team from its previous lethargy but also frees his alter ego—the filmmaker—from being suspected of trading in the art of simulation and the inauthentic. Wortmann’s second strategy of authenticating his images and sounds has to do with the director’s repeated effort to show the stars of the German team, not as being entirely insulated from the public media’s attention but as being inextricably bound up with media themselves and the production, mediation, and consumption of moving images. Klinsmann’s coaching staff and squad are as much dedicated to using contemporary media technologies—iPods, digital cameras, television sets, Internet lounges, digital projectors, DVD players, PowerPoint shows, sampled music mixes—as the very crowd using such devices to enthuse itself with the successes of the German team. In one remarkable scene toward the end of the film, we witness substitute goalie Oliver Kahn—right after the end of the last game and his announcement that he is no longer pursuing an international career—as he watches a television interview with Klinsmann in which the latter lauds Kahn’s role and sportsmanship throughout the tournament. Kahn’s face appears deeply affected by what he sees and hears, so deeply that his usual roughness seems to have vanished from his countenance. Though we might want to see the sight of Kahn watching television as proof of the circularity of the FIFA World Cup’s media spectacle, the function of these images for the film is quite different. For, similar to the work of Gordon and Parreno, here Wortmann not only suggests that we cannot think of today’s reality (athletic or not) as being free of mediation but also draws our attention to the role of affect in authenticating what we may see mediated on screen. To watch Kahn watching encourages us to lose our suspicion about the proliferation of mediated images and simulated experiences in an advanced digital culture. To see Kahn being seized by the image on screen rather than seizing others with his typical intensity is to realize the extent to which mediation deeply affects and is being affected 74

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by the textures of the real. Kahn is Wortmann’s stand-in spectator, an avatar of our own act of viewing. The image of Kahn attentively watching television here is meant to confer authenticity to Wortmann’s images in general. Similar to the film’s repeated references to Klinsmann’s scientific methods of coaching, the presentation of screens within the screen serves the function of appeasing our nagging doubt about the film’s realism, the vanishing of reliable representation in the age of the digital image. Digital filmmaking à la Wortmann is as real as Kahn’s act of watching television, not because Wortmann obscures the circuits of electronic mediation but, on the contrary, because he reckons with the fact that televisual mediation has penetrated the deepest fissures of our everyday lives. Though reality may have turned into a fairy tale, Wortmann’s camera can capture the real realistically, precisely because it does not flee from but immerses itself into what is mediated, seemingly prosthetic, and potentially inauthentic. Though worlds separate the nature of Zidane’s gaze and Kahn’s stare, both play similar roles in the work of their respective cinematographers and filmmakers to make us believe that the affective spectacle of contemporary spectator sport—the way athletic performances touch upon our lives and identities—is everything but make-believe. From the first interview with team manager Oliver Bierhoff in the film’s first minutes, Wortmann’s Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale wants to draw particular attention to the precarious balance between the private and the public, the players’ focus on their most immediate task and the fans’ desire to consume their stars in the limelight of publicity. In this interview, Bierhoff describes the modifications to the team’s hotel in Berlin: the strategic placement of attractive lounge furniture to give a more intimate feel to the hotel lobby; the construction of computer and Internet zones to allow players to pursue their communication and relaxation needs; the setting up of certain common areas, both indoor and outdoor, to encourage team members to hang out together without necessarily thinking of the next game and their tactical assignments. Bierhoff ’s vision of the team hotel is that of a vacation resort that provides a place tucked away from the demands of the everyday, allowing individual team members to recharge their energies before appearing on the pitch or taking a choreographed bath in the crowds waiting in front of their hotel. Although it would be both futile and undesirable to shut out the buzz outside entirely, Bierhoff ’s hope is nevertheless to create an 75

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island of intimacy, relaxation, and privacy, of spontaneity and repose at the very heart of the media’s hyped-up attention—a site of interiority untouched by the public’s hungry eyes and ears. Wortmann’s camerawork throughout this and other hotel scenes largely seeks to confirm Bierhoff ’s choreography as he pictures the team hotel as if it indeed provided a privileged retreat, a private space at once denying the public’s curiosity and offering a base to step outside and present oneself to the gaze of the media and the fans. At the same time, however, Wortmann leaves little doubt about the fact that Bierhoff ’s vision, in our age of highly mediated and all-pervasive media coverage, cannot but remain a fiction; that the boundary between interior and exterior is highly unstable; and that in the face of the public’s forceful pressure any gesture of shutting out the public’s gaze will produce certain symptoms of repression, demarcation, and displacement within the zone of privacy itself. In one remarkable sequence, Chancellor Angela Merkel visits the team hotel to convey her support and enthusiasm before the beginning of the tournament. With the players seated in a semicircle around her and with Merkel herself standing in front of a blank television monitor, the chancellor delivers a brief speech of encouragement. It does not take much, however, to realize that Merkel is very uneasy in her role and is struggling to find some kind of script to communicate the nation’s wishes to the assembled crowd. Torsten Frings’s late arrival and his utterly casual traversal of the room and greeting of the chancellor does not help to make Merkel more comfortable—nor does Jens Lehmann’s rather reluctant question about tax lures for expatriates, which Merkel deflects by speaking about recent changes in parental support policies. Although Merkel’s presence inscribes the public’s attention within the private spaces of the team, her visible discomfort in trying to play the right kind of role articulates this private sphere’s nonaggressive neutrality toward such forms of intrusion or takeover. Thus, public and private domains here strangely coexist next to each other; one includes the other, one grafts itself onto the other without striving for some kind of dialectical synthesis. Private space—the local—seems to contain within itself the potentiality of the public and the national, just as much as the national is best articulated at the core of what seems to elude the public’s eager gaze and pressure to perform. Later in the film, Bastian Schweinsteiger takes command of Wortmann’s camera as both secretly enter Lukas Podolski’s hotel room and try to wake him up. Schweinsteiger goofs around throughout the prank, 76

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thus counterbalancing what in this sequence is clearly reminiscent of a cheap snuff film. When the camera, handheld and hence shaky, finally comes to focus on Podolski’s half-asleep body, we see the young media icon curled up in his bed, his cell phone resting in his hand as if he was unable to return it to the nightstand before falling asleep or is still awaiting a call not to be missed. Though meant to be funny and playful, the scene is quite unsettling—yet less so because Wortmann fulfills the dreams of many of his viewers, namely, to see their celebrity at his most intimate (and dressed in underwear only), and more so because we shudder at the curious banality and silence at the very heart of what is presented as a highly private space. Schweinsteiger leads us into the room as if such an intrusion will inevitably yield a great story, the revelation of some kind of secret, a sight whose surprise we will never forget. When we finally come to see Podolski, however, what is most striking is the complete absence of any story at the very center of this action as well as the sight of the cell phone crying for, but currently not fulfilling, acts of successful communication and interaction. Although Schweinsteiger pretends to reveal the innermost secret of the hotel’s intimate space, we come to realize not only that the external and public has always already been there but also that this presence of the public within the private is far from spectacular and titillating. Holding on to his unused cell phone, Podolski reminds the viewer of a teenager desperately longing for the next call to show off his nodal position within a vivid network of exchanges. But what radiates a greater sense of loneliness and loss, what communicates a more profound absence of meaningful narrative than the sight of a cell phone putting the world at our fingertips yet failing to connect our lives in reciprocal ways to the lives of others? Even though both Bierhoff and Wortmann, then, initially seek to present the team hotel as a protected island of intimacy and unscripted spontaneity amid a hyped-up public, and even though they in so doing posit public space as a theatrical stage on which private individuals present themselves to the gaze of a gathered audience, in the end Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale seems to convey a very different story. For similar to the way in which millions of viewers, during the FIFA World Cup, gathered on local Fan-Meilen to witness games, not in their secluded living rooms but in large crowds and in front of gigantic electronic screens, so did the team hotel emerge as a space in which a clear juxtaposition of the public and the private no longer seemed available. Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale, as much as it is dedicated primarily 77

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to documenting the wonder of German soccer in 2006, in this respect might also be seen as documenting the evanescence of former spatial demarcations under the pressure of an ever more global economy of celebrity, technological connectivity, and mediation. The film’s true fairy tale is not that Germans, in the summer of 2006, dared to say “we” again and wave their flags because they were inspired by a young team overturning expectation and convention. The true fairy tale, instead, is that Wortmann, perhaps contrary to some of his initial intentions, reveals the extent to which this ability to say “we,” to show affect and patriotic self-confidence, must be seen as an integral moment of the process of globalization itself—a fold within the global reconfiguration of personal spaces and collective temporalities quite different from how industrial society saw the present as structured by oppositions between the private and the public, interiority and exteriority, the national and the international. Team hotel and Fan-Meile are articulations of locality within the exploded territories of global space—territories relegating former oppositions of the private and the public, of individualized spectatorship and glamorized spectacle to the past and defining the present as a fluid simultaneity of possible identifications and localizations, a space in which one can be at once private and public, viewer and viewed, national and postnational. One year after the 2006 FIFA World Cup, at Documenta XII, Harun Farocki presented a video installation called Deep Play, having as its object the tournament’s final game between France and Italy on July 9, 2006. The installation consists of twelve television screens providing different perspectives on the flow of the game and recording individual movements, tactical shifts, spatial distributions, levels of exertion, and ball possession according to different analytical paradigms. On all twelve screens, we see the game progress synchronically in real time, but what we can glean from each individual monitor largely differs from what we might see on the next. On some level, Farocki wants to draw our attention to the spatial dynamic and ever shifting constellations of soccer. Looking at all the graphs, motion charts, and computer-generated renderings allows us to recognize the complexity of transitory interactions and network-like spatial figures that drives even games as void of creative play as the final between France and Italy. But Farocki’s innermost impulse is more ambitious than to merely let us enjoy the beauty of motion, spatial complexity, and temporal regrouping. The installation is 78

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framed by two monitors, the left showing a few analysts as they produce the very data and charts we see on some of the other screens, and the right presenting images from the Olympia Stadium’s police and surveillance station, including some of the footage captured by this station’s array of observation cameras. The didactic gesture of these two framing devices is difficult to miss. The pleasures of soccer spectatorship, Farocki tells us, are far from innocent. Our desire to watch, to marvel at, and to understand the infinite possibilities of passing and kicking is at once deeply complicit with and uncannily enveloped by the operations of media experts and the surveillance techniques of the police. Far from being merely a site of physical action and athletic play, soccer is deeply entrenched in how contemporary society struggles over the production, consumption, interpretation, and presentation of moving images. To watch is to participate and be positioned in a stratified relay of competing power positions. Wortmann’s Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale clearly does not have such critical ambitions. His film wants to expand rather than unsettle the perspective of the fan; the aim is not to expose the work of different regimes of observation, quantification, and control but to chart what remained of the regular fan’s perspective and thus give additional emphasis to what, during the FIFA World Cup, seemed to unhinge older regimes of German soccer and identity formation, regimes sacrificing play, passion, and pleasure on the altar of the legacies of a traumatic past. And yet, in all its desire to tap into and fan the new German patriotism of 2006, in all its efforts to expose to view the extent to which Germans have learned to say “we” again within a larger culture of postnational(ist) encounters, transactions, and recognitions, Wortmann’s documentary has some critical insight to offer. However, this insight is not that the fear that mediated images of crowds, of collective bodies, of affect and spontaneity could merely be the result of digital manipulation and simulation and hence deceive the viewer into some kind of fake bondage. Rather, what is to be gleaned from Wortmann’s film is the troubling notion that in an age of a globalized culture of public viewing, patriotic self-display, and thoroughly mediated privacy, older arguments about the power of surveillance have lost some of their normative ground and are in dire need of a conceptual update. The criticality of Farocki’s Deep Play rings strangely hollow and outdated vis-à-vis the images and sounds Wortmann has to offer. For why should we fear the state’s use of advanced technologies controlling people’s most intimate desires and activities if 79

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we are more than happy to play out our lives and affects in public viewing areas? Why fear omnipresent and omnipotent monitoring devices if our private spheres turn out to be eerily vacant and are merely defined by the intersection of various technological, cultural, political, and economic flows of the present?

Notes 1. Sönke Wortmann, Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen. Ein WM-Tagebuch, with Christoph Biermann (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006), 14. 2. For thorough documentation and an analysis of the World Cup’s news media coverage, see Amanda R. Gumbrecht, “Fußballfieber: The 2006 World Cup and Patriotism in Germany,” Senior honors thesis, Washington University at St. Louis, March 2007. 3. Wortmann, Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen, 112. 4. For more on the spatial dynamic of team sports, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).

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Elisabeth Krimmer

More War Stories Stalingrad and Downfall

Although German postunification cinema is often perceived as playful and fun-loving—it has, as Eric Rentschler claims, “a much lighter touch and is far more user-friendly”1—there are also a number of films that appear to continue the project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or the attempt to come to terms with the Second World War and the Holocaust associated with critically acclaimed New German Cinema features, such as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler: A Film from Germany, 1978), Volker Schlöndorff ’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy (1979– 81). Many high-profile productions of the past two decades, such as Josef Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993), Max Färberböck’s Aimée & Jaguar (1998), Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), André Heller’s Im toten Winkel—Hitlers Sekretärin (Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, 2002), Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstraße (Rosenstrasse, 2003), Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2003), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), and Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005) deal with the Third Reich. And yet, despite their purportedly critical impetus, these seemingly substantive productions are often as unwilling to challenge the status quo of the “cinema of consensus” as recent German comedies. To show how these films inflect complex debates to please a mass-market audience, I will analyze how Stalingrad and Downfall engage with Germany’s World War II past in general and with the highly controversial debate on victimization and guilt in particular. Rather than extending New German Cinema’s legacy of critically 81

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interrogating the past, both films fail to provide balanced representations of the difficult dynamic of guilt and victimization in favor of oversimplified portraits of Germans as victims. To contextualize my analysis and illustrate what is at stake in the discourse on victimization, I begin with a brief survey of the recent debate on German victimhood. Recent years have seen a proliferation of essays, literary texts, movies, and television productions depicting the suffering of “ordinary Germans” during and after World War II. There was a large audience for many of these works, which ranged from Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940–1945, 2004), a study of the horror of death and survival in the bombarded cities, to television productions, including Dresden (2006; ZDF) and Die Flucht (The Flight, 2007; ARD) and magazine articles dealing with the refugees from the East, the so-called Ostflüchtlinge, including a widely discussed series in Der Spiegel in 2002; from Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002) and W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (On the Natural History of Destruction, 1999) to the 2003 publication of Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin), an anonymous account of a German woman raped by Red Army soldiers. The fact that the discourse of victimization, which was already fully developed in the 1950s and 1960s,2 is often framed as a much needed and long delayed breaking of the taboo against narratives of German suffering indicates that these stories are in the business of fashioning “a present truth about the past.”3 In other words, the frequency, popularity, and supposed “newness” of the theme of German suffering suggest that this discourse is not simply designed to set the record straight but rather has a purchase on the current political situation. More specifically, as Aleida Assmann explains, stories of German victimization can be interpreted in the political context of 1989, that is, they may be appropriated for the consolidation of a new German state and the concomitant efforts to relieve the Germans of their historical burden.4 Numerous studies, ranging from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s pathbreaking Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, 1967) and Ralph Giordano’s Die zweite Schuld (The Second Guilt, 1987) to recent works by Assmann and Norbert Frei demonstrate convincingly that a decontextualized focus on German suffering is fraught with political pitfalls. However, eliding the issue altogether is equally problematic. In a much discussed series of lectures at the University of Zürich 82

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in 1997, W. G. Sebald lamented the dearth of literary treatments of the bombing of German cities. According to Sebald, this lack produces its own form of “Geschichtsblindheit” (historical blindness).5 Whereas Sebald is concerned with the absence and calcification of narratives, others conceive of the long overdue return of the repressed as a contribution to the psychological health of the German nation. In this way, the dictum that if we choose not to remember the past we are doomed to repeat it— long associated with the Holocaust—could now be applied to the issue of German victimization. In contrast, those who oppose efforts to shine a compassionate glimmer on Germans as victims of World War II read them as attempts to turn the spotlight away from the average German as perpetrator. Seen from this perspective, the discourse of victimization is problematic not only because it forms the unconscious underbelly of current German foreign policy—several scholars have pointed to a connection between the current German reluctance to engage in warfare and the propensity to identify with the victims of World War II6—but also because, in identifying with the victims of World War II, Germans run the risk of eliding the responsibility for both the war and the Holocaust. A case in point is the controversial exhibition Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (War of Extermination: Crimes of Hitler’s Army 1941 to 1944) organized by the Hamburg Institut für Sozialforschung, which opened in 1995 but was temporarily shut down in response to accusations regarding careless use of photographic evidence. The original exhibition focused on the potential involvement of millions of soldiers in the genocide of the Jews on the eastern front and thus brought the Holocaust home to the average German family.7 In contrast, the reopened and defanged version, which removed the 20 out of 1,433 photos that had been used inappropriately, minimized the role of German perpetrators. Hannes Heer, one the organizers of the exhibit, connects the “disappearance of the perpetrators” (Verschwinden der Täter) with the newly popular discourse of victimization that leaves no room for the representation of Nazi crimes. In addition, as historian Norbert Frei pointed out, attempts to portray German suffering run the risk of leveling differences between different kinds of victims.8 Frei’s warning is well taken since, at times, the perception of Germans as victims goes hand in hand with expressions of anti-Semitism and a problematic reevaluation of the past.9 As Stuart Tabener explains, this “development often subsumes the very different causes of German and Jewish 83

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suffering within a sentimentalized, universalized victimhood. Sooner or later, however, the depiction of Germans as victims may no longer necessitate the attendant depiction of Jewish victims.”10 Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire exemplifies this trend. Several scholars have drawn attention to the fact that Friedrich likened air shelters to crematoria and called the Allied bombing the biggest book burning of all times, thus provoking a comparison of the air raids on German cities and the German-engineered Holocaust. In Friedrich’s book, a “Mongolian” storm of destruction is unleashed against the Germans, and the Allies are frequently portrayed as on par with the Nazis. Friedrich calls the Allied Bomber Group 5 an “Einsatztruppe,” a term commonly used to refer to Nazi military units charged with the murder of Jews, and he also implies that Churchill was a war criminal. As these examples indicate, the discourse that surrounds questions of German responsibility, guilt, and suffering is extremely volatile. It is also a discourse that is riddled with sweeping statements and problematic binaries. Frequently, agency is perceived as a stable category, victimization is equated with innocence and moral superiority, and victims and perpetrators are perceived as mutually exclusive categories. Thus, discussions about the representation of German suffering remain deadlocked into the oversimplified dichotomy of silence or remembrance. And yet, instead of asking whether it is appropriate to discuss German suffering, one might ask how to acknowledge the suffering of individual Germans without denying or minimizing their responsibility and culpability both on a personal and on a national level. The following presents close readings of how Stalingrad and Downfall engage with the discourse on guilt and victimization. As I will show, both films emulate classical Hollywood aesthetics, and in both the interest in suspenseful narrative, visual spectacle, and moral binaries leads to a problematic simplification of Germans as victims of World War II.

Stalingrad In recent years, a surge of war movies has been accompanied by a critical debate regarding the possible pacifist impact of film as a medium. Although war films are often judged based on their perceived authenticity, that is, their willingness and skill in portraying the horror of war, there is also a consensus that the mere presentation of wounded and dying bodies does not in itself constitute a pacifist message. In the wake of popular 84

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successes ranging from The Deer Hunter (1978) to Saving Private Ryan (1998), critics have become increasingly wary of the sensationalist implications of war spectacles, arguing that “the meticulously detailed aping of an atrocity is an atrocity . . . the unmediated representation of violence constitutes in itself an act of violence against the spectator.”11 Clearly, it is not merely the fact of war’s horror that matters but also the style in which it is presented. As Robert C. Reimer points out, if images of war are framed in an aesthetically pleasing form, the beauty of the form may overpower the horror of the content.12 Or, as Jeanine Basinger puts it, “A film that says war is hell, but makes it thrilling to watch, denies its own message.”13 Reimer and Basinger’s point is well taken, but it remains limited to aspects of the genre while ignoring a larger problematic inherent in the medium. In implying that there is a “better,” nonanaesthetizing form of portraying war this line of thought neglects what Manuel Köppen refers to as “the imaginary power over time and space that is assigned to the spectator in the cinema.”14 Since film is as capable of projecting fantasies as it is of rendering reality, our reception of history on film is informed and undermined by our awareness of the illusory nature of the medium. Thus, one might well wonder if even stylistically sophisticated war films are more likely to de-realize war than to rally support for a pacifist agenda. However, since this is a problematic inherent in the medium, one cannot fault any particular filmmaker for it. More important, none of these critiques mentions another fundamental dimension of the war film that does fall within the purview of the individual director, namely, the fact that any pacifist agenda must be subtended by concepts of agency. As I will show, Stalingrad’s elision of the agency of German soldiers with respect to war and war crimes, the film’s myth of the insubordination of the upright German, and its simplistic leveling of differences between various kinds of victims undermine whatever pacifist intention Vilsmaier may have sought to convey. The archetype of the benevolent German grunt who does not participate in the crimes of the Nazi regime cannot conceal the fact that, in a nation of allegedly disempowered victims instead of responsible citizens, war is always an option. In his essay on German heritage cinema, Lutz Koepnick speaks of “a sudden rise of sweeping historical melodramas that reproduce the national past, including that of the Nazi period, as a source of nostalgic pleasure and positive identifications.”15 Koepnick names Joseph Vilsmaier as a representative of this new trend. Vilsmaier is indeed no newcomer 85

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to filmic depictions of Germany’s troubled past. His debut as a director, Herbstmilch (Autumn Milk, 1988), revived the genre of “Heimatfilm.” His Rama dama (1990) narrates the stories of Trümmerfrauen, “rubble women,” in Munich; Comedian Harmonists (1997), his biggest success to date, recounts the fate of the eponymous sextet during the Nazi era; and Marlene (2000) features episodes in the life of Marlene Dietrich. His latest film, Der letzte Zug (The Last Train, 2006), depicts the deportation of Berlin Jews. Although Vilsmaier has received numerous awards for his work, he has also been the target of much criticism. John E. Davidson, for example, accuses Vilsmaier of “spreading anti-memory,” that is, films that “steal or falsify the possibility of real cultural memory.”16 Whether or not one endorses the usefulness of the term “anti-memory,” it is certainly true that Vilsmaier’s representations of Germany’s past tend to shy away from moral ambiguities in favor of nostalgic reappropriation. And his Stalingrad is a case in point. Stalingrad traces the plight of a German platoon from the beginning of the siege to its bitter end. In critical responses to Vilsmaier’s war epic, there appears to be a consensus regarding the film’s pacifist intent. Stalingrad does not portray war as a heroic endeavor but as cruel, dirty, and futile. Vilsmaier deals in the stock-in-trade of the antiwar film. There is the soldier who succumbs to panic and defecates in his pants; the young recruit who machine-guns a comrade whom he mistakes for the enemy; and the traumatized soldier who cannot stop stuttering after he kills a Russian soldier with a shovel. Stalingrad also does not shrink from showing the “body in pain” to use terms set out by Elaine Scarry.17 The film contains numerous gruesome images of severed heads and body parts, men cut in two, human torches, a close-up of shrapnel in a man’s carotid artery, men who are being mowed down indiscriminately by machine gun fire or run over by tanks, corpses that are being devoured by rats, and the battlefields of an industrialized war strewn with bodies. Viewers witness the catastrophic conditions in army hospitals along with an excruciating amputation without anesthesia. Evidently, Stalingrad is not guilty of any of the multiple strategies with which representations of war seek to elide the body in pain and eliminate from their surface the facts of wounding and killing.18 Undoubtedly, Stalingrad shows the pity of war. But to maintain that this is enough to produce a pacifist film is to ignore not only important qualities of the medium of film and of the war film genre in particular but also the intimate relation between pacifism and concepts of agency. 86

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The Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 through February 1943), one of the bloodiest battles in human history, is generally perceived to be the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime. In German public discourse, it has become synonymous with the blind hubris of the Nazi leadership as well as with the inordinate suffering and victimization of the “ordinary” German soldier.19 Clearly, the topos of Stalingrad is ideally suited to a narrative that exonerates Germans by transforming them into victims of the war and the Nazi regime. Unsurprisingly, the myth of Stalingrad does not date from the postwar period but originates during the Nazi era. Nazi propaganda first concealed the experience of the “Kessel,” that is, the complete encirclement of Field Marshal Paulus’s Sixth Army and Hoth’s Fourth Tank Division by the Russian forces, and then proceeded to mythologize the catastrophic defeat. Evoking the Nibelungen epic and the battle of Thermopylae, Stalingrad was transformed into a narrative of heroic perseverance and sacrifice for the fatherland of the “Sie starben, damit Deutschland lebe” variety (they died so that Germany may live).20 Symptomatic of this trend is Hermann Göring’s speech of January 30, 1943, which presented the Sixth Army as the last bulwark against Russian bolshevism and culminated in the claim that “even a thousand years from now, every German will have to say the word Stalingrad with a sacred shiver.”21 In post-World War II fiction, Stalingrad offered an attractive perspective because it allowed for a clear bifurcation of victimized soldiers and corrupt leaders.22 The battle evokes images of glaring social injustice and came to be synonymous with the Nazi regime’s criminal indifference to human life and the military leadership’s spineless complicity in Nazi policy. Certainly, the suffering of all participants of the battle was extreme. Exposed to the terror of urban warfare and lacking proper gear owing to Hitler’s overconfident estimate that the battle would be over before winter, soldiers starved and froze to death in sub-zero temperatures. Whereas wounded soldiers were left to die in the beleaguered city, officers and generals took advantage of the few available airlifts to save themselves. Out of 600,000 German soldiers only 6,000 survived. But the “Kessel” was no less costly for the Russian forces, whose dead numbered 1,100,000 because of the unrelenting brutality of the Germans and Stalin’s “Not-One-Step-Back” doctrine. The suffering of German soldiers has been memorialized in numerous fictional representations, ranging from Bertolt Brecht’s Schweyk im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Schweyk during the Second World War, 1943) and 87

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Alexander Kluge’s Schlachtbeschreibung (Portrait of a Battle, 1978) to Heinz G. Konsalik’s Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor of Stalingrad, 1956).23 In recent years, the events of Stalingrad inspired a German documentary, the Emmy-nominated Stalingrad (2003), directed by Sebastian Dehnhardt, Christian Deick, and Jörg Müllner, and two feature films: the European coproduction Enemy at the Gates (2001), directed by Jean-Jacques Anneau, and Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993), produced by Bavaria Filmgesellschaft. In almost all these works, the suffering of the German army occupies center stage and serves to obfuscate the German soldiers’ involvement in the crimes of the regime. Judging from many of the German-authored texts, German soldiers were so busy staying alive that there was no time left to threaten or harm the Russian population. And yet, there is abundant evidence of German war crimes in the area: In the Smolensk area over 135,000 people were murdered, in the Leningrad area 172,000, in the Stalingrad area 40,000. In Stalingrad itself over one thousand mutilated corpses of local inhabitants, which showed signs of torture, were found after the expulsion of the Germans, among them 139 women, whose arms had been bent back in a painful manner and tied together with wire; some women had their breasts cut off, the star of David was burnt on the corpses of the men with a hot iron or cut out with a knife, in some cases, the stomach had been slit open.24

As this report illustrates, the issue at stake in German fictionalizations of Stalingrad is the same that made the exhibition War of Extermination: Crimes of Hitler’s Army 1941 to 1944 so controversial: the role of the average Wehrmacht soldier in the Nazi regime. However, whereas the exhibit of 1995 set out to shatter the stereotype of the common soldiers as innocent bystanders, Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad, whose release coincided with the fifty-year anniversary of the battle, caters to the desire to exonerate members of the Wehrmacht. Rather than attempting to grapple with the moral complexity of the “Kessel,” Vilsmaier’s film reproduces what Jens Ebert has identified as the basic topoi of German Stalingrad discourse: the betrayal and victimization of German soldiers.25 Unsurprisingly, the emphasis on victimization calls forth a correspondingly stereotypical representation of Nazi perpetrators whose motivations remain “underspecified, overgeneralized, or downplayed.”26 From the very beginning, Stalingrad sets German soldiers apart from the stereotypes commonly associated with Hitler’s army. Instead 88

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of orderly, disciplined, merciless brutes, the viewer encounters fun-loving young men. Convalescing on an Italian beach, the two protagonists, Rollo Rohleder and Fritz Reiser, are late and improperly attired for a roll call because they prefer to spend their time with wine and women.27 The depiction of soldierly community, of soldiers who share food and look out for each other, is continued throughout the movie. In a film with almost no female characters, the soldiers themselves take on female roles. Even the shots of wounded and dying soldiers upon arrival near Stalingrad are interspersed with images of caring and charitable acts, such as a soldier sharing his cigarette with a badly injured man or cradling a wounded comrade in his arms. Stalingrad does not simply ignore Nazi ideology and brutality but rather presents them in a way that distances the protagonists, the common soldiers, from the excesses of the “real” Nazis. For example, the film offers a brief glimpse of the brutal mistreatment of Russian prisoners of war, but it does so through the perspective of the inexperienced and idealistic Lieutenant Witzland, who spontaneously tries to stop the abuse, whereupon he himself is beaten because of his courageous intercession.28 The film does not completely erase the fact that Nazi ideology was widely endorsed. Rather, it briefly touches on ideological complicity in the beginning—during the train ride to Russia, some soldiers proclaim that they are going to take Stalingrad in three days and that, after the war, everybody will get as much Russian land and as many women as he wants—only to relegate it to oblivion during the remainder of the film. Consequently, the soldiers’ colonialist fantasies and their spouting of Nazi propaganda are presented as boyish giddiness rather than ideological fanaticism. The notion of the average grunt’s distance from the regime is further reinforced when the soldiers listen to a speech by the Führer on the radio. The film dwells on this scene at length to bring home the point that these soldiers are anything but a captive audience. Some men smoke, others clean their guns, Fritz Reiser shakes his head in disapproval, and Witzland turns the radio off in disgust. Again and again, Stalingrad suggests that its soldier protagonists are battle-hardened skeptics or innocent dupes—but not enthusiastic supporters of the regime. Viewers are encouraged to identify with Fritz Reiser and Lieutenant Witzland, who, as prototypes of the quiet hero, embody the moral center of the film. Witzland initiates a ceasefire to recover the corpses of dead comrades even though this procedure violates army regulations. Fritz shares bread and meat with a Russian soldier and spits in the face 89

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of the German who broke the ceasefire. The only character whose representation defies such simplistic heroization is Rollo. He craves medals, parrots Nazi slogans, and is quick to call for revenge on Russians when his wife has an affair with a French POW. Rollo is not averse to raping a female prisoner and generally eager to please the authorities. But not even Rollo is a fanatical ideologue. His flaw consists in the fact that he is easily led and that, in Germany, the wrong people are leading. Hardened Nazi perpetrators, on the other hand, are either members of the top brass or reduced to fleeting presence and faceless anonymity. In his analysis of Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), Brad Prager shows that Wolfgang Petersen’s submarine film exonerates the “ordinary” soldier by emphasizing the difference between soldiers and their superiors, thus “externaliz[ing] the evil in the form of the Nazi High Command.”29 A decade later, Stalingrad draws on much the same discourse to achieve the same effect. Vilsmaier stresses the gulf that separates soldiers from officers visually through the frequent use of low-angle shots that present high-ranking officers as towering and menacing. Whereas common soldiers deal with the daily peril of war and worry about what they left behind, the upper echelons of the military hierarchy are infested with corruption. There is a captain who manipulates a bumbling young soldier to volunteer for a suicide mission and another who makes his men beg him for bread on Christmas day in the freezing cold. The corruption of the officer class is further brought home during the dramatic scene of the air lift. While thousands of wounded soldiers try in vain to get aboard one of the few airplanes, a group of officers is escorted through the crowd and flown to safety. Stalingrad exploits the theme of social injustice to the fullest, showing how soldiers starve while the officer class lives in secret lairs stuffed with luxury items, food, and alcohol. Whereas officers rape and torture Russian women, Witzland and his men come to the rescue. Finally, in addition to absolving the common soldier from responsibility, Stalingrad creates a myth of insubordination. Throughout the film, there are numerous instances of moral courage (Zivilcourage). Witzland protests the mistreatment of POWs; when the soldiers are asked to execute prisoners, they resist, albeit in vain; eventually, Fritz and Witzland decide to desert—“I no longer feel bound by my oath” (“ich fühle mich an meinen Eid nicht mehr gebunden”), Witzland says—and they even shoot Captain Haller, who, throughout the film, is portrayed as a sadistic cynic.

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Through its class discourse, Stalingrad cements the notion of the common soldier as victim. The officer class is responsible for the deaths of Russians and Germans alike: “You are much worse, you lousy officers” (“ihr seid viel schlimmer, ihr Offiziersgesocks”), a soldier tells his captain, who claims that he is not a Nazi. He adds: “You went along even though you knew who you were dealing with” (“ihr habt mitgemacht, obwohl ihr gewusst habt, mit wem ihr euch einlasst”). Repeatedly, the film portrays Russian civilians and German soldiers as fellow sufferers, thus establishing a bifurcated moral perspective that is mirrored in the film’s aesthetics. The steadiness and firm focus of the camera, the moderate pace of the editing, and the frequency of tracking shots all convey a sense of control and intelligibility. In Stalingrad, the fog of war is reduced to its literal manifestation in the form of rain, snow, or dust so that the moral disorientation commonly associated with the term cannot dim Vilsmaier’s selective vision of Germany’s troubled past. In effect, by steering clear of experimentation and moral quandaries, Vilsmaier comes close to creating a German version of the traditional Hollywood World War II film “where ease of style, naturalness of narrativity, matches an ease of worldview, a naturalness of mission and meaning.”30 Whereas Germans are divided into corrupt superiors and caring soldiers, Russian soldiers and civilians are reduced to cameo appearances.31 Stalingrad allows glimpses into the suffering of the Russian population, but this suffering is presented as independent of and parallel to the suffering of the film’s protagonists. Again, the film does not elide German war crimes altogether, but reduces them to brief scenes in which the German perpetrators remain anonymous and faceless. Viewers witness how Germans burn the homes of civilians who are left unprotected against the cold of the Russian winter. Later, shots of dead babies bring home the results of this policy. But these events are removed from the sphere of the film’s protagonists, who themselves feel no enmity for the Russian people. The soldiers of Witzland’s platoon enjoy listening to Russian folk music and take care of a captured Russian orphan, who offers to fix the boots of his German captors. When the same boy is later arrested as a so-called saboteur, Witzland and Fritz attempt to save him but are prevented from doing so by a fanatical superior. While Nazi rhetoric of the German army as bulwark against Bolshevism is reduced to a few giddy remarks on the train to Russia, there is no reference of any kind to the Holocaust. The only mention of antiSemitism occurs indirectly when Captain Haller accuses Witzland of be91

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ing too Jewish-minded (Verjudung). In light of this glaring absence, it is all the more disturbing that the representation of common German soldiers at the airport is evocative of concentration camp imagery32: dead bodies are carelessly amassed in a huge pile, and the wounded soldiers wait in line to undergo a selection process in which a doctor decides over life and death. Even the tags that testify to their status as wounded in combat are reminiscent of the tattoos that reduced camp inmates to numbers. Although this scene is not indicative of anti-Semitism, it shows a problematic leveling of different kinds of victimization to the point where Germans appear as the primary victims of Hitler and the war.

Downfall Although Stalingrad’s approach to Vergangenheitsbewältigung leaves much to be desired, defenders of the film might point to the fact that its release date preceded many of the public debates that revolved around German victimization and guilt. This, however, does not apply to Downfall, which, despite the lively public discussion of Germany’s World War II past during the past decade, relies on the same parameters in its portrayal of guilt and victimization. From the 1940s to the present, many films and novels have attempted to psychoanalyze Hitler.33 Norman Mailer’s A Castle in the Forest (2007) and the American movie Max (2002) both explore Hitler’s early years. The first German comedy about Hitler, Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (Mein Fuhrer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, 2007), directed by Dani Levy and with Helge Schneider as Hitler, has Hitler undergo psychoanalysis, whereas Downfall, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and produced by Bernd Eichinger, focuses on Hitler’s last days in the Berlin bunker. By allowing a glimpse into the inner sanctum of the Third Reich, into Hitler’s living room so to speak, Downfall caters to viewers’ voyeurism. It is, as Lars Quadfasel puts it, “Big Brother for the educated crowd,”34 a fact that may account for the film’s enormous success at the German box office. At the same time, the fact that the film lays claim to absolute authenticity and faithfulness to the historical record—the director and producer relied heavily on Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (2005) and Traudl Junge’s memoirs Until the Final Hour (2003)—allows sensationalism to appear in the guise of historical enlightenment. In the mode of 92

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the Hollywood-style megapicture or blockbuster,35 Downfall is showy, reliant on special effects and star power, designed to evoke empathy and identification, and abounds with period details and atmosphere.36 In keeping with the production values and aesthetics of traditional Hollywood cinema, Downfall opts for narrative certainty and avoids any hint of the constructedness of its story. The film’s frame, excerpts from Heller’s interview with Traudl Junge, and its credits, which juxtapose information about historical figures with the images of the actors, strongly encourage the viewer to take the film’s historicity for granted. Public statements by the producer, Bernd Eichinger, further reinforce this claim: “We let ourselves be guided exclusively by actual events.”37 In light of this self-proclaimed faithfulness to the historical record, one might expect a film that does not shy away from exploring German responsibility and guilt. Surprisingly, however, Eichinger and Hirschbiegel find an investment in facticity perfectly compatible with the desire to foster national pride: “All of us need to take a closer critical look at our history. This is precisely what we have to do to say without timidity or a strange taste in our mouths: I am proud to be a German.”38 Whereas Stalingrad relies primarily on class discourse, Downfall effects the curious compatibility of Nazi crimes and national pride through the representation of gender. Critics such as Johannes von Moltke and David Bathrick have made important contributions to our understanding of the film by analyzing the ways in which Downfall solicits empathy with Hitler or purports to provide an authentic, seemingly “authorless” portrait of Hitler’s last days, but their analyses largely ignore issues of gender. In contrast, this article points to an important interrelation between what Assmann calls the film’s “female gaze,” its interest in cooks and secretaries,39 and its investment in Germans as victims. As I will show, by dividing the German people along gender lines, female enthusiasts and male resistance fighters, Eichinger and Hirschbiegel preclude an investigation of the complex interrelation of guilt and victimization. Many critics found fault with Downfall. Some argued that the attempt to humanize the Führer, that is, to include scenes that show him as charming and caring, makes Hitler seem harmless and provides a narrative that does not do justice to the magnitude of his crimes. As Christine Haase explains, “Contextualizing the man involves the risk of relativizing his deeds.”40 Or, as von Moltke puts it, where a film’s emotional “appeal bathes the atrocities of historical perpetrators in the revisionist light

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of compassion, it is fundamentally misplaced.”41 One might counter, as Assmann has done, that the emphasis on the trivia of Hitler’s life serves to debunk the Hitler myth.42 Moreover, one might also suggest that the few scenes that show Hitler in a gentler light—his encouraging words when Traudl Junge produces a page filled with typos during her job interview or his offer to provide a plane for her to fly her to safety—are offset by numerous scenes that depict his anti-Semitic mania and genocidal rage. But it remains true that several scenes of the film are deliberately designed to put the spectator in a position of empathy with Hitler.43 Moreover, even a “balanced” portrait cannot counteract the film’s tendency to depict Hitler’s regime in a manner that Susan Sontag labeled “fascinating fascism.”44 As Wim Wenders points out, glamorizing the Third Reich always remains an option in a film that naïvely reproduces Nazi iconography and presents Nazi terror and crimes as overwhelming and excessive spectacle. And yet, even though Downfall is at times drawn into the vortex of Nazi self-aggrandizement, it does provide a rationale for its humanization of the Führer. By presenting Hitler, in a much lauded performance by Bruno Ganz, in a positive light, Hirschbiegel and Eichinger offer a narrative apt to explain the strong bond between the Führer and his followers and to explore “how the mechanisms of such a system impacted the lives of the people and how the enthusiasm came about that carried such a dictatorship.”45 In its attempt to explore the nature of the bond between Hitler and “das Volk,” Downfall focuses on a shared resentment of the upper classes and on Hitler’s much vaunted sex appeal. The latter is particularly evident when Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries, who worked for him from 1942 to his final days in the Führerbunker, spontaneously refuses the Führer’s offer of a plane that could take her south after observing how Eva Braun insists on staying by Hitler’s side and is promptly rewarded with a kiss. Through this scene and, more generally, by representing Junge’s relation to the Führer as a schoolgirl crush, the film underlines the supposed erotic connection between Hitler and his female followers. Somewhat more sophisticated than the topos of the Führer’s sex appeal is the film’s interest in class envy and resentment. Repeatedly, Downfall suggests that the bond between Führer and Volk is based on a common disregard for members of the social elite. At a reception, for example, the secretaries comment on the double-faced hypocrisy of the Nazi big shots, who flatter Hitler when they are in his presence and denounce him behind his back. In line with acclaimed Hitler biographies, 94

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such as Ian Kershaw’s Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, the film suggests that Hitler too conceives of himself as a victim surrounded by traitors and cowards, particularly in the upper echelons of the military hierarchy. It depicts Hitler as a raving maniac who claims that his generals lie to him, disobey his orders, and foil all his valiant efforts to save Germany. In one of his tirades, Hitler is fixated on the fact that the generals, whom he calls “vermin” (Geschmeiss), went to military academies where they learned how to hold a fork and knife properly while he conquered all of Europe without much schooling. A variation of the same theme also plays out in Peter Kranz’s brief encounter with Hitler. Peter Kranz, a “Flakhelfer,” a young boy who was drafted into an antiaircraft unit of children, is about to receive a medal, awarded by the Führer himself, for his extraordinary service in defending the fatherland. When Hitler presents the medal, he comments that Peter has more courage than his generals. In focusing on class envy and sex appeal, Downfall foregrounds psychological explanations but largely ignores structural and social factors, such as, to name but a few, the role of propaganda or the peculiar diffusion of authority in the Nazi hierarchy of power. In this, as well as in its preference for a realist mode, Downfall shows its investment in the traditional Hollywood style of narrativization with its attendant penchant to simplify and personalize.46 Whereas the film’s focus on individual psychology serves to trivialize a complex subject matter, its unquestioned “realism” lays it open to a different set of challenges. Haase claims that, in presenting a realist narrative, Downfall depicts the Third Reich and the Holocaust as knowable and thus “implies the existence of a logic, order, and reason that belies the nature of the Nazi regime and its atrocities.”47 Similarly, in his review in the New Yorker, David Denby claims that the “attempt to re-create Hitler in realistic terms has always been morally and imaginatively questionable, a compromise with the unspeakable.”48 Informing this claim is the insight that an overinvestment in logical explanations runs the risk of domesticating the Holocaust and thus of denying the gravity of the trauma and its resistance to representation. And yet, the criticism of realist modes of representation is itself faced with an equally unacceptable alternative. Although it is true that Downfall streamlines a complex reality, its attempts to understand and explain in a realist mode are integral and important elements of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In contrast, a refusal to entertain the possibility of rational explanations threatens to relegate the Holocaust to a dimension of mythical otherness or primal 95

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Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) is subject to the allure of Hitler (Bruno Ganz) in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004).

evil that ultimately also serves to absolve its human actors from responsibility.49 Thus, as Haase rightly points out, it is not the film’s realism per se that is problematic but rather its failure to acknowledge the artificiality and limitations of such realism. In terms of cinematography and narrative, Downfall remains beholden to its transatlantic models, in particular to the Hollywood-style historical drama. It would appear that Eichinger, who declared, “My 96

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greatest fear was that Hollywood might be interested in the book,”50 sought to outdo his competition by imitating it. However, there is also a sense in which one might claim that, rather than imitating Hollywood too much, Downfall does not imitate it enough. During the past two decades, the line between traditional Hollywood and independent production has become increasingly blurry. Even mainstream movies now indulge in a certain degree of experimentation, “playful knowingness,” and “highly self-conscious narration.”51 This preference for irony, parody, pastiche, and reflexivity that characterizes many recent Hollywood productions is absent from Downfall. In its approach to history, Downfall is much closer to the historic epic and melodrama of 1950s Hollywood than it is to highly self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek productions of recent years. Clearly, there are certain limitations inherent in Downfall’s choice of a realist, psychologically focused narrative. But the film’s overinvestment in victim narratives does not flow from its narrative style but instead results from its representation of gender and, to a smaller extent, age. Tellingly, Downfall opens with a scene from André Heller’s documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary in which Junge comments on her decision to accept the position as Hitler’s secretary. Her explanations constitute a contradictory mixture of denial, exculpatory circumstances, and confused admission of guilt. By choosing to introduce its narrative with these comments and the subsequent scene of Junge’s job interview, the film sets Junge up as a point of entry for the viewer. Thus, viewers witness the inner workings of the Nazi regime through the eyes of an unusual bystander, one who is uncharacteristically close to Hitler but at the same time not involved in the decision-making processes of the Third Reich and as such, an innocent. Downfall means to explore how the average Jane and Joe mythified Hitler, believed in him, and empathized with him. We glean Hitler’s celebrity status from Junge’s girlish anticipation and nervous giggling before her job interview. We witness the secretaries’ tender concern for Hitler when they wake up to the sound of artillery fire and immediately worry not about their own safety but about the fact that this is an awful gift for Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday. Through Junge, the film explores the schizophrenic nature of the Germans’ emotional cathexis in the Führer and his politics from a safe position of innocence. On the one hand, Junge is portrayed as an astute observer who is acutely aware of the impossibility of final victory, as evidenced by her nervous breakdown during Eva Braun’s madcap party 97

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amid bombs. On the other hand, she implicitly believes in the Führer and clings to Hitler’s claims that an attack by Army Detachment Steiner, wholly imaginary at this point in the war, will save Berlin. Most importantly, however, the only wrongdoing Junge is guilty of is youthful gullibility and curiosity. The film shows that her initial blindness progresses toward a gradual disillusionment, but it leaves open whether Junge continues to remain beholden to the Führer. Tellingly, the film includes two endings. First, we see Junge and her young companion bicycle away from the city in the sunlight. Although this hints at a new and better life, the final clip tells a different story. In yet another segment from Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, Junge addresses the question of her guilt and admits that she could have known better. Her advanced age at the time of the interview suggests that Junge did not cycle into a brighter future but remained unable to leave the past behind. Based on this last scene, one might conclude that the much criticized decision not to show Hitler’s corpse is not necessarily indicative of the film’s uncritical prolongation of the Führer myth, as Wim Wenders argued, but could be read as an attempt to show that Hitler’s followers remained committed to their idol even after his death.52 And yet, the fact that Junge’s exploration of personal guilt is patched on after the credits and that its critical implications do not inform the rest of the film makes it all too easy to ignore this belated call for reflection. Junge’s experience forms the focus of the film, but it is only one of many storylines that center on emotional attachment to the Führer. Tellingly, all these stories revolve around adolescents, such as the Flakhelfer Peter Kranz and women. Although it is true that women condoned and actively participated in the crimes of the Third Reich,53 Downfall is not interested in different degrees of complicity but rather appears to be inspired by Joachim Fest’s conviction that the Führer cult was the province of women: “Certainly, elements of idol worship are no less at work in the ‘male’ movement; but this boundlessly overwrought, decidedly hysterical note . . . is rooted in the emotional excess of a certain kind of older woman who sought to activate unsatisfied internal drives in the frenzy of nightly rallies before the ecstatic figure of Hitler.”54 In Downfall, viewers are presented with an extensive parade of hysterical female followers: Eva Braun, who is willing to die for the Führer; Magda Goebbels, who cannot bear to face a life without Hitler; Traudl Junge, who refuses to save her own life if it means abandoning Hitler; a random nurse, who, upon meeting the Führer, has a hysterical breakdown and starts to 98

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Both Traudl Junge and Peter Kranz (Donevan Gunia) appear innocent as they ride away in the final moments of Downfall.

scream “lead us and we will follow”; a female member of the Volkssturm, who, when she realizes that the war is lost, convinces her fellow soldier to shoot her; Frau Reitsch, who proclaims, “One must kneel before your genius, mein Führer.” In addition to Hitler’s adoring female fans, there are some adolescent followers, such as Peter Kranz, whose age provides an all too understandable excuse for his fanaticism. In contrast, adult male charac99

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ters are shown to share in only one facet of the Führer-follower bond, namely, the suicide pact, but the male suicides in the film are dwarfed by an excess of fawning female admiration. Moreover, the emotional implications of the male suicide pact are not revealed until the very end of the film. Initially, the ever growing number of suicides among the notable members of the Nazi regime can easily be understood as straightforward attempts to escape the consequences of their actions. The fact that fear of the approaching Russian forces is only one factor in this decision does not become evident until the final minutes of the film. In a conversation between the Nazi diplomat Hewel and the SS doctor Schenck, shortly before Hewel’s suicide, Hewel explains to an uncomprehending Schenck that Hitler himself gave him the suicide pill. Thus, Hewel’s desire to commit suicide is framed as a perverted form of loyalty and emotional attachment to the Führer. Through this scene, the film acknowledges that emotional cathexis in the Führer is not exclusively the problem of women and children, but, again, it is too little too late. Downfall relegates this insight to the sidelines drowned out by the wealth of scenes focused on female and adolescent followers. Whereas all women characters in the film fall victim to Hitler’s lure, the representation of Hitler’s male entourage is multifaceted and thus leaves ample room for male omnipotence fantasies. Alongside the spineless military leaders and craven sycophants, there is an impressive array of male characters who preserve their independent judgment and resist Hitler in various ways. Peter Kranz’s father, for example, a war veteran, scolds the Hitler youth fanatics and instructs them to stop fighting. The SS doctor Ernst-Günter Schenck insists on staying on in Berlin to help care for the civilian population. Whereas the historical Schenck was accused of using concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs for his experiments to improve nutrition, the film focuses on Schenck’s tireless efforts to save the lives of wounded soldiers and his courageous albeit fruitless attempts to stop the execution of so-called deserters. Downfall also contains no mention of Albert Speer’s ruthless exploitation of forced labor and prisoners of war in his function as minister of armaments. Instead, viewers witness how Speer heroically refuses to carry out Hitler’s Nero Decree, which called for the demolition of all German infrastructure. Similarly, SS general Wilhelm Mohnke, who was accused of involvement in the Malmedy Massacre, the brutal execution of unarmed American prisoners of war, is portrayed as a valiant hero who calls for the evacuation of all civilians from Berlin and protests the senseless killing of the 100

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inadequately armed members of the Volkssturm. Even Hermann Otto Fegelein, Himmler’s “golden boy,” who was accused of participation in massacres in the Pripet Marshes during his service on the eastern front, emerges as the voice of reason who urges the generals to accept the reality of the lost war and tries to save Eva Braun and Traudl by urging them to leave. In “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s Crisis Years and West German National Identity,” Elizabeth Heineman argues convincingly that “memories of female victimhood during the latter part of the war . . . were generalized into stories of German victimhood.”55 Because women are traditionally stereotyped as gullible and weak and thus more easily identified as victims, an emphasis on their experience is apt to diffuse questions of guilt and responsibility. Seen in this light, it is significant that our main point of entry into the story of Downfall is Traudl Junge, a hapless innocent who can hardly be blamed for the sins of her superiors. Through its deployment of gender, Downfall short-circuits any serious investigation into “die Mechanismen dieses Systems.” It encourages a reading that presents cathexis in the Führer as an affliction that befalls women and adolescents, groups with limited liability, while it offers an impressive array of male heroes who, whitewashed of their inglorious past, preserve their independence and resist Hitler’s nefarious commands quietly and effectively. The heroization of these men and the obfuscation of the crimes in which they were involved are further aided by the fact that, in Downfall, all racist and anti-Semitic comments are attributed exclusively to Hitler and Goebbels, whereas they cause their followers some mild embarrassment and concern. Thus, Albert Speer remains silent when listening to Hitler’s mad ravings about Jews, and Traudl Junge’s face expresses horror when Hitler dictates his antiSemitic convictions as part of his testament. In Hirschbiegel’s film, the only ones who are invested in the Holocaust are Hitler and Goebbels, whereas all other Nazis are either suicidal or in the business of hurting their fellow Germans. Hirschbiegel’s work presents suicidal maniacs and heroic helpers and saviors, but it does not show the Holocaust or Hitler’s “willing executioners” in the lower ranks of the military hierarchy. It is emblematic of this trend that the film allows brief glimpses of the roaming units that executed deserters but chooses to not make them the focus of one of its multiple subplots. This absence combined with numerous declarations by Nazi big shots that the German Volk has proven unworthy and does not deserve to survive—“If the war is lost, it is completely 101

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irrelevant if the people are lost as well . . . the people have proven to be weak and it is a law of nature that they will be exterminated”56—creates a narrative that again frames the German Volk as a prime target of Hitler’s genocidal rage.

Coda In a bitter satire in Die Zeit, Harald Martenstein discusses Hitler’s relationship with his mother’s Jewish doctor and draws the following conclusions: During the so-called Third Reich, Hitler personally took care that the old doctor remained unharmed. . . . Hitler took some risks when he helped Dr. Bloch, he could have lost his job and be publicly ridiculed. . . . When I read that, I doubted for the first time that Hitler really was a National Socialist. Of course, it is true that he was employed in a supervisory position and that he was implicated in these matters, but during that time the latter more or less holds true for all. It is possible that Hitler, who was simply ambitious and wanted to have a political career, observed the anti-Semitism and militarism of most other Germans and realized that acting the way he did was the most expedient way to become chancellor, which was true after all, but inside he was an enemy of the NS-regime. But like millions of others, he too could not escape its pressure.57

The merit of Martenstein’s farcical exaggeration lies in the excess that instigates suspicion toward all too easy claims to victimhood. The danger of Stalingrad and Downfall lies in their earnest investment in simple dichotomies of heroization and victimization. The gravest shortfall of Downfall is not, as some have suggested, an all too sympathetic portrayal of Hitler. After all, showing Hitler in this light provides a narrative, however simplified, of the bond between the Führer and his Volk. Rather, the real problem consists in the fact that, like Stalingrad, Downfall refuses to engage with the complexities of guilt and suffering in the context of World War II. Both Stalingrad and Downfall, in their different ways, promote Andreas Hillgruber’s thesis of “two kinds of destruction” (zweierlei Untergang) according to which Hitler is responsible for two attempted genocides: that of the European Jewry and that of the German Volk. Both locate responsibility for German crimes with a small group of elite leaders. It remains to be hoped, as Aleida Assmann suggests, that 102

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“the diverse memories of suffering, guilt, and resistance can co-exist side by side without necessarily canceling each other out,”58 but in both Stalingrad and Downfall the focus on Germans as victims of Hitler and the war serves to elide questions of responsibility and guilt. Rather than interrogating the past, both films present an account of the Nazi era that does indeed allow for positive identifications and national pride.

Notes 1. Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 264 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 2. See Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Studies such as Peter Sichrovsky’s Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, trans. Jean Steinberg (New York: Basic Books, 1988) and Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall’s “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2002) provide ample proof that, far from being a taboo, the perception of Germans as victims of the Nazis and the war dominates memories of the Third Reich in the private realm. Regarding public discourse, a taboo against Germans as victims characterized the works of those of the “skeptical generation,” such as Günter Grass and Jürgen Habermas (see Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewußtsein der Deutschen [Munich: Beck, 2005], 12), but can hardly be said to describe the entire political spectrum. Robert G. Moeller’s analyses of public policy, stories in the daily press, works by historians, and movies of the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate that the “past of German victimization did not have to be scripted anew, because it was already in place” (Moeller, War Stories, 193). Similarly, the notion that there is a dearth of literary portrayals of German suffering does not hold up under close inspection. Numerous texts and films, ranging from Hans Erich Nossack’s Der Untergang (1948) to Gert Ledig’s Die Vergeltung (1956) depict Germans as victims of World War II, although it is true that many of these texts have not attained canonical status and were unwelcome at the time of publication. In addition to these works, whose focus is on German suffering, the pain and agony of life during and after the war form the unacknowledged subtext of numerous films and literary texts. In Heinrich Böll’s Der Zug war pünktlich (1947), for example, a German soldier is blown up by the Polish resistance. Böll’s Das Brot der frühen Jahre (1955) depicts the pernicious effects of starvation and the shock of living among ruins in postwar Germany. Furthermore, Jaimey Fisher has argued convincingly that German rubble films depict the destruction wrought by the Air War. See Jaimey Fisher, “Bombing Memories in Braun’s Zwischen Gestern und Morgen (1947): Flashbacks to the Recent Past in the German Rubble-Film,” in Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, 329 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). 103

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3. See Robert Eberwein, “Introduction,” The War Film, ed. Robert Eberwein, 13 (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 4. See Aleida Assmann, “Two Forms of Resentment: Jean Améry, Martin Walser and German Memorial Culture,” New German Critique 90 (2003): 129. 5. W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003), 6. 6. See, for example, Andreas Huyssen, “Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad,” New German Critique 90 (2003): 164–71, and Lothar Kettenacker, ed. Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003), 13. 7. On this see Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 157–58. 8. Frei, 1945 und wir, 3. 9. Martin Hohmann, then member of parliament for the Christian Democratic Union, characterized the Jews as “Tätervolk” in a reference to Jewish Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. 10. Stuart Taberner, “Philo-Semitism in Recent German Film: Aimée und Jaguar, Rosenstraße and Das Wunder von Bern,” German Life and Letters 58, no. 3 (2005): 362. 11. Gilbert Adair, Hollywood’s Vietnam: From The Green Berets to Full Metal Jacket (London: Heinemann, 1989), 159. 12. Robert C. Reimer, “Picture-Perfect War: An Analysis of Joseph Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993),” in Light-Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 307 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). 13. Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 87. 14. “die imaginäre Herrschaft über Zeit und Raum, die dem Betrachter im Kinosaal zugewiesen wurde,” Manuel Köppen, “Von Tolstoi bis Griffith: Krieg im Wandel der Mediendispositive,” in Krieg in den Medien, ed. Heinz-Peter Preußer, 75 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 15. Lutz Koepnick, “Amerika gibt’s überhaupt nicht: Notes on the German Heritage Film,” in German Pop Culture: How American Is It? ed. Agnes C. Mueller, 192 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 16. See John E. Davidson, “Shades of Grey: Coming to Terms with German Film since Unification,” in German Cinema since Unification, ed. David Clarke (London: University of Birmingham Press, 2006), 46 and 43, respectively. 17. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 18. Ibid., 77. 19. For East German discourse on Stalingrad, see Jörg-Uwe Fischer, “Man soll nicht vergessen: Stalingrad-Deutungen im Hörfunkprogramm der SBZ/DDR in den späten vierziger und fünfziger Jahren,” in Schuld und Sühne? Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit (1945–1961), ed. Ursula Heukenkamp, 127–37 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). 20. On this see Peter Krüger’s “Etzels Halle und Stalingrad: Die Rede Görings 104

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More War Stories: Stalingrad and Downfall vom 30.1.1943,” in Die Nibelungen: Ein deutscher Wahn, ein deutscher Alptraum: Studien und Dokumente zur Rezeption des Nibelungenstoffs im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Joachim Heinzle and Anneliese Waldschmidt, 151–90 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991); and Michael Kumpfmüller, Die Schlacht von Stalingrad: Metamorphosen eines deutschen Mythos (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1995). 21. “jeder Deutsche noch in tausend Jahren . . . mit heiligen Schauern das Wort Stalingrad aussprechen [muß]” reprinted in Krüger, “Etzels Halle und Stalingrad,” 180. 22. On this, see Jens Ebert, Stalingrad—eine deutsche Legende (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1993), 276. 23. Additional treatments include Theodor Plivier’s novel Stalingrad (1945), based on documentary sources and interviews with German prisoners of war; Peter Bamm’s Die unsichtbare Flagge (The Invisible Flag, 1952); Heinz Gerlach’s Die verratene Armee (The Betrayed Army, 1955); Fritz Wöss’s Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben (Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? 1958), which inspired the eponymous film of 1958; and Heinz G. Konsalik’s Das Herz der 6. Armee (The Heart of the Sixth Army, 1964). 24. “Im Gebiet von Smolensk wurden mehr als 135.000 Menschen ermordet, im Gebiet von Leningrad 172.000, im Gebiet von Stalingrad 40.000. In Stalingrad selbst wurden nach der Vertreibung der Deutschen über tausend verstümmelte Leichen von Ortsbewohnern gefunden, die Foltermerkmale aufwiesen, darunter 139 Frauen, denen die Arme in schmerzhafter Weise nach hinten gebogen und mit Draht zusammengeschnürt waren; einigen waren die Brüste abgeschnitten worden, auf den Leichen der Männer war der fünfzackige Judenstern mit einem Eisen eingebrannt oder mit einem Messer ausgeschnitten, einigen war der Bauch aufgeschlitzt.” Quoted in Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, Der Nürnberger Prozeß: Bilanz der tausend Jahre (Cologne: Kiepenheuer, 1958), 541–42. 25. Ebert, Stalingrad, 256. 26. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), xv. 27. Nazi ideology that promotes racial health and despises all forms of mental illness also has no purchase on Fritz and Rollo. They are shown caring for their former lieutenant, who is incapacitated because of a head injury, taking him to the beach and playing cards with him. 28. Witzland, a newly minted member of the officer class, albeit of low rank, is portrayed as an outsider among his own class, whereas his relationship with his men is intimate and egalitarian. 29. Brad Prager, “Beleaguered under the Sea: Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981) as a German Hollywood Film,” in Halle and McCarthy, Light-Motives, 247. 30. See Dana Polan, “Auteurism and War-teurism: Terrence Malick’s War Movie,” in Eberwein, The War Film, 54. 31. There are brief shots of Germans herding and manhandling Russian POWs, of a dying Russian soldier whose last words are addressed to his mother, and of mothers and children who have been left behind in the beleaguered city. 32. Ole Frahm showed that during the Third Reich the image of the Leichenberg 105

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(pile of corpses) was used to signify German suffering: “Die Projektion einer Vernichtung der Deutschen durch den ‘jüdischen Bolschewismus’ materialisiert sich im Bild des Leichenbergs,” Ole Frahm, “Ein deutsches Trauma: Zur Schamlosigkeit deutscher Opferidentifikation,” German Life and Letters 57, no. 4 (2004): 383. 33. Films that deal with Hitler’s last days or attempt to present a psychological study of the Führer include Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1942); G. W. Pabst’s Der letzte Akt (The Last Ten Days, 1955); Ennio De Concini’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) with Alec Guinness as Hitler; George Schaefer’s The Bunker (1981) with Anthony Hopkins as Hitler; Aleksandr Sokurow’s Moloch (1999); Christoph Schliengensief ’s 100 Jahre Hitler—Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker (1989); Christian Duguay’s Hitler—The Rise of Evil (2003) with Robert Carlyle as Hitler; and Gespräch mit der Bestie (Conversation with the Beast, 1991) directed by Armin Müller-Stahl and with Müller-Stahl as Hitler. 34. “Big Brother für Gebildete,” Lars Quadfasel, “Unmenschen, menschlich gesehen: Die Faszination am Subjekt im Stande von dessen Zerfall,” in Filmri:ss: Studien über den Film Der Untergang, ed. Willi Bischof, 115 (Munster: Unrast, 2005). 35. The film’s aspiration to blockbuster status is also evident in the fact that, during its initial release, a record number of 400 prints were sent to cinemas all over Germany. The DVD is available in a luxury edition and as the director’s cut. See Sabine Hake, “Historisierung der NS-Vergangenheit: Der Untergang (2004) zwischen Historienfilm und Eventkino,” in Nachbilder des Holocaust, ed. Inge Stephan and Alexandra Tacke, 209 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007). 36. For detailed information about Hollywood aesthetics and style, see David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 37. “Wir ließen uns ausschließlich von den wirklichen Ereignissen leiten.” Quoted in Jan Weyand, “So war es! Zur Konstruktion eines nationalen Opfermythos im Spielfilm Der Untergang,” in Bischof, Filmri:ss, 39. 38. “Wir alle haben uns noch nicht genug mit unserer Geschichte auseinandergesetzt. Aber genau das müssen wir tun, um wieder ohne Scheu und seltsamen Beigeschmack sagen zu können: Ich bin stolz, ein Deutscher zu sein,” quoted in Alexander Ruoff, “Die Renaissance des Historismus in der Populärkultur: Über den Kinofilm Der Untergang” in Bischof, Filmri:ss, 72–73. 39. Aleida Assmann, “Lichtstrahlen in die Black Box: Bernd Eichinger’s Der Untergang,” in Das Böse im Blick: Die Gegenwart des Nationalsozialismus im Film, ed. Margrit Fröhlich, Christian Schneider, and Karsten Visarius, 46 (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 2007). Kilb, however, draws a diametrically opposed conclusion: “Mythisierung durch Entzauberung: Dass der nette Onkel zugleich die schrecklichsten Massenmorde und Kriegsgräuel ins Werk setzt, macht ihn noch interessanter,” Andreas Kilb, “Ein Mahnmal, ein Reißer, ein Meisterwerk? Das Ende Adolf Hitlers im Kino: Der letzte Akt von Georg Wilhelm Papst und Der Untergang von Oliver Hirschbiegel im Vergleich,” in Fröhlich, Schneider, and Visarius, Das Böse im Blick, 93. 40. Christine Haase, “Ready for His Close-Up? Representing Hitler in Der Untergang (Downfall 2004).” Studies in European Cinema 3, no. 3 (2007): 191. 106

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More War Stories: Stalingrad and Downfall 41. Johannes von Moltke, “Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion,” New German Critique 102 (2007): 42. 42. Assmann, “Lichtblicke,” 52. 43. Moltke, “Sympathy,” 29–35. 44. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn, 73–105 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980). 45. “wie die Mechanismen eines solchen Systems in das Leben der Menschen eingegriffen haben und wie der Enthusiasmus geboren wurde, mit dem eine solche Diktatur getragen wurde,” quoted in Katharina Dockhorn, “Warum sollten andere über unser Trauma berichten? Der Produzent Bernd Eichinger über seine Perspektive auf den Untergang,” Film: Das Kino Magazin 100 (2004): 37. 46. On this, see Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Krimmer, Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens, and TV Heroines: Contemporary Screen Images of Women (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 11. 47. Haase, “Close-Up?” 197. 48. See David Denby, “Back in the Bunker: Downfall,” New Yorker, February 14, 2005. 49. For more on the debate, see Brad Prager, “The Good German as Narrator: On W. G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing,” New German Critique 96 (2005): 79–80. 50. “meine größte Angst war, dass sich Hollywood des Buches annimmt,” quoted in Dockhorn, “Trauma?” 37. 51. See Bordwell, Hollywood, 7 and 182, respectively. 52. See Wim Wenders, “Tja, dann wollen wir mal,” Die Zeit, October 21, 2004. http://www.zeit.de/2004/44/Untergang_n. 53. See Christina Herkommer, Frauen im Nationalsozialismus—Opfer oder Täterinnen? Eine Kontroverse der Frauenforschung im Spiegel feministischer Theoriebildung und der allgemeinen historischen Aufarbeitung der NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: m press, 2005), esp. 59–75. 54. “Gewiß sind die Elemente abgöttischer Verehrung in der ‘männlichen Bewegung’ nicht minder wirksam gewesen; aber jener schrankenlos überreizte, entschieden hysterische Ton . . . nahm seinen Ausgang doch vom Gefühlsüberschwang einer bestimmten Gattung ältlicher Frauen, die das unbefriedigte Triebmaterial ihres Inneren im Taumel nächtlicher Großkundgebungen vor der ekstatischen Gestalt Hitlers zu aktivieren versuchten,” Joachim Fest, Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches: Profile einer totalitären Herrschaft (Munich: Piper, 1977), 159. 55. Elizabeth Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s Crisis Years and West German National Identity,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 355. 56. “Wenn der Krieg verloren geht, ist es vollkommen wurst, wenn auch das Volk verloren geht . . . das Volk hat sich als das schwächere erwiesen und es ist nur ein Naturgesetz, dass es dann eben ausgerottet wird.” 57. “Hitler sorgte im sogenannten ‘Dritten Reich’ persönlich dafür, dass dem alten Arzt kein Haar gekrümmt wurde . . . Hitler hat also einiges riskiert, als er Dr. Bloch half, er hätte ja seinen Job verlieren und zum Gespött werden können. 107

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. . . Als ich das gelesen habe, sind mir zum ersten Mal Zweifel daran gekommen, ob Hitler wirklich Nationalsozialist war. Es stimmt natürlich, dass er dort in leitender Position tätig und in diese Dinge verstrickt gewesen ist, aber das Letztere gilt in jener Zeit doch mehr oder weniger für alle. . . . Womöglich hat Hitler, der einfach nur ehrgeizig war und eine politische Karriere machen wollte, den Antisemitismus und den Militarismus der meisten anderen Deutschen beobachtet und sich gesagt, dass er auf diese Weise, indem er sich so gibt, wie er sich gab, am schnellsten Kanzler wird, was ja auch stimmte, innerlich aber war er ein Gegner des NS-Regimes. Seinen Zwängen aber konnte er sich ebenso wenig entziehen wie Millionen andere,” Harald Martenstein, “Hitler,” Die Zeit 17, June 21, 2007. http:// www.zeit.de/2007/17/martenstein-17. 58. Aleida Assmann, “On the (In)compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory,” German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (2006): 198.

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Anna M. Parkinson

Neo-feminist Mütterfilm? The Emotional Politics of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse

Released in 2003 in Germany to critical acclaim, Rosenstraße (Rosenstrasse) indicated that Margarethe von Trotta, Germany’s foremost female film director, who has offered the most sustained and successful female variant of Autorenkino in postwar German film history, is alive and well.1 It is worthwhile asking, however, what kind of politics—feminist and otherwise—is being offered to the viewer of von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse. Does what I term here “Mütterfilme” (mother films) continue the feminist politics of von Trotta’s earlier doppelgänger or “sister” films? How does von Trotta’s first feature film directly and consistently thematizing the period of German National Socialism represent the intersection with or traversal of the political terrain of memory with that of feminism? Is fiction blurred with fact in this film through its claim to authenticity as it declares the historical veracity of the women’s protest in Rose Street in February 1943; and if so, to what end? To address these questions, it is necessary to ask after the nature of the work performed by the figure of the mother in von Trotta’s film. Which assumptions underlie the different levels of mobility represented by gentile women’s bodies and those of Jewish women, for example? And what type of relationships are being staged between male Jewish and female non-Jewish German bodies at the level of the explicit narrative of National Socialist domination and genocide as well as through the feminist narrative for which the film becomes a vehicle? And, finally, does von Trotta’s neofeminist return to German screen memories in Rosenstrasse significantly depart from her existing palette of films about women? 109

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New German Cinema—nascent in the war declared on “Papa’s Cinema” (Papas Kino) by the twenty-six young German filmmakers in the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, and whose demise is often conveniently linked to R. W. Fassbinder’s early death in 1982—was never a particularly feminist cinema, despite a slew of films about women produced by female directors in Germany in the late 1970s. Although several women filmmakers garnered national attention and occasional accolades during this period, including Helma Sanders-Brahms with her film Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1979), Jutta Brückner with Hungerjahre (The Hunger Years: In a Land of Plenty, 1979), and Helke Sander with Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit—REDUPERS (The All-Around Reduced Personality, 1977), to date most film histories documenting this period record the prejudice toward and limited means available at this time to these and other women filmmakers’ projects.2 Thus despite a flurry of films produced by women filmmakers at this time,3 the near absence of contributions by contemporary women filmmakers to the critical omnibus film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) from 1978 signals a significant omission of their voices from what was envisioned as a communal film project. Ironically enough, it was at the funeral of the three Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) members found dead in their cells at Stammheim—part of the constellation of events that compelled the making of Germany in Autumn and that is recorded in the film’s documentary footage—that Margarethe von Trotta first met and spoke with Christiane Ensslin, the sister of RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin. Both Christiane Ensslin and Margarethe von Trotta were attending the funeral of the three RAF terrorists, including Christiane Ensslin’s sister Gudrun, whose alleged suicide in the high security prison of Stammheim remains a point of contention in most accounts of the “German Autumn.” The encounter between Ensslin and von Trotta ignited the idea in the latter for her film Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981), which documents the uneasy relationship between two sisters, one who turns to radical violence as a means of political critique, while the other occupies a more moderate position on the political spectrum of dissent by working as an editor for a feminist magazine. First screened in 1981, Marianne and Juliane received numerous film prizes, including the coveted Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, and in many ways it remains von Trotta’s most popular and topical film to date.4

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The focus of this essay, however, is not to establish that there is a fraught relationship between terrorism and feminism but rather to consider the exposition of the relationship between feminism and philoSemitism and, even more so, between women and Nazi resistance, represented by von Trotta’s film Rosenstrasse, for which she received, interestingly enough, her second Golden Lion Award.

The F-Words: Female, Feminist, Filmmaker Emerging in the 1970s as one of a handful of prominent German female filmmakers, Margarethe von Trotta has exhibited an at times ambivalent relationship to the moniker Frauenfilm (women’s film) that has often been applied to her films. The term is multivalent and was applied in the 1970s and 1980s to a broad spectrum of cinema, including films by women, films about women, films with a feminist agenda, and films that were seen to celebrate “women’s essence.”5 Understandably then, perhaps, von Trotta has rejected the term “Frauenfilme” as a descriptor for her films. At first glance, this may seem a wholesale rejection of feminism, but a closer examination of the subjects of her films and statements she has issued about her work reveals a more complex relationship to feminism. Belonging to the first generation of postwar women filmmakers in Germany, von Trotta is often claimed and celebrated as feminist simply through her achievements as a woman making films in a notoriously male-centered industry.6 In this understanding of feminism as equality—namely women having the same opportunities available to them as men—von Trotta certainly is a success story. Further, as von Trotta herself states, while living in Paris she was part of the wave of political ferment in Europe during the 1960s that demanded social change, at first through critical reflection on the shortcomings of the conventional and then, when that failed to produce the desired results, by calling for revolutionary action. Although von Trotta was fascinated by the figure of the female terrorist and her attendant web of contradictions vis-à-vis conservative state formations and patriarchy alike, her contribution to political activism consisted more in the distribution of flyers and an engagement in the ongoing political debates of the 1970s.7 Apparently, von Trotta saw herself reflected more accurately in the causes of the women’s movement, which she supported in a variety of ways, both intentionally and by dint of the fact that German independ111

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ent women filmmakers had needed to frame their claims within feminist terms from the very start.8 In comparison to her contemporary, filmmaker Helke Sander, whose political initiatives and filmmaking were explicitly critical of patriarchy and confrontational in feminist terms,9 von Trotta may be seen to represent a feminist practice of filmmaking emerging in the 1970s that is more invested in what has been called questions of “feminine aesthetics” than in overt confrontation or overt political action. In other words, whereas Helke Sander’s films insist on the “political” in the feminist slogan “the personal is the political,” Margarethe von Trotta’s films prefer to access the slogan by way of emphasis on the “personal.” Unlike fellow women (and self-proclaimed feminist) filmmakers Helke Sander and Jutta Brückner, von Trotta largely eschews experimental strategies, such as avant-garde film techniques or extreme camera angles, preferring instead narrative film and nothing less disruptive to narrative rhythm than her characteristic flashback sequences.10 On the level of ideological insight into the sociohistorical position of women and unlike Sander, who exercises feminist critique through a documentary aesthetic and a materialist dialectical approach to the lives of women, von Trotta’s work from the 1970s and 1980s views women’s historical position through the lens of a kind of historically informed existentialism. In short, von Trotta’s contribution to oppositional practices of feminist filmmaking may be seen rather as a matter of content over form; that is, her work concentrates on stories that focus on explorations of women’s personal lives in both historical and psychological terms. Von Trotta’s early feminist film aesthetic might be grouped broadly under a critique of received images of women, as well as a positive reevaluation of less lauded qualities traditionally associated with women, such as relationality, emotionality, and the potential to nurture. The tension between the personal and the public, and the emotional current that binds and undoes the two overlapping spheres, provides the material for earlier films directed by von Trotta. These include the film she co-directed with her then husband Volker Schlöndorff Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975), which examines violently intrusive, systematic ostracism by the West German press of a young woman who has a casual affair during Carnival with a man accused of being a terrorist. The spaces inhabited by women in these films are characterized by their extreme claustrophobia—what critics refer to as von Trotta’s continual return to imprisonment as an appropri112

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ate frame of reference for women in patriarchal society.11 All subsequent films directed by von Trotta explore a liberating, if not at times petrifying, intensity of (explicitly) nonsexual emotion shared between two (or more) female figures.12 The tortured, intensely intimate relationship between sisters Marianne and Juliane in Marianne and Juliane, as well as the dramatic bond of friendship between Lina and Olga that mirrors the friendship between Romantic writers Caroline von Günderrode and Bettina von Arnim (née Brentano) in the film Heller Wahn (Friends and Husbands, 1983) are two examples of the universe of female-coded emotion von Trotta urges her viewers to explore. Comments made by von Trotta in the 1970s and 1980s underscore that emotion, mostly expressed by and for women, is a central category of legibility in her films. Indeed, in an interview conducted by feminist film critic Renate Möhrmann in 1980, von Trotta states, “. . . mir geht es hauptsächlich darum, daß der emotionale Bereich als ein absolut vollwertiger anerkannt wird und die Männer nicht mehr sagen, ach ihr und eure Gefühle. . . .” (“. . . for me it’s all about the emotional sphere receiving full recognition and men no longer saying, ach, you and your feelings. . . .”) In addition to planting emotion firmly on the side of women and in opposition to a masculine-coded rationality, von Trotta also stresses how emotion is the organizing principle of the content and aesthetic form of her films: “Mich interessiert weniger der konkrete Ereignisablauf bei einer Geschichte als vielmehr der emotionale Fluß, der sich durch die Handlung durchzieht.” (“I am far less interested in the concrete chain of events of a story than in the emotional flow that runs through the plot.”)13 As we shall see, this emphasis on emotion continues to be a staple of her film productions, even if the politics underpinning its deployment appear to have altered over time. Finally, despite what might be called von Trotta’s almost utopian attachment to the figure of the female doppelgänger configured in the model of the intense, yet nonsexual female friendship, E. Ann Kaplan is right to point out that von Trotta’s feminist aesthetic deploys the masochistic female figure to ask after the sociohistorical roots of such subject formations.14 It is this tendency toward what I would call an aesthetics of psychological naturalism, attentive to the intersection of contemporary and historical social questions with gritty personal histories, that provided the bridge between the personal and political and a critique of gender and sexual norms in von Trotta’s earlier feature films. Crossing this bridge has become an increasingly risky business in an era of so113

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called postfeminisms,15 supported by what has been termed “prosthetic memory,” as we shall see in von Trotta’s narrative feature film Rosenstrasse, her latest addition to what she has often called her chronicle of the twentieth century.16 A brief synopsis of von Trotta’s film will help us to understand how the narrative of redemption through maternal self-sacrifice proper to classical maternal melodrama is undermined through multiplication and splitting of the mother-daughter figures and their sites of political and identificatory allegiance in Rosenstrasse. The film narrates three overlapping stories: first, the framing narrative set in 2001 in New York, where we encounter the recently widowed Ruth Weinstein (played by actress Jutta Lampe), who assiduously performs the initial rites of the Jewish mourning ritual of shiva in her apartment after the death of her husband. Her daughter, Hannah (Maria Schrader), acts as the spectatorial frame for Ruth’s activity as she exclaims, astounded by her otherwise secular mother’s newfound orthodox Jewish behavior expressed through traditional Jewish rituals of mourning, “Was soll dieses plötzliche jüdische Getue?” (“What on earth is this sudden Jewishness supposed to mean?”) It is suggested that Ruth’s husband’s death has dislodged years of hidden traumatic memory, visually conveyed through close-ups of Jutta Lampe’s face, accompanied by threatening and overloud sounds, such as the fall of heavy footsteps, preparing us for her memories of her experiences of National Socialist Germany, which come as blue-grayish sepia-toned flashbacks. Ruth’s inexplicable “Jewishness” extends to her sudden rejection of all things and people non-Jewish, including Hannah’s South American gentile boyfriend Luis. These events are coupled with Hannah’s encounter with an unknown cousin of her mother who tells her of Ruth’s threeyear stay in Nazi Germany with a gentile German woman in the final war years before Ruth was brought by relatives to New York. Hannah is thus compelled to travel to Berlin in search of Ruth’s mysterious gentile adoptive mother and the cause of her mother’s sudden traumatized behavior. In Berlin Hannah passes herself off as an American graduate student in history who is conducting oral research on the Third Reich, with a particular interest in the non-Jewish women’s resistance against the deportation of their Jewish husbands in the final war years in Berlin. This practice of deceit in the name of scholarship is never overtly addressed in the film, unwittingly suggesting that when involved in researching 114

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matters of the heart the ends justify the means. Hannah learns from a now aged Lena Fischer (formerly the aristocratic von Eschenbach and played by Doris Schade) that Lena had adopted Ruth on the street while she and other gentile women stood outside the building on Rosenstrasse where they knew their Jewish husbands were interned, awaiting an uncertain future, possibly even a deadly transport to the East. Ruth’s mother, Miriam Süßmann, is likewise interned in Rosenstrasse. This brings us to the third part of the tripartite structure, namely the representation of Lena von Eschenbach’s (played by Katja Riemann) memories of her courtship with Fabian Fischer, a talented Jewish violinist (Martin Feifer). These memories are visually characterized by their vivid color and familiar stock representations of the “wild” Weimar period, such as uninhibited dance club behavior involving exotic black female jazz singers, a snort or two of cocaine, and a spontaneous marriage proposal (by Lena to Fabian). The remainder of this 136-minute-long film consists of a movement between Hannah’s brief appearances as a catalyst for Lena’s narration as she poses interview questions to the older Lena and extended flashbacks representing Lena’s memories of the events that culminated in the women’s protest at Rosenstrasse, including her chance “adoption” of Hannah’s mother, Ruth, at Rosenstrasse where Ruth has, through one of many improbable coincidences structuring the film, discovered that her mother is interned, awaiting certain deportation to the East. There

Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann) participates in an impromptu protest against the detention of Jewish husbands of Aryan women in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse (2003). 115

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is also one scene that suggests that Lena, taken to a soiree in Babelsberg by her sympathetic brother Arthur von Eschenbach (Jürgen Vogel), who is a member of the Wehrmacht (German army) wounded in Stalingrad, plays the piano for and may even have sex with propaganda minister Goebbels to win sympathy for the cause at Rosenstrasse. Ruth’s story is interwoven with and eventually dominated by Lena’s memories of Rosenstrasse, which end with the release of Fabian, Lena’s husband, and the other Jewish husbands from the so-called mixed marriages from their internment at Rosenstrasse. The conspicuous absence of Ruth’s mother is not explicitly represented in narrative form but is instead visually signaled by the camera craning up the façade of the building in Rosenstrasse and coming to rest in the now empty room, signifying Miriam’s deportation to and murder at Auschwitz. The story ends with Hannah and Ruth’s reconciliation in New York and Hannah’s marriage, Jewish-style, to Luis. Rosenstrasse draws consistently on the generic ploys of melodrama, specifically engaging the scene of maternal melodrama to achieve its emotive effects. Indeed, the figure of the maternal has seldom been so thoroughly exploited as in this suturing of the maternal symbolic to the biological in von Trotta’s film. Symbolic aspects of the maternal are split from bodies defined in terms of biological alterity according to the racialized terms of National Socialist propaganda. This splitting and suturing of the maternal is embodied by Lena von Eschenbach, who becomes the symbolic figure of nurturing care and redemptive protection for Ruth (and Lena’s Jewish husband Fabian), thus displacing the biological mother Miriam, Ruth’s Jewish mother, who quickly vanishes from the film, apparently replaced—if not displaced—by Lena.

The Politics of Memory Prosthetics: Access to the Motherland Drawing on scholarship addressing heritage film in the British context by critics Andrew Higson and Richard Dyer, Lutz Koepnick transplants their term to Teutonic soil to describe a spate of German films that appeared from the mid-1990s onward. Although these films demonstrate a conservative nostalgia for how things were (and, perhaps how things might otherwise have been), they are also, as Koepnick notes, innovative in their ability to “actively reinterpret the past according to changing views of history, memory, gender, and ethnicity.”17 These popular Ger116

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man films of the 1990s have become the latest site for a pronounced revisiting of what might be called “the Jewish Question in the German Question.”18 This relationship, more often than not, is staged as a German-Jewish romance or love affair that offers the viewer the guarantee that a bond of feeling can overcome even the greatest odds, given an injection of passion and good timing, as can be seen in films such as Max Färberböck’s Aimée & Jaguar (1998), Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1997), and Dani Levy’s Meschugge (The Giraffe, 1998). In one sense, von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse may be added to this list of films inasmuch as it stages the principal German-Jewish relationships in the film through the topos of romantic love, here particularly in the socalled Mischehen or “marriages of mixed blood,” the Nazi term for marital unions between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans during the Third Reich. As with Levy’s The Giraffe, von Trotta structures her film around two different “love stories” and three different “mothers.” The first love story depicts a heterosexual romance in Nazi Berlin in the final stages of WWII between the Jewish-German man Fabian Fischer and his gentile German wife, Lena von Eschenbach, whose protest, it is suggested, saves her husband from deportation by the Nazis from his interment in Rosenstrasse with other Jewish Germans from “mixed marriages.” The second grand love story is that of three interrelated motherdaughter relationships: first, the bond between Hannah, a first-generation Jewish American, and her mother Ruth, who spent her childhood in hiding in Nazi Germany and managed to survive the Third Reich and migrate to the United States; second, the fleetingly depicted motherdaughter bond between Ruth and her Jewish mother Miriam Süßmann, a bond prematurely ruptured by Miriam’s deportation from Rosenstrasse; and, finally, the central relationship between surrogate mother Lena von Eschenbach/Fischer and Ruth, who was “found” by Lena in Rosenstrasse during the women’s protests against their Jewish husbands’ deportation in 1943. Like Levy’s The Giraffe, von Trotta’s film is concerned with conceptions of Jewish identity beyond what has been called the German-Jewish symbiosis (such as what it might mean to belong to the postwar Jewish diaspora), which can be seen in both films’ reliance on the figure of second- and third-generation Jews living in New York for their narrative thrust. In both films third-generation Jewish New Yorkers provide the starting point for a search for platonic wholeness or prelapsarian “origins” in a Germany where Jewishness and Germanness have ostensibly not yet been torn asunder. 117

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Unlike in Levy’s The Giraffe, in Rosenstrasse von Trotta allows the heterosexual romance to be subordinated to the framing narrative of the mother-daughter relationships. At most, the German-Jewish love affair between Lena and her husband Fabian provides the key through which the daughter, Hannah, deciphers her mother Ruth’s traumatic past. Ruth’s story includes the loss of two “mothers,” namely her JewishGerman mother, Miriam, who is deported from their home in Berlin in 1943 and ultimately murdered in a concentration camp as well as her Ersatzmutti (substitute mother) Lena von Eschenbach/Fischer, who reluctantly adopts Ruth during the former’s participation in the women’s protest in 1943 in Rosenstrasse. Lena then equally reluctantly gives Ruth up when her Jewish relatives in New York send for her at the end of the war. Further, von Trotta’s tripartite film is more ambitious than Levy’s in scope, both temporally and geographically, structured as it is between Weimar Germany of 1932, Nazi-ruled Berlin in 1943, and New York at the turn of the twentieth century, even if the lion’s share of the film is set in Berlin. The oedipal family, often broached through the question of generation in the German context, provides a fraught site of cultural representation through which dialectical negotiations between what has been called the postwar “loss of history” and, more recently, “a surfeit of memory” has taken place.19 Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” is perhaps the most poignant formulation of the crossroad between memory and family or generation. “Postmemory” describes the painful memories of the generation that experienced the events of the Third Reich that have come to occupy later generations almost as if they were their own. These memories are usually connected to traumatic experiences of the older generation “that can be neither understood nor recreated.”20 Hirsch uses this concept to describe processes of memory transmission within families where photographic images are galvanized by those viewing them into narrating meaningful memories or stories that do not necessarily originate with the viewer. Hirsch’s concept underscores both the vicarious nature of this process of memorialization and the familial medium in which this transmission takes place. The topic of memory transmission will be discussed in further detail below, but for now I would like to turn to the question of the family and, more specifically, the concentration of German postwar writers and filmmakers on intergenerational transmission of memory—or its absence—as a space of potential redemption. For Margarethe von Trotta in Rosenstrasse, this 118

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space of redemption is gendered female and is centered on the figure of the mother. If films about the figure of the mother represent a particular cycle in postwar German cinema, which I argue they do, then this occurs over and against the stern figure of the returned veteran father. Michael Schneider explored the literary intergenerational relationship of the second generation to the “sins” of their fathers in terms of what he called a “Väterliteratur” (father literature), a genre that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s.21 Characterized by a stance of judgment and reckoning taken by the so-called second or “fatherless” generation, the genre of father literature might be described as an attempt by those born just before or during the war to reconcile personal, familial memories of fathers with belated revelations of active involvement in or complicity with the ideology of National Socialism. Examples of these texts of conflict and recrimination include Christoph Meckel’s Suchbild. Über meinen Vater (1980) and Ruth Rehmann’s Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979). Most of these texts invoke a keen sense of family-driven drama22 and evince a highly emotive tone of betrayal, disappointment, and, even more frequently, judgmental rage at both the father’s reprehensible (Nazi) past and the damaging ways in which the psychological scars of the war and the subsequent sense of guilt or denial continued to impinge on the childhood of the authors in the postwar years. By contrast, the New German Cinema women filmmakers of what I am calling “Mütterfilm” (or mother film) offer a much less recriminating analysis of their troubled relationship to their mothers and their mothers’ relationship to a patriarchally coded fascist regime and the subsequent restoration state of Adenauer’s Germany. Like father literature, mother film is a product of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but the type of family drama performed in these films is of a different stripe. Helma Sanders-Brahms’s film Germany, Pale Mother, with the mother’s story framed through the forgiving lens of the daughter’s ambivalent, yet ultimately loving memory of her mother, might be seen as the prototype of mother film, with Jutta Brückner’s The Hunger Years: In a Land of Plenty and Jeanine Meerapfel’s Malou (1981) representing further examples of the cycle. Mother film is an appropriate name for this group of films not only because of the central role accorded to the figure of the mother23 but also because of the questions concerning gender, complicity, representation, and nationality that accrue to the figure of the mother during and after National Socialism. 119

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What becomes clear by turning to von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse, arguably the latest incarnation of German mother film, is that the approach to this material has undergone substantial revision since the 1980s. For in von Trotta’s film the figure of the mother is multiplied. The spectator is confronted with two generations of mothers: first, the “good” nonJewish-German mother Lena in Berlin of 1943, who adopts the freshly orphaned Jewish-German child Ruth in the aftermath of Ruth’s loss of her mother Miriam and, second, the newly widowed and traumatized Jewish-German Ruth, now living in present-day New York, who in turn is the mother of Hannah. Ruth’s daughter Hannah restores the maternal triangle by in turn setting out to discover the roots of her mother’s traumatic past in Nazi Germany when she travels to the scene of the crime—to Lena Fischer’s Berlin. However, that Hannah, Ruth’s assimilated Jewish New Yorker daughter, has to travel to Germany to retrieve her mother’s story of Jewish persecution from the non-Jewish Lena places the power of maternal redemption firmly on the side of Germans in Germany. This characteristic is common to most mother films from the 1980s, even if these earlier versions of the cycle are somewhat more reticent about granting unequivocal redemption to the mother figure. The most enduring link between Rosenstrasse and other contributions to the cycle of mother film is these films’ dependence on the mode of melodrama. That von Trotta deploys the genre of melodrama should come as no surprise, considering her privileging of emotion and its centrality to this genre. Furthermore, melodrama has traditionally been gendered feminine and routinely marked as maternal. Indeed, the figure of the mother has played such a central role in melodrama that maternal melodrama is a recognized subcategory within the genre of the so-called women’s weepies. In the early 1980s feminist film scholars devoted much critical attention to the maternal melodrama and its female protagonist, the figure of the mother. Reflecting on the low esteem in which this genre had traditionally been held, Linda Williams and E. Ann Kaplan engaged in a pointed and productive exchange on the politics of melodrama, motherhood, sentiment, female spectatorship, and identification in the protomaternal melodrama King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937).24 The central dispute of this debate was whether maternal melodrama acted as a mouthpiece for a patriarchal society intent on coercing female spectators into identifying with “correct” versions of motherhood. Whereas Kaplan argued that maternal melodrama represents a regressive agenda 120

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at odds with that of feminism, Williams eschewed the routine degradation of maternal melodrama as “sentimental” because of its dependence on affect. Significantly, Williams stressed the complex, divided processes of identification characteristic of the relationship between the protagonist of maternal melodrama and the viewer. In von Trotta’s film the identificatory relationship between the viewer and the maternal protagonist is made still more complicated by the splitting of the mother-daughter relationship into a series of four overlapping dyads, namely, Miriam and Ruth (the doomed German-Jewish mother-daughter dyad); Lena and Ruth (the German-Jewish and non-Jewish German dyad); Lena and Hannah (who acts as a surrogate figure or mediator for her mother Ruth); and Ruth and Hannah (part of a diasporic Jewish-American family constellation in New York). Rosenstrasse thus appears to embrace a neofeminist aesthetic of Hollywood melodrama as it rewrites this genre based on suffering and irretrievable loss (of the mother) as one of redemption. Here, family memory becomes a redemptive site for national history, represented by Lena, the suturing figure of the good mother.25 Similarly, if the temporal logic of classic melodrama is that of “too late!” as many scholars of melodrama have argued, then von Trotta’s film rewrites this temporality in a definitively nonmelodramatic, redemptive vein by displacing the logic of “too late!” with an insistence on that of “just in time.” Recently, Linda Williams has revisited the scene of melodrama to ask about its structural features as a mode of expression. The qualities she ascribes to the mode of melodrama include “sympathy for another grounded in the manifestation of that person’s suffering,” “emotional and sonic excesses,” “address to female audiences,” an engagement with “moral questions,” and an “attempt to construct (a nation) as the locus of innocence and virtue.” Further, she describes an attention to “sensational pathos and action” whereby “the sufferings of innocent victims and the exploits of brave heroes or monstrous criminals” supply the materials from which melodrama is woven.26 Melodrama also famously stages a nostalgic return to a “space of innocence,” a site of almost preoedipal plenitude, from which the protagonists were forcefully—and fatefully—expelled. However, Rosenstrasse rewrites this tale of postlapsarian expulsion (and symbolic and actual rupture of Jewish-German life) by insisting on an ultimate recuperation of the maternal as a redemptive symbolic site coded in specifically national terms.

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In this regard, Williams’s most telling insight in her observations on melodrama in the U.S. context is her attention to racialized aspects of melodrama. She states, “It is a peculiarly American form of melodrama in which virtue becomes inextricably linked to forms of racial victimization.”27 One might argue, however, that this linkage of virtue and racial victimization—in the form of anti-Semitism—forms the staple for the new heritage films in Germany of the 1990s. And in Margarethe von Trotta’s film, questions of gendered virtue and racialized victimization come together in a particularly potent way to structure what I have been calling von Trotta’s neofeminist aesthetic, which draws strongly on the tradition of maternal melodrama as a site of sentimental identification (or sympathy) while gaining contours of moral legibility from its dependence on the racially victimized Jewish body. This racialized body remains strangely silent in von Trotta’s film: its voice is represented by Hannah’s questions as “oral historian” in Berlin, Ruth’s obstinate silence in the face of visually signaled traumatic memories, and Fabian’s expression of his “gentle” male Jewish sensibility through his musical performances. The power of the maternal body to make audiences feel, as is the case in traditional maternal melodrama, draws its sentimental potency in von Trotta’s film from its attachment to the site of the racially tagged Jewish body. Indeed, the figure of Lena becomes exemplary through her attachment to her Jewish husband Fabian, whom—unlike Ruth’s “bad” German father who deserted Ruth and her mother, Miriam—she refuses to abandon in the face of Nazi scare tactics and rejection by her aristocratic family. However, Lena only truly becomes singular when her body becomes figured as maternal through her adoption of young Ruth during the women’s vigil for their Jewish husbands outside the building in Rosenstrasse. If the racialized Jewish-German body needs the gendered (maternal) body to effect its sentimental and moral work in von Trotta’s neofeminist aesthetic, then we might well ask how von Trotta’s relationship to memory work, her ability to maintain a tension between history and fiction in films,28 has changed in relation to her manner of representing the Holocaust. Margarethe von Trotta’s 1981 film Marianne and Juliane refers to, even as it does not explicitly center on, the representation of the Holocaust in postwar West German society. In a sequence in the film we see Marianne and Juliane watching the documentary excerpt from Alain Resnais’s 1955 film Night and Fog in which corpses are being bulldozed into mass graves by the Allied forces after liberation. The sisters’ 122

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response to the images is one of disbelief and physical repulsion, but their reactions are kept strictly separate from the images of the corpses, which hold the viewer’s entire attention during their on-screen inclusion. It is only in a separate take that we find the sisters in the school corridor outside the film room, reeling from what they have seen, crying, and retching in their dawning adolescent comprehension of the enormity of Germany’s Nazi past. Memory and the characters’ access to it are much more fluid in Rosenstrasse, where emotive changes of perspective are aligned with chronological changes and film techniques. For example, memory work is foregrounded in the first part of the film, which also acts as the framing device for the rest of the story. Observing the cinematic technique of framing, it becomes clear to us as the camera pulls back from our observation of Ruth’s covering the mirror and all reflective surfaces according to the rituals of shiva in the first scene that we are witnessing the events from her daughter Hannah’s point of view. Thus Hannah’s spectatorial position as an unknowing yet empathic viewer is offered to us through most of the film as an identificatory space from which to watch the recounted events unfold. This technique ostensibly offers us a post-Holocaust, diasporic view on the events, amplified by Hannah’s deployment of techniques of oral history, including a recording device used in her interviews with Lena and photos as Hirschian postmemorial props for Lena’s narration. This viewing position, however, elides the complexity of what Dan Diner has called the “negative symbiosis of Germans and Jews after Auschwitz” by offering spectators a comfortable non-German viewing position for the unfolding events.29 But this is not the only spectatorial position we encounter in the film. Ruth’s initial flashbacks to her childhood in Nazi Germany, which also act as the diegetic catalyst for the film’s events, initially give us access to the period of the Third Reich in Germany as experienced from the perspective of a young Jewish girl who escapes deportation by the skin of her teeth. These images use visually and sonically exaggerated techniques that draw on tropes from popular representations of trauma, including the intrusion of overloud sound into the present moment before remembered, sepia-gray images of persecution appear on the screen. Further, all scenes of the 1943 period, except for Lena’s excursion to a Wannsee villa for a Nazi festivity, are shot with a different lens and the film is developed with a technique that allows more silver to be retained by the images, lending a heavy, leaden tone to these sequences in the 123

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film.30 These overwhelming events shown from the perspective of Jewish victim Ruth act to frame all other moments of remembering in the film and give the film an “acceptable” Jewish frame that makes us sympathetic to the actions remembered by Lena later on in the film. However, the leaden tones of the film belong equally to Ruth and Lena’s memories, positing an equivalence of memory that is clearly at odds with von Trotta’s earlier care in distinguishing memories of the victims of the Third Reich from those of others. Perhaps this would be less problematic if Lena’s memory were not framed as coherent and intact over against Ruth’s fragmented traumatic memory, in contrast to which it gains its status as a position of honorable victimhood. This stance recalls the problematic turn in feminist debates from the 1980s around the terms “perpetrator” and “victim” (Täter and Opfer) and the strange slippages in position that were at times granted to women by virtue of their supposed position as “victims” of a patriarchal society.31 It also invokes the trope of the “good German,” on which Färberböck’s Aimée & Jaguar, not to mention Steven Spielberg’s sensationalist Schindler’s List (1994), also relied to blur the specific contours of different forms of victimhood suffered by Jewish-Germans during the Third Reich.32 This tendency is further exacerbated by von Trotta’s conflation of the “good German” with the mother figure in her neofeminist aesthetic, as suggested above. Even if Hirsch’s concept of postmemory might be applied, with some liberty, to Hannah’s approach to her mother’s history, although Lena’s narration of the same problematizes this in complicated ways, we shall have to find a different approach to memory to describe how the viewer of the film negotiates the position between Hannah’s assumption of Lena’s memories and Lena’s process of narrating the memories as her own. The privileged position allotted to historical fact in von Trotta’s film is certainly one framing device that has caused much debate in the film’s reception. Rosenstrasse opens with the following statement that is placed before the opening credits and its accompanying soundtrack: “Die Ereignisse in der Berliner Rosenstrasse vom 27. Februar bis zum 6. März 1943 haben tatsächlich stattgefunden.” (“The events in the Berlin Rosenstrasse between the twenty-seventh of February and the sixth of March 1943 actually took place.”) This claim to authenticity sits awkwardly with the often melodramatic style in which events are represented, particularly in the seemingly superfluous scene in which Lena plays off her aristocratic beauty and musical talent for the ambiguous attentions of Goebbels and where it is suggested that the Jewish men interned in Rosenstrasse may 124

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have been released in exchange for Lena’s favors to Goebbels. This scene is strangely at odds with von Trotta’s attempt to otherwise honor the civil courage of the gentile women at Rosenstrasse. Indeed, if it is meant to be a reductive feminist comment on the base ambitions of men set over and against the honor and fidelity of the German woman, it instead ends up reducing the protest to a dangerous game of sexual weaponry and reproducing an already exhausted and reductive set of tropes about fascist masculinity. It also replays the Manichean vision that reproduces and merely reverses the logic of National Socialist racial politics whereby, in the logic of von Trotta’s film, contact with a Jewish body cleanses and redeems the German gentile characters and interactions with the (male gendered) Nazi body taints female Treue (loyalty) and feminist intentions and female solidarity. Further, the release of Rosenstrasse sparked heated debates in history journals and German newspapers alike over the historical veracity of the events depicted in the film. In these debates between U.S. and German historians a ploy common to melodrama is set in motion, strangely enough, namely, a focus on the irresistible force and authenticity of emotions. Historian Nathan Stoltzfus, the first scholar to publish a book-length study on the women’s protest at Rosenstrasse, perhaps unwittingly—but certainly uncritically—depicts this act of civil disobedience as a (feminized) “resistance of the heart” (this is also the title of his book).33 In this way, Stoltzfus’s “history” (and von Trotta’s cinematic adaption thereof) of the women’s protest at Rosenstrasse is connoted as a genuine and respectful rendering of the feelings of the women participants. This depiction was then pitted over and against the suggested stodginess of other historical reports, particularly voices of dissent at Stoltzfus’s and von Trotta’s representations of the events issuing from historians working with Wolfgang Benz at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin.34 In short, if the film is meant to show that the women’s courageous and rare act of civil disobedience forced the National Socialist regime to release their men, then this is coded as a female struggle of the heart, one of love, and is pitted against the ongoing struggle to prove in historically verifiable terms that their resistance had the suggested heartening and heroic results. German historians are depicted as cold, masculinist slaves to the archive who have difficulty accepting a woman’s truth (ironically represented by Nathan Stoltzfus and his affective history). Effectively, this dichotomy opposes the putatively masculinist discipline of German historians against the more open, feminine, 125

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sympathetic paradigm of American historians. And if this claim seems far-fetched, we need only to remember that Hannah acts as an alibi of sorts for Stoltzfus’s position of empathetic witness to the stories of the women of Rosenstrasse, giving a definitively female form to the work of the oral historian, even if this is a deceptive disguise she assumes to enable her meeting with Lena Fischer and thus her encounter with her mother’s untold tale of her origins in Nazi Berlin. What is suggested by this attention to emotional attachment or identification with the figures in the film in their particular historical dilemma might be captured by what Alison Landsberg has suggestively called “prosthetic memory.” Prosthetic memories are those that circulate freely in the public sphere through popular cultural artifacts; Landsberg gives the examples of Holocaust museum cultures and mass media representations in the American context as sites through which the individual can incorporate memories of others into their own experiential, even sensorial, archive. She calls these memories prosthetic, because they are “actually worn by the body” as “sensuous memories produced by experience” at different “sites of production of feeling.”35 This approach to memory accounts for the affective work done by film melodrama, which might be seen as an infernal machine of affective production of kinds, and it certainly addresses the ways in which viewers are interpellated by von Trotta’s film and invited to make the experiences of those good Germans onscreen into their own. What remains unaccounted for, though, in the process of transplanting Landsberg’s concept into the German context, is what one might do with “bad histories” specific to one’s own nation that cannot be manufactured only as “good memories.” I would argue that to make this particular history compatible with the production of good memories, von Trotta’s film unwittingly indulges in a process of sublation to a higher plane of symbolic meaning. This has less to do with popular culture’s manufacturing of easily ingested prosthetic feelings than with a redemptive strategy that, following Walter Benjamin, draws on what remaining “weak Messianic power” might be invested in the redemptive synthetic concept of the Jewish-German symbiosis despite scholars’ attempts to point out the perhaps permanent damage it sustained in Germany during National Socialism (a process begun during the many Jewish pogroms before this).36 What von Trotta may indeed be seen as working toward in the redemptive gesture represented by her film is the creation of sites of neomemory that, in von Trotta’s case, are inflected by the loyalty of the female—and in particu126

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lar the maternal—body, which figures both as the liminal zone through which history must pass to become good memory as well as the adhesive that holds together the Jewish-German relationship, based here on the model of heterosexual romance and mother-daughter dyads. Sites of redemption offered to the viewer by von Trotta’s film include the invocation of music, a synecdoche for the German Kulturnation— and an essential staple of melodrama—as an almost prelapsarian site of Jewish-German relationality; women’s political engagement, represented through the neofeminist aesthetic of melodramatic maternal love and self-sacrifice, as a threshold to symbiotic reunion; and an anachronistic historical projection of Enlightenment humanism as the space in which sentimental communities, multiple religions, and ethical rationality can all harmoniously coexist. The scenes between Lena and Fabian in all the sequences set in 1932, which are shot with camera objectives with a less sharp focus, warm lighting, and a colorful mise-en-scène, are entirely organized around their lives as musicians and their relationship to music. Music is the emotional glue and substance to their relationship, the excuse for coding Fabian’s Jewish masculinity as stereotypically “soft” or feminine, and the catalyst for any number of melodramatically moving scenes that tie the spectator to the film’s narrative trajectory. As Lutz Koepnick has described in detail elsewhere, the heritage films of the 1990s draw on the trope of music as a guarantor of types for the union of a Kulturnation in which both Jewish and gentile Germans can enjoy the fruits of this shared German cultural imaginary.37 Similarly, the engagement ring given by the Jewish mother Miriam to her daughter Ruth, who manages to slip into the building at Rosenstrasse where Miriam is interned to see her mother one last time, becomes an important symbol of the link between Jewish and gentile Germans. Originally given to Ruth’s mother, Miriam, by her gentile husband, who apparently deserts the family under the Nazi regime, the ring passes between generations, from mother to daughter, in three different constellations, namely, from Miriam to Ruth during the former’s interment in Rosenstrasse, from Ruth to Lena when Ruth is forced to leave Berlin to live with her Jewish relatives in New York, and then from Lena to Hannah, who then gives the ring back to her mother. Ruth, in turn, gives the ring to Hannah, thus restoring the continuity of a Jewish maternal line of inheritance. This passing on of the ring is reminiscent of the ring parable offered 127

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to the Sultan by Nathan the Wise in Lessing’s eponymous Enlightenment drama. Nathan’s parable tells of the futility of trying to favor any singular approach to religious allegiance and unfolds the story of Enlightenment reason’s attempt to take the bite out of religious strife and demonstrate the goodness of the Jewish subject before one single God and his community. The ring, given to Ruth by her mother Miriam on the eve of her deportation, signals their particular bond and destiny as Jewish-German and is meant to signify to Ruth her task of living beyond or surviving as Jewish the particular murderous history of National Socialism. Lena’s return of the ring to Hannah symbolizes the German wish for a renewed symbiosis beyond the strictures of the National Socialist history. When Ruth accepts the ring from Hannah once she has returned to New York, then passes the ring on to Hannah along with her blessings for Hannah’s marriage to the gentile Luis, the circle of Enlightenment tolerance has been completed, the film suggests, allowing and enabling unions between individuals regardless of their particular ethnic histories and religious allegiances. Interestingly enough, whereas in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise Nathan is, ironically, excluded from the communal embrace of humanity shared by all other figures onstage, it is Lena who, by returning the ring to Ruth’s family, adopts the position of Nathan. In these scenes of communal merriment at Hannah and Luis’s wedding the absent Lena takes up the position of the excluded Nathan, and hence problematically assumes this Jewish-coded position in yet another manner. Margarethe von Trotta’s otherwise admirable attempt to do justice to a visual representation of German women’s countermemory is overshadowed by the complexities of the memories she wishes to explore and encumbered by her use of what I have called a neofeminist aesthetic of maternal melodrama as the vehicle for her story. Ironically enough, her framing of the mother film as a Jewish tale enables German spectators to empathize with the victims and feel positively toward the “good Germans,” a position at odds with the one presented in the Väterliteratur of the 1980s where the politically involved or even passive father represented a position of ethical failure in his inability or unwillingness to oppose the fascist regime. What we encounter in von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse is less an appeal to the affective positions of sympathy or even empathy vis-à-vis another subject than an attempt to elide the difference between subject positions by smuggling putatively universal and ahistoric constants of maternal care and humanist enlightenment in through the back door of Jewish-German symbiosis. 128

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Notes I am grateful for suggestions from Michael Rothberg, Yasemin Yildiz, and the participants in the Jewish Studies Colloquium of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I presented an earlier version of this essay. Thanks also to Brad Prager and Jaimey Fisher for their editorial advice. 1. It is important to note that the reception of von Trotta’s films varies greatly depending on which national reception of her films is under consideration and how “topical” her film subjects are. For although Rosenstrasse garnered critical attention and praise at the Venice Film Festival and was widely and, for the most part, positively received in North America and Germany, other recent films by von Trotta, such as Ich bin die Andere (I Am the Other Woman, 2006), received next to no critical attention. 2. For critical accounts of the difficulties encountered by women in the film industry, and particularly by women filmmakers, during the time of New German Cinema, see Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992); E. Ann Kaplan, Women & Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983); Renate Fischetti, Das Neue Kino-Acht Porträts von deutschen Regisseurinnen (Dülmen-Hiddingsel: Tende, 1992); Renate Möhrmann, Die Frau mit der Kamera: Filmemacherinnen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Situation, Perspektiven. Zehen exemplarische Lebensläufe (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1980). For analyses of films by women filmmakers, as well as interpretations of gender in New German Cinema, see Sandra Frieden, Richard W. McCormick, Vibeke R. Petersen, and Laurie Melissa Vogelsang, eds. Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions. Vol. 1, Gender and Representation in New German Cinema (Providence: Berg, 1993) and Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions. Vol. 2, German Film History/German History on Film (Providence: Berg, 1997). See also Susan E. Linville, Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women’s Auto/biographical Film in Postwar Germany (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Barbara Kosta, Recasting Autobiography: Women’s Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Andréa Staskowski, Conversations with Experience: Feminist Hermeneutics and the Autobiographical Films of German Women (New York: Lang, 2004). For analysis of German film in terms of gender and sexuality, see Ingeborg Mayer O’Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow, eds. Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); Alice A. Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 3. Julia Knight documents the gap between the prolific activity of women filmmakers in their production of films and different forums for writing and discussing women’s films and their productions’ ongoing critical neglect (or very gradual gaining of recognition) in her Women and the New German Cinema (1–21). In fact, Knight’s book is her attempt to write what she calls “this other history” of filmmaking. 129

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4. Von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit received renewed critical attention in academic circles in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Many conference panels, academic papers, and essay volumes have been written in response to the events of 9/11. Of the essays referring to von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit in this context, Karen Beckman’s essay on terrorism and feminism deserves special mention: Karen Beckman, “Terrorism, Feminism, Sisters, and Twins: Building Relations in the Wake of the World Trade Center Attacks,” Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002): 24–39. 5. See Knight, Women, 51–69. 6. The most illustrative example in von Trotta’s context is the much cited fact that Margarethe von Trotta’s first film finally received institutional funding when filmmaker Völker von Schlöndorff underwrote the guarantee for the production. See Renate Hehr, Margarethe von Trotta: Filmmaking as Liberation (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 2000), 16. 7. Margarethe von Trotta’s political engagement at this time is documented in Hehr, Filmmaking as Liberation, 16–22. In dialogue with Peter Buchka in his film made for television on Margarethe von Trotta, she mentions how she found the ideologically rigid language of the political flyers she distributed almost violent. Peter Buchka, Die Neugier immer weiter treiben: Margarethe von Trotta (1995). 8. Hehr comments on the integral link between the feminist movement and women filmmakers in Germany (Hehr, Filmmaking as Liberation). 9. Perhaps the most prominent female filmmaker in Germany in this respect was Helke Sander. Sander’s engagement can be charted from her infamous speech on behalf of the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for Women’s Liberation) at the September 1968 delegates’ conference of the Socialist German Student Association (SDS), in which she decried the patriarchal behavior of her male comrades and her politically motivated films, including feminist titles, such as Kindergärtnerin, was nun? (What Now, Nursery School Teacher, 1969), Macht die Pille frei? (Does the Pill Liberate? co-director, 1972), and Der subjective Faktor (The Subjective Factor, 1981), through to her founding of the seminal feminist film journal Frauen und Film (Women and Film). For a historical account linking the German feminist filmmakers and critics with institutional initiatives see Julia Knight, “Institutional Initiatives,” 102–21. 10. Barton Byg accuses von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane of ultimately colluding with the patriarchal “culture industry” by dint of the conventional narrative strategies it exhibits. See “German History and Cinematic Convention Harmonized in Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane,” in Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, ed. Sandra G. Frieden, Richard W. McCormick, and Vibeke R. Petersen, 259–71 (Providence: Berg, 1993). 11. For instance, Hehr devotes a large portion of her analysis of Margarethe von Trotta’s cinematic language to the recurring spatial framing that creates a sense of imprisonment in von Trotta’s films. Hehr, Filmmaking as Liberation, 101–16. 12. In her review essay of two biographies on Margarethe von Trotta that were released in 2000, Margret Eifler underscores the explicit distancing from a lesbian subject position—or even a whiff of lesbian attraction—as expressed with ap130

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The Emotional Politics of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse proval (and maybe even relief?) by journalist and film critic Thilo Wydra in his biography, Margarethe von Trotta: Filmen, um zu überleben (Berlin: Henschel, 2000). Eifler writes, “Wydra also characterizes Trotta as a warm, emotional, openhearted female who in all her painful representations of relationships never abandons anyone. He particularly appreciates that, despite Trotta’s focus on women, she never discards men for lesbian sisterhood: ‘Das romantisch-sehnsüchtige Sujet der Verdoppelung geht eng einher mit jenem der schwesterlichen, aber nie lesbischen Beziehung (als solche zuweilen fehlinterpretiert)’ (62).” See Margret Eifler’s useful review essay “Margarethe von Trotta as Filmmaker: Biographical Retrospectives,” The German Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 448. Indeed, Wydra’s characterization of von Trotta in his biography, as well as many of the citations he gives in the book, would lead us to believe that von Trotta represents a kind of authentic, all-embracing mother figure for those around her. 13. See Möhrmann, Die Frau mit der Kamera, 204–5. Von Trotta adds to this: “Dabei gehe ich nie von einer Geschichte aus, sondern immer von den Personen.” (“My point of departure is never a story, but rather the people involved.”) In a question-and-answer session after a conference in March 1998 organized by Peter Golz at the University of Victoria, von Trotta explains her approach to the material on which she bases her films as follows: “When I work from a text such as an authentic letter, I want to portray the emotional side, but that comes to me naturally. I go mainly with emotions, not with documentary facts. I try to recreate the emotion I feel.” See Jacqueline Levitin, “The Personal and the Political: Interview with Margarethe von Trotta,” in Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, ed. Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, and Valerie Raoul, 80 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003). 14. E. Ann Kaplan, “Female Politics in the Symbolic Realm: Von Trotta’s Marianne und Juliane (The German Sisters) (1981),” in Women & Film: Both Sides of the Camera, 104. In this chapter Kaplan describes von Trotta’s aesthetic approach as one of “relentless realism,” a critical move that does not adequately examine the role of von Trotta’s favored mode of narration, namely, flashback, even as Kaplan recognizes how the film’s plot is structured by this narrative device. 15. The term “postfeminism” is taken from Ann Brooks’s book Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (New York: Routledge, 1997). 16. Margarethe von Trotta has often referred to her films as a kind of work in progress that may well chronicle the historical events in Germany of the twentieth century. See, for example, Buchka, Die Neugier immer weiter treiben. 17. Lutz Koepnick, “Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s,” New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002): 56. 18. See Anson Rabinbach, “The Jewish Question in the German Question,” New German Critique 44 (1988): 159–92. In addition to Koepnick, Stuart Taberner has critically addressed this tendency in his essay “   ‘Wie kannst du mich lieben?’: ‘Normalizing’ the Relationship between Germans and Jews in the 1990s films Aimée und Jaguar and Meschugge,” In Politics and Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. William Niven and James Jordan, 227–44 (New York: Camden House, 2003). Daniela Berghahn has also addressed this tendency in a comparative East131

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West framework in “Post-1990 Screen Memories: How East and West German Cinema Remembers the Third Reich and the Holocaust,” German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (2006): 294–308. 19. See Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (1993): 136–51. Theodor W. Adorno uses the term “loss of history” in different ways, including when he refers to the historical amnesia he sees afflicting postwar German society. See “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, 91 (New York: Columbia University Press, [1959] 1998). 20. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21–23. See also Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer, 215–46 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001). 21. See Michael Schneider, “Fathers and Sons, Retrospectively: The Damaged Relationship between Two Generations,” trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, New German Critique 31 (Winter 1984): 3–51. 22. Critics who have noted the frequency with which German history is narrated in film as an oedipal drama include Stefan Reinecke, who discusses films from the late 1990s as “Familiendramen.” See “Nachholende Bewältigungen oder: It Runs through the family; Holocaust und Nazivergangenheit im deutschen Film der Neunziger,” in Die Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart. Konfrontationen mit den Folgen des Holocaust im deutschen Nachkriegsfilm. ed. Claudia Dillmann and Ronny Loewy, 78 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2001). Daniela Berghahn rightly describes the film Rosenstrasse as “a generic hybrid, incorporating aspects of the heritage genre, melodrama and family saga” (“Post-1990 Screen Memories,” 304). 23. Jan Mouton was the first North American scholar to address this new constellation of mother-daughter films of the women filmmakers associated with New German Cinema. She writes, “The figure of the mother has emerged as an autonomous subject. Stories of mother/daughter and mother/son relationships have been foregrounded and treated as legitimate, authentic, and important.” She names Helma Sanders-Brahms, Jutta Brückner, Helke Sander, and Margarethe von Trotta as the principal filmmakers working within this genre. See Jan Mouton, “The Absent Mother Makes an Appearance in the Films of West German Women Directors,” Women in German Yearbook 4 (1988): 69. 24. In her important essay, “   ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (1984): 2–27, Linda Williams critiques two earlier contributions by E. Ann Kaplan on Stella Dallas: “Theories of Melodrama: A Feminist Perspective,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 1, no. 1 (1983): 40–48 and “The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas,” Heresies 16 (1983): 81–85. For Kaplan’s response to Williams, see “E. Ann Kaplan Replies to Linda Williams’s “   ‘Something Else besides a Mother: “Stella Dallas” and the Maternal Melodrama’  ” (Cinema Journal 1984),” Cinema Journal 24, no. 2 (1984): 40–43. For the continua132

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The Emotional Politics of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse tion of this debate, this time with a contribution coauthored by Patrice Petro and Caryl Flinn, see “Dialogue,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 1 (1985): 50–52. For Kaplan’s response to Petro and Flinn, see, Kaplan, “E. Ann Kaplan Replies,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 1 (1985): 52–54. 25. This is an example of what scholar Lutz Koepnick has pithily formulated as the new heritage cinema’s practice of “converting bad history into a good story.” Koepnick, “Reframing the Past,” 72. 26. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodrama of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 16–44. 27. Ibid., 43–44. 28. The tension between history and fiction has played itself out via the catalyst of the film in what Nathan Stoltzfus, the U.S. historian and author of the standard book on Rosenstrasse, namely, Resistance of the Heart, has called a new “Historikerstreit” (historians’ dispute) and what German historian Wolf Gruner, who has also written about the “Fabrik-Aktion” (factory action) that provoked the events in Rosenstrasse has more reservedly, and pointedly against Stoltzfus, named a “Medienstreit” (media dispute). The argument is, greatly simplified, about whether the German gentile women’s act of protest in the Rosenstrasse resulted in the release of the German Jewish husbands and children, with Stoltzfus being an unequivocal proponent of the women’s protest’s success. It is important to stress that neither party denies the civil courage of these brave and tenacious protesters. They only differ in how they weigh the importance of the action and the conclusions about civil resistance that might be drawn from it. Nathan Stoltzfus, “Die Wahrheit jenseits der Akten,” Die Zeit, October 30, 2003, 48. Wolf Gruner, “Ein Historikerstreit? Die Internierung der Juden aus Mischehen in der Rosenstraße 1943: Das Ereignis, seine Diskussion und seine Geschichte,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 52 (2004): 5–22. Von Trotta’s film also catalyzed a theater production based on eyewitness accounts from the Rose Street protest action that was performed at the Probebühne of the Berliner Ensemble October 16–18, 2003. Martin Wiebel, Augen-Zeugnisse: Zum Gedächtnis der Protest-Aktion der Frauen der RosenstraßeBerlin 1943. The performance on October 17 was accompanied by a postperformance discussion with Martin Wiebel and Hermann Beil. See also note 32 below. 29. See Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historian’s Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin, 251–61 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). 30. The technical specificities of the camera objectives used and the methods of developing the film for the different sequences are discussed in some detail in the chapter “Berlin 1932-Berlin 1943-New York 2001. Drei Zeitebenen, zwei Farbgebungen,” in Thilo Wydra, Rosenstraße. Ein Film von Margarethe von Trotta. Die Geschichte. Die Hintergründe. Die Regisseurin, 133–35 (Berlin: Nicolai, 2003). 31. These debates centered on feminist discussions of female agency and responsibility in patriarchal societies. One principal contention in the dispute was the role of women and their accountability for the atrocities of National Socialism. This subject was approached head-on in U.S. feminist historian Claudia Koonz’s seminal and controversial book Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, 133

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and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). In the German language context, feminist theoretician Christina Thürmer-Rohr contributed a critical stance on women’s claim to reduced culpability in patriarchal societies with her book Vagabundinnen: Feminisitische Essays (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1987). For an exploration of feminist intergenerational discussions on the question of female culpability during the Third Reich, see the collection of essays titled TöchterFragen: NS-Frauen-Geschichte, ed. Lerke Gravenhorst and Carmen Tatschmurat (Freiburg: Kore, 1990). 32. For information on debates on the figure of the “good German” in Spielberg’s film, see Christoph Weiss, ed. ‘Der gute Deutsche.’ Dokumente zur Diskussion um Steven Spielbergs “Schindlers Liste” in Deutschland (St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1995). 33. Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). 34. The so-called Rosenstrassekampf (the Rose Street fight) has many aspects to it, the calibration of which exceeds the parameters of this essay. Two main contentions of the debate were the question of whether the “evacuated” Jews from “mixed marriages” were actually slated for deportation to the East and, hence, if the Rose Street protest actually played any role in “saving” the interned Jewish members of “mixed marriages.” In his article “The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943—Sixty Years Later,” Wolf Gruner writes, “In contrast to the current view, no deportation plan was scuttled as a result of the Rosenstrasse protest of the relatives.” However, he also adds that this does not detract from the civil courage of those protesting relatives; nonetheless, Gruner does warn against the process that has turned “[t]he story of the ‘successful’ protest in the Rosenstrasse” in the German collective memory into “the symbol for individual resistance against the NS dictatorship” Central European History 36 (2003): 207. See also Thomas Roth, “Rosenstraße revisited (NS/Medien 3),” Korrespondenz 77, October 13, 2003, 1–15. December 20, 2004. http://www.korrespondenz.biz/077.html. See historian Beate Meyer’s response to the film: “Geschichte im Film: Judenverfolgung, Mischehen und der Protest in der Rosenstraße 1943,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 52 (2004): 23–36. The release of von Trotta’s film also led to the conference “Der Protest in der Rosenstraße 1943—Zeitzeugen und Historiker zwischen Akten und Erinnerung,” which was organized by the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung/TU Berlin and the Jewish Museum in Berlin in cooperation with the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, Berlin, April 29–30, 2004. For a report on the conference by Jana Leichsenring on the H-Soz-u-Kult Web site, see “Der Protest in der Rosenstraße 1943—Zeitzeugen und Historiker zwischen Akten und Erinerung.” Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung/TU Berlin, Jewish Museum in Berlin in co-operation with the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, Berlin, April 29–30, 2004. http:// hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=501. 35. See Alison Landsberg, “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy,” New German Critique 71 (1997): 66. 36. Walter Benjamin writes of the “weak Messianic power” that each genera134

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The Emotional Politics of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse tion has in relation to the past they inherit. This power is redemptive inasmuch as each generation has the critical task of rescuing potentially utopian aspects from moments of history for their present and future. Benjamin writes, “In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. and introduction Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 254 (New York: Schocken Books, 1955). This comment is to be understood in the context of Benjamin’s relationship to theology and, more specifically, to historical materialism. 37. See Koepnick, “Reframing the Past” and Koepnick, “   ‘Honor Your German Masters’: History, Memory, and National Identity in Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1997),” in Light Motives. German Popular Film in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 349–75 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003).

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Wilfried Wilms

Dresden The Return of History as Soap

If we recall for a moment the stir caused in the German public sphere by W. G. Sebald’s theses vis-à-vis the Air War a mere decade ago, we may find ourselves amazed by the tempo at which real-existing or perceived memory gaps have been filled in the German public arena. In the mid1990s, Sebald could point to a near complete absence in popular memory about the Air War.1 Unsure of how his theses were to be received, he in fact deemed it necessary to provide something like a “reception guide” in an expansive postscript to his lectures. Clearly, his greatest apprehension was the potential abuse of his provocative work by revanchists on the political right.2 Less than a decade later these worries would surely have been put to rest.3 The politics of the ZDF television event of 2006 may lie, somewhat paradoxically, in how it depoliticizes the Air War to a degree that the packaging of the event now resembles that of late afternoon soaps. Noteworthy, in this context, may be the increasing feminization of Germany’s storytelling. Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) focalizes its narrative through Hitler’s secretary, and the two recent megaevents on German television, Dresden (2006) as well as Die Flucht (The Flight, 2007), similarly had a female protagonist as their focus. One way to explain this curious phenomenon seems obvious: if we accept the thesis that a fundamental desire for normalization in the age of European integration accompanies these productions, then the coveted badge of victimhood can more easily be obtained through someone who did not bear arms.4 The experience of the Nazi years is instead filtered through layers of transnational worship and passion that, more often

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than not, runs contrary to official state policy when a German nurse loves a British airman or a Prussian landowner a French forced laborer. In the following, I will revisit the TV event Dresden to discuss how state-sponsored television in particular has been shrewdly mining both Germany’s violent past and contemporary desires for its normalization and commercial exploitation. Once again Germans work through their past by means of a miniseries. Yet, whereas the NBC miniseries Holocaust provided in 1979 historical simulations for “the” German as perpetrator, recent television events allowed Germans to see themselves as victims during the Second World War.5 Even though Dresden tried hard to envelop itself in an aura of taboo-breaking political and moral immediacy before its screening, the result was a consensus-driven, pseudopolitical telenovela. First, I will provide a more detailed account of the film’s narrative and background. Second, I will revisit other politicized visualizations of the raid on Dresden in previous decades in both the East and West. And finally, I will draw attention both to the media hype surrounding Dresden and to other examples of recent fictional event television.

“Dresden: The ZDF Movie Event of the Year” The city below is ablaze, its blistering inferno lights up the cloudy skies. We, the voyeuristic onlookers, soar through the clouds after a job well done. Computer animation provides us with this bird’s-eye view, lifting us out of our recliner chairs into the rear-gunner’s seat of the British Lancaster. It is 22:30, as the screen indicates. The first wave just dropped its deadly load on Dresden, and the fires below are only beginning to merge into a firestorm that will kill thousands. It’s hell on earth below. Before joining the relative calm above for a moment of respite, we are down on the ground, experiencing the violence firsthand. And now that things are really warming up we’ll have another look—for some thirty minutes we will mingle with all those caught up in the bedlam down below. We leave the sonorous, monotonous droning of the four-engine bomber behind and join, first, yet another onlooker. We enter the home of Simon Goldberg (Kai Wiesinger), a Jew who has so far survived the Nazi persecution because of his marriage to a German gentile, Maria (Marie Bäumer). But we know something that Maria does not know: Simon has been summoned to come to a collection point; his deporta-

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tion is imminent. He knows it means death. We are looking right over his shoulder down onto debris and burning façades outside his surprisingly intact window. An eerie silence fills the room for a few seconds when his face, in a close-up, reflects the warm and comforting glow of the fires outside. For Goldberg, who is closely modeled after Victor Klemperer (with direct quotes even),6 the destruction and suffering outside his beleaguered home means the end of his sufferings, liberation, and life. Simon and Maria will use the ensuing chaos in the aftermath of the attack to escape. We then return to a group of frightened Germans in a cellar below the blaze. This marks the halfway point of this three-hour epic. We join our two main protagonists again, the young surgeon Alexander Wenninger (Benjamin Sadler) and his fiancée Anna Mauth (Felicitas Woll). She is a nurse in her father’s hospital, and he is her father’s likely successor once the war is over. She, however, loves another man. What’s more, the other man is a handsome British bomber pilot shot down over Magdeburg. Yet, for now that matters little. Ever mounting fear and uncertainty has gripped the people in the air raid shelter, for they are running out of oxygen. Desperate, they take their chances and escape the cellar. Dresden’s city center is ablaze. Flames shoot up everywhere, licking through every visible broken window. Sparks fly by horizontally, driven by the roaring of a storm that, amid the screams and drowned-out shouts of those caught in this nightmare, dominates our acoustic experience. The camera swings left and right as if looking for an escape route, heightening our disorientation. This is historical simulation at its technical best. We look around and realize that we are surrounded by ripped-open façades that lay bare the guts of our guilty past existence that has finally caught fire. We are encircled by walls of flames that roll like tidal waves onto the streets. It is a high-tech pyromaniacal spectacle. When the camera finally finds Anna and Alexander, we gain a bit of control. Her surveying gaze is our visual anchor. She looks around in disbelief, observing the helplessness as well as the violent end of many Dresdeners around her. Once she has collected her thoughts she tells Alexander she wants to be left alone. As we listen to her shout at him over the roaring noise, we, the audience, know she hasn’t forgotten that she has no love for him, in fact she hates him for his spinelessness visà-vis her father Carl (Heiner Lauterbach). She is no longer innocent, no longer fooled by the respectable aura erected around her. She sees clearly now, both literally and figuratively. At that moment, out of nowhere, her 138

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father walks into the frame. An instant later he is blown up by a bomb. Both of his legs are gone; only bloody stumps remain. His arms are flopping helplessly, and within a few seconds he is dead. What follows is the dramatic, visual, and acoustic climax of the film, and it is accompanied by a crystal clear guide to comprehend—or interpret—all this mayhem thundering at us from the screen. For a few more scenes we see people rushing left and right, seemingly without any sense of direction, past burning buildings and over heaps of debris. We hear the moans and screams of individuals in pain. Anna and Alexander are among those looking for a way out. They have barely taken a few steps away from her father Carl when, amid the inferno, they bump into Robert Newman (John Light), the pilot she is in love with. Alexander charges at him, furious, grabs hold of his collar, and shakes him violently. The camera angle widens. In the background we are looking down a Dresden street in flames, bombs of the second wave now exploding everywhere. The agony of fellow Germans is at its height. Smack in the center of the image stand our three protagonists, trapped not only by a gruesome war, but also—and more important—within their love triangle. Anna attempts to intervene, demands that Alexander stop. He yells back, “When will you finally get it? That is him!” A quick move with his head indicates what he means by “that”—the airborne assault on civilians and cities, the death of thousands, including her father. Yet she retorts, “No, that is us!” We can take her word for it; after all, she has become our levelheaded moral compass amid this carnage. The continuously falling bombs put a quick end to the quarreling anyway, and the three lovers immediately team up in their common quest for survival. “The ZDF movie event of the year,” as it was touted, ran amid much PR fanfare on German television in March of 2006 at prime time on Sunday and Monday evenings.7 For days before the actual screening, all major and minor newspapers reported on this truly public “event” about to reach millions of homes. Once it did, it beat all other offerings by a large margin, even Spider-Man (2002) and Germany’s most successful crime series, Tatort, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted.8 All across Germany nearly 13 million watched the latest German cinematic attempt to come to terms with its past. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported the same day that—more than anywhere else in Germany—in Saxony itself a phenomenal 45 percent tuned in to see their capital Dresden get blown up once again.9 With a budget exceeding ten million euros the film is the most lavish production in the history of German television. 139

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The love triangle becomes entangled in the bombing of Dresden in Roland Suso Richter’s made-for-television “event film” Dresden (2006).

By the time it was shown in German homes, the film had already been sold to Italy, France, and the Benelux countries as well as Japan, Poland, Greece, Serbia, and even Thailand. The reception of the film, however, was mixed, as we will see below. Produced by Nico Hofmann, who in the Berliner tageszeitung said he considered his film a contribution to “international understanding,”10 and directed by Roland Suso Richter, this latest production was another feather in the hat of teamworx, a company founded in 1998 and since then specializing in contemporary blockbusters for German television dealing with Germany’s complicated history.11 By 2006, Dresden was certainly its biggest success yet. The film tells the story of the city’s destruction in the last months of World War II by British and American air forces. Or rather, it uses one of the war’s notorious and hotly contested12 events as background noise to involve the audience in an improbable love triangle that, combined with other aspects of the story, more often than not borders on (and goes beyond) kitsch before it finally ends in a demonstration of mind-boggling political correctness. Carl Mauth, Anna’s father, runs a hospital in Dresden. He is in charge of hundreds of wounded soldiers arriving from the nearby eastern front. Yet, concerned only with saving his own neck and that of his family, he has been hording morphine in the basement of his hospital. With the help of a corrupt 140

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Nazi official, Mauth has been secretly preparing for his departure from Dresden, swapping the morphine for cash and papers that are ultimately supposed to bring him and his family to Switzerland. While the soldiers in his hospital undergo surgery without anesthetics, he has purchased a private clinic in Basel. Anna, a dedicated nurse, even exhibits moments of nationalist pride in the opening sequences when we hear her curse “those damned Americans” after an air attack occurs near the hospital. Her future within the all-white and all-wise medical environment seems all but certain as she is about to become engaged to Carl Mauth’s likely successor, the young surgeon Alexander. He himself is initially just as much in the dark visà-vis Mauth’s immoral morphine dealings, yet once Alexander discovers everything, he offers only fleeting resistance. Robert Newman, the British pilot, was shot down over Magdeburg. Wounded, he somehow manages to join a trek of refugees, mostly women, children, and the elderly, heading toward Dresden. This journey is only one of the improbabilities the film has in store for us. Once in Dresden, he sneaks into the hospital and hides in the basement. One day, Anna discovers him there and provides food and medical care for him. While becoming engaged to Alexander, her affection grows for this mysterious man in the basement whom she deems a British spy. In one of the film’s most baffling moments, they even make love in the very hospital bed Robert managed to secure for himself, surrounded by wounded soldiers (never mind the fresh gut wound Robert suffered). On a previous evening, Robert observed Mauth’s depraved industry but delayed telling Anna until the day she gets engaged. In yet another daredevil move, and wearing a German uniform, Robert appears at Anna’s engagement party, an upscale festivity taken straight from the best doctors’ series on television.13 Once she comprehends how much her father and her fiancé have played her, Anna attempts to flee with Robert. Alas, they are captured, but not, thank goodness, before they find time for a second rendezvous in the attic of Mauth’s home while everybody else celebrates Anna’s engagement to Alexander. A German-British reconciliation baby will spring from one of these two encounters, as the audience will learn at the very end of the film. With Robert sedated and locked up in the attic until the bombs begin to rain down, and while Anna’s mother and sister escort her to the train station, the film awaits the crescendo described earlier. Forty-five television minutes of mayhem follow. 141

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The next day—with Dresden smoldering and in ashes—we find that our three protagonists have miraculously survived the attack. Robert and Anna stumble onto the Altmarkt together, where concentration camp inmates are already gathering the dead. Alexander is among the many who move like ants through the streets, without identifiable aim or purpose, altogether listless and stunned. The extended shots at the Altmarkt, following the surveying gaze of Anna and her British lover, illuminate the charred and distorted corpses on the ground. Here the director resorts to black-and-white photography to amplify the purported historical accuracy and immediacy of the film. Together with Robert we climb atop the Frauenkirche and, in a final moment of voyeuristic pleasure, survey the immense devastation. Dresden is a moonscape that defies Robert’s visual command as he cannot encompass what’s below. But all’s well that ends well. A close-up of Robert atop the city depicts his distress in the face of so much destruction; a close-up of Anna reveals her sadness as tears begin to stream down her smoke-blackened cheeks. It is Anna’s voice near the breaking point that puts the last touches on the tale for us as she juxtaposes her individual tragedy with the collective success of postwar Germans—both physically and politically—while scenes of the destruction fill the screen. “It is said that innocence is the first victim of war. It is also its last. Robert returned to England. He crashed with his plane into the North Sea only a few months after the war. He was never found. He was on his way to Dresden for the birth of our daughter.” Now the film reverts to grainy original documentary footage of the church’s ruins as well as the Martin Luther memorial, with Luther himself thrown off his pedestal, face down on the ground. “The Frauenkirche stood for one more day. Then its stone cupola gave way and collapsed. The immense heat of over 1,000 degrees centigrade had made the stone as porous as a sponge. Only remnants of the walls remained standing.” At first the fade-out that follows seems to signal not only the solemn end of the glum tale but the end of the film as well. Yet, after a few seconds, the blackness of the screen is filled with white letters. We read “October 30, 2005.” The faint ringing of church bells accompanies the next image: a large gathering—in color—under a blue sky around the repaired Martin Luther memorial. More text appears: “Consecration of the Frauenkirche Dresden.” Thousands upon thousands have gathered downtown around a resurrected Frauenkirche, whose white façade has replaced the smoke-blackened ruins of a dark past. Numerous cranes 142

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left and right of the church indicate not only that this house of worship is seeing a facelift but also that reunified Germany is hard at work giving itself a makeover. We aren’t left alone for long, as Anna’s sad tone is quickly replaced by an assertive male voice. It is Germany’s president Horst Köhler, the representative figurehead of the republic, who provides the conclusion in tandem with Anna for an audience apparently in need of an interpretative compass when he explains that the church, “an open wound for forty-five years,” was “resurrected as a sign of reconciliation, hope, and faith.” After a few shots of the marvelous interior of the church during the ceremony, close-ups of senior citizens present at the dedication remind the audience yet again that they are watching a real-life drama with real-life players. These introspective faces, lost in thought—we are led to assume—all have stories to tell that rival Anna’s. And swiftly Anna’s voice returns for a final declaration: “It is difficult to grasp what happened back then, in February of 1945. But those who survived carried the obligation to create something new. He who is always looking back will see nothing but his shadow.”

The Dresden Raid in East and West Maybe some of the seniors present near the resurrected Frauenkirche in 2005 felt inclined to remember other visualizations of the Dresden raid. The TV spectacle in 2006 was certainly a departure from what audiences of several generations got to see in the years and decades following 1945. One has to dig deep into Germany’s film archives, though, to unearth if not fictionalizations then at least “educational” pieces that centered on Dresden’s destruction and its rise from the ashes under socialist rule. Given its political currency during the emerging Cold War, it comes as no surprise that references to “Dresden” were as frequent as the electric bill. ZDF’s Dresden builds on this history and takes it decidedly down a new path. In 2006, culpability and responsibility take a backseat in an Anglo-European Gesamtkunstwerk of transnational forgiveness and partnership that rests on a notion of shared victimization. As can be expected, during the Cold War, the city and its destruction was politicized quite differently. East Germany’s newsreel Der Augenzeuge, for example, made repeated use of the city’s demolition by the British and American air forces, underscoring Western violence and thirst for blood. In the spring of 1946, with the Cold War still in its infancy, the raid had not yet risen to prominent status. The ruined city was 143

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merely one of the many results of Nazi aggression. One of the first references (Augenzeuge 16 [1946]) uses the Allied bombings to underscore Soviet help for reconstruction, reporting about a delegation under Molotov visiting the eighteenth-century Zwinger Palace. We hear that it is being rebuilt “with the support of the Soviet Union whose politics vis-àvis Germany is exclusively devoted to our [German] national interests.” Although we see works of art, we hear and see nothing of the destruction. The delegation’s next stop, then, becomes slightly more explicit. We hear “The reconstruction of Leuna, destroyed by American bombs.”14 Despite the fact that for the first time the agent of the destruction is identified, the emphasis remains on the close partnership between the Soviet Union and Germans in the Soviet zone of occupation, expressed in the narrator’s question: “Which foreign minister of a capitalist state is so closely connected to the workers?” A year later not much has changed. In the context of an industrial fire in Texas City, Augenzeuge 52 (1947) recalls the days and nights of fires and explosions that “Hitler’s war bestowed upon us.” Although we see how “enterprising Dresdeners” plant vegetables in their parks and along the Elbe River, we hear nothing about what happened to their city. Soon, however, the tone of the newsreels changes noticeably. By the early 1950s, the raid on Dresden has developed its full political potential. Augenzeuge 51 (1952) blasts “Adenauer and his accomplices,” calls them “criminals,” and compares West Germany’s chancellor to Hitler. While we see shots of destroyed, gutted streets, followed by their rebuilt counterparts, we hear the narrator announce, “We will not tolerate that, for example, Dresden will be destroyed once more. . . . The sweat that was poured and still pours into rebuilding the city on the Elbe cannot be for naught.” Linking Adenauer with Hitler’s Nazi Germany became a theme for years to come, just as the newsreels never tired of stressing that the destruction was American made. “Educational” films like Dresden mahnt Deutschland (Dresden Admonishes Germany; produced in part in 1949 and released in 1954) were entirely devoted to the raid on Dresden. Images of the baroque, intact city open this film, presenting Dresden as a cultural treasure. Then we hear the howling of sirens and bombs. B-17s fill the screen. The raid is dramatized with the screams of individuals in agony. While we see images of destroyed Dresden from atop, we hear a male voice: “On February 13–14, 1945, and devoid of any military necessity, the Anglo-Americans murdered the art center Dresden. . . . The blow was directed against residential areas and cultural treasures. . . . Men and 144

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women, infants and the elderly were mangled, torn to pieces, burned, shredded.” We see piles of corpses, probably on the Altmarkt. “Mothers and children were hunted down, chased, and slaughtered” explains a female voice. “Two thousand Anglo-American planes” dropped bombs. Allegedly, the attack happened so that Americans could test their latest bombs before the end of the war. “The blood of these victims is the gold of the American warmongers.” The twofold connection between Dresden 1945 and Germany 1954 is established afterward. Both the Korean War and West Germany’s impending rearmament are the contemporary context for this remembrance of the raid on Dresden. A newspaper headline (Der Kurier, September 12, 1950) appears on the screen and reads “Ten German Divisions?” Fascism is altogether dropped at the expense of Cold War rhetoric that juxtaposes Western (capitalist) aggression and Eastern peace-loving evenhandedness. By the 1960s, a new generation needed to be educated about Dresden’s past. The twentieth anniversary of the attack was especially big news in the East, and with twofold implications: on the one hand, an entire nation could return to the indiscriminate nature of alleged Western brutality. On the other hand, it was a splendid opportunity to stress real-existing socialist reconstruction efforts and successes. Augenzeuge 7 (1965) revisits Western “barbarism” quite graphically as it lingers on images of destroyed Dresden and those who died in makeshift bunkers. Now famous images (reproduced in Jörg Friedrich’s picture book Brandstätten as well) fill the screen, and we see chalk scribbling on remnants of a wall (“Clara Singer lies here in the ruins”). Dresden. Erinnerung und Mahnung (Dresden. Memory and Reminder, 1965), a film made under the direction of Max Jaap, repeats much of the anti-American jargon of the 1950s. The film opens with a quote from Brecht: “The Great Carthage conducted three wars. After the first it was still mighty. After the second it remained a place to live. After the third it could no longer be found.”15 The maps of Europe, the Mediterranean, and Northern Africa we see first are replaced with scenes of New York City and the Statue of Liberty, followed by images of London and Paris. “What will happen” implores the narrator, “when nuclear war reaches the cities? . . . Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Warsaw, Coventry, and Dresden are everywhere.” Only months after the Cuban missile crisis, and at the height of the Cold War, Dresden is just one example among many of the dangers of indiscriminate warfare executed by the Western powers. What is usually narrated as cause and effect—Dresden because of Warsaw—is here just another example 145

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of Western barbarism and, possibly, atomic war as the final madness of the violent twentieth century. “Dresden’s death was a result of Hitler’s barbarism” explains the narrator whose voice accompanies shots of corpses piled up on the Altmarkt. “However, the fact that those British and American bombers attacked Dresden when fascism was already overcome, when the population had doubled due to refugees, and when the liberation of the city by the Soviet army was only a matter of days, that was an act of barbarism as well.” Prolonged shots of burials, destruction, and shocked people conclude this sequence while we hear that “one crime begot another.” The film’s closing sequences, however, highlight the reconstruction efforts underway. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) youth, it is suggested, know better than to wage war. As in many other visual documents of the time, modern Dresden takes center stage. And that means selling ugly blocks of concrete apartments (Grossplattenbauweise) without any greenery as the “self-confident style of our socialist age.” And, surprisingly, “they fit in nicely” with whatever remained of the old architecture, the narrator claims (Augenzeuge 9 [1967]). By 1970, with much of the city “rebuilt” (or rather, replaced), a triumphant Dresden has risen from the ashes. “   ‘Dresden—a cemetery.’ Headlines from 25 years ago” reports Augenzeuge 7 (1970). We see a memorial for those who perished in the attacks of February 13 and 14, 1945. Of course, a jab right on the chin of the capitalist West was still welcome. While we see scenes of modern Dresden suffocating in concrete, the narrator speaks of the “hypocrisy of the bombardiers who lacked any rationale for the necessity of the attack.” Obviously, this comment is something you would have never heard or seen espoused by the government in the Federal Republic.16 In the East, this was official news. “The winner is the city of Dresden” the narrator then claims, and we see more images of workers, concrete blocks, elderly women drinking coffee, statues, bridges and cars. “Dresden, a cemetery? . . . No!” It has become a modern city filled with happy people. For the West it was altogether more difficult to take advantage of the Dresden raid and its “howling success,” because—to borrow from Kurt Vonnegut—what is there to say about a “massacre”?17 A few years after the war, the U.S. administration licensed its own “educational” vignette, a film titled Zwei Städte (Two Cities, 1949), for the Western zones. It announces itself as filmed “on both sides of the Iron Curtain.” The film juxtaposes Dresden (in the Soviet zone of occupation) and Stuttgart (in the American zone). Its sole purpose is to celebrate Western reconstruction 146

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success vis-à-vis Eastern backwardness. The unambiguous message the film wishes to send is clear: while the Soviets feed the Germans in the East propaganda and talk about rebuilding, the Western Allies have long since begun the restoration and modernization of the West. The film makes ample references to Marshall monies, economic freedom, and a solid currency for Western consumers. Although the technological advances in the West do not automatically transform everything overnight (it’s “not a paradise,” stresses the narrator), Stuttgart is living proof of impending affluence. The shot of a movie theater (Palastlichtspiele) provides a curious clue of the ongoing culture war. The marquee indicates that Stuttgarters can see Ninotchka in the movies—Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 film with Greta Garbo, which bashes all things Communist. Most astounding, however, is a comment by the narrator at the opening of the film that directly addresses agency regarding the bombing raid on Dresden. The city “used to be called the Florence on the Elbe River. . . . In 1945, air raids destroyed 80% of the city; air raids that only took place because the advancing Red Army demanded them.”18 It seems that the Western powers not only found it difficult to embrace the destruction of all major cities as part of their success story, with regard to Dresden they also found it necessary to point to the actual culprit behind the Iron Curtain. One cannot help but think that the next logical step in this whitewashing would have been to claim that the Western air forces “only obeyed orders.” Another Western production, Die verschwundene Stadt (The Vanished City, 1954/55) by Boehmer Film Dresden (by the mid-1950s located in Erlangen and Hamburg) is equally hesitant when it comes to identifying an agent behind this city in Saxony that “disappeared in an unimaginable firestorm.” The film’s emphasis rests on cultural treasures that were lost in the winter of 1945. Whatever we see on the screen is accompanied by the narrator speaking in the past tense: “This used to be Dresden’s Dom, this used to be . . .” What we see archival footage of exists no longer. The film calls itself “Erinnerungsfilm,” a film that calls to mind what is lost. What other country can boast of a genre like this in its film history?

“Schmaltz-Bombs Raining Down onto Dresden” A skillful and unparalleled media campaign prepared the ground for the television bombs in 2006.19 On March 4, one day before the actual 147

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broadcast, newspapers reported—positively as well as critically—about the impending “event.” Producer Hofmann and director Richter did what they could to advertise their telenovela in interviews to create as much hype as possible. And that meant, primarily, to play up their “antiwar” film as morally and politically important for the Germans. Producer and director were thus in tune with the ZDF program director Hans Janke, who carried the final responsibility for what appeared on television. He explained that “   ‘Dresden’ . . . was supposed to be a . . . film that—by telling the story of Dresden’s indisputably terrible destruction from the air by British bombers—does not cast doubt on the fundamental responsibility of Nazi Germany for the Second World War and thus the responsibility for the death of 50 million human beings.”20 The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung21 printed an extensive interview in which Hofmann and Richter covered a variety of postwar markers from “zero hour” to Mitscherlich’s inability to mourn. They emphasized how thrilled they were that “the long buried chapter ‘Dresden’ will be an emotional impetus to talk about the World War.” But which taboo exactly did they desire to break? Hofmann and Richter wished to avoid, by all means, “the polarized debate about ‘Dresden’  ” and mentioned Jörg Friedrich’s Air War tome Der Brand as a negative example—indicating, if anything, that they had not read or understood it. “That showed me,” Hofmann explains, “what I did not want: a film about the victims that deteriorates into nationalist pathos. . . . Dresden does not offset one side’s suffering against the other, but rather is a film about and against war.” Ultimately, Hofmann reflected, the film should be considered a success if this chapter of Germany’s history reaches the generation of their lead actress in the form of a few lasting images. “If our film hooks the generation of Felicitas Woll . . . with a few images that remain—that would be wonderful. Then we would have achieved something.” Be that as it may, Michael Hanfeld, who conducted the interview, did not ask Hofmann and Richter why they did not make an antiglacier film instead, as Kurt Vonnegut has one of his characters suggest sardonically in one of the first and perhaps still most famous prose works about the Dresden raids, Slaughterhouse Five.22 In addition to firsthand instructions by producer Hofmann and director Richter, the readers of newspaper editorials learned to distinguish right and wrong from well-known historians east and west of the Channel, supposedly hired to accompany the film’s production and to guarantee its historical accuracy. Military historian Rolf-Dieter Müller, for instance, was assigned by Dresden’s mayor Ingolf Roßberg to assess the 148

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bona fide number of victims in Dresden via computer simulation with the intention of ending the “psychology of numbers.” Müller believed that the moving images of the film are more “impressive” than the “arid works of historians.”23 What for some spectators turned into a “flaming appeal against the war,”24 “grandiose television,”25 or successful fictionalization of “a sensible and controversial topic,”26 others identified—and I think rightly so—as politically overcorrect “soap.” Dresden is a “mélange,” wrote one reviewer in Neues Deutschland, “that has to be mainstream. A spectacular catastrophe, some forties ambiance, dangerous conspiracies, and plenty of love. Nothing fits together, but the audience will be firstclass.”27 For Peter von Becker, the “war-love movie” was at best a “questionable success. . . . Dresden warps the inhuman lunacy of war into shallow melodrama,” exhibiting at every turn its craving to be “politically correct. . . . Dresden indicates how difficult it is to create entertainment about one’s own annihilation. No wonder that the British—who have assessed critically the bombing of Dresden for a long time now—can only shake their heads in disbelief about so much German reconciliation kitsch.”28 One of the harshest critics was German historian Arnulf Baring, born in Dresden in 1932 and present in the city during the raids. For him, the film is a “nervous compromise that never loses sight of today’s politically correct standards.” Whereas the focus of the film, according to him, should have been the disappearance of an “entire world,” it is the British pilot that takes center stage at the expense of the city. Baring considers this a “blasphemy. . . . Have, once again,” he asks imploringly, “a German inferiority complex, German self-hatred, and hatred of the fathers wielded a wicked pen here?”29 Indeed, with its energies spent on producing a politically overcorrect entertainment tale of trans-Channel love and world peace, we can safely assume that this film does not hurt anybody’s feelings, no matter how much publicity the film’s purportedly “controversial” subject matter received. Dresden shares with other productions of the previous two decades, whether in post-Wall German cinema or on German television, a mode of production that Lutz Koepnick labeled “heritage film.” The film exposes the audience to a past that highlights “not the disconcerting memory of trauma, but rather the image of intuitive understanding, harmonious community, and ethnic consensus.” It is a cinema made for easy consumption that ultimately offers history—despite its prolonged focus on harrowing violence—as a “site of comfort and orientation.” Anna’s 149

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intuitive understanding and directive amid the carnage of Dresden’s destruction—that “that is us” and not “him”—as well as the film’s emphasis on what Koepnick calls “fantas[y] of consensus and historical reconciliation” marks Dresden as the logical endpoint of the heritage film. The schematic constellations and formulaic trajectories it shares with other recent productions that engaged with Germany’s wartime past, including its heartwarming happy ending inside Dresden’s resurrected Frauenkirche, only further underline their ideological home in a comfort zone that hopes to overcome the “irredeemable ruptures of modern history and memory.”30 Dresden does not neglect deeper questions of history and identity. With its focus on a notorious raid of World War II it seems to do, rather, the opposite. Yet, even though Dresden is all about consensus, it is not just a television example of what Eric Rentschler has called a “cinema of consensus.”31 To be sure, it is harmless cinema. It neither challenges nor unsettles us when it foregrounds a “we” in the form of peace-loving Germans as staunch Europeans or cosmopolitans. There is precious little for the mind but abundant fodder for both the heart and the senses in Dresden. But what appears to be another case of consensus cinema would be much more accurately described as a deliberate political negotiation of a long-time political and moral quandary. A glance at recent German television programming reveals that Dresden does not stand alone; and herein may lay its politics. Over the past few years, the German viewing public was given ample opportunity to connect with its wartime past, not only in the movie theaters with films such as von Trotta’s Rosenstraße (Rosenstrasse, 2003), Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, and Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005) but especially on German television. In fact, it is the public arena of television—in the case of ARD and ZDF sponsored by the Federal Republic and fulfilling a specific public role determined by federal law—that has shelled recipients on couches and easy chairs with a mixture of documentary and feature films about mostly delicate issues such as the Air War and expellees. What we have observed in recent years is what Elizabeth Heineman described in a different context as “shifts in the ‘location’ of memory.”32 What once was considered politically or morally knotty and relegated to an area far to the (political) right of Germany’s official or even popular displays of memory seems to have changed its standing. Since Sebald’s lectures in Zurich, Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand, and Guido Knopp’s documentaries for television, the proposition of Germans as victims has come alive in the popular imagination, 150

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even though this new pair of boots does not yet fit well and causes discomfort for those who wear them as well as those who feel trampled by them. With President Köhler’s involvement in the present film we may wonder whether the Air War will soon be embraced by official memory, perhaps in the form of some sort of federally sponsored memorial for the victims of the raids. And the Air War, certainly, is not the only subject to resurface from the past in the popular mainstream arena of television. Almost exactly one year after Dresden, teamworx delivered another foray into Germany’s past as there was more to be mined for an audience apparently still ravenous to see itself (or its compatriots) in a role different from the one it had been socialized to occupy. With the television drama The Flight (directed by Kai Wessel) the plight of refugees from the East toward the end of the war had a triumphant return into the public imagination. Prominent in the 1950s, but significantly less important for public or official memory since then, German suffering was reintroduced by teamworx into the public arena when their film aired on the ARD in March 2007.33 The 9-million-euro undertaking garnered the broadcasting company the best ratings in years. Some 11 million tuned in for the first part of what was, like Dresden, a two-part series for Sunday and Monday prime-time television. Junkers in eastern Prussia replaced the doctors of Dresden, a French forced laborer the British pilot, Prussian snow and frost the flames of downtown Dresden. Yet otherwise we observe much of the same cookie-cutter formula. Another love triangle takes center stage. Lena Gräfin von Mahlenberg (Maria Furtwängler) is engaged with Heinrich Graf von Gernstorff (Tonio Arango) yet loves—secretly—a forced laborer from France, François Beauvais (Jean-Yves Berteloot). The tale has us join the resolute countess in the summer of 1944 while she is attempting to resist the irrational demands of Nazi fanatics and support forced laborers. It is in the second part of the film in particular that we find ourselves reminded of the mayhem Dresden depicted. We bond with the refugees on their laborious and at times grueling trek from Prussia toward Bavaria away from the advancing Russian front. And even though the film is rife with grisly Nazis, its focus on individuals tends to blot out the bigger historical picture. The critics, again, had a ball. Recently ousted conservative Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski expressed perhaps the strongest reservations about this latest German dramatization of history. “Any attempt to revise the history of World War II needs to be watched care-

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fully,” he told reporters, implying that such films posed a danger to Poland and Europe. “I hope the process in Germany will be stopped.”34 Kaczynski’s position may be the discourse of the day before yesterday, insofar as no one in his or her right mind attempts to find fault for World War II with anyone else but Nazi Germany. Its history, in this respect, will not be revised. German victims of a war instigated by Germans have long ceased to be an exclusive issue for intolerable revanchists on the far right. What is truly a phenomenon of recent years, what may be, in Wulf Kansteiner’s words, a new “distinct phase . . . in coming to terms with the past via television,” is the return of Germany’s criminal history as soap.35 With a keen eye on political correctness and would-be normality, good and bad is easily distinguishable through stereotypes rather than through characters. That indeed we are confronted with a “process” is quite perceptive, though. Whether it needs to be “stopped” is another question. Even before Dresden and The Flight there were other television production “events”—all of them teamworx productions with overt structural parallels—that have mass-produced a new convention for television. They all featured German dead for German audiences. In 2001, teamworx presented Der Tunnel (The Tunnel, 2001), a film about the construction of the Wall and the division of Berlin that linked a historical event, German victims, and a love story. In 2005, we could watch Die Luftbrücke—Nur der Himmel war frei (The Airlift, 2005) on SAT 1. Again German victims, again a love triangle–this time between a German woman, her husband believed to be dead, and a U.S. soldier. Before Dresden, RTL aired Die Sturmflut (The Flood, 2005). Predictably, it had a similar scenario: flooded Hamburg, German dead, and a love triangle between a nurse, her missing friend, and a doctor.36 The unstoppable fictionalization of the past will not be over any time soon. And given the nature and structure of these recent television fabrications rolling off the conciliatory assembly line, Christopher Keil’s assessment reads more like a threat: “Fictional event television has only started to analyze German history.”37 Welcome aboard the rollercoaster of history!38

Notes 1. His Zurich lectures on “Air War and Literature” claimed that the Germans made a taboo of the physical and moral destruction of Germany after the war. Published as Luftkrieg und Literatur in 1999 (Munich: Hanser Verlag), the English translation is On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003). 152

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Dresden: The Return of History as Soap 2. In Part 3, Sebald shares reflective comments on letters his initial lectures triggered. He is dismayed to see that, despite all his efforts to remove himself from revanchist rhetoric, some in his audience seem encouraged to identify in him an ally in their quest to protect Germany from a perceived “cultural invasion” by America, or, even more disturbing, the “Jews.” For Sebald, a “Dr. H.” from Darmstadt appears to be a “revenant from those ill-starred times,” suffering from “fantastic delusions” (Natural History, 100). Sebald uses Dr. H. as an example of someone “who will never learn” (103) and concludes his essay with a sweeping reference to Guernica, Warsaw, Belgrade, and Rotterdam as examples of German pioneering vis-à-vis destruction from the air. See my own essay on Sebald’s theses, “Taboo and Repression in W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction,” in W. G. Sebald. A Critical Companion, ed. J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 175–89 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). 3. Not all are able—or willing—to do so. The recent renaissance of memory politics has triggered numerous reactions, ranging from empathetic and constructive to defensive and even hostile. On representations of German victims of the war, see, for example, Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims. Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2006), or Helmut Schmitz, ed., A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). On the memory of the destruction of Dresden in the GDR, see especially Bill Niven’s overly concerned piece, “The GDR and Memory of the Bombing of Dresden,” in Germans as Victims, 109–29 (see also his introduction to the volume). 4. In Germany’s first postwar production, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946),Wolfgang Staudte offered his audience a similarly inviting role model in Dr. Hans Mertens, a wartime surgeon, supposedly representative for millions of returning Wehrmacht soldiers, who struggled to reintegrate into postwar society. 5. On the Holocaust miniseries, see Wulf Kansteiner, “Entertaining Catastrophe: The Reinvention of the Holocaust in the Television of the Federal Republic of Germany,” New German Critique 90 (2003), 135–62. 6. A professor of Romance languages in Dresden, Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva survived the war in Germany. His secret diaries were uncovered by Victor Nowojski, a former pupil. The publication of the diaries in German in 1995 was a national event. They appeared in English in 1999. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933–1945, 2 vols., trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Random House, 1999). 7. An elaborate Web site with background information was made available online, including pedagogical materials for in-class use of the film. See http://www. zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/3/0,1872,3881603,00.html. 8. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (“12,68 Millionen: Groβer Zusehererfolg für Dresden,” March 7, 2006) reported that “Dresden has found its audience. 12.68 million watched the first part on Sunday—the equivalent of about 32.6% of the market” and that the film’s success was even more remarkable as it

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was rivaled by ARD’s Tatort (6.2 million) and Spider-Man on Pro Sieben (3.19 million). 9. Christiane Kohl claimed that “nowhere else were so many people suddenly reminded of their own past.” “Ein leiser Sirenenton,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 7, 2006. 10. In an interview with Christian Buss titled “   ‘Eine Art Völkerverständingung.’  ” Tageszeitung, March 3, 2006. In 2007, Dresden was followed by “Die Flucht,” another WWII (and love) drama zooming in on the experiences of German refugees fleeing the eastern provinces of the Reich toward the end of the war. 11. The company has garnered numerous TV and film awards and advertises its recent productions on their home page: http://www.teamworx.de/. 12. Two of the most recent contributions dealing with the Air War and, in particular, with the attack on Dresden, albeit quite different in focus and judgment, were provided by Frederick Taylor (who delivers a robust defense of the Dresden raids) and A. C. Grayling (who engages with the very moral implications of the Air War that Taylor decided not to touch). Frederick Taylor, Dresden. Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities. The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan (New York: Walker & Company, 2006). 13. Similarly, David F. Crew sees in Dresden “a German family melodrama that traces the dissolution of a privileged bourgeois family.” See Crew, “Sleeping with the Enemy? A Fiction Film for German Television about the Bombing of Dresden,” Central European History 40 (2007): 121. For him, Dresden falls short morally, because amid all these German victims, the German perpetrator simply is not present enough. Yet, Crew’s analysis itself falls short by rehashing the same traditional concern vis-à-vis the necessity of not losing sight of Germany’s guilt when discussing—or displaying—its moments of victimization. What this “logic” implies, and what he considers to be a “moral judgment,” is, ultimately, justifying one mass killing with another. 14. Leuna was part of the IG Farben conglomerate until 1945. 15. “Das große Karthago führte drei Kriege. Nach dem ersten war es noch mächtig. Nach dem zweiten war es noch bewohnbar. Nach dem dritten war es nicht mehr aufzufinden.” Bertolt Brecht, “Offener Brief an die deutschen Künstler und Schriftsteller,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 19 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, [1951] 1967), 496. 16. Taylor’s recent book Dresden (see note 12) is an attempt to do just that: deliver a good argument that indeed there was a military or strategic reason to destroy the city and kill an unknown number of civilians on the ground. 17. A fact that, of course, was not lost on Kurt Vonnegut either. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (New York: Random House, [1969] 1991), 190 (“howling success”), 19 (“massacre”). 18. My emphasis. 19. “Schmalzbomben auf Dresden” the title of a critical review by Peter von Becker in the Berlin Tagesspiegel on March 7, 2006. 20. Hans Jahnke, “Ein zu Herzensverstand gehender Film.” http://www.zdf.de/ 154

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Dresden: The Return of History as Soap ZDFde/inhalt/25/0,1872,3792921,00.html. 21. “Eine Reise durch die Apokalypse,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 4, 2006. The same number of the FAZ also contains an eyewitness report by Friedrich Karl Fromme. “In den Kellern der brennenden Stadt. Ich war dabei: Ein Zeitzeuge sieht Roland Suso Richters eindrucksvollen Zweiteiler Dresden.” 22. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, 3. 23. Katrin Bischoff, “Dresden. Psychologie der Zahlen,” Berliner Zeitung, March 4, 2006. 24. Tilmann Gangloff, “Feuer vom Himmel,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, March 4, 2006. 25. Sven Felix Kellerhoff, “Liebe im Feuersturm,” Berliner Morgenpost, March 4, 2006. 26. Hannah Pilarczyk, “Dresden, 13. Februar 1945,” tageszeitung, March 4, 2006. 27. F.-B. Habel, “Liebe Pflicht,” Neues Deutschland, March 4, 2006. 28. Peter von Becker, “Schmalzbomben auf Dresden,” Tagesspiegel, March 7, 2006. Oliver Storz, in a cynical reference to the colorful world of the circus (“Menschen, Tiere, Sensationen”), called his contribution in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of March 7, 2006 “Ärzte, Flammen, Sensationen.” Critical that the script anchored the story as a medical drama, he writes, “What remains is the question: why on earth did one choose a script that features the white robes and disinfected halls of doctors’ rounds in a hospital [Ärztemilieu] and that, therefore, drags into the ambitious project the men’s perfume of each and every doctor’s telenovela on this planet?” 29. Arnulf Baring, “Das große Feuer. Im ZDF geht Dresden verkitscht und nach dem neuesten Stand politischer Korrektheit unter,” Die Welt, March 6, 2006. 30. Lutz Koepnick, “Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s,” New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002): 51–52. 31. Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed., Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 264 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 32. Elizabeth Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman,” in The Miracle Years. A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed., Hanna Schissler, 46 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 33. As with “Dresden,” a Web site with background information is available: http://www.daserste.de/dieFlucht/. 34. According to a report by Deutsche Welle, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2374468,00.html. 35. See Wulf Kansteiner’s interesting analysis “Nazis, Viewers and Statistics: Television History, Television Audience Research and Collective Memory in West Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 39 (2004): 581. He identifies four distinct phases: the 1960s and early 1970s as phases of strong engagement with the Nazi past; the late 1970s and post-1988 as phases of disengagement. It appears to me that since about 2000 a new phase of engagement is upon us. 36. And, of course, German victims have seen a renaissance in literature also. Günter Grass’s novella Im Krebsgang (2002; translated as Crabwalk [2004]) about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff may be the most prominent example. 155

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37. Christopher Keil, “Krieg und Frieden,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 4, 2006. 38. See Jan Schulz-Ojala in a piece titled “Willkommen in der Geisterbahn,” Tagesspiegel, March 19, 2007, about yet another fictionalization of the Nazi past, Stefan Ruzowitzky’s concentration camp thriller Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters, 2007).

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Johannes von Moltke

Terrains Vagues Landscapes of Unification in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go

During the waning hours of a November night in 1989, a middle-aged woman dons an enormous black wig, wraps herself in an extravagant Dior coat, and steps into the deserted street. She has been put up for the night in a makeshift apartment on the outskirts of East Berlin, but now even her trusted sleeping pills fail her, and she feels as though she is living a waking nightmare. Walking against the flow of people on their way to work, she heads across a barren strip of land framed by distant highrises. She has been crying, her heavy mascara forming blotches on her cheeks. On stiletto heels, she picks her way gingerly over the uneven terrain to a food stand located incongruously in the middle of this exurban wasteland. She orders coffee, and with a fleeting smile of recognition, she turns up the volume on the radio as the Can sings, “She brings the rain / In the dawn of the silvery day / Clouds seem to melt away / She brings the rain.” Located precisely at the midpoint of Die Unberührbare (No Place to Go, 2000), this is an emblematic sequence of Oskar Roehler’s exquisitely stylized film. Through its brilliant black-and-white cinematography with noirish undertones,1 No Place to Go constructs the melancholic vision of a woman utterly out of place. Its protagonist Hanna Flanders navigates the plot and its postunification German landscape much the same way she negotiates the urban void in the early hours of this particular “silvery day”: the film shows her as a figure incapable of inhabiting the places she visits, lost in the human geography of unification and its terrains vagues. In the apt mistranslation of the film’s title (literally The Untouchable [Woman]), November 1989 finds Hanna with No Place to Go. 157

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Hanna Flanders (Hannelore Elsner) in the exurban wastelands of 1989 Berlin in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go (2000).

This pervasive sense of spatial incongruence takes on visual form in close-ups of Hanna’s high heels negotiating cobblestones; in long shots through windows of Hanna pacing her empty fishbowl bungalow in Munich or making a desperate call in a phone booth in the crowded center of Berlin; and in sequences that show Hanna trying to find sleep in one wrong place after another: in the decrepit East Berlin apartment, in a children’s room replete with elephant wallpaper, on the cold floor of her bungalow, and finally in a cavernous sanatorium. The same motif of displacement structures Hannelore Elsner’s critically acclaimed performance of Hanna Flanders as a restless figure who hardly once conveys the impression that she is at one with her surroundings. In Elsner’s portrayal, Hanna finds it difficult to sit still, and constantly lighting up is all she can do to tame her fidgeting hands. Finally, the narrative itself is structured around the topos of displacement: Hanna is a peripatetic protagonist on an errant journey across Germany. The film chronicles her fruitless attempt to regain her footing in a world out of joint. Taking my cue from this film’s manifest concern with displacement on the levels of plot, mise-en-scène, and cinematography, I propose to follow the aesthetic, allegorical, and spatial implications of No Place to Go across several overlapping contexts. I begin by situating Roehler’s postunification film in a trajectory that dates back to the beginnings of 158

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Hanna Flanders negotiates cobblestones in high heels in No Place to Go.

the West German Autorenfilm (auteur cinema) and the international successes of the New German Cinema. This allows us, among other things, to measure the distance that separates Roehler from the more mainstream, consensus-oriented production of the past decade or two; it also allows us to analyze the contemporary uses to which Roehler puts the type of filmmaking that he inherits from the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, and Wim Wenders: an intertextual reading of No Place to Go alongside Kluge’s Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl, 1966),2 in particular, reveals the function of Roehler’s film and his protagonist as a seismograph of unification. In the final section, I expand on this reading by suggesting that the film’s concern with displacement allegorizes social and political responses to unification long after the fact: in this reading, No Place to Go, which premiered a decade after 1989, is as much a postunification film about the Berlin Republic as it is the story of an individual’s helpless response to the fall of the Berlin Wall during November of 1989.3 Ten years after, Roehler’s film stages unification as an unfinished project as his protagonist, groping for a sense of place as much as for an adequate subject position, registers the shocks and aftershocks of unification within a mesmerizing aesthetic framework. In this regard, I hope to show that this single film by a director situated “exterritorially” with respect to the stomping grounds of filmmaking in 159

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the Berlin Republic can tell us something about the contemporary landscape of German cinema more generally.4

All about My Mother: Legacies of the Autorenfilm Told in carefully composed and often elegiac images, Roehler’s prizewinning feature is a striking portrait of a writer’s last days.5 Its peripatetic narrative is held in suspense by Hanna’s deferred suicide, which frames the film. The opening sequence, broken down into a disorienting series of extreme close-ups, shows Hanna on the telephone with her younger friend Ronald, while in the background we hear continuous television coverage of the celebration at the Berlin Wall. Juggling two lighted cigarettes, a glass of wine, and the receiver in her trembling fingers, Hanna picks up a bottle of arsenic. Although Ronald gently coaxes her into lighting another cigarette and ultimately manages to keep her from taking the poison, Hanna’s detached demeanor already suggests that her decision is irrevocable, to be delayed only for the few short days that constitute the film’s plot duration. Despite the apparently loose, episodic succession of scenes from Hanna’s journey, No Place to Go maintains considerable narrative tension by inviting the spectator to accompany a protagonist whose desire to kill herself is firmly established in the opening images but deferred for the duration of the film. What fills the temporal space opened up by this deferral? Confronted with the ubiquitous images of unification on TV, Hanna—a West German writer whose Communist convictions brought her more success with publishers and readers in the East than in the Federal Republic— decides to move to Berlin in hopes of finding her bearings in a changing political landscape; but the city offers no refuge. She stays in a seemingly deserted hotel, stops in for an awkward visit with her estranged son, and then finds her former East German editor Joachim to tell him that she has acted on her long-standing plan to move in with him. With her moving vans “already positioned outside of Berlin,” Hanna is devastated by Joachim’s evasive and noncommittal response. When he fails to offer her even a temporary place to stay, a kindhearted employee at the publishing house puts her up in the makeshift author’s apartment that will rob an already restless woman of her sleep. Finding her at the coffee stand in the dawn, an East German family takes pity on Hanna and takes her in, embracing her in the euphoria of unification. But the unsolicited kind-

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ness of strangers only confronts Hanna all the more poignantly with her own profound homelessness. Admitting defeat, she heads back south. She is now strapped for money and makes a stop at her parents’ house in Nuremberg, fully cognizant of the additional humiliation this will mean. Correspondingly, the overbearing bourgeois interiors convey no more of a sense of home than did the decrepit, water-stained architecture of the East Berlin apartment. The sparse and occasionally bitter exchanges that take place in this setting clearly testify to an unbridgeable generational rift between the fiftyyear old daughter and her 1950s parents. Perhaps the only moment that holds out a faint promise of repose for the restless traveler arises from a chance encounter with her former husband Bruno at the Nuremberg train station. However, in the spatial economy that structures the film, we quickly realize that this meeting will be as transitory as the locale in which it takes place. Hanna agrees to travel with Bruno to Darmstadt, where they drink, dance, and reminisce in his dimly lit apartment. But as talk turns to inebriated intimacy, both of the former lovers retreat to callous insults and Hanna flees the scene once again. She returns to Munich, spends a night on the floor of her empty apartment, covered only by her extravagant designer coat—the closest thing to an ersatz home that this vagrant woman knows. Now she tries to sell it back to the Dior boutique for cash but is rebuffed by the same salesclerks who had doted on their valued customer at the time of the sale. In the late hours of the following night, Hanna collapses in a public square as she leaves a bar. Though the immediate cause is a mistimed dose of sleeping pills, she is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness related to her smoking habit. The thick-walled sanatorium to which she is transferred for detox will be her last abode: after smoking a final cigarette with a sudden calm emphasized by her momentary but steady gaze into the camera, Hanna Flanders climbs onto the sill of a fourth floor window and drops silently to her death offscreen. Hanna charts an errant trajectory that explicitly forsakes the security of home from the moment she clears her flat in Munich and replaces its sparse comforts with the wildly expensive coat from a local Christian Dior boutique. This is as much a psychological journey as a geographical one, and the spatial dislocations that Hanna experiences are, on one level, simply the outward manifestations of an intensely insecure and neurotic subjectivity. In its emphasis on a fictional writer’s personal de-

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A sanatorium as Hanna’s final abode in No Place to Go.

Hanna smokes a final cigarette with sudden calm in No Place to Go.

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spair, on her isolation from the places and people around her, No Place to Go is the psychological portrait of an ageing artist, the case history of her suicide. This biographical fiction has autobiographical overtones: the character of Hanna Flanders is loosely based on the writer Gisela Elsner, Oskar Roehler’s mother, whose last years the film condenses into a few days in 1989.6 A child of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle of the 1950s) born in 1937, whose parents incarnated the bourgeois aspirations toward “normalization” against which the student movement would rebel in the 1960s, Elsner had become notorious for her antibourgeois stance. In the late 1950s, she moved on the periphery of Gruppe 47, having been invited to a few of its annual meetings. The publication of her debut novel, Die Riesenzwerge (The Giant Dwarves, 1964), was an immediate success; the angry energy of this Kafkaesque satire on German postwar complacency and bourgeois family life won her critical acclaim, the lucrative Prix Formentor, and a contract with the prestigious Rowohlt publishing house. But if her writing might be described as a precursor to Elfriede Jelinek’s “prose of destruction,” it was also soon overshadowed by it.7 Over the years, Elsner became more and more isolated as an author in the Federal Republic. In 1972, she joined the German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei; DKP) more out of spite than out of political conviction, and by the mid-1980s, she was dropped by Rowohlt. Her son Oskar was born in 1959 from a brief marriage with the author and publisher Klaus Roehler, whom she divorced in 1963. As at least one reviewer quipped, No Place to Go might thus be viewed as Oskar Roehler’s take on Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999). Although few actually followed up on the implication that the film should therefore be seen as a “form of psychotherapy” (itself a misreading of Almodóvar, if nothing else), most critics did zoom in on the personal, autobiographical nature of Roehler’s undertaking. They tended to compare the protagonist of No Place to Go favorably with the writer Gisela Elsner and spoke of a “fascinating document of filial ambivalence,”8 speculating on the value of the film as a son’s declaration of love to a mother he never had the chance to really know.9 In such commentaries more is at stake than a cinephile pun on Roehler’s film. By emphasizing the autobiographical sources and the self-expressive functioning of No Place to Go, such (re)views implicitly place it in a tradition of auteurism in German cinema that ties filmmaking to the biographical persona of the writer-director. If 163

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we put the emphasis on the filmmaker’s family history, No Place to Go does indeed revive what Thomas Elsaesser has described as a “cinema of experience” centered on modes of self-expression10; specifically, the autobiographical search evokes earlier Autorenfilme of the New German Cinema like Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1979) or the family narrative of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat. Eine deutsche Chronik (Homeland. A German Chronicle, 1981–1984), the signature work of a director who explicitly ties authorship to autobiography.11 In other words, along with a handful of other recent productions, No Place to Go inherits the paradigm of the Autorenfilm even as the mainstream of German cinema from Tykwer to Eichinger and from the “Lola” to the European Film Prize strives to “Europeanize” or continues to emulate Hollywood models. Roehler’s film harks back, across the cinematic landscape of the past two decades with its apparent investment in popular cinema, populist consensus, and generic formulas,12 to the international successes of the New German Cinema with its critical edge, its idiosyncratic and subjective auteurism.13 Stylistically, too, the film evokes an earlier film-historical moment: with its deliberate pacing and its observational stance toward its outlandish protagonist, No Place to Go may be seen to participate in a cinematic “rediscovery of slowness” by the so-called Berlin School (Berliner Schule) that critics have likewise traced back to the German Autorenkino of the 1960s.14 But Roehler’s film reconnects with that tradition in another respect as well. If the Autorenfilm had been closely linked (in distinction to the French politique des auteurs after which it was modeled) to the subjectivity of autobiography, by the late 1970s, its distinguishing hallmark had arguably become the way in which it articulated (auto)biography, the narration of an individual’s story, with German history. As Elsaesser puts it, “The New German Cinema discovered the past when filmmakers found history in the home and fascism around the family table. . . . The royal road in the 1970s of West German cinema to German history was family history.”15 Significantly, the New German Cinema repeatedly articulated this link between biography and history, between personal Geschichten (stories) and national Geschichte (history) through allegorical depictions of femininity. In addition to the explicit allegory of Germany, Pale Mother or the figure of Maria in Heimat, one need only think of Fassbinder’s penchant for exploring German history through female performance in films like Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1978), Lola (1981), Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Ve164

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ronika Voss, 1982), or Lili Marleen (1980). Roehler has repeatedly cited Fassbinder as a major influence, and the intertextual echoes of Fassbinder’s heroines remain audible in No Place to Go and were detected by some of the critics: Fassbinder, wrote Andreas Kilb, “would have loved this film.”16 In her outrageous outfits, her brooding mannerisms, and her melodramatic performances of femininity more generally, Hanna Flanders is a reincarnation of Fassbinder’s vamps. Cinematographically reminiscent of Veronika Voss’s shades of noir,17 she also borrows her particular brand of gender performativity from such figures as Martha, Maria Braun, Lili Marleen, and even the garish Lola from their respective films. With the exception perhaps of Martha, all these figures have been seen—not least by Fassbinder himself—as allegorical figures for aspects of German history, most specifically the 1950s, which Fassbinder saw as a decade of missed opportunities. We get a sense of how closely Roehler’s cinematic obituary (Kilb: “Nachschrei”) for his mother follows Fassbinder’s footsteps if we recall not only the latter’s obsessive casting of his mother in his own films but also his lifelong interest in investigating the generation of his parents through film, including an unrealized project titled The Marriages of Our Parents.18 Viewed from within the New German Cinema’s pronounced tradition of using autobiographical material as the basis for national allegories, Roehler’s film thus clearly amounts to far more than “just” a search for his mother. Even as contemporary German cinema in many respects continues to grope for a distinctive identity in an increasingly global marketplace,19 Roehler’s debt to the earlier successes (and politics) of the New German Cinema runs deep.20 Indeed, I would argue that the relevant film-historical intertexts for No Place to Go date back further than the acknowledged influence of Fassbinder. To fully gauge Roehler’s debt to the New German Cinema, we may have to return to its beginnings. Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl has come to stand as an inaugural film of what was then still known as the Young German Cinema. Yesterday Girl was the feature debut for one of the instigators and cosignatories of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, which had proclaimed the birth of the “new film.” The film was based on a story titled “Anita G.,” one of several semifictional biographical narratives that Kluge had previously published under the title Lebensläufe (Case Histories).21 Without wishing to claim any direct influence of Kluge’s work on Roehler’s film, I would suggest that the cinematic “case history” of Anita constitutes an important intertextual relay for understanding the cinematic reincarnation of 165

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Roehler’s mother as Hanna Flanders. Wandering aimlessly across the postunification German landscape in her white and black Dior coat, toting a voluminous zebra-patterned handbag, Hanna recalls the younger Anita, whom Kluge sends on a similarly peripatetic mission in the admittedly distinct landscape of the Federal Republic of 1959. The films may be separated by some thirty years, but the parallels between the two “case histories” are illuminating: like Roehler’s mother, both Anita G. and Hanna Flanders were born in 1937, and both chart solitary paths across Germany at two historical junctures. Anita, who fled her birthplace of Leipzig in the early 1950s, tries to find her bearings in the West between the Adenauer era, the building of the Wall, and the student movement. Hanna, whose mother hails from a small town in Thuringia not far from Leipzig but who grew up in the oppressively solid upper middle class of the 1950s economic miracle, certainly comes from a different background than the East German Jewish protagonist of Kluge’s film; but the figure of Hanna serves to chart a pervasive sense of displacement that had already been mapped, in slightly different aesthetic and historical terms, in Yesterday Girl. Anita G. is another female figure “on the run”—a plight that Kluge repeatedly visualizes in time-lapse sequences of his sister Alexandra hurrying around Frankfurt with her suitcases. Having fled East Germany and later committed a petty crime in Braunschweig, Anita is running from the law for most of the film. Multiply displaced, she is perpetually homeless. In the elliptical and episodic structure of the film, Anita moves in and out of apartments, hotels, and various lovers’ homes. She works as a sales agent, tries unsuccessfully to enroll in a university, and at one point even luxuriates in trying on different glamorous fur coats, one of which she purchases on her current lover’s credit. In emblematic images of her peripatetic existence, we find her squatting on a construction site or sitting on her suitcase at a highway interchange as the camera drives circles around her. Toward the end of Kluge’s film, she is another uprooted female figure left with no place to go. Rather than commit suicide, however, Anita turns herself in to the police. Like Hanna, she ends up in an institution, though Anita’s future is left open as she holds the camera’s gaze—a gesture Roehler will repeat at the end of his film. The crucial parallel between the two films, however, does not consist in similarities of character, let alone of aesthetic devices (the abundant marks of enunciation that Kluge builds into his film, for example, are almost entirely muted in No Place to Go); what unites these two distinct 166

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Anita G. (Alexandra Kluge) as another female figure on the run. She hurries around Frankfurt with her suitcases in Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966).

films—and others in between—is, rather, the particular function of the female protagonists and of their common displacement in a historically marked German landscape. It is a function that Kluge himself usefully compared to that of a “seismograph,”22 and which Miriam Hansen describes in terms of Anita’s role in registering pockets of the past—or “nonsynchronicity”—in the German present she traverses.23 Beyond the (more or less porous) boundaries of the respective diegeses, both Anita and Hanna prompt the spectator to ponder the shifting realities to which they respond. As Enno Patalas put it in his review of Kluge’s film, “The divided-undivided Germany that has come to terms and not come to terms with its past, the Germany of 1966 accounts for the subject and the form [of Yesterday Girl].”24 The same might be said of the differently “divided-undivided Germany” that Hanna Flanders traverses in Roehler’s film. Although the political contexts of the early 1960s and of 1989 differ in many respects, their immediate relevance to our understanding of both the films and their respective protagonists is of a similar 167

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urgency. Both films define their respective moment as posttraumatic, forcing questions of how to come to terms with a radically reconfigured present. Frieda Grafe’s response to the premiere of Yesterday Girl at the Venice Film Festival applies to No Place to Go as well: “This radical film (Kahlschlagfilm) is wholly adequate to the political and social situation in Germany.”25 In Yesterday Girl, that situation is defined by the end of the Adenauer era (the plot begins in 1959) and the two events that bracket the making of the film: the Auschwitz trials of 1963–1965 and the student movement. As she sounds out that present, Anita G. registers continuities with the past in ways that make the German title appear patently ironic. In her probing analysis, Hansen elaborates how Kluge explores this peculiarly German constellation of past and present through the two dominant spatial tropes of Flucht (flight), as both flight and escape, and of Heimat, the feeling of home. In Hansen’s words, Anita is “running away from a past of which she has been twice dispossessed”26; as I have already suggested, this trope of flight and displacement structures the overall narrative as well as the visual representation of Anita’s movements around Frankfurt. By contrast, Hansen finds references to Heimat inscribed in some of the spaces that seem to lie beyond the diegesis. These include cutaways to bourgeois interiors, a table in a rotating restaurant above the city, or even the “memory space” evoked by nursery rhymes that are recited offscreen and illustrated by drawings without apparent connection to the plot. To Hansen, these spaces, which are concentrated mainly in the first half of the film, “connote a sense of inside versus outside, of safety, protection, warmth, childhood, home—Heimat,” or a “peculiarly German tradition of interiority.”27 Together with the trope of Flucht, they form part of a public/private binary that Kluge critiques through his film as a mechanism of alienation. As Hansen points out, this critique is directed against both the exclusionist cultivation of interiority and the progressive reduction of private space that takes Anita from unpaid hotel rooms across busy public spaces (restaurants, train stations, bridges, public restrooms) to the prison in which she gives birth to her child. Anita never retreats into an enclosed, inner, “safe” place but “moves on, into ever more open, more public and impersonal spaces—spaces whose distance from anything resembling a home is underscored by a predominantly long-shot range.”28 To the degree that the film’s spatial figurations add up to suggest a pervasive historical sense of displacement in a post-

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war Germany, Yesterday Girl becomes, for Hansen, a “dialectical image” that confronts past and present. Like Kluge’s film itself, Hansen’s analysis offers a number of suggestive starting points for investigating the allegorical functioning of Roehler’s film. Like Kluge’s Yesterday Girl, Roehler’s protagonist Hanna Flanders serves as a seismograph who registers the tremors and aftershocks of the recent past in the German political landscape; like Anita, the figure of Hanna Flanders serves to “throw into relief particular discourses that cut across Germany, past and present, East and West.”29 The following section explores the figuration of such discourses within Roehler’s film.

“Fatal Mix” The discourses that No Place to Go negotiates “cut across Germany” quite literally, as Roehler uses Hanna to explore the aftershocks of unification. Here, the film suggests two related readings: one that follows the immediate repercussions of unification within the diegesis as they affect Hanna in particular and another that takes into consideration the context in which Roehler’s film premiered over a decade later. In other words, building on the “retrospective” reading of No Place to Go through Kluge that I have begun to elaborate above, I now wish to propose two “contemporary” readings that focus on the historical moment of the fiction and of its production, respectively. Whereas the former perspective yields a bleak picture about the West German Left’s inability to cope with the impact of the unification, the latter asks us to take a longer view of unification as a process marked by various nonsynchronicities—particularly the lag between material changes and mental adjustments to these changes. In both readings, however, Roehler’s mother becomes a figure for broader discursive shifts. Reinventing her as Hanna Flanders, Roehler “uses” his mother as a seismograph that allows us to sound out postunification dispositions. The allegorical aspect of the film is intimately linked to its autobiographical dimension but has tended to become buried under the latter, as critics have emphasized the “authenticity” of Roehler’s portrait and taken the film as an opportunity to revisit not unification but the biography of the director’s mother. Consequently, No Place to Go hardly ranks among the first films that come to mind as “unification films.” Here, we

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tend to think instead of the genre of the “Wall film”30 that flourished in the early 1990s; of feature films such as Das Versprechen (The Promise, 1994) and Nikolaikirche (Nikolai Church, 1995);31 or of the films that make up the current “third phase” of postunification retrospection on the German Democratic Republic (GDR), notably Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (1999) and Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003) or the Oscar winner Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006).32 And yet, Roehler’s film fits in squarely with these various ways of confronting the recent German past, making its unique contribution in part by adopting a resolutely Western perspective. This approach precluded both facile critiques of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former East Germany) that have been leveled at films like Sonnenallee as well as complaints about caricature and exploitation that were voiced as soon as West German filmmakers began to tackle “East German” subjects.33 Hence the sigh of relief by Veronika Rall, one of the few critics to review No Place to Go for its representation of unification: Finally a German feature film that manages to address the Wende from a Western perspective as a time during which the Left indulged in declarations of powerlessness, the cultural sections of West German newspapers did nothing but analyze the compromised positions of East German writers, and the conservatism of the Kohl era had its day. Finally one gets a feeling for the depression, the shock (as opposed to the general euphoria) unleashed in West Germany by the fall of the Wall.34

Roehler sets the stage for a unification film even before we see the first image: as the credits roll over a black screen, we hear the sounds of switching television channels, all of which are broadcasting the celebration at the Wall. Clapping and cheering alternate with fragments from interviews with East Berliners arriving in the West. Only after this historical moment is firmly established (as a mediated event) do we cut to the extreme close-up, indecipherable at first, of a bottle of arsenic shot from Hanna’s point of view. As she contemplates suicide with Ronald on the other end of the phone line, the TV images that are flashing simultaneously in both apartments provide a bridge for the parallel editing.35 After they terminate the conversation and Hanna has agreed to “give herself just a little more time,” the camera’s intense proximity to the characters is replaced by a long crane shot from the outside that isolates Hanna in her bungalow. She paces restlessly, but returns to the television 170

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set, where she stares uncomprehendingly and distraught at the live coverage. The camera moves in closer again and pans to frame her against a photograph of Lenin in the background. This deliberate opening introduces a desperate left-wing writer’s reaction to (media images of) German unification as the film’s theme. In this light, Hanna’s subsequent trip to Berlin appears merely to confirm the shattering of whatever vague dream she still had concerning the “intact world” (heile Welt) of communism. After a sleepless night and two disastrous encounters with “the people” who famously claimed its rights on the streets (“wir sind das Volk!” [We are the people!])—but whom Hanna Flanders had romanticized as the subject of a different history from afar—she calls Ronald to tell him that her move has “failed”; she has realized that among the realities of postunified Germany, she has “no chance.” Trapped in a telephone booth in the center of Berlin, she articulates her existential displacement. As one reviewer rightly pointed out, “The fall of the wall appears here as the end of something; it was a beginning only for others.”36 From the start, this ill-fated exploration is shot in lingering takes accompanied by an often wistful soundtrack. Through his protagonist, Roehler captures a profound melancholia that mirrors a broader disillusionment of left-wing intellectuals around 1989. In 1990, Helmut Dubiel had already diagnosed a “melancholic fixation on loss” among the Left, and Andreas Huyssen spoke of the failure of the intellectuals to seize the opportunities of the moment (thus leaving them to be exploited by the triumphalist rhetoric of the right).37 Peter Schneider, coauthor of The Promise, criticized as opportunistic and thoughtless the sudden reversal among Leftist loyalists in the West, “who until recently pounced on anyone who dared to call the GDR a Stalinist dictatorship.”38 In a familiar turn, narcissistic melancholia replaced mourning, “purely tactical reactions replaced analysis.”39 Hanna becomes a figure for this shock, registered not only in the critique of unification that she voices explicitly at different moments in the film but also in her somatic reaction: Elsner’s meticulous acting projects alternating states of bodily composure (generally with the help of make-up, the wig, the coat, and cigarettes) and physical breakdowns (crying, trembling, and the headlong fall into unconsciousness toward the end). This vacillating subjectivity is inscribed from the very beginning of the film. The scenes that follow her decision to postpone suicide alternate between images of utter despair and Hanna’s attempt to 171

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(re)gain her composure through the use of make-up, an enormous black wig, and a trip to the Dior boutique. Several takes of Hanna in front of her bathroom mirror show her completely disheveled at first and then fully “masked” behind heavy mascara, dark eyeliner, and a Cleopatra-like wig. Once in “costume,” she musters the courage to call her publisher at Volk und Welt in Berlin to inform him of her decision to move; but when he fails to respond enthusiastically, she breaks down again, realizing that “apparently I’ve been completely mistaken about you, too. I just don’t know what’s what anymore.” Then again, Hanna appears fully composed for a final interview that she conducts in her Munich apartment as the movers are packing around her. She begins elaborating in a combative tone on the consumerist ideology of unification, on the general loss of ideals, on the “cultural fascists” in the West, and on the renunciation of the search for truth “in Lenin’s sense.” But when the interviewer points out that few appear to have taken the early days of unification as personally as Hanna Flanders, she gradually breaks down again to admit that “the truth is that I have no dream anymore.” Manifesting her profound inability to maintain either an “authentic” self or the constructed persona that she assembles in the bathroom in front of a mirror, this overall pattern shows a person in shock, alternating between disavowal and helpless agitation—a fractured subject. Hanna becomes a figure who refracts the events of 1989 through an obsessive concern with herself—her outward appearance, her reflection in different mirrors, her acceptance by others. This narcissism is the flip side of her long-held projections of an intact world onto the East. When someone recognizes her at her former East German publishing house, he accosts her with the remark: “You’re that Flanders woman who didn’t understand the first thing about our political reality aside from some champagne receptions in Moscow, and who only believed in the damned GDR because it was the only country that would print her crap.” From beginning to end, the film relentlessly chronicles the shattering of the world Hanna had built up for herself, an event that amounts to a fatal narcissistic wound for its “seismographic” protagonist. A literal and particularly brutal version of this injury transpires in a bar on the outskirts of Berlin. Amid the exuberant crowd of East Germans celebrating the fall of the Wall, Hanna is approached by a local teacher named Dieter, who has read and taught all her books. This appears to flatter Hanna, as does Dieter’s question about whether she knows that she’s rather famous in “our country.” Dieter is clearly drunk, 172

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Hanna assembles herself in front of a bathroom mirror in No Place to Go.

Hanna, fully “masked” behind heavy mascara, dark eyeliner, and a Cleopatra-like wig in No Place to Go.

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and he is flirting with Hanna by echoing the party line on her books. Nonetheless, the exchange initially permits Hanna to believe in her projected image of the GDR as the better half of Germany, where people still understand and value her work. In apparent harmony, the two drink to the “fatal mix” of German and history, the subjects that Dieter teaches at school. Dieter compliments her on her looks and loudly proposes another toast to “the greatest woman in the room, the great Hanna!” However, by this point, the fleeting moment of mutual recognition is already rapidly deteriorating. When Hanna resists Dieter’s physical advances, he suddenly starts hurling insults at her, loudly maligning not only her outward appearance but also the fact that “for twenty years she’s been writing nothing but crap.” It is all the crowd at the bar can do to restrain him from hitting her. The event has put Hanna in the center of attention, but now for the wrong reasons. The concrete encounter with her fantasized intact world not only reveals the latter to be different from her projected image but also shatters her self-image in the most brutal, public way. Hanna’s identification with the other Germany had made recognition of the other as other (and not simply as a projection of the self) impossible; when that recognition comes, it is at the price of a traumatic shattering of Hanna’s narcissistic projections and hence of her own ego. In this regard, Peter Körte’s description of the film as the “chronicle of a loss of reality” (Chronik eines Realitätsverlusts) may need to be reversed: what we witness are the fatal consequences of Hanna’s confrontation with reality.40 Roehler’s film explores this confrontation with almost brutal patience until Hanna cracks under its pressure. It is thanks to this persistent attention to that shattering of Hanna’s illusions that the seemingly idiosyncratic portrait of the filmmaker’s mother resonates, as I have suggested, with a broader dynamic of disillusionment among Western Leftists—with the significant difference that, however helplessly, Hanna confronts what others would appear to have disavowed. In Peter Schneider’s suggestive image, the West German Left found itself “standing among ruins, trowel in hand, wanting to patch over cracks long after the walls had already fallen down.”41 Roehler depicts Hanna Flanders as precisely this forlorn figure, but he confronts her and the viewer with the ruins of unification as well. Indeed, the emblematic image of Hanna walking across the East Berlin void in high heels and dressed to the hilt captures both: her need for the safety of an unbroken self-image (projected, again, by the heavy make-up and the Dior coat) and the disorienting lack of 174

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stable structures, visualized in her insecure footing on high heels, in the long shots that emphasize the expanse of empty terrain, and in the direction of her walk against the flow of people. Her heavy make-up, itself a prominent motif in the many close-ups of Hannelore Elsner’s face that punctuate the film, is both a mask of repression that she herself claims to have worn unaltered for thirty years and a tear-stained surface that registers her profound destabilization. In an illuminating article on an exchange between two prominent psychoanalysts from the East and West, Alison Lewis has unraveled the multiple projections and the narcissistic blockages, respectively, that characterized even seemingly well-intentioned debates between intellectuals from both sides of the Wall. In her view, the trauma of unification derived in large part from the disappearance of a projective “other” against which one could comfortably define oneself, whether in the East or in the West. “The absence of another German state as a foil to one’s own,” she argues, “forced an identity crisis not only for the sixteen million East Germans but for much of the West German critical intelligentsia as well.” For the latter, East Germany had all too often remained a narcissistic projection that allowed one to “perceive the other predominantly as an extension of a reflection of the self.”42 Hanna reveals the breakdown of this projection, and it is this breakdown that leaves her with “no place to go.” As one reviewer rightly remarked, there is “no place anymore for her dreams.”43 A particularly arresting pair of shots soon after Hanna’s humiliation at the bar provides the literal image for this view. Hanna has returned to her temporary East Berlin apartment and looks across the street to the façade of a Plattenbau (prefabricated high-rise). We first see her framed in her own window as she draws back the curtains; the composition of the shot is reminiscent of Fassbinder’s many interior framing devices that generally serve to underline his protagonists’ isolation. Thunder rumbles in the background and Hanna murmurs, “This is a nightmare.” The following shot reverses this one, with the camera now looking out from behind Hanna’s head, which is centered in close-up, but out of focus; instead, it is the bleak façade in the far background that provides the focal plane of the image. If her inability to sleep literally makes it impossible to dream, the blank windows across the street provide only an empty surface that allows for nightmarish projections at best.44 With the figure of Hanna Flanders, Roehler brings to the screen an extreme representative of the West German Left to remind us that many 175

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Hanna, first framed in her own window, followed by a shot looking out from behind her head, which is centered in an out-of-focus close-up in No Place to Go. The bleak façade in the far background provides the focal plane of the image.

of its members experienced unification not as cause for celebration but as a traumatic event that shattered long-held hopes and beliefs. To be sure, Hanna’s depiction as an armchair socialist with an elitist habitus and soundly capitalist (shopping) habits immediately undercuts this disillusionment by emphasizing the problematic nature of the prior illusion itself; this is a film not about a “representative” figure on the Left but about a particularly neurotic, self-absorbed, and embittered Leftist 176

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who has long since fallen by the wayside. But the film is no less representative because Hanna is a seemingly “minor” figure on the Left. For all the private and personal dimensions of Roehler’s story, Hanna Flanders becomes a figure for the profound disorientation brought about by the events of November 1989. Although few may have shared the suicidal despair that overcomes the protagonist at the televised images of East and West Germans dancing on the Wall, the film convincingly channels her idiosyncrasies into a representative collective portrait: like Anita G., who also never quite seems to comprehend the events in which she immerses herself, Hanna registers—psychologically and somatically—the tremors and aftershocks of unification as she traverses Germany from West to East, South to North, and back again. In the suspended time of the film constituted by Hanna’s postponed decision to commit suicide, we are confronted with unification as a shock yet to be comprehended and assimilated even as waves of exuberance wash over the nation. But to trace Hanna’s wounded narcissism back to the discourse of the West German Left in the years immediately after unification provides us with only the most literal understanding of the film’s allegorical function. Such a reading treats No Place to Go as a “psychogram” of the filmmaker’s mother that sheds some light on the historical moment of unification itself. However, the ten years between unification and the premiere of the film serve as a reminder of this moment’s extended duration: if unification was in many respects a traumatic shock, it also turned out to be an ongoing and difficult process characterized by Nachträglichkeit (belatedness) and powerfully mapped for the cinema in the postunification installments of Barbara and Winfried Junge’s Golzow documentaries, for example. In this view, Hanna’s inability to come to terms with the events around her, her uncomprehending stare at the television images and her perpetual displacement serve as reminders of the lag between material and political changes, on the one hand, and individual adaptation to these changes, on the other. Like Anita G. in Yesterday Girl, she is a seismograph in that she serves to sound out nonsynchronicities, or “pockets of yesterday” in the swiftly changing landscape of unification. The disastrous exchange with Dieter provides a particularly vivid example of how explosive the “fatal mix” of German history becomes at this juncture. To be sure, many of these nonsynchronicities are her own: in a sense, it is the seismograph that is suddenly out of date and not the material it is designed to measure. On the other hand, in Roehler’s emphasis on 177

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nonsynchronicity, on miscommunications and missed opportunities, Hanna’s status as a West German raised during the Economic Miracle (Wirtschaftswunder-Wessi) and even her dogmatic—if idiosyncratic— Leninism recede behind the film’s more general image of failed reconciliation. This would begin to explain why Roehler manages to portray his mother melodramatically as a self-absorbed diva and helpless victim at once: her movements seem misguided and her failure to comprehend the events around her is to a large degree of her own making, and yet the film does not indict its protagonist for her blindness. Rather, in her retrograde nostalgia for a better East Germany, she becomes the figure for a more general persistence of the past that crosses the East/West divide; indeed, we may extend the film’s concern with mirrors and mirroring to read Hanna as a mirror for postunification biographies from the East as well.45 Whereas Gisela Elsner committed suicide in 1992, the film condenses the last three years of her life into a few days late in 1989, thus emphasizing the overpowering speed of events and their alienating impact on this individual. It thereby also opens up a reading that inquires into the dynamics of unification as they played out in individual “case histories” more generally. This reading is liable to emphasize not the disillusionment of the West German Left but the processes of transformation and adaptation that unification demanded of the German population more generally, especially in the East. Drawing on the work of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, the East German sociologist Wolfgang Engler has analyzed these processes in a number of important publications. Of particular relevance in this context are his investigations of the “civilizational gap” that opened up between the East and the West with the events of 1989. In Engler’s reading, 1989 amounted to an abrupt invalidation or “defunctionalization” of human dispositions “that had been generated by education and long practical experience, and which served under normal conditions of social development to mediate between objective structures on the one hand and both individual and collective forms of praxis on the other.”46 Engler’s continuing project has consisted in tracing those dispositions, whose sudden “defunctionalization” leaves them “naked, laid bare to the gaze of the observer.”47 With films like No Place to Go, the cinema can contribute to such a project. Although a film like Good-Bye, Lenin! would appear to translate Engler’s interest in the persistence of a GDR habitus far more literally than Roehler’s film, the latter’s observational stance toward its ageing female protagonist, its characteristic hovering between distance 178

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and proximity, offers glimpses of the lag between rapidly shifting political realities and the more gradual process by which deep-seated dispositions adapt—or in this case fail to adapt—to those changes. One of the most intriguing aspects of Roehler’s film lies in the fact that it finds spatial images for this temporal lag. As in Yesterday Girl, these hover between home and flight, Heimat and escape; to this underlying distinction, Roehler adds poignant contrasts between a collective sense of place, on the one hand, and Hanna’s utter isolation in putatively public spaces, on the other.48 Her decision to leave her old life in Munich behind to join the fray of unification in Berlin is accompanied by media images of the masses, but the Berlin in which she arrives is oddly devoid of people—save on the ubiquitous television screens. Few customers, if any, frequent the Berlin and Munich bars where Hanna takes her drinks and sleeping pills. Her makeshift apartment in East Berlin, the empty fishbowl bungalow to which she returns at the close of her circular journey, and the sanatorium in which she ends up all serve to isolate and imprison her. When she traverses populated public places, mise-enscène and cinematography emphasize her anonymity by placing her in a phone booth or clearing the sidewalk that she uses; when she ultimately collapses in a public square in Munich, the choreography stylizes the silent movements of passers-by and onlookers to de-realize that space. Each of these spatial arrangements marks Hanna’s lagging consciousness, translating her inability to keep up with the pace of events into a topography of increasing isolation. The most powerful of these images, however, remains the one with which I began: Hanna’s traversal of the East Berlin void in the “dawn of the silvery day.” The power of this image derives not only from its logic within the film’s internal spatial system of inclusion and exclusion but also from its relation to other images of “voids” that have dominated unification discourse. One is reminded particularly of the Potsdamer Platz before its rebuilding, unforgettably rendered as the “vacated space” that Homer scours for history in Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987).49 Writing a few years after unification, Andreas Huyssen emphasized that this former center of the city was now a “void saturated with invisible history”50 and that there remained “ample reasons to emphasize the void rather than to celebrate Berlin’s current state of becoming.”51 Huyssen was joined in this analysis by other readers of the urban terrain vague, notably Ignasi de Solà-Morales, who describes the tension, in such residual urban spaces, “between absence of use, of 179

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activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy.” As the authors of an intriguing article on the postindustrial cityscape of Detroit put it, “Terrain vagues are conspicuous pauses amidst a landscape homogenized to the point of indiscernability. These voided, abandoned spaces resonate with what Solà-Morales refers to as ‘our strangeness in front of the world’; they empathize with our feelings of placelessness and dislocation within our cities.”52 Hanna’s poignant trip across a less centered void on the outskirts of East Berlin tangentially invokes this (architectural) debate and personalizes it in the melodramatic terms of this particular narrative. But like the more prominent discursive and practical struggles around the rebuilding of Berlin, her story—and particularly the images through which it is told—stands as a reminder that ten years after the fall of the Wall (if not longer), “the history of Berlin as void is not yet over.”53 In its consistent and compelling mise-en-scène of displacement, through the figure of Hanna Flanders and through the figuration of her circular journey into death, Roehler’s film “emphasizes the void,” thus joining those who would break with the postunification “cinema of consensus.” Although the release of No Place to Go coincided with the glut of German films that brought German history back onto the screen—from

Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz as both a void and a site of historical drama in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987). 180

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Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) to Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2003) to NVA (2005)—and although Roehler shares with these films a penchant for grand emotions, he leaves the affirmative use of these emotions to the mainstream productions.54 Along with a handful of other works by directors such as Christian Petzold, No Place to Go must be numbered among the “species of the Autorenfilm, which remains virulent even in the face of neocapitalist restructuring of subsidy policies.”55

Notes 1. On No Place to Go as film noir, see Matthias Frey, “No(ir) Place to Go: Spatial Anxiety and Sartorial Intertextuality in Die Unberührbare.” Cinema Journal 45, no. 4 (2006): 64–80. 2. The title in the original was Abschied von Gestern; for an incisive critique of the translation as Yesterday Girl for English language distribution, see Miriam Hansen, “Spaces of History, Language of Time: Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966),” in German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Methuen, 1986), 213n. 3. Roehler’s film, I suggest, provides a rather precise map of the “new spatial dimension in the representation of German history” that Julia Hell and I have traced in the postunification cultural landscape. See Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke, “Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic,” Germanic Review 80, no. 1 (2005): 74–95. 4. Though he pans the mainstream of German film culture of the 1990s, Matthias Altenburg celebrates Roehler’s “exterritorial” position—“der Exterritoriale Roehler”—in his hymn to the director’s debut film, Silvester Countdown (In with the New, 1997). See Matthias Altenburg, “Der schönste Sexfilm aller Zeiten,” in Szenenwechsel: Momentaufnahmen des jungen deutschen Films, ed. Michael Töteberg, 144 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1999). I should point out, however, that the claims that I make about Roehler’s “auteurism” are strictly film-historical rather than theoretical: although I see important links between the aesthetic choices Roehler makes in No Place to Go, on the one hand, and the aesthetics of the earlier Autorenfilm of the 1960s and 1970s, on the other, I am less certain of the continuity of an auteurist “signature” across Roehler’s work, which I consider to be rather uneven. Whereas there admittedly is a strong thematic coherence to Roehler’s explorations of sexuality, gender, and power in his films from Silvester Countdown through No Place to Go and Der alte Affe Angst (Angst, 2002) to Agnes und seine Brüder (Agnes and His Brothers, 2004) and Elementarteilchen (Elementary Particles, 2006), taken as a whole this work seems to waver between a desire for authenticity, on the one hand, and a commitment to artifice, on the other. 5. No Place to Go won the German Film Prize of 2000 and was nominated as Germany’s submission for best foreign film at the Academy Awards. 181

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6. Gisela Elsner committed suicide on May 13, 1992. 7. Reinhard Baumgart, “Eine Rebellion zu zweit,” in Wespen im Schnee: 99 Briefe und ein Tagebuch, ed., Gisela Elsner and Klaus Roehler, 10 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2001). 8. A. O. Scott, “Both a Nation and a Novelist Getting Too Little Sunshine,” New York Times, April 5, 2001. 9. See also Hubert Spiegel, “Königin Lear auf der Heide,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 20, 2000; Brigitte Desalm, “Prinzessin vor dem Abrgund,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, April 22, 2000. 10. “The inner logic of New German Cinema and central strategy during the 1970s and early 1980s was to set against the politics of spectacle as practiced by Hollywood the notion of personal experience as politically and cinematically authentic.” Thomas Elsaesser, “The New German Cinema’s Historical Imaginary,” in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Film and Television, ed. Bruce Murray and Christopher Wickham, 288 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992). See also Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989) and Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992). 11. Edgar Reitz, “Alle Autoren entdecken eines Tages den autobiographisch gefärbten Stoff,” in Bilder in Bewegung: Essays und Gespräche zum Kino, 238 (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1995). 12. See Eric Rentschler, “Endzeitspiele und Zeitgeistszenarien,” in Geschichte des deutschen Films, ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans-Helmut Prinzler, 285–322 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993); Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 260–77 (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), 179–92. 13. For a more general argument about significant continuities between the New German Cinema and its post-Wall successor, particularly in terms of the Autorenfilm, see Ian Garwood, “The Autorenfilm in Contemporary German Cinema,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, 202–10 (London: BFI, 2002). 14. Christiane Peitz, “Was kommt nach den Reality-Shows? Die Stille nach dem Schluss,” Der Tagesspiegel, March 4, 2001. For some of the film’s few, but ardent, detractors, this was precisely one of the problems: Describing Die Unberührbare as an example of “the usual fare of angst-ridden Teutonic characters,” Elke de Wit complained that the film was too predictable. Her argument only makes sense if we take her resentment to be informed by a prior dislike for the “usual” films of Herzog, Fassbinder, or Ottinger in the 1970s. For how else could one claim that a strikingly different film like Die Unberührbare is “what people expect of German film: black and white, slow, lacking in plot and depressing: all of which are to my mind old-fashioned and predictable . . . yet another film about a disorientated, boozy, old writer, who has lost her ideology and her publishing deal.” See Elke de Wit, “Panel Games: Neue deutsche Filme at the Berlin Film Festival,” Central European Review 3, no. 10 (2001). http://www.pecina.cz/files/www.ce-review. 182

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Landscapes of Unification in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go org/01/10/kinoeye10_dewit.html. 15. Thomas Elsaesser, “Historical Imaginary,” 281, 289; see also Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 16. Andreas Kilb, “Die Unberührten: Zum Stand der Dinge im deutschen Film,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 15, 2000. A. O. Scott describes Hanna as “a creature of desperate contradictions, pathetic and heroic, vulnerable and vain, and, almost like a Fassbinder heroine, dignified even as she is humiliated again and again.” Scott, “Too Little Sunshine.” Other obvious connections include Fassbinder’s In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year with 13 Moons, 1978) as a backdrop for the transsexual story of Agnes und seine Brüder (Agnes and His Brothers). 17. Veronika Voss and film noir, respectively, feature as the main intertexts for readings of Roehler’s film by Paul Cooke, “Whatever Happened to Veronika Voss? Rehabilitating the ‘68ers’ and the Problem of Westalgie in Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (2000).” German Studies Review 27, no. 1 (2004): 33–43; and Frey, “No(ir) Place to Go.” 18. See Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, ed. Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing, trans. Krishna Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992): 33. 19. On the current state of German Cinema, see “Postwall Cinema,” ed. Eric Rentschler, special issue, New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002) and “Newer German Cinema,” ed. Jennifer Kapczynski, special issue, The Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007). 20. Both critics writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (which reviewed the film in its cultural section as well as in its “Berliner Seiten” on the same day) recognized this heritage and spoke of an “homage to the Young German Cinema” that “conjures up memories of the great era of German Autorenfilm.” See Michael Allmaier, “Ohne mit seiner Mutter” and Hubert Spiegel, “Königin Lear auf der Heide” both in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 20, 2000. 21. See Alexander Kluge, Case Histories (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), originally published in German in 1962. Kluge uses the term “Lebenslauf ” to designate a genre of storytelling where biography meets, and intersects with, history. 22. “Anita is like a seismograph that travels through our society, like a probe. I have attempted to register its readings,” “Tribüne des Jungen Deutschen Films: II. Alexander Kluge,” Filmkritik 10, no. 9 (1966): 487. 23. See Hansen, “Spaces of History,” 195. 24. Enno Patalas, “Abschied von Gestern,” Filmkritik 10, no. 11 (1966): 623. 25. Frieda Grafe, “Abschied von Gestern (Anita G.),” Filmkritik 10, no. 10 (1966): 550. 26. Hansen, “Spaces of History,” 195. 27. Ibid., 208f. 28. Ibid., 210. 29. Ibid., 196. 30. See Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 8. 183

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31. On these films, see Jennifer Ward, “On Borders, Hybridity, and Sameness in Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen” and Kristie A. Foell, “History as Melodrama: German Division and Unification in Two Recent Films,” both in Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film, ed., Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, and Kristie A. Foell, 225–32 and 233–52, respectively (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001). 32. See Matthias Dell, “Sandmann, lieber Sandmann: Ost-Retro mit nachgetragenem Pop-Slang,” Freitag 10, February 28, 2003. 33. Leonie Naughton faults many unification films for being backed by Western financing and for treating the East simply as West Germany’s past, its lost Heimat; her framework, itself a helpful corrective to the industry’s own logic of colonization, structurally obscures the question, however, of how the West might have treated unification not simply to denigrate the “Other” but also as a means toward self-reflection. A film that would warrant further consideration in this context is Detlev Buck’s Wir können auch anders (No More Mr. Nice Guy, 1993). Naughton somewhat disingenuously describes its protagonists in terms of their helpless “Eastern” traits. They are, however, of decidedly West German origin, and their ironically imperialist push toward the eastern frontier provides some poignant and hilarious commentary on the colonization of the East by the West. No Place to Go, I argue, provides another variant of this self-reflexive Western position. See Naughton, Wild East. Despite its overwhelming success, Good-Bye, Lenin! (1993) appears also to have drawn criticism on both of these counts: made by West German director Wolfgang Becker, it was accused by some of “appropriating” an East German subject; on the other hand, in his treatment of that subject, Becker has clearly tapped a still virulent Ostalgie; see Dell, “Sandmann” and Nora Fitzgerald, “Berlin’s Wall Is Down, but Try to Keep Mom from Finding Out,” New York Times, April 2, 2003. 34. Veronika Rall, “Die Unberührbare,” epd Film 17, no. 5 (2000): 47–48. 35. A few scenes later, Roehler will zoom in on the television images as a means of suggesting Hanna’s move to Berlin. We cut from documentary live images of the Wall on the TV set in Munich to a shot of her son opening the door of his flat for his mother in Berlin. 36. Peter Körte, “Alles über meine Mutter,” Frankfurter Rundschau, April 19, 2000. 37. Helmut Dubiel, “Linke Trauerarbeit,” Merkur 496 (June 1990): 482–91; Andreas Huyssen, “After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals,” New German Critique 52 (Winter 1991): 109–43. 38. Peter Schneider, “Man kann ein Erdbeben auch verpassen,” German Politics and Society 20 (Summer 1990): 5 39. Ibid., 9. 40. See Körte, “Alles über meine Mutter.” 41. Schneider, “Man kann ein Erdbeben,” 10. 42. Alison Lewis, “Unity Begins Together: Analyzing the Trauma of German Unification,” New German Critique 64 (Winter 1995), 139. Interestingly, one of the principal ways in which East German intellectuals and West German Left184

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Landscapes of Unification in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go ists managed to mitigate the shattering of that projection without lashing out at the other was to agree on the excesses of capitalism as a common scapegoat— precisely the position taken by an irate Hanna Flanders when she complains in her interview that “now the society of consumption will devour us all. . . . I am disgusted by the way [these uniform people (Einheitsmenschen)] scramble for underwear [and fight] to stick Western tampons, Coke bottles, and bananas up their cunts.” 43. Gunnar Decker, “Seelendrama ohne Hoffnung,” Neues Deutschland, April 19, 2000. 44. If this take, too, invokes a paradigmatic shot like the preceding one, it is not a shot from Fassbinder but a nightmarish vision from Murnau: the blank nighttime façade is reminiscent of the one Nina sees from her bedroom as she beckons to the vampire in Nosferatu (1922). 45. After the disillusionment of the West German Left that the film traces on one level, longing for the “better” East German past has shifted into another register entirely with the phenomenon of Ostalgie. In this context it also seems relevant to note that the film had a particularly successful run in Moscow, where the postCommunist audience picked up on the protagonist’s characteristic lack of orientation after the loss of her Communist ideals. 46. Wolfgang Engler, Die zivilisatorische Lücke: Versuche über den Staatssozialismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), 10. 47. Ibid. 48. Frey’s reading of the film further links these spatial dynamics to those of film noir, analyzed in Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and to the fragmentary and mediated space of television. See Frey, “No(ir) Place to Go.” 49. Omar Perez and Georgia Daskalakis, “Projecting Detroit,” in Stalking Detroit, ed. Georgia Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young, 83 (Barcelona: Actar, 2001). 50. Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 65. 51. Ibid., 62. 52. Perez and Daskalakis, “Projecting Detroit,” 80. 53. Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” 81. 54. See Johannes von Moltke, “Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion,” New German Critique 102 (Fall 2007): 17–43. 55. Andreas Kilb, “Die Unberührten.”

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German Historical Film as Production Trend European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others

In their articles on Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), Wolf Biermann and Thomas Brussig—both prominent former citizens of East Germany and both active in creating art about it—profess their amazement.1 Biermann, a popular folk-rock performer who had been banished from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1976 for criticizing the GDR state, and Brussig, a former East German author who wrote satirical works about the process of reunification, wonder at how a “Westdeutschmensch” (Westgermanperson, Biermann’s term) or a “Wessi” (Westie, Brussig’s term) could make such an effective film about the East German (GDR) surveillance state, one focusing specifically on the Stasi and its victims. Both feel compelled to point out the numerous mistakes made by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in this, his first feature film: the surveillance operation would never have been located in the attic above a target; the Stasi trainees would never don civilian clothes in class; it was, when it came to couples, more frequently men serving as informants (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or IMs) against women. More important, however, both Biermann and Brussig underscore a more basic problem with the film: the fundamental inappropriateness of turning Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) into a hero of humanity. Wiesler’s status as a hero of whatever sort points to something fundamentally disconcerting about the film and the history it offers. The film’s plot trajectory is at least as troubling as the missed details that Biermann and Brussig point out because it is, historically speaking, unprecedented and, representationally considered, distorting. One mu186

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seum director in fact denied von Donnersmarck permission to shoot on location at the Hohenschönhausen prison because of, in his words, the film’s “heroization of a Stasi officer.”2 Stasi agents may have falsified reports, but they almost invariably did so to please their superiors, not to dupe them: there is, in fact, no record, as Timothy Garton Ash recounts, of any agent falsifying to protect a target and getting away with it.3 More important than questions of historical accuracy, the ultimate trajectory of this plotline is distorting in its unequivocal redemption of Wiesler, as it ends in a universalizing celebration, with the film’s invented sonata, of “the good person.” Despite these obvious problems, however, both Biermann and Brussig express admiration for what von Donnersmarck has accomplished: a remarkably effective psychological representation of what it was like to live under surveillance and in the GDR more generally. This is the recurring conclusion of most scholarly engagements with the film, which tend to underscore the film’s questionable historical accuracy but also grudgingly praise von Donnersmarck’s effective movie-making technique.4 It is, indeed, this question of the film’s general effectiveness despite its problems, rather than adjudicating the appropriateness of the detail or plausibility of plot, that is most intriguing in approaching the phenomenally successful film. The Lives of Others is probably the most successful German film since 1989 in terms of combined commercial success and critical accolades: not only did it win, in addition to some fifty-seven other awards, the 2007 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but it also earned in the U.S. market what the popular Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 1998) and Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003) took in together.5 So, even acknowledging the film’s clear historical mistakes or distortions, I would nonetheless like to take up what I consider the more interesting question, a question too often neglected in German film studies: why was the film such a popular success? Why, indeed, would the film have been praised, even ambivalently, by people like Biermann and Brussig, despite these obvious and fundamental problems? Both Mary Beth Stein and Cheryl Dueck, in their analyses of the film, quote Timothy Garton Ash in explaining the film’s effectiveness: “[Historical] objections are in an important sense beside the point. [The Lives of Others] uses the syntax and conventions of Hollywood to convey to the widest possible audience some part of the truth about life under the Stasi.”6 Although they certainly do lodge historical objections, they apparently agree with Ash that, in many ways, it is the “Hollywood syn187

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tax” that helps explain the efficacy of von Donnersmarck’s movie making. But precisely such details of this aspect of the film—exactly how its filmic syntax functions—have been largely missing from analyses of the film. In this essay, I want to explore how the film functions as film, as this explicates its surprising (for many) effectiveness as well as its historical and political limitations. To understand such cinematic syntax and the film’s place within wider production trends as well as The Lives of Others’ effects and effectiveness, I shall examine two related aspects of the film: first, its place within the context of a wider, “heritage” production trend and, second, the function of melodrama as a film genre within that trend. None of the existing studies of von Donnersmarck’s work has analyzed The Lives of Others as heritage cinema, but the heritage debate is relevant not only because it has analyzed, in considerable detail, how mainstream historical films function—both how they create meaning and generate their considerable popularity—but because the debate has also explored the limits and limiting politics of such films. On the former count, understanding The Lives of Others’ heritage cinema aspects illuminates how the film signifies both a continuation and a change in tone from 1990s films about East Germany that leads to its impact. In this way, it underscores the turn to more serious-minded cinema since 2000 that the present volume is tracing, as well as how this turn to the serious can transpire within popular and accessible cinematic forms. Linked to this turn to the serious within a surprisingly popular and widely accessible film is how genre, especially melodrama, functions in heritage cinema generally and in The Lives of Others particularly. An analysis of the film that locates it in this heritage production trend and underscores the way genre functions within it does not merely clarify the film’s operations in terms of popularity and politics; it also casts light back on the heritage cinema debate. The plot of The Lives of Others follows three characters in the late and end phases of East Germany’s history. In 1984 Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler is charged with the surveillance of a playwright whose loyalty to the GDR has never been doubted but who has the misfortune of having a girlfriend pursued sexually by a minister of culture. This minister, also a member of the party’s central committee and a former Stasi agent, orders Wiesler’s superior, Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz, to initiate the surveillance. Grubitz assigns Wiesler, who was his friend but is now his subordinate, to undertake it. As Wiesler learns of the rationale for the operation and as he gets to know, through his surveillance equip188

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ment, the playwright Georg Dreymann and his girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, he begins to sympathize with them. When Dreymann’s faith in the GDR is shaken by the suicide of a director, Jerska, who had been forbidden to work, he writes an article about suicide in the GDR that is smuggled out to the most important West German weekly, Der Spiegel. To protect Dreymann and hide his illegal activities, Wiesler invents false reports on those activities, a scheme that succeeds until ChristaMaria Sieland is arrested and pressured to become an informant (an IM) against her boyfriend. Her New Testament given name (the English form is “Mary”) portends her narrative sacrifice and misogynist martyrdom for other characters’ redemption. Interrogated first by Grubitz and then by Wiesler, she eventually reveals the hidden typewriter on which Dreymann wrote his text. Wiesler races to the apartment ahead of his Stasi colleagues and hides the apparatus that would give both Dreymann and him away. Sieland kills herself out of guilt, but the film concludes by skipping forward to the Wende and its aftermath, traced in the last fifteen minutes of the film. By 1989, Wiesler has been reassigned to a menial mailroom position in a (prison-like) Stasi basement; in 1991, at the post-Wende production of his play, Dreymann encounters, like a haunting ghost from the past, Hempf, the minister who ordered the operation against him, an encounter that leads Dreymann finally to learn how Wiesler saved him; and then, two years, later, a surprised Wiesler buys Dreymann’s new novel, about the events above and dedicated to Wiesler in final recognition of what he had done and risked to protect the playwright from persecution.

A German Heritage Cinema? Most extended analyses of The Lives of Others, as noted above, have focused on this plot’s historical and cultural invocations and (in)accuracies, that is to say, on the questionable status of historical and cultural references within the film.7 The former line of inquiry is certainly important: films are inevitably problematic as historical documentation or representation, and it is important, in the first instance, to observe and factor in those distortions. But such a focus can too easily overlook the film’s status and function within its cinematic contexts and cannot adequately elucidate the film as a work and product circulating within a global system of not only culture but also genre-driven commerce. Such studies also do not go far enough in explaining how the film functions 189

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as popular culture and how it so fully captured the imagination of diverse audiences and critics. Such specifically cinematic contexts include, as they will for this essay, The Lives of Others’ status as global commercial product, its generic operations, as well as its particularly cinematic commodification of history in post-1989 German cinema. This last question is among the most important at this moment in German cinema. It is remarkable that almost all the highest profile (both popular and critical successes, in Germany and abroad) post-2000 German (produced and coproduced) films have been historical period films: Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), Good-Bye, Lenin!, Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), The Lives of Others, Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters, 2007), Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (The Baader-Meinhof Complex, 2008), and Anonyma—Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, 2008). By “highest profile” I mean films that sold many tickets in Germany (over one million each), that are more or less well received by the film-critical community, and that export well, a constant concern of much German cinema, given the modest size of its domestic market (despite having about a 20-percent larger population, Germany has roughly the same size film market as France). It is worth noting that critical success and viable export is not a concern of all German cinema; we are, after all, talking about a domestic market in which the mass-market comedy Der Shuh des Manitu (The Shoe of Manitu, 2001), about an Apache Indian, a dancer, and their treasure map, had nearly 12 million visitors, over five times the number of the much heralded The Lives of Others (2.3 million visitors).8 Unlike a domestic blockbuster like The Shoe of Manitu, however, this kind of historical period cinema has often found itself at the serendipitous crossroads of relatively respectable commerce, warm reception, and, especially, successful exportability of post-1989 German cinema. If one considers how many of these films have gone on to international accolades—for example, all four of the Best Foreign Language film Oscars winners in German are historical period films9—German historical films would seem to constitute German national cinema, at least as it performs national discourses for international audiences. There has not, however, been much discussion of this phenomenon where the reception of The Lives of Others is concerned, discussion of what Andrew Higson, following Tino Balio, calls a “production trend” of historical films offered by a European nation as it tries to find a niche, both domestically and internationally, in a market dominated by Hollywood product. A 190

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production trend is a series or cycle of films that share any number of commonalities as well as (inevitably) differences within, and often based on, those commonalities.10 There has been relatively little work on how, as a production trend, post-1989 German cinema works with history in a specifically cinematic mode, a question about which there has been a lengthy debate in the United Kingdom. In British film studies, this debate was cast in terms of “heritage cinema,” a term that has received some, but not full, attention in the context of German film studies. Lutz Koepnick introduced the term into scholarly discourse on German cinema with essays from 2002 and 2004, but, given the growing importance of the German production trend since then, the time seems ripe to revisit the issue of heritage cinema.11 Heritage cinema, as the concept was postulated and then repeatedly refined by Andrew Higson, describes a group of 1980s and 1990s films from Great Britain that are set in an earlier historical period. In the British context, this frequently meant, especially at first, a Victorian or Edwardian setting with the concomitant estate home locations, lush decors, and elaborate costumes. Higson and a few other critics in the early 1990s emphasized the complicity of these mise-en-scène heavy films with the “heritage” conservation project of the Thatcherite government and the generally conservative Zeitgeist of the 1980s and early 1990s.12 These films’ approaches to their historical periods are emphatically naturalistic, striving for auratic, even fetishized “authenticity,” amid what is inevitably, upon closer inspection, anachronistic and, in some ways, postmodern pastiche.13 Most of these British films were based on well-known, even canonical, literary works that underscore the status of these films as prestige productions of “good taste” pitched to middle-class and uppermiddle-class audiences. This good taste is also marked in the theatrical actors and acting the films deploy, even as those actors evolved a heritage cinema star system of its own, locating them somewhere between art house and commercial cinema.14 Those two distribution networks proved successful for domestic and European consumption, although the films also proved highly exportable to North America’s art house circuits.15 The visual pleasures of lingering over these films’ mise-en-scène, however, also distinguishes heritage cinema from more aesthetically challenging works. This is one of the central assertions of Higson, one also asserted by Koepnick: the spectacularization of mise-en-scène undercuts the critical potential of these films. In these spectacularizations, Higson and Koepnick are both critical of what they regard as a nostalgic 191

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deployment of the past, a politically problematic turning away from the present to a fantastically (and phantasmagorically) staged upper- and upper-middle-class past dominated by breathtaking mise-en-scène.16 In a short piece defining the heritage film, Richard Dyer emphatically broadened the original British context of these films to include European cinema in general. One reason this heritage categorization has found such critical purchase is the importance of it as a production trend in European cinema more broadly. Throughout Europe these heritage films have achieved considerable popularity (with audiences and producers) because they can leverage and export Europe’s wellknown historical legacies and its theatrical traditions in mise-en-scène (costume and acting), usually all within their modest production budgets as they continue, especially since 1990, to fall increasingly behind Hollywood’s exploding expenditures (Hollywood’s average production budget for a studio film has more than doubled since 1992).17 Successful heritage productions have not been limited to the usual Western European suspects of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany; Poland’s Katyn (2007), for instance, has enjoyed enormous domestic and foreign success. Given these commercial realities and the established popularity of such films, The Lives of Others certainly seems part of the Europeanwide production trend of historical film. In assorted ways, The Lives of Others can be seen to function as a heritage film, for both its stylistic approach and its marketability at home and abroad. Although the film is set more recently than many of the films that Higson discusses, Higson is clear in his book-length study that his emphasis on films set in the Victorian and Edwardian periods is arbitrary and driven primarily by concerns about the scope of his study; he admits that he could just as well have focused on World War II and postwar films, and in the ensuing heritage debate the purview of the heritage film was indeed expanded.18 Koepnick, for example, expands Higson’s original constellation to include films set during World War II, and it is not clear why it would not also be appropriate and productive to similarly examine films about the GDR’s past, particularly because that past serves many films since 1989 as a kind of heritage to be protected and preserved. The question, as noted above, is how style, production values, and commercial strategies/audience address contribute to the popularity of such historical films. Although it is important not to simply label and reduce this or other films to the “heritage” designation, the extensive writing on this trend can illuminate specific, and specifically cinematic, 192

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aspects of The Lives of Others. In The Lives of Others’ basic setting and stylistic approach, in its mode of audience address, and generic operations, the film is clearly of a piece with the European heritage cinema trend. Set in the past, it is emphatically “authentic” in its deployment of props and costume (but not, as we saw, in the history implied by this mise-en-scène authenticity); it casts well-known and highly respected theater actors who, at the time of this film, belonged to something of a heritage film star system within Germany and who were indispensable to the film’s sundry successes19; finally, as a prestige production mining not only history but the European cultural tradition, it makes much of its connection to the high(er) culture of literature and theater. Next to the film’s questionable history, this literary aspect of the film has received the most attention, including in Mareike Herrmann’s and Mary Beth Stein’s analyses, but it is also worthwhile to contextualize this high art inclination within the heritage cinema precedents for the deployment of good literary taste and accomplished literary figures—those literary linkages, after all, are a proven marketing technique for heritage cinema.20 On the other hand, however, it is also important to distinguish the German films from the British works that have dominated the heritage debate. Even as both have achieved unusual international popularity, there still seems to be a kind of German Sonderweg of Western European heritage cinema. Most importantly, as all the films mentioned above underscore, the German heritage films tend to transpire during, or parallel to, major historical events. In the British context, “heritage” (rather than “historical”) films have tended to evoke the vague, often nostalgic turn to an upper-class—mannered and (estate) manored—yesteryear that could make viewers feel better about a more glorious but rapidly fading past.21 In this nostalgic vein, the earlier heritage British films tended, with a few notable exceptions, to favor (canonical) literary scenarios to the challenges of major historical or political events or questions of the past.22 This is obviously not true of the recent trend of German films, which often avoid literary models in favor of exploring, even foregrounding and exploiting, everyday life at the key moments of German history, something that Koepnick convincingly argues has to do with post-1989 coming to terms with the past, particularly in the Berlin Republic’s drive toward a new national consensus, a consensus also to be forged around Germany’s complicated history.23 Koepnick, however, does not quite remark on this development within the continuing debate on European heritage cinema; this ten193

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dency to engage historical events and questions has been true of French period cinema—such as La Reine Margot (Queen Margot, 1994), Le Colonel Chabert (Colonel Chabert, 1994), and La Fille d’Artagnan (D’Artagnan’s Daughter, released as Revenge of the Musketeers in the United States in 1994)—as much as or even more than recent British heritage films, which signify a further evolution of the heritage production trend even within the United Kingdom.24 Koepnick structures his argument as more or less parallel to Higson’s: just as the Thatcher years brought a different interest in and relation to history in a heritage mode, the normalization of Germany in the late 1990s helped create a German heritage cinema that sought, in its own ways, to drown out certain persisting historical dissonances. In a similar fashion, Koepnick hews fairly closely to Higson on a central aesthetic and stylistic argument about this mode of heritage cinema: he considers how the inclinations of German heritage cinema toward lush mise-en-scène over narrative, toward aestheticized spectacle over social or political contradiction, have tended to produce the kind of cinema of consensus of which Eric Rentschler writes.25 In contradistinction to Higson’s and Koepnick’s critiques of heritage cinema as spectacle, I want to suggest that one ought to foreground what makes these films so popular, that is, how they function so effectively as popular culture, which arises more from their generally overlooked genre operations than from their mise-en-scène. The Lives of Others, for instance, ultimately drives toward reconciliation and consensus that is not so much museum-like in its treatment of mise-en-scène as it is, generically speaking, melodramatic. Attending to these generic operations and modes also illuminates how the film forecloses potentially political moments.

Ostalgie and the Evolution of a Production Trend The historical and mise-en-scène critiques of heritage cinema in Higson’s and Koepnick’s work seem most pertinent to the series of nostalgic comedies about the GDR that came before The Lives of Others and to which, to comprehend its surprising popular and critical resonance, The Lives of Others should be compared as part of a production trend. One of the advantages of foregrounding such production trends is the set of intertexts it offers, and The Lives of Others is related, in terms of its production trend, to the comedies about East Germany and the territory of the former East Germany (the so-called “new federal states”) of 194

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the mid- and late-1990s as well as with the 2003 Good-Bye, Lenin!: those films were marked by the often analyzed comedically pitched “Ostalgie,” the nostalgic remembrance of eastern times past, particularly in films like Go Trabi Go (1991), Wir können auch anders (No More Mr. Nice Guy, 1993), Sonnenallee (Sun Alley, 1999), and Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1999). By the time of Good-Bye, Lenin! which was an immensely popular critical success before The Lives of Others, it seemed as if Ostalgie had successfully established itself as the dominant mode of cinematic remembrance in turning to the former GDR or the “new federal states” that its former territory became. Even if Ostalgie is treated somewhat critically by Good-Bye, Lenin!, it nevertheless, as Paul Cooke argues, constitutes the film’s dominant mode: both its most memorable decors and its narrative challenge to be overcome.26 Ostalgie has similarly become the dominant analytical mode for film scholars analyzing post-1989 films about the GDR or the new federal states.27 Ostalgie seems, indeed, to confirm Higson’s and Koepnick’s critiques of nostalgia in heritage cinema that tends to preserve a fantastical past via fetishized, museumlike mise-en-scène.28 If Ostalgie served the useful purpose of reminding audiences of everyday life in the GDR—an everyday life that may have intermingled with but also outstretched conventional politics—there is a sense, looking back now from a post-2000 landscape, that films like Sonnenallee, Heroes like Us, and even Good-Bye, Lenin! went too far in recuperating the GDR, often by obscuring the suffering caused by the state. Reading The Lives of Others within this context of heritage cinema around Europe as well as within these particular production trends illuminates two aspects of the film: its surprising popularity and the muted politics of its reconciliatory conclusion. First, the existence and success of a production trend suggest how a film might seek, and aim to extend, its audience; certainly part of The Lives of Others’ success was its simultaneous reference to, but also transcendence of, the existing series of films about the GDR, something noted ubiquitously in the reception of the film.29 But this production trend also elucidates something about its popularity that has gone unnoticed so far in the scholarly literature about the film. The Lives of Others seems to have enjoyed more remarkable success abroad than it did in Germany—not that it was not successful in Germany, but its success in finding an audience was even more pronounced abroad than it was domestically. The film did considerably worse in Germany than Good-Bye, Lenin!—it had about half of the domestic box office receipts of Good-Bye, Lenin!—whereas, as noted above, 195

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The Lives of Others took in what the two export hits Good-Bye, Lenin! and Run, Lola, Run earned together in the United States. Moreover, The Lives of Others won international accolades never seen by a German film, both a Best Foreign Language film Oscar and three European film awards.30 Why this disparity between domestic and international success? The disparity is best explained by attending to the dynamics of heritage cinema and the production trend mentioned above. The heritage debate made clear how export markets influence the decisions taken by European producers and filmmakers, and this particular production trend seems, indeed, to demonstrate a distinct trajectory away from a domestically oriented genre (comedy) toward that most accepted and established in an international arena for heritage film (melodrama). Good-Bye, Lenin! was predominantly a comedy that fit into the Ostalgie trend as it existed and thereby dovetailed with the most successful German genre for domestic audiences, whereas The Lives of Others drove the trend in a different direction, much further toward the serious, even lugubrious, treatment of GDR politics and political persecution, something only at the periphery of (though still present in) Good-Bye, Lenin! Although both films function within the heritage trend, both trafficking in “authentic” representations of the past, they negotiate this past quite differently. As he recounts in the DVD commentary, von Donnersmarck is very proud of the authenticity of his period reproductions, but The Lives of Others, as I aim to show in my reading of the film below, relies much less on mise-en-scène spectacle than does Sonnenallee, with its MuFuTi (“multiple function” table), or Good-Bye, Lenin!, with its Spreewald Gurken, both of which were offered as what Koepnick calls, in a different context, museum-like fetishes from another time.31 The Lives of Others’ turn to the serious helps explain the film’s popularity, especially abroad, but it also has its limits, particularly its political limits. Although the film offers a new direction for the production trend, it also does so in a way that returns heritage cinema to its dominant genre, melodrama, whose representational strategies seem ultimately to dominate the narrative trajectory, much more than aesthetic ambition, historical rigor, or political concerns. Simple moral legibility and the muteness of pathos are, as I shall outline, central to the operations of melodrama in ways that limit the politics of The Lives of Others more than any museum-like presentation of mise-en-scène. To bring those limiting tendencies of trend and genre into starker relief, one might think of the contrast with other filmic representations of the German 196

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police: The Lives of Others operates at considerable aesthetic and political distance from New German Cinema’s representations of law enforcement, in films like Wim Wenders’s Polizeifilm (Police Film, 1969), Volker Schlöndorff ’s Die verlorene Ehe der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975), or, in many ways, New German Cinema’s most openly political statement and engagement, Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978). The current heritage trend and the genres associated with it keep The Lives of Others from these kinds of approaches, not only by displacing its themes onto an “authentically” staged history but also in the many decisions that follow from foregrounding such genres. For another contrastive example, at one point in his ambivalent analysis, Thomas Lindenberger suggests The Lives of Others might have been more historically interesting and resonant if it had focused on the political complicity of Dreymann’s neighbor, who witnesses the Stasi entering Dreymann’s apartment but who, out of fear, never informs Dreymann of the surveillance.32 Despite Lindenberger’s provocative suggestion, the observations above about popular heritage cinema point to why von Donnersmarck choose not to concentrate on the complexity of complicity or on the conscience of the average, working-class person and would instead opt for the artistically exceptional individual, with his intellectual friends, his literary milieu, and the high art associated with his musical inclinations. These last aspects point to the elements shared with many heritage melodramas, and, in the next section, I show how genre and especially The Lives of Others’ melodrama explains such specific moments of the film, that is, how melodrama functions in a way that elucidates the film’s efficacy but also its reduction of more complicated, ambiguous history and politics in its muted moral logic.

The Heritage Debate and Genre: Semantics and Syntax of Period Films I am making a melodrama with thriller elements. The closed system of the GDR offers, like all totalitarian regimes, an excellent backdrop for it. One thinks of Casablanca. —Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck33

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of the films he was analyzing; indeed, Sight and Sound even published a lengthy reader in 2002 of essays and reviews largely questioning his critical indictment of heritage cinema.34 One of Higson’s interlocutors in the heritage debate, Claire Monk, pointed to a series of films she called “post-heritage,” including slightly later films like Elizabeth (1998) that do deploy heritage mise-en-scène but also unfolded explicitly transgressive narratives. She goes further in a later essay, in which she suggests something that bears directly on the popularity of The Lives of Others: she argues that the detractors of heritage cinema consistently do not account for the popular aspect of these films because they have not effectively attended to the genres working within and behind all the heritage miseen-scène: “The effect is to invalidate what would surely be a useful and relevant focus on how the films might work as popular cinema, within genres in which period setting provides an opportunity for specific pleasures which are not all reducible to ideology.”35 For Monk, the heritage mise-en-scène is deployed by filmmakers in all sorts of genres, including “melodrama, romance, comedy, satire, picaresque, fantasy, crime film, action adventure, political thriller, colonial epic, war film, horror or vampire film—or a mixture of more than one of those.”36 I want to suggest that understanding the generic aspects of heritage cinema—that is, the genre operations within and behind the heritage mise-en-scène—indeed addresses what Monk found lacking in Higson’s account: how these films function as popular cinema. A generic approach will help locate and explain The Lives of Others’ place in postmillennial cinema and help explicate both its effectiveness with viewers and its limitations in historical or political documentation or analysis. Neither Higson nor Monk goes much further in analyzing the genres at work in heritage cinema, and I would suggest Rick Altman’s semantic/ syntactic model of genre helps explain the arc of the heritage trend in both British and German contexts. Altman suggests that to comprehend a genre, particularly as it recurs and unfolds over time, one ought to use a linguistic model distinguishing between the semantics and the syntax of a genre: “The semantic approach thus stresses the genre’s building blocks, while the syntactic view privileges the structures into which they are arranged.”37 Altman argues that the semantics of a genre would include “attitudes, characters, shots, locations, sets, and the like,” whereas the syntax would address “certain constitutive relationships between unassigned and variable placeholders,” with the emphasis on relationality and relationships among semantic elements.38 Both the semantics and 198

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syntax of a genre can be varied as the genre evolves—in fact, the bivalent character of genre emphasizes the multifaceted negotiation of a genre that transpires, in a “period of accommodation,” between producers (as they attempt variations in semantics or syntax) and audiences (as they offer commercial feedback to these variations).39 For the heritage debate, such a model is important because it offers a bivalent account in which either mise-en-scène semantics—which, alone, do not necessarily reveal much about how a film works—or the narrative syntax can be varied. This semantic/syntactic model of genre helps bring into focus just how The Lives of Others varies the Ostalgie production trend described above. Whereas the majority of the early British heritage films (such as the highly successful Merchant-Ivory productions of the mid-1980s) were melodramas that largely insulated their characters and narratives from history with domestically confined affective vicissitudes, later British films determinedly varied that genre most associated with heritage cinema. The trend seems almost the opposite of the German one: unlike the Ostalgic comedies, The Lives of Others subtly revisits the association of heritage cinema with domestically set and focused melodrama. The affinity of heritage cinema for melodrama—that is, the affinity of heritage semantics for melodramatic syntax—is clear, given the theatrical proclivities of heritage acting and plotting as well as its focus on decors and other mise-en-scène rich set pieces. Melodramas usually offer character-driven plots that dwell on the domestic sphere, a syntax that offers convenient opportunity to foreground domestic décor and props. It is not that historical melodrama cannot offer historical or political critique—one might consider, for example, Fassbinder’s both popular and political Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979)—but that such critique generally occasions, as in Fassbinder’s films, some revision or at least self-conscious manipulation of the genre of a sort in which The Lives of Others does not engage.40 The predominance of conventional melodrama in The Lives of Others’ plotting helps explain moments of the film that function very well as cinema but that also prove politically somewhat muted, with that mutedness being integral to the operations of non-self-reflexive melodrama.41 Central to melodrama’s character-driven plots of melodrama are tensions and often open conflicts in intimate relationships, be they parental-child, romantic, or homosocial. At the core of most melodramas are the emotional travails of a protagonist or a couple of central characters in light of these tensions and conflicts. These emotional travails and the subsequent tra199

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jectory in light of them have often been linked to the woman’s film and the female audiences for much melodrama, but more recent work has emphasized how melodrama, with its emotional travails and pathos, pervades others types of film as well.42 As Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams have argued, although melodrama may have been isolated in certain genre films at specific historical moments, melodrama functions as a mode or sensibility within a wide range of films. As a mode, melodrama tends to focus on the pathos evoked in viewers by the persecution of a (frequently secretly) virtuous hero/ine and the belated recognition of undeserved victimhood.43 Such films often focus not so much on conventional politics as on intimate emotional life and viewers’ responses to these emotions—so at least in a different mode of politics than those implied in The Lives of Others’ constellation of the minister, the Stasi, and the subversive activities against them. Those aspects of The Lives of Others’ plot relating to Sieland and her relationship with Dreymann fit this model. As is often the case in melodramas, the female characters’ desires clash with societal expectations and rules, often creating, as they do here, a confluence between the film’s structuring emotional conflicts and wider social contradictions. The melodrama then traces the female characters’ repressions of their own desires in light of such social demands; repressions and the inevitable returns of the repressed often materialize in tears (with Stella Dallas [1937] being the classic in this regard). In The Lives of Others, the Sieland character is forced to choose between her beloved career as a celebrated actor and her love for Dreymann, a choice compelled by the personification of the GDR’s malevolent forces, Minister Hempf. The relationship of Hempf and his lieutenant Grubitz to the triangle of characters at the center of the film (Sieland, Dreymann, and Wiesler) underscores the way in which melodrama foregrounds the clear victimization of characters with whom viewers identify. This is another way in which The Marriage of Maria Braun varies its generic tendencies, since Maria’s suffering is clearly not due, at least not simply due, to her victimization by others. On the other hand (and quite differently from The Marriage of Maria Braun), many conventional melodramas, since the genre’s earliest days, have tended to evoke a strong sense of pathos and pity for the victims, a victimization blatantly appealing to viewers’ moral sense and indignation.44 As is often the case, a virtuous innocent is victim of larger forces, evoking in viewers a reaction of pathos.45 The Lives of Others’ staging of the subsequent emotional-social 200

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tensions and contradictions is similarly marked by unironic, unselfconscious melodrama; emotionally overwrought scenes depict Sieland crying in the shower or catching increasingly uncertain glimpses of herself, deploying those familiar props of melodrama: tears and mirrors.46 Caught between social mandate and her own desires, her eventual suicide intersects these mise-en-scène elements: she has just finished another guilt-assuaging shower when she realizes Dreymann suspects that she informed on him, and she dies on the street, the blood streaking her wet hair, visually linked (by graphic matching) to the wet pavement that underscores the film’s generally lachrymose atmosphere. Dreymann, of course, reciprocally weeps as life slips from her. As the blood, rain, and tears underscore, melodrama tends to displace the emotions that occupy front stage in their narratives onto miseen-scène. As is often observed about the great melodrama stylists like Douglas Sirk, an exaggerated, often domestic, mise-en-scène serves to represent the restrained, often repressed emotions of overwrought characters.47 Melodrama would thereby seem to offer ample opportunities to linger on mise-en-elements of the heritage film not so much (or at least not only) in what Higson and Koepnick call a museum-like or “museal” manner but rather in a genre mode. Another way in which heritage melodrama clearly transcends the spectacle of mise-en-scène that Higson and Koepnick foreground is the importance of music, a key feature of two central sequences in The Lives of Others. First is a scene that von Donnersmarck claimed (in his DVD commentary) was among those of

The melodramatic final image of Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), who dies in the arms and amid the tears of Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006). 201

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which he was most proud, when Wiesler visits the apartment of Dreymann alone, that is, without the usual team of invasive Stasi agents. At this point in the plot, viewers realize that Wiesler is rethinking his loyalty to the (obviously) morally depraved Minister Hempf and is increasingly drawn to the orbit of Dreymann and Sieland. The camera follows Wiesler around the apartment as he examines and obviously admires the props of the artists’ lives; the audio track is dominated not by dialogue or even sound effects, but rather, revealingly, by music that underscores the emotional turmoil in which Wiesler finds himself in an apparently “holy” moment, as von Donnersmarck puts it. Such emphatic use of music in pivotal scenes is also central to melodrama, the word itself meaning “musical drama,” to describe works in which music, helping to create a prevailing mood, moved to the foreground. Von Donnersmarck terming the scene “holy” recalls Peter Brooks’s model for how melodrama functions: it helps provide a (frequently simplistic) moral legibility and order in a postreligious world.48 Melodrama tends to do so, however, in a mute mode that emphasizes, with music and expressive mise-en-scène, the limits of language. If music and the subsequent mute mode of morality constitute the very definition of melo-drama, they also rest at the very core of The Lives of Others. Von Donnersmarck’s original conceit for the film was a single scenario developed in an exercise at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, a setup he based on a remark by Lenin: Lenin was said to have declared once that he could not listen to Beethoven’s Appassionata (1803–5) or he might lose the wherewithal to see the revolution through.49 The notion of a politically hardened man softening to the right music rests at the heart of The Lives of Others in the scene in which Wiesler’s definitively turns against the Stasi when he hears Dreymann playing “The Sonata of the Good Person” after the suicide of Jerska. Wiesler sits alone in the attic, surrounded by surveillance equipment and huddled under his headphones, a tear rolling down his cheek as he hears the music. In cinematic melodrama, music often replaces words, as it does here, to underscore the emotional subtext—the one that really matters—to scenes and sequences and the entire plot. Von Donnersmarck’s original conceptualization shows, with surprising clarity, how the mute mode of melodrama, in its music, is opposed in the film to the political. Von Donnersmarck does not argue or engage in debate with Lenin or Wiesler but plays them, as he does for the viewers throughout the film, music to melt the heart, an approach common to the melodrama mode. 202

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In Wiesler’s wordless but musically scored admiration of Dreymann’s home and then his wordless crying to music, the staging and particularly the soundtrack underscore how the apparently spectacularizing element of the heritage cinema can function within an overriding genre logic, a melodrama highly effective but also politically muted even in its music.

Crying to the Cops and Cuing the Music: Melodrama and the Police Thriller All three of these sequences—Wiesler’s musically scored worship of Dreymann’s apartment, Wiesler’s crying at Dreymann’s playing, and Sieland’s tears and committing suicide as Dreymann cries—are dramatic highpoints of the film and underscore the film’s melodramatic approach to its heritage milieu. But they also seem at a considerable distance from the film’s main narrative line, its police plot: Dreymann is being investigated by the Stasi for subversive activity, and the film tracks this surveillance by Wiesler of Dreymann and his circle of artist friends/colleagues from beginning to end. These two scenes above, however, suggest how the police drama is thoroughly interwoven with the film’s melodrama; in fact, as with many commercially and critically successful works, The Lives of Others creates a hybrid genre, bringing its heritage melodrama mode to familiar elements of the police drama. Other dramatic highpoints of the film—including a parallel series of scenes at the core of the film’s plot—are symptomatic of the generic hybrid with which the film works, the heritage melodramatizing of the police thriller. The recurring scenes at the heart of the film are the interrogations, a familiar police scenario. The Lives of Others foregrounds this scenario in its very first sequence when, by way of viewers’ introduction to him, Wiesler interrogates “Prisoner 227” (as Wiesler addresses him) in the Hohenschönhausen prison. This interrogation setup is dramatically revisited twice near the end of the film, when Sieland has been apprehended and is being pressured to give evidence of Dreymann’s involvement in writing the Der Spiegel essay. In the two scenes in which Stasi officers question Sieland, the film is, on the one hand, repeating a standard scenario from a police thriller, the dramatic interrogation as a duel between central characters in the film; on the other hand, it has inserted into this familiar scenario—these semantics of the police thriller—a woman whose inner conflicts and emotional life are, as discussed above, treated melodramatically throughout the film. In this way, the later repetitions 203

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The opening shots of Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) in The Lives of Others immediately locate a series of interrogations at the heart of the plot and help establish it as a kind of police drama.

of this setup reconfigure the police drama that seems to be at the heart of the plot in the direction of melodrama. Revealingly, Dreymann is never subjected to such an interrogation and, indeed, hardly even really encounters his antagonist, Wiesler; the film, in its melodrama, opts instead to interrogate the woman and create the hybrid melodrama–policethriller. In the film’s second interrogation, Grubitz tries to convince Sieland to divulge who wrote the essay on suicide for Der Spiegel; she does start to cooperate as an informant but does not give away the specific hiding place of the typewriter. The scene, in mise-en-scène and narrative content, deliberately recalls the film’s opening interrogation because it is lit low key, with the dominant light from a single source (the lamp); at one point, the film cuts to a close-up of the seat cushion that plays a 204

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In the second interrogation scene, Wiesler’s superior Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) has replaced him in the interrogation setup, but the scene looks nearly identical in its mise-en-scène and camera placement.

prominent role in the first interrogation; and Grubitz is in his Stasi uniform as Wiesler was in the opening interrogation, the first and only time viewers have seen either of them so dressed. Also linking the scenes is the emotional breakdown of the interrogated, but in this later iteration, around ninety minutes into the film and likewise deep into the emotional turmoil that Sieland faces, the film recasts the interrogation in a melodramatic mode. When Grubitz asks her directly if she knows anything about the author of the essay in Der Spiegel, Sieland breaks into a whimper that seems at first to be crying but then turns to a knowing, though pained laugh. Viewers watch, in a very near close-up, her face register three or four emotions sequentially before the film cuts to Dreymann’s apartment where the Stasi are about to burst in and search. The abrupt cut from her inscrutable response both builds suspense as well as 205

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underscores that response itself, a response varying the usual accusatory questions, aggressive gesticulating, and histrionic denials in an interrogation. In the opening scene, the crying of the prisoner serves an important plot function and underscores how the Stasi preys on the psychologies and emotions of its victims. Prisoner 227’s crying is contrasted and contained in the clipped, officious manner of Wiesler, who turns the prisoner’s crying into evidence against him. The Stasi officer’s protocol, in fact, contrasts starkly to the muted melodramatic mode of tears. There is no room for crying and the humanity that it suggests in this cosmos of the Stasi—at least not in the first iteration of the interrogation. In the second interrogation of the film, however, the whimper from Sieland has entered an altogether melodramatic register, as viewers understand and identify with her situation in a way they did not with Prisoner 227. The melodramatizing difference from the opening, interrogation scene is realized in the cinematography and editing as well: viewers have Sieland’s straight-on point-of-view shots as much as Grubitz’s, whereas the prisoner’s point-of-view was largely denied to viewers in the first interrogation. The camera identifies with certain characters in a way that has certainly shifted from early in the film, which underscores the melodramatic identification with Sieland and her emotional turmoil as well as with melodrama’s moral vision and indignation at pointless victimization. Her response breaks out of the familiar interrogation scenario, becoming, at once, inscrutable and excessive in its reply, excessive, as melodramas often deploy excessive (misogynistically) hysterical emotions at dramatic moments. After the Stasi search Dreymann’s apartment and Grubitz realizes that Sieland has not divulged the hiding place of the typewriter, he calls Wiesler to the same prison. Grubitz has started to suspect Wiesler’s questionable commitment to the law at this point, and Wiesler even wonders if he has been called there to be interrogated himself. But Grubitz, after asking Wiesler if he’s still on the right side, orders Wiesler to interrogate Sieland, another repetition and variance that becomes the dramatic highpoint of the film. On the one hand, viewers wonder if Sieland will finally save herself and her career by revealing the hiding place of Dreymann’s typewriter; on the other, viewers wonder whether she will recognize Wiesler and divulge that he approached her once in a pub, a clear violation of Stasi policy and sure to doom Wiesler. The importance of Wiesler’s interrogation is underscored by the unusual camera move206

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ments that von Donnersmarck employs: throughout the film there are slow tracking shots, often as segues between scenes, but in this sequence there is a rapid backward tracking pan at the dramatic “Are you still on the right side?” The association of Wiesler with Sieland in the face of the growing distance between Grubitz and Wiesler links the Stasi captain with the woman the film has been treating in a melodramatic mode, a telling foreshadow of the conclusion that will emphasize his, not her, melodramatic victimization. This scene varies the earlier setups to register Wiesler’s transformation from devotee of the GDR law to (like Dreymann and Sieland) its victim. Instead of his uniform, Wiesler is wearing civilian clothing; instead of a darkened room with one strong single source of light, it is day and full of diffuse light; and instead of sitting straight on, uniformed, behind the desk, and directing the prisoner—a position of power—Wiesler now slowly rotates his chair to reveal very deliberately to Sieland that it is he who will interrogate her. It is a remarkably melodramatic entrance, one underscoring his own newly found artistic performance, sensibility, and sensitivity. Wiesler cannot have her startle at the recognition of him, as this would expose the fact that he introduced himself to her once before, a recognition of a personal connection that would endanger them both. Sieland does not react, and, after Wiesler makes reference to her “Publikum” a couple of times in his incessant questioning of her, she divulges exactly where Dreymann’s typewriter is hidden, with an “X” on the apartment sketch Wiesler offers her. The high drama of this, the melodramatic interrogation as climactic scene of the film, seems very much the product of the diverse generic modes underpinning the film. There is the familiar police drama suspense of whether Sieland will betray Wiesler or Dreymann, but the staging underscores once again the melodramatic subtext of The Lives of Others’ interrogations. The two key moments of the scene are Wiesler’s unusual turning of his chair and Sieland’s muted response to it until she suddenly divulges the typewriter. Both Wiesler’s unusual entrance and Sieland’s response underscore the compelled performance of restraint and repression in light of the high emotion and suspense of the moment: he has to introduce himself in a restrained way and she reacts in a restrained way. The compelled performances contrast to what viewers know is an emotionally explosive moment, which undercuts the idea of their socially mandated performances even more starkly. The restraint also recalls their previous meeting in the pub when Wiesler tried to 207

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The final interrogation scene varies the interrogation setup further: Wiesler is now in civilian clothing, the lighting is much brighter, and he introduces himself to Sieland by turning his chair slowly around to face her.

convince Sieland to return to Dreymann without revealing that Wiesler surreptitiously knows everything about her personal life. The hollow performance of emotional control and restraint at moments of high drama is also central to the melodrama, which, as noted above, tends to oscillate between histrionic excess and deliberate, containing displacement to mise-en-scène and soundtrack. Here, the prevailing restraint is undercut by the remarkably loud music cued by her divulgence. As is often the case in melodrama and particularly in The Lives of Others, the music picks up and expresses the emotional subtext at precisely that point at which the words leave off. Stuck, as many female characters in melodramas are, in an irresolvable conflict between her own desire for Dreymann and for her well-being, Sieland has chosen the latter, but her 208

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decision is lamented by the elegiac strings of the soundtrack. It is the first interrogation in which nondiegetic music plays, underscoring how the deliberately repeated interrogations build to this moment that fundamentally recasts the police thriller in the mute, musically scored mode of melodrama.

Conclusion: The Effective but Limiting Logic of Genre The drama of this final interrogation—revisiting and revising earlier scenarios as it does—is augmented by another variation from those earlier iterations: this time Grubitz is watching Wiesler and Sieland through a two-way mirror, such that there is a secret surveillance of the interrogation. Besides adding another melodramatic prop to the interrogations— a mirror surface and image as false self, used early in the sequence as Wiesler contemplates what to do—the three-way setup underscores a last generic element of the police thriller that, by von Donnersmarck’s own admission in his DVD commentary, adds considerably to the dramatic effects of the film. A surveillance scenario allows the cutting from the standard shot/reverse shot to a third point of view that complicates the usual binaries of continuity editing. Here, too, one finds in The Lives of Others the kind of postmodern pastiche that marks heritage cinema more generally: this device is a decontextualized police thriller element familiar from celebrated films such as Rear Window (1954) and The Conversation (1974), both of which examine the ethics of surveillance and both of which The Lives of Others quotes.50 But The Lives of Others, as with its interrogations, recasts this familiar trope in a melodramatic mode missing from the surveillance films. Whereas L. B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) in Rear Window as well as Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in The Conversation likewise become overly invested in the subjects of their surveillance, neither cries (or could be imagined to cry) to the elegiac music as the hardened Stasi captain Wiesler does, perched alone in his attic. This contrast to films from which von Donnersmarck conspicuously draws brings into stark contrast The Lives of Others’ particular genre operations. As with Jeffries and Caul, Wiesler eventually uncovers his true self (that fetish of Hollywood drama) by watching and listening to the lives of others, but Wiesler does so in a highly melodramatic mode that emphasizes literature, music, and tears, all the recurring props of the heritage melodrama cinema. The conclusion of the film likewise emphasizes the cinematically ef209

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fective but historically and politically muted genre hybrid with which the film works. Melodrama’s victimization of the virtuous hero is precisely what The Lives of Others tends to in its memorable coda when Dreymann comes to realize that he was helped, even protected, by Wiesler’s fictitious reports. In the muted moral logic of melodrama, as it has been sketched by Brooks and Williams, the belated recognition of the victimization and virtue of the hero offers melodrama many of its most moving moments. This final recognition comes after a long period in which viewers know of the hero’s virtue, but those around him or her do not (as with Dreymann’s ignorance of what Wiesler had done until years later). When Dreymann finally discovers Wiesler’s identity, he has a taxi following Wiesler at work—after the Wende, Wiesler works as a distributor of shopping flyers (Zeitungsausträger). At the moment viewers expect Dreymann to approach Wiesler and thank him (perhaps hug him and cry), Dreymann decides not to; he restrains himself much as both Wiesler and Sieland restrained their reactions even as the viewer is cued to the emotionally overwrought atmosphere. The overwhelming affect is, as is often the case in melodrama, displaced to the mise-en-scène, this time to a novel by Dreymann for Wiesler, a kind of love letter offered in gratitude. This displacement of feelings (here gratitude and, viewers assume, affection), especially to writing, is another stock theme of the heritage melodrama, and the film’s closing freeze-frame certainly seems to likewise traffic in jubilant but restrained affect. The memorable ending of The Lives of Others highlights how the film is, in von Donnersmarck’s words on the commentary, a love story between two men, but the staging of this end unveils the sort of repression, denial, and self-abnegation that very often resolves the melodramatic love story. This approach to the end helps explain both its power as effective drama but also its limited aesthetic and political logic. The displacement of love and gratitude to an object, an aspect of mise-en-scène, evokes the repressive representational strategies of the melodrama. This particular object, the novel, recalls the heritage cinema’s affinity for the prestige of the literary as well as the refined economy of tasteful sublimation. The freeze-frame with which the whole film concludes allows melodrama’s moving recognition of virtue and victimization, a moving recognition that viewers see in Wiesler’s final and long awaited smile. But the freeze-frame also underscores the mute mode of melodrama, emotionally powerful but ultimately silent on the myriad of complex historical and political issues the film raises. 210

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Notes 1. Wolf Biermann, “Die Gespenster treten aus dem Schatten: ‘Das Leben der Anderen’: Warum der Stasi-Film eines jungen Westdeutschen mich staunen läßt,” Die Welt, March 22, 2006; Thomas Brussig, “Klaviatur des Sadismus: Die DDR in Das Leben der Anderen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 21, 2006. 2. Filmheft: Das Leben der Anderen (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2006). Quoted in Mary Beth Stein, “II. Stasi with a Human Face? Ambiguity in Das Leben der Anderen,” German Studies Review, 31, no. 3 (2008): 570. 3. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” The New York Review of Books 54, no. 9 (May 31, 2007), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20210. 4. In addition to Stein’s essay above, see the special section of German Studies Review, which includes a total of five essays titled “Dealing with the GDR Past in Today’s Germany: The Lives of Others,” German Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 557–610. 5. According to www.boxofficemojo.com, The Lives of Others earned $11,286,112, Good-Bye, Lenin! earned $4,064,200, and Run, Lola, Run earned $7,267,585. 6. Cheryl Dueck, “V. The Humanization of the Stasi in Das Leben der Anderen,” German Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 604; Stein, “Human Face?” 568. 7. True of the five essays in German Studies Review, for instance. 8. Box office figures are from the Web site of the Filmsforderungsanstalt (www.ffa.de). 9. Those films are Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979), Nowhere in Africa (2001), The Lives of Others (2006), and The Counterfeiters (2007). 10. Tino Balio distinguishes a “production trend” explicitly from a genre in, for example, his discussion of U.S. prestige films of the 1930s, which he deems the most important such trend in that decade. See Tino Balio, History of American Cinema, vol. 5, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930– 1939 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 179–80. The phenomenon of the production trend is also discussed in Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 13. 11. See Lutz Koepnick, “Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and Holocaust in the 1990s,” New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002): 47–82; Lutz Koepnick, “Amerika gibt’s überhaupt nicht: Notes on the German Heritage Film,” in German Pop Culture: How American Is It? ed. Agnes C. Mueller, 191–208 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 12. The original essay appeared in a volume on culture during the Thatcher years: Andrew Higson, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman, 109–29 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and UCL Press, 1993). 13. Higson discusses this pastiche aspect in Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 66. 14. Higson describes the star system that emerged in England around the her211

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itage film: Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 29–32. He offers a cartoon from The Guardian that mocked how easy the heritage formula was in the format of a recipe that calls for, in its list of sundry ingredients, “1 Helena Bonham-Carter (or own-brand equivalent).” Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 33. 15. Richard Dyer, “Heritage Cinema in Europe,” in The Encyclopedia of European Cinema, ed. Ginette Vincendeau, 4–5 (London: BFI and Cassell, 1995). 16. I would argue that Higson’s critique of emphatic mise-en-scène to the detriment of narrative is a red thread of his critique running from his earlier essays through the book-length treatment in English Heritage, English Cinema. See, for example, Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 39, 66, and 77. Koepnick writes, “Paradoxical though it may seem, [the German heritage films] present the past, not only as a site of violence and trauma, but also of precious properties and valuable assets, of splendid decors and richly textured signifiers of pastness. In their evocation of the past, heritage films tend to privilege setting over narrative, mise-en-scène over editing. In contrast to conventional costume features, heritage films do not simply conjure the historical as an atmospheric background for tales of adventure and melodramatic stories. Instead, they present the texture of the past as a source of visual attractions and aural pleasures.” Koepnick, “Reframing the Past,” 49–50. 17. See Mary P. Wood, Contemporary European Cinema (London: Hodder Arnold, 2007), 25. She has a table showing the production budget of the U.S. majors going from a per-picture average of $28.9 million in 1992 to a per-picture average of $63.6 million in 2004. The country with the highest per-picture budget in Europe is Great Britain at $13.3 million in 2004 (France is at $6.6 million and Italy at $2.9 million). 18. “I’ve decided to not include much discussion of films set mainly during or after the Second World War. Such films are still clearly costume dramas, they are still about the past—but they deal with the more recent past, and I needed to end my discussion somewhere. So for the purposes of this book, I won’t very often venture beyond the Second World War.” Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 4. He makes a similar argument on p. 10. 19. For example, Ulrich Tukur, who plays Anton Grubitz, started his film career in Die weiße Rose (The White Rose, 1982) but has starred in more recent films such as Der Fall Fürtwangler (Taking Sides, 2001). A famed theater actor in the GDR, Ulrich Mühe (Wiesler) had even starred with Sebastian Koch (Dreymann) and Tukur in Der Stellvertreter (Amen, 2002). 20. Mareike Herrmann, “The Spy as Writer: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen,” Gegenwartsliteratur 6 (2008): 90–113. 21. See Richard Dyer, “Nice Young Men Who Sell Antiques: Gay Men in Heritage Cinema,” in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau, 44 (London: BFI, 2001), where he makes this distinction between heritage and historical films, although it is worth noting that Higson rejects this distinction and would see everything as costume/heritage cinema. Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 12. 22. There were exceptions to this within British cinema, including Gandhi 212

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European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others (1982) and the Scottish films like Rob Roy and Braveheart (both 1995). 23. “heritage filmmaking . . . is inextricably linked to the specificities of German national history in the 20th century. These productions navigate a historical minefield, structured by Germany’s peculiar history of violence, displacement, and division. By re-viewing the national past, they solicit a new kind of German consensus for the emerging Berlin Republic.” Koepnick, “Reframing the Past,” 51. 24. This greater historical orientation in the French heritage films is discussed in Ginette Vincendeau, “Unsettling Memories,” in Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Ginette Vincendeau, 29–32 (London: BFI, 2002). The Elizabeth films (Elizabeth [1998] and Elizabeth: The Golden Age [2007]) are examples of the greater historical engagement of the British heritage industry. 25. In both of his pieces on heritage cinema, Koepnick foregrounds how the German heritage films drive at the cinema of consensus of which Rentschler writes. See Koepnick, “Reframing the Past,” 51 and Koepnick, “Amerika gibt’s überhaupt nicht,” 192. 26. See Cooke’s discussion of the film in Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (New York: Berg, 2005), esp. 128–36. 27. See Cooke, Representing East Germany; Jennifer M. Kapczynski, “Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin Is in Germany and Good-bye, Lenin,” Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007): 78–100; and Michael D. Richardson’s essay in this volume, which also gives an overview of the work on Ostalgie. 28. Part of the Ostalgie wave’s popular appeal was likely a reaction to the early 1990s working through—sometimes histrionically—the role of the Stasi in the GDR. The conflation of the GDR (and all its problems) with the Stasi had a number of advantages for both former East Germans (who could blame the “real” villains, the Stasi) and for West Germans (who could highlight how “totalitarian” the GDR was). 29. See, for example, Miriam Lau, “Das Leben der Anderen: Schluss mit Lustig,” Die Welt, March 22, 2006; or Margit Voss, “Das Leben der Anderen, Ein Film über die DDR ohne Klamauk,” Neues Deutschland, March 23, 2006. Even before the film was released, Philipp Lichterbeck distinguished The Lives of Others from the trend before it. See Philipp Lichterbeck, “Die innere Wahrheit der DDR: Die StasiFalle: Wie in Mitte gerade ein Film über die Angst im Sozialismus gedreht wird,” Tagesspiegel, May 5, 2004. 30. Before The Lives of Others, The Tin Drum had probably garnered the most international recognition, but, when Schlöndorff released the film, the European film awards had not yet been established. 31. “Though these films often challenge mainstream codes of gender and sexuality their gaze is museal: they transform the past into an object of consumption.” Koepnick, “Reframing the Past,” 50. 32. See Thomas Lindenberger, “I. Stasiploitation—Why Not? The Scriptwriter’s Historical Creativity in The Lives of Others,” German Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 564–65. 33. “Ich drehe ein Melodrama mit Thriller-elementen. Das geschlossene Sys213

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tem der DDR bietet wie all totalitären Regime einen hervorragenden Hintergrund dafür. Man denke nur an Casablanca.” Von Donnersmarck quoted in Philipp Lichterbeck, “Die innere Wahrheit.” 34. See Vincendeau, Film/Literature/Heritage. 35. Claire Monk, “The British Heritage-Film Debate Revisited,” in British Historical Cinema, ed. Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant, 194 (New York: Routledge, 2002). 36. Monk, “British Heritage-Film Debate,” 176. 37. Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” in Film Genre III, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 31 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 38. Ibid., 31. 39. Ibid., 36 and 37. 40. The best known examples of this kind of canny deployment of melodrama for the purposes of social and political critique are Douglas Sirk and Fassbinder. In each case, the director plays with clichés from the genre to distance the film’s thematic meaning from the surface of the text. 41. In his influential study The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks’s third chapter is titled “The Text of Muteness,” in which he writes, “The mute role is remarkably prevalent in melodrama. Mutes correspond first of all to a repeated use of extreme physical conditions to represent extreme moral and emotional conditions.” From this insight, Brooks postulates that muteness, the silent gestures to express extreme emotions, becomes a key element of melodramatic aesthetics more broadly. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 56–80. For how this notion of “muteness” migrated from Brooks’s analysis to film studies, particularly in Christine Gledhill’s arguments, see John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (London: Wallflower, 2004), 84. 42. The work of Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams moves in this direction because they emphasize how melodrama, as a mode, can operate within works that appear to belong to other genres; Williams especially problematizes the binary categories of melodrama and realism, underscoring how melodrama can function in apparently realist texts. Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill, 5–39 (London: British Film Institute, 1987); Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revisited,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne, 42–88 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 43. Williams, “Melodrama Revisited,” 48. 44. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 40. 45. See, on this victimization element, Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 222. 46. Tears are among the most discussed of melodrama’s mise-en-scène elements. See, for instance, Steven Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 6–22. Douglas Sirk considered the use of mirrors one of his signature tech214

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European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others niques in his Universal melodrama. See Mercer and Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility, 60. 47. “The laying out of the problems ‘realistically’ always allows for the generating of an excess which cannot be accommodated. What is characteristic of the melodrama, both in its original sense and in the modern one, is the way the excess is siphoned off. The undischarged emotion which cannot be accommodated within the action . . . is traditionally expressed in the music and in the case of film, in certain elements of the mise-en-scène. That is to say, music and mise-en-scène do not heighten the emotionality of an element of the action: to some extent they substitute for it.” Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill, 73 (London: British Film Institute, 1987); originally published in Screen 18, no. 2 (1987): 113–19. 48. See Williams, “Melodrama Revisited,” 59. 49. Von Donnersmarck discusses this in the DVD commentary; it’s also quoted in Lindenberger, “Stasiploitation,” 561. 50. A scene shot but cut from the final version of The Lives of Others has Wiesler looking out his apartment window with binoculars at goings-on in an apartment across from his, a clear citation of Rear Window. It is available on the DVD. Toward the end of the film, Dreymann dismantles his apartment, peeling wallpaper off to get at the bugs and wires that allowed the Stasi to listen to his life, which recalls a scene at the end of The Conversation in which Harry Caul also dismantles his apartment in search of a bug.

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A World of Objects Consumer Culture in Filmic Reconstructions of the GDR

In 1991 the infamous film and theater director Christoph Schlingensief made one of the first feature films about German reunification and the fall of the Wall. This was no teary-eyed reminiscence of a day whose consequences, both good and bad, still reverberate through German culture. In his horror farce, Das deutsche Kettensägen Massaker (The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990), Schlingensief created a vivid if crude allegory for East German fears about unification, as luckless East Germans crossing the border into West Germany meet a gruesome fate at the hand—and mouths—of a deranged West German family of cannibals. This grotesque caricature of unification—rich, fat West Germans consuming poor, defenseless East Germans—may have been designed simply to provoke, but the motifs of consumption and border crossings loomed over the fall of the Wall and reunification. The stirring images from the night of November 9, 1989—euphoric Berliners streaming across the border, East and West Germans celebrating together, dancing on the Wall—were soon replaced with images that quickly acquired the same iconic status: East Germans were shown in the media frantically spending their welcome money in West German stores, happily buying everything from televisions and VCRs to bananas. In contrast to this image of eager East German consumers, Schlingensief presented an economic reality that followed this euphoric wave of shopping, as West Germans began to lay claim to long confiscated property and West German businesses snatched up properties and businesses in the East. Now, twenty years after unification, the “consumption” of East Ger-

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many, albeit in a different manifestation, remains a central concern in filmic reconstructions of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and unification such as Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (1999) and Wolfgang Becker’s Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003). Here, this consumption can be understood on two, interrelated levels: On the level of narrative, the role that Western consumer goods and their less-appealing Eastern counterparts played in the daily lives of East Germans drives each plot. But these films also engage with the act of consumption in the present. Ostalgie—a nostalgia for the East—has become an increasingly widespread phenomenon in Germany, which in recent years has seen East German art retrospectives such as the one held by the Neue Nationalgalerie, television shows such as The DDR-Show, a documentary talk show series hosted by ice skating star Katarina Witt wearing a Young Pioneer uniform, GDR-themed parties and bars—there have even been plans to build an East German theme park, complete with actors posing as surly border guards.1 But above all, the current wave of Ostalgie has been marked significantly by the consumption of goods from and symbols of the GDR—Vita-Cola and Spreewald pickles, Pioneer red scarves and Sandmännchen dolls. For former East Germans, these once trivial objects have become highly invested with meaning, recalling as they do a lost identity and serving as a gesture of defiance against the rapid Westernization of the Eastern commercial market. In this broader context, these films, and their focus on consumer and cultural objects, can be seen as engaging with this Ostalgie and offering a form of remembrance that seeks to counter the historical reappropriation of the East via a Western model of consumer culture, through a critique of the centrality of cultural products in the formation of identity. In the face of a newly unified German identity that subsumes—or consumes—a distinct East German identity, these films consciously create what at first appears to be a realistic portrait of the GDR by foregrounding its consumer products and cultural objects, not as a retreat into an idealized past but as a way to recuperate East German identities and undermine the existing historical understanding regarding everyday life in the GDR. Further, the focus on consumer objects and the reconstruction of East German space via these objects are part of a larger tendency to redefine the topography of unified Germany by foregrounding temporal and spatial differences between East and West Germany as well as by problematizing the very notion of a clearly defined and distinct German space.

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The Fall of the Wall: Consumption and Nostalgia Why exactly consumer goods occupy such a central role in these visual reconstructions of the GDR can be attributed to the cultural and political developments that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Beginning with the Christa Wolf controversy following the 1989 publication of her novel Was bleibt, there has been a systematic, almost pathological attempt to demolish anything of value, cultural or otherwise, from the GDR.2 Unsatisfied with the demise of the GDR, West German critics turned their sights on elements of East German culture that could potentially legitimate the existence of the former state and therefore call into question the absorption of East Germany into the Federal Republic. Immediately following the fall of the Wall, the primary targets were East German artists and intellectuals whose criticism of the East German government was tempered by a commitment to socialism. As Claudia SadowskiSmith writes in her discussion of recent German novels highly critical of Ostalgie, for such critics, the only authentic East German experience is one predicated on an opposition to the state, and the only valid East German identity was that of “the highly vocal and visible dissident, who, in many cases, eventually left for the West.”3 Paradoxically then, the only valid East German identity is one that repudiated itself—the former East German. Attempts to unmask leading cultural figures of the GDR as morally or politically complicit in an oppressive state structure gave way to more systematic processes of discreditation, aimed at broader cultural institutions and objects. Not just the political system but also the entire culture of East Germany was dismissed wholesale as regressive and antimodern, in a series of practices that not only sought to delegitimate the GDR but also were designed to enable a physical transformation of the former GDR.4 On a literary historical level, this has involved attacks on the entire East German artistic canon.5 On another level, these attacks involve a struggle to represent (or re-present) the GDR, to define its identity not through its leading personalities but rather through an artistic recreation. German literature has produced several representations of the GDR whose narratives reflect a complicated process of identity formation: Thomas Brussig’s comic novel Helden wie wir (1995) and Wolfgang Hilbig’s Ich (1993), to name but two.6 This discussion has not been onesided: novels such as Thorsten Becker’s Schönes Deutschland (1996) or Wolfgang Hegewald’s Ein Obskures Nest (1997) dismiss any longing for the GDR as useless and naïve, whereas Reinhard Ulbrich’s Die Spur der 218

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Broiler (1998) and Jurij Brezan’s Die Leute von Salow (1997) seek to salvage from GDR culture the values of collectivity and community.7 These cultural erasures of East Germany manifested themselves most visibly through the radical transformation of the landscape of the East, particularly that of East Berlin. Since unification the very topography of the city has been radically altered, as entire neighborhoods have undergone significant renovation, demolition, and rebuilding.8 Much of this construction was long overdue and, in many cases, provided a significant aesthetic enhancement (architectural styles in East Germany circa 1950 left much to be desired); but for better or for worse, this urban makeover left few traces of a familiar environment for former East Berliners. Ironically, this development has restored the cultural center of the city to its Eastern half, where it had traditionally been located until the Cold War, far away from the Kudamm and the Gedächtniskirche. However, rather than providing a sort of equilibrium to the city, this has instead given the appearance of an encroachment, particularly with respect to newly gentrified residential neighborhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg and Spandauer Vorstadt.9 Given these widespread efforts at devaluation, East Germans turned to the once discarded consumer products and cultural objects of their former land as a reaction against the disappearance of their “culture.” For those in the West, this fascination took many by surprise, primarily owing to perceptions of the status of consumer goods in East Germany. That former East German citizens, who had ostensibly lamented their limited product choices and lack of access to popular Western commodities, suddenly longed for inferior products of their past seemed to suggest a regressive form of nostalgia—the construction of an idealized past and the forgetting of a complicated present. But dismissing the current fad for all products East German as a mere retreat to the familiar overlooks the importance of these objects and the significance of everyday life for the process of identity formation. Consumer goods—and their scarcity—played a significant role in the development of East German self-conceptions. Although Cold War images of socialist countries frequently include images of empty store shelves and long lines even for necessities such as toilet paper, East German consumer culture far surpassed that of other East Bloc countries. This is not to suggest that the GDR was a consumer paradise; most basic needs were often met, but consumers could not count on the regular availability of items such as televisions, cars, and washing machines. Looking 219

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eastward, citizens of the GDR enjoyed significant access to consumer goods, but, in comparison to West Germany, with whose economy the East remained inextricably entwined, the East was woefully inadequate. Despite the official rejection of the consumer culture of the West, exposure to West German material culture in the form of Western television channels forced the government of the GDR to recognize satisfaction of consumer needs as a measure of economic success.10 Thus, whatever limited internal progress was made in the production and availability of consumer goods, in the forty years of the GDR’s existence, the standard against which East Germans measured the material quality of their life was the real and perceived quality of life in West Germany.11 The appeal of Western goods in the former GDR was significant. As the East German psychiatrist Hans-Joachim Maaz wrote in Behind the Wall: The Inner Life of Communist Germany, “There was nothing that could beat the fetish value of Western goods. . . . Real shortages and inferior merchandise in our country, and the surplus of items and quality luxuries in the West were the emotional background for a never-ending and never-satisfying spiral of consumption.”12 Even rare East German items such as a Trabant or a telephone acquired this fetish value. Following the fall of the Wall, however, the magical value of these objects evaporated. Theoretically accessible, the steep costs of many luxury items made their purchase prohibitive for the majority of Easterners. Those objects once coveted simply for their brand names lost their symbolic value as markers of difference. If, as David F. Crew has argued, the inability of the East German regime to provide the consumption needs of its citizens was a key element in undermining the legitimacy of that state, the discovery of the reality behind Western consumer culture—cheap electronics and appliances that break within months of their purchase, necessitating a perpetual cycle of purchase and disposal—was equally integral to a rapid disillusionment with the West.13 On one level, the eschewal of West German goods and the recuperation of East German products can be understood as an act of defiance, a strategic use of consumption and consumer choice as an oppositional practice.14 But at the same time, this resurgent interest in trivial objects signifies a longing for a lost sense of identity, one that had been rooted both in these objects and in the absence or lack of access to objects from the West. These consumer products function both as individual acts of memory and as signifiers of group identity.15 The goods themselves stand in for the time and space in which they had been consumed; the 220

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longing here is not for the actual product but for a reconnection with a historical moment and lost community, with a moment that differentiates East Germans from West Germans. Berdahl thus connects these consumptive practices to “the creation and reification of a temporal and spatial boundary. ‘Ostalgic’ and similar practices are not only a part of a dynamic of boundary maintenance and invention between East and West; they have also helped create a division between before and after ‘the Fall.’  ”16 Still, these consumptive practices, and the ostensible boundaries between past and present, East and West Germany, that are implicated in them, take place for the most part within a united Germany that bears little in the way of visual traces of this East German past. This fad for East German products is not limited to former East Germans, as West Germans have also participated in the appropriation for GDR era consumer products, though out of a very different type of nostalgia. As a result, the extent to which the objects themselves could function to adequately re-create an exterior space demarcated from the present German space (as opposed to a sort of reconstructed private sphere or mental state) is bounded by the reality of a Germany that is rapidly transforming. Film, then, becomes a medium that could not only offer a powerful commentary on the nature of this fascination with detritus from the GDR but also adequately marshal such objects in a more elaborate reconstruction of the past. By foregrounding cultural objects and modes of consumption, both of the films under discussion here similarly participate in an effort to reconstitute East Germany as temporally and spatially distinct from the unified Germany of the present. But they also risk engaging in a form of memorialization that distorts—and fictionalizes—this ostensibly lost historical moment. Clearly, both films participate in a form of Ostalgie, but they do so in a manner that encourages critical reflection and posits a multitude of historical narratives.17 The term “Ostalgie,” and its root “nostalgia,” generally have negative connotations. Rather than dismissing nostalgia wholesale, Svetlana Boym makes a productive differentiation between two general tendencies of nostalgia, differentiated by their degrees of emphasis on either nostos—“return home” or algia—“longing” as well as their respective relationships between individual and collective longing.18 Restorative nostalgia foregrounds nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home through totalizing reconstructions of monuments of the past, compensating for temporal distance and displacement by making 221

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available a desired object and ignoring historical incongruities between past and present.19 In its extreme form this sort of nostalgia often embodies a “conspiratorial worldview” that simplifies historical narrative into a Manichean battle of good and evil, imagining a community “based more on exclusion than affection, a union of those who are not with us, but against us. . . . This is not simply ‘forgetting of reality’ but a psychotic substitution of actual experiences with a dark conspiratorial vision: the creation of a delusionary homeland.”20 Even in its milder manifestations, restorative nostalgia offers a return to a collective home and is driven by “anxiety about those who draw attention to historical incongruities between past and present and thus question the wholeness and continuity of the restored tradition.”21 By contrast, reflective nostalgia, emphasizing algia, lingers on ruins, foregrounding the passage of time—both historical and individual— and the irrevocability of the past.22 Unlike restorative nostalgia, reflective nostalgia can be ironic, inconclusive, and fragmentary. It does not reject critical reflection but incorporates it into longing, seeing the past in terms of a multitude of potentialities and nonteleological possibilities of historical development: If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.23

Finally, although restorative nostalgia, linked to a return home, tends toward unifying symbols to evoke a national past and present, reflective nostalgia is more concerned with individual and cultural memory. Reflective nostalgia recognizes what is known as “cultural intimacy”—the elements that make up a common social context—but the shared frameworks of collective or cultural memory allow for individual reminisces and suggest multiple narratives.24 Although both Sonnenallee and Good-Bye, Lenin! take the reconstruction of East Germany as their central premise, the phenomenon of Ostalgie as it manifests itself in these films is predominantly, though not exclusively, a reflective sort of nostalgia, since it foregrounds temporal 222

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and spatial difference and mobilizes a reconstruction of the GDR and the objects as markers for multiple recuperations of history. These reconstructions do not present themselves as totalizing visions but rather, by structuring their narratives as coming-of-age stories centered on single protagonists, serve to highlight the very individual nature of memory. Moreover, both films are highly self-reflective with respect to their reconstructions of the GDR, highlighting their own performativity in two different, but related ways.

Test the West, but Stick with the East: Sonnenallee Sonnenallee, written by the author Thomas Brussig, tells the story of a group of teenagers circa 1970 living on the “short end” of Sonnenallee, a street divided by the Berlin Wall. Micha, the central figure, is a mild, somewhat nerdy teenager who dreams of being a rock star, studying in Moscow, and winning the affection of Miriam, the neighborhood beauty. A loose collection of episodes rather than a tightly woven narrative, the film portrays an East German neighborhood populated by quirky, yet good-natured characters: Micha’s mother nervously plots to flee to the West using a stolen passport; Micha’s Western uncle smuggles in goods not actually forbidden in the East; Micha’s best friend Mario discusses Sartre with his equally nonconformist girlfriend, and Micha’s other friend Wuschel dreams only of acquiring a verboten copy of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Haußmann’s comedy was a tremendous success in Germany. As a nostalgic view of 1970s Berlin, the film presents a communal society, yet its unflinching representation of the pervasiveness of the state apparatus constantly reminds the viewer that this community is predicated on a mutual opposition to the state’s repressive controls. Similarly, the West exists in the imagination of East Berliners simultaneously as a utopian and thus highly desirable alternate reality and as a despised and dangerous other threatening the stability of both the state and of the community. Perhaps not surprising, given Haußmann’s background in the theater, the film, in its efforts to call attention to its constructed vision, employs techniques of Brecht’s Epic Theater, particularly Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung. Specific formal elements reflect the film’s commitment to an anti-illusionist representation, beginning with the opening of the film. The nondiegetic introductory narration by Micha (“My name 223

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is Micha, I am seventeen years old, and I live in the GDR. Otherwise, I don’t have any problems.”) is precisely the sort of straightforward selfidentification and plot explication found at the beginning of Brecht’s plays. Although by now this has long been a film convention, it nonetheless serves to remind the audience of the film’s status as a constructed representation. Micha’s voice-over also returns at the end of the film as a final reminder. Similar, fleeting moments pepper the film, such as when Micha’s father’s glances knowingly at the camera when his wife beckons suggestively from the bedroom. More significant is the presence in the film of a chorus, a group of West Germans who have constructed a platform from which they can overlook the Wall, observe real live East Germans being East German, and offer commentary on their actions, however mundane. The play-within-a-play, or rather the play-within-amovie structure creates a doubling—the group of West Germans functions as a stand-in for the Brechtian audience, a critical, detached audience who discusses and disputes character action while we, the movie audience, act as observers of both dramas, critically assessing both performance and performance reception. The group of West Germans on the platform does not offer a moment of identification for the contemporary film audience (as reinforced by the fact that the film only briefly views the East from their perspective: the platform is usually shot at a distance to include platform and East German “stage” or shown in a medium shot from below, the perspective of the Easterners) but instead stands in for the contemporary audience of East German culture, the critics who, like Haußmann’s chorus, seek to denigrate the East Germans they observe and who delight in catching them with their pants down (literally so in the case of Micha and Marco, who are photographed drunkenly urinating on the Wall). They nonetheless serve as a reminder that Micha and friends are, in their very quotidian actions, performing for an audience. Essential to this performance are the correct props, and the space of the film is overflowing with these cultural objects from the former GDR. At first glance, the film seems to be participating in a re-enchantment of these objects. By setting his story in the 1970s, Haußmann is obligated to re-create an image of the GDR impossibly awash with cultural products. The camera often lingers over a product label or foregrounds an advertising column. Other times, a particular item becomes the center of attention, such as when Micha’s father struggles to open his Mufuti (Multifunktionstisch—an expandable and redirectable multifunction ta224

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ble ubiquitous in GDR living rooms). But the sheer volume of products that will fill a single frame, Haußmann’s “too perfect” reconstruction, in the words of Paul Cooke, only serves to highlight the objects as props, giving the impression of a hyperreal simulation that allows the viewer to indulge in nostalgia but not without admitting that this overcoded presentation is highly artificial.25 Indeed, the excessive nature of the film’s marshalling of objects can only lead one to believe that realism is not one of its primary objectives. But it is the cultural products of the West that play the most significant role in the film narrative. Interior scenes from the communal space of his family apartment leave little doubt that the space is a faithful reconstruction of an East Berlin interior circa 1970, but shots of Micha’s room—such as the slow pan of Micha’s poster-covered walls at the beginning of the film—reveal that it could easily pass for West German—or even American. Micha and his friends obsess over Western pop music, whose banned status only heightens the rebellious cache that such items would have even for West German youth. Whereas Micha’s story arc primarily concerns his pursuit of Miriam, the subplot involving Wuschel’s search for Exile on Main Street highlights this fetishization of goods from the West. Wuschel invests the forbidden record with a value that outstrips even his own life, as is made clear in a scene immediately following his first acquisition of the album. When one border guard inadvertently blows the power for the entire block, the others assume the worst: an attack, an attempt at an escape to the West. So ingrained is the notion of the ubiquitous system of surveillance that Wuschel assumes, irrationally, that the alarms have sounded because of him. Frightened and confused, he flees upon seeing a policeman who, equally frightened and confused, assumes Wuschel is trying to escape and shoots him. As the crowd gathers around the seemingly dead boy, Micha cradles him in his arms—and discovers that the contraband record, tucked inside Wuschel’s jacket, has saved Wuschel’s life—at the cost of the record. Wuschel comes to, but upon seeing the shattered record, begins to sob uncontrollably. Other scenes as well lampoon the fetishization of goods in the East, whether they are coveted Western goods or simply scarce Eastern ones. Late in the film, Micha’s mother hosts two visitors from the “Tal der Ahnungslosen” (Valley of the Clueless Ones) where Westfernsehen (television from the West) cannot be received by antenna. The pair is fascinated by television, particularly a Western game show, which, in a 225

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jab at both the Eastern and Western preoccupation with consumption, consists solely of a shot of a conveyor belt of consumer goods. Similarly, the acquisition of a telephone leaves the family flabbergasted, to the point that they are unable to answer the ringing phone. Even Micha’s pursuit of Miriam, and the character development that accompanies his pursuit, are colored by this relationship with the West. A shy and awkward teenager, Micha is initially rebuffed by the more hip Miriam, who is only interested in Scheich, her boyfriend from the West, who arrives at the disco in a flashy sports car just as the group of Eastern teenagers are trying to impress the girls present with their choreographed dance inspired by a Dynamo 5 cover version of T-Rex’s “Get It On.”26 The film’s repeated use of cover versions functions on two different levels. Given the film’s temporal setting, these songs already signal a bygone historical moment, and these clearly “inauthentic” versions of Western pop and rock music locate the aural world of the film at a geographical remove as well. But the motif of the cover song is not limited to its distancing function. Implicit in the notion of a cover version is an act of appreciation as well as an act of appropriation and transformation. Bad cover versions are those that seek to reproduce exactly the original—an impossibility, since the cover version that merely replicates its source disappears by virtue of its indistinguishability—and which, in their failure, their minor deviation from the original, only reinforce the primacy of the source. Thus, Scheich’s arrival at the disco is a confrontation between an imitated version of Western culture with a figure who embodies it more directly, a confrontation whose outcome—Miriam leaves with Scheich—is inevitable. Cover versions that balance an appreciation of the original with a reinterpretation of the work, one that essentially wrests control of the work from the original producer, allow for a more meaningful and productive relationship with the original. As long as Micha attempts to compete with Scheich in terms of Western cultural goods, he is doomed to failure. Instead, he must show Miriam that he possesses that which the objects stand in for in her mind—independence and rebellion. He ultimately wins her over by performing an act of self-definition. Over a two-day period, Micha writes— or rewrites—his own personal history through a series of diaries that document his lifelong antipathy to the state. Given the trajectory of the love story that drives the film, as well as the status of the film as a whole, its participation in questions of memory and history, Micha’s actions here are ambiguous. Do we understand his retrospective account of his 226

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feelings as an effort to rewrite history, to reinvent his identity, now as a dissident (at least in thought) rather than a model student, as a whitewashing of the past, an opportunistic effort to appear nonconformist when conformity is no longer advantageous? Given the message of the film as a whole, a perhaps more productive interpretation of Micha’s actions are not as a rewriting, since this implies that a narrative had already been written, but rather an assertion of the right to write—the assertion of rightful authorship of the narrative of one’s life. Micha’s retrospective journal entries are not simply a repudiation of his previous behavior (he does not explicitly distance himself from his old identity) but rather an attempt to take control of the process of identity definition. Tellingly, when Micha arrives at Miriam’s house with an armful of journals, she does not open them before embracing him. What is important for her is that Micha, then or only now, has taken control of his identity away from a world of objects—and in a parallel fashion, away from the contemporary discussion. After kissing Micha, she too symbolically rejects the West; while her erstwhile boyfriend can be heard honking his car horn and shouting up to her, Miriam embraces Micha and repudiates an earlier remark, noting that Westerners do not in fact kiss better than Easterners.27 Other characters in the film are shown experiencing a similar disillusion with the West and its objects. When his uncle dies, Micha’s mother is finally granted permission to cross the border. She returns with a smuggled coffee can that contains not some forbidden luxury item but the ashes of her brother. The final moments of Sonnenallee return to the interior space of Micha’s room. Wuschel is able to purchase another copy of Exile on Main Street, thanks to a fortuitous encounter with Miriam’s boyfriend Scheich, who, after accidentally hitting Wuschel with his car, quickly gives him fifty deutschmarks to avoid an encounter with the police. When played, however, the record reveals itself as a fake: the band is not the Rolling Stones but a German-speaking cover version. Although Wuschel is heartbroken, Micha remains undaunted, instead donning an imaginary guitar. As he begins to “play” the American pop song “The Letter” (yet again a cover version by Dynamo 5), this imaginary music replaces the counterfeit Rolling Stones record and soon overpowers all other diegetic sound. Meanwhile the entire cast assembles into a choreographed dance number—directed westward at the border guards and the Wall. In a marked contrast to the discotheque scene, here it is precisely the refigured version of the song that is valorized, not the original. 227

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This rejection of Western cultural products is a rebuke to the reduction of East German identity to its inability to acquire objects from the West. The money Wuschel receives from Scheich, symbolizing the welcome money given to East Germans crossing the border in 1989, implies a critique not just of the West’s understanding of East German culture but also of an expectation on the part of East Germans that access to Western consumption could provide anything more than disappointment. In this clearly fantastical ending, the film for the last time breaks with any notion of realism. In doing so, it affirms a value of community directed against both the state, as embodied by the border guards, the only East Germans not to participate in the dance number, and the West. But as the film ends and Micha closes his narrative of East Germany, describing it as the most beautiful time of his life, the last shot is of a gray and desolate Sonnenallee. Micha’s narration, the dissonance between his final words and the final image, brings the film back to the present, distancing the audience once again from the constructed world of the film. The fantastic ending of the film confirms its status as fairy tale, while the final shot, which pulls backward through the border crossing and fades to black only after the camera has crossed into the West, reinforces the irretrievability of this idealized memory vis-à-vis the present historical circumstances and yet preserves it as memory itself. The film thus asserts a political stance that both affirms the present state of German history and reclaims a moment, and a celebration of that moment, that subverts the notion of an inevitable teleological progression toward that present and asserts the validity of personal memory in the face of official memory.

Reconstructing the GDR, One Object at a Time: Good-Bye, Lenin! By contrast, Good-Bye, Lenin!, set not in an East German past but in the moments of its demise, reconstructs the GDR not just to ostensibly celebrate it but also to restage its eventual disappearance. After witnessing her son Alex’s arrest for demonstrating for free speech on the night of the fortieth anniversary of the GDR, Christiane lapses into an eightmonth coma, oblivious to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resignation of Honecker, the invasion of Western products and companies, and talk about the reunification of Germany. When she awakens, her son Alex, afraid that his committed socialist mother will have another heart at228

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tack, decides to hide the truth from her and reconstruct the GDR. As this task grows increasingly impossible, Alex goes to greater and greater lengths, becoming lost in his own fantasies of an idealized past until he must finally confront the reality of the present and the truth about his childhood. Like Sonnenallee, Good-Bye, Lenin! self-consciously calls attention to the fictional character of its reconstruction of East Germany. For an audience fully aware of the reality of East German life, Alex’s idealistic reconceptualizations ring false from the outset. Good-Bye, Lenin! also begins with a retrospective nondialogic narration. Guided by Alex’s wry voice-over, the first half hour of the film documents the end of the GDR and the rapid transformation of East Berlin, thus affirming the concrete reality against which Alex will attempt to fight throughout the film. The very absurdity of Good-Bye, Lenin!’s premise precludes any reception of the film that would suggest such a reconstruction is believable. The lengths to which Alex must go to preserve the charade in the face of the rapid and visual Westernization of Eastern space, as he is forced to exert control not only over the objects in his mother’s room but also over the character of the entire country, constantly remind viewers that the material presence of East Germany is rapidly disappearing.28 Whereas Sonnenallee foregrounded the role of Western consumer goods in East German identity formation, here East German consumer goods occupy a central role. To maintain his charade, Alex is forced to reconstruct the family apartment as it once was, removing clear discrepancies, such as a tanning bed, and retrieving the cheap furniture that he and his sister had quickly discarded when the Wall came down. He struggles to find familiar products—Spreewald pickles, Mokka Fix coffee, brands that have already quickly disappeared from store shelves—and forces his sister to change her Western-style clothes when interacting with their mother. Curiously though, the mother never seems to notice that Alex has substituted Western goods for their Eastern counterparts. Presumably, anyone with a favorite brand of pickles could distinguish her preferred type from a substitution, regardless of packaging, but his mother’s apparent ignorance suggests that the anxiety Easterners felt about their lack of access to “superior” goods from the West may have been driven as much by a constant bombardment of advertisements as well as inherent differences.29 At first, Alex is successful, but even though his mother is limited to one room in their apartment, he is unable to defend against the triumph 229

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of Western consumerism, which encroaches into this private space in the form of a giant Coca-Cola banner hanging directly across the street from his mother’s window. Unable to deny the existence of the banner or the presence of Coca-Cola in East Germany, he finds a novel solution: he explains, with the help of a phony news broadcast, that the banner symbolizes the West’s admission that the formula for the successful soft drink—invented in 1886—was in fact an East German invention from the 1950s stolen by the West. Thus, rather than dismissing the value of Coca-Cola as a cultural product, he merely claims East German ownership of it, which is the only possible solution given the overdetermined nature of the soft drink as a symbol of Westernization.30 Not only do products from East Germany disappear, but their value is also diminished to the point of worthlessness. When Christiane finally remembers where she has hidden her life savings—in a dresser in the living room—this long-discarded piece of furniture is suddenly imparted with great value. Although Alex eventually finds the dresser and the money hidden inside among the piles of old furniture that still line the streets, it is too late: not only have they missed the deadline for converting ostmarks to deutschmarks by two days but even had they arrived in time, the bank did not accept cash. The confrontation Alex has in the bank is ostensibly about the lost money, but it also resonates with an East German frustration regarding the status of its culture in the new Germany, where this culture, even were it not considered to be obsolete, is deemed, in its very essence, to be of no value. The film also implicitly criticizes those who are quick to reject the East in favor of the West, as made clear in the case of Alex’s sister Ariane, who has willingly embraced the fall of the Wall. Almost immediately, she has quit studying economics, taken a job in a Burger King, and become involved with her West German manager. Still traumatized by the loss of her father, who fled to the West when she was young, Ariane frequently lashes out at Alex for his attempts to reconstruct a world that happily for her has disappeared. But when she recognizes her father while working the drive-through lane, the psychic effects of this transition to a capitalist economy are made clear. Despite her emotional investment, she is unable to say anything more than the pat phrase she has learned for her job: “Enjoy your meal and thank you for choosing Burger King.” When Christiane emerges from the apartment for the first time, she is overwhelmed by physical evidence that contradicts the status quo image of the GDR that Alex had created. As she makes her way out of the 230

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apartment and down to the street, the screen begins to fill up with objects foreign to the GDR space: though she seems to overlook the Burger King uniforms hung by the door, when she emerges into the daylight, she stares disbelievingly at the front lawn of the apartment building cluttered with the furnishings of young West Germans preparing to move into her building. Fatigued and overwhelmed, she momentarily sits on a neo–art deco chair as the film frames a shot of her surrounded by leopard skin lampshades, a microwave, an exercise bike, posters, and other furniture that evoke a hipster lifestyle defined by patterns of consumption. When she continues her excursion farther away from the constructed world of her apartment, she pauses again. Standing in front of a billboard featuring a car, half-Trabant, half-Mercedes, she sees a once familiar neighborhood overrun with Western cars and new shops. In the sky, in a shot that evokes the opening sequence in La Dolce Vita (1960), she watches a statue of Lenin hanging from a helicopter slowly disappear into the distance. In Fellini’s film, the flight of a plaster statue of Christ that flies over Rome and out of view marks two transitions: on one level, it sets the stage for a portrayal of a Rome that has abandoned its moral center for a more profane lifestyle; on another level, it highlights the film as a transition between Fellini’s earlier neorealist works and his later, more fantastic films. Becker’s allusion, his suggestion of a parallel between Christ and Lenin, is both a parody of the monumentalizing and deification of Lenin and a acknowledgment that the old gods have truly departed the city. On the level of film aesthetics, it inverts Fellini’s shift, since it is at this point that the fantastic nature of Alex’s reconstruction gives way under the weight of reality. Ultimately, Alex’s charade becomes untenable, partly because of the impossibility of repelling the invasion of East Germany by Western goods and partly because, as with Sonnenallee, Alex does not create a straightforward mimetic recreation of East Germany but rather an idealized vision of a GDR that never existed, one that only serves to highlight its unreality. The restorative nostalgia, the attempt to return home through a totalizing reconstruction that characterizes Alex’s obsession with the objects of his childhood, is doomed to fail since Alex has substituted the objects themselves for the values that he saw them as symbolizing. In his last act of deception, Alex reveals to his dying mother the collapse of the border between East and West. Unable to fully reveal the truth, Alex recruits a boyhood idol, the East German cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn, to announce, as newly elected general secretary, that the 231

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West has recognized the futility of spiraling consumption and the need for something more than cars, VCRs, and television sets. East Germany, Jähn announces, is ready to reach out to others and has opened its borders and agreed to accept a capitulated West Germany into its socialist paradise. Since the film has already shown the mother learning the truth from Alex’s girlfriend, the closure that this broadcast provides is clearly for Alex. Only now, having completed his own narrative of the GDR and its demise, can he move beyond the past and engage with the reality of the present. We can thus understand Alex’s relationship to the past—and the dangers of investing objects with too much meaning—as a commentary on the Ostalgie of the present. Alex’s idealism is valued positively in the sense that his mobilization of the past enables those around him to recuperate their own positive memories. Though his neighbors were at first skeptical of Alex’s plan, in their reenactment of certain rituals of the past, such as when Christiane and Frau Schäfer write polite, but critical letters to the authorities regarding the quality of Eastern goods, they recognize that the social relations that marked their daily lives constitute a past worth saving. But it is precisely the nonmaterial, the memories of a shared social community, one often defined by its retreat from an oppressive public sphere, that hold power, not the objects, which only serve to historicize the GDR, not realize it in the present.31 Good-Bye, Lenin! ends as it begins—with a mixture of authentic old footage from the GDR and staged home movies of Alex as a child, made to look authentically old. Given the deceptions that have preceded it, this ending serves not to legitimate the film narrative through the use of historical footage but rather to raise the claim that this ostensible historical record—and history itself—is merely constructed as well. Unlike Sonnenallee, Good-Bye, Lenin! returns to a present that bears little resemblance to its constructed East German past, save for the fact that the characters who inhabit both spaces are the same.

Conclusion By attempting to provide a counterhistory of the GDR, these films confront the presumption of a negative past. They question a narrative of the GDR that conflates political freedom with consumer freedom and locates happiness solely in the fulfillment of individual desire rather than a sense of community. Both films provide an idealized vision of social har232

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mony, but one that is self-consciously artificial and visually and spatially delimited as belonging to an irretrievable past. In doing so, they seek to mobilize this utopian social state both as a critique of the present and its understanding of the GDR and as a foundation for the reestablishment of an East German identity. It is not noncoincidental that both of these films are staged as coming-of-age stories, narrated retrospectively by their protagonists in a voice-over that prevents the audience from establishing the indeterminate point in the future when this narration takes place. In both cases, the main characters connect a pivotal moment in their youth, marked by both falling in love and becoming independent from their family and an understanding of the social circumstances that defined their personal development. Coming of age is simultaneously coming to terms—by looking backward, the protagonists, like East Germans today, should be able to establish an identity and outlook that will allow them to move forward. By deliberately engaging with the contemporary fetish for cultural products of the GDR, these films implicate audiences by at first indulging this fetish, then repudiating—or attempting to repudiate—it. It is the difference in the degree of success in this repudiation that distinguishes these films in a meaningful way, a difference that can be best understood by understanding the extent to which the films’ respective critiques of consumerist practices of nostalgia coincide with a larger critical moment at work in these films. Eric Rentschler has argued that the state of German film in the 1990s can best be described as a “cinema of consensus,” where the critically driven films of the New German Cinema were replaced, for reasons aesthetic, political, and economic, by films that did not engage in cultural criticism but instead sought to “create images for a nation and to speak as a prominent and privileged voice of that nation.”32 In the eyes of its critics, such German cinema lacked any oppositional energy and functioned instead as “an emanation of an overdetermined German desire for normalcy as well as of a marked disinclination towards any serious political reflection or sustained historical retrospection.”33 The affirmative nature of contemporary German cinema, particularly with respect to the historical development of Germany since the Wende, is also apparent in subsequent films about the GDR. In the years immediately following unification, few films actually looked back on the GDR, instead focusing on presenting the current state as the logical conclusion of history.34 Films that did take a pre-Wende GDR as their setting tended to focus on the decline of the GDR, such as Margarethe von Trotta’s Das 233

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Versprechen (The Promise, 1994) and, later, Volker Schlöndorff ’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss (The Legend of Rita, 2000)—and to this list one could also perhaps add the 1999 film version of Brussig’s novel.35 Sonnenallee was therefore a rarity in that it was located firmly in the past (however phantasmagorical that past was) and ended in the past, at least visually: the voice-over accompanying the final shot—a washedout image of a deserted street—signals the end of the GDR, switching from the present tense that was used at the beginning of the film to the past tense. The self-conscious artificiality that marked the entire film, from its sets to the various moments that called attention to the film as fictionalized portrayal, reinforce the film’s temporal and spatial distance from the present, a distance that is never bridged. The visual absence of contemporary Germany from the film—this image that closes the film cannot be construed as a present-day Sonnenallee, only an imagined one—preserves the space of the GDR as distinct from the present and precludes the sort of teleological track of German unification otherwise common to films about the GDR. By contrast, the conclusion of GoodBye, Lenin! falls neatly in line with the “consensus” about German history that Rentschler described. Whereas Sonnenallee leaves unresolved the tension between individual and social, Good-Bye, Lenin! confirms not only the impossibility of a reestablishment of the GDR but also the inevitability and necessity of its demise. As Alex struggles with the impossibility of maintaining his charade, he becomes increasingly controlling in his actions and his interactions with others, essentially morphing into a version of the totalitarian state leader. As a result, even his ostensibly well-intentioned plan reveals the inherent danger of such a project. Since it will inevitably tend toward domination, such a return to—or even celebration of—the culture of the GDR must be rejected in favor of an embrace of a postunification culture, made concrete in the form of his sister and her boyfriend’s gesamtdeutsches baby. When in the final scene of the movie Alex sends his mother’s ashes into the air where they explode into the now undivided Berlin sky, his mother’s funeral, and the finality implied by such an act, is simultaneously a funeral for the GDR, which, like his mother, has been stripped of any material existence.36 Ultimately, neither film embodies those critical and Leftist positions that have been traditionally associated with New German Cinema, yet Sonnenallee offers a challenge to the consensus historiography of the GDR by asserting the possibility that it should be equally understood in terms of individual histories, not merely a single narrative. 234

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Notes 1. See, for example, Steve Korver, “Back to the Bloc: Fifteen Years after the Wall Came Down, Nostalgia Is Fuelling a New Kind of Quirky Tourism in Berlin,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), November 10, 2004: R7; Edward Wilkinson-Latham, “Go East, Young German; From the Indie Hit Good-Bye, Lenin! to Katarina Witt’s Nostalgic Chat Show to a Berlin Theme Park Replicating Life behind the Iron Curtain, a Nostalgia for the Bad Old Days Is All the Rage in Germany,” The Globe and Mail (Canada), October 15, 2003, R3; and Vera Pfister, “Süß-saure Erinnerungen; Der Ostladen im Ostalbkreis verkauft Vita Cola und Faßgurken,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 4, 2006. 2. For a discussion and exposition of the debate around Christa Wolf ’s Was bleibt, see Thomas Anz, ed., “Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf ”: der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland (Munich: Spangenberg, 1991) and Bernd Wittek, Der Literaturstreit im sich vereinigenden Deutschland: eine Analyse des Streits um Christa Wolf und die deutsch-deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften (Marburg: Tectum, 1997). 3. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, “Ostalgie: Revaluing the Past, Regressing into the Future,” GDR Bulletin 25 (1988): 1. 4. “Such practices have included the selling of East German factories to Western companies, occasionally for next to nothing; the discrediting of the GDR educational system, particularly the Abwicklung (restructuring) of the universities; the renaming of schools, streets, and other public buildings; the toppling of socialist memorials and monuments . . . discourses that ridiculed the backwardness of East Germany while ignoring the social and historical contexts that may have produced it.” See Daphne Berdahl, “   ‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos 64, no. 2 (1999): 195–96. 5. See Julia Hell, Post-fascist Fantasies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10. 6. Brussig is a particularly interesting figure in this regard. Whereas the film Sonnenallee, co-written by Brussig with Haußmann, as well as Brussig’s novel on which the film was based are infused with an impulse to recuperate GDR values seen as desirable, Helden wie wir portrays the fall of the Wall and the end of the GDR as a fitting end for an absurd and clownish state. 7. Sadowski-Smith, “Ostalgie,” 1. 8. This is not to suggest that these renovations could be reduced to mere antiGDR bias. The implications (and motivations for) this radical transformation of Berlin extend far beyond this discussion of the preservation or destruction of an identifiably East German space in Berlin, touching not only on efforts to efface the traces of a divided city (and hence a divided nation) but also on efforts to perform national memory work with respect to the Second World War and the Holocaust, reestablish the city as the capital, and revive Berlin as a modern consumer center. In fact, much of the critical discussion of the architectural transformation of the city centers precisely on the implications for national memory of the Holocaust. See Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University 235

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of Minnesota Press, 2005) as well as Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006). 9. See Brian Ladd, “Center and Periphery in the New Berlin: Architecture, Public Art, and the Search for Identity,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22, no. 2 (2000): 7–21. 10. Patricia Hogwood, “   ‘Red is for Love . . .’: Citizens as Consumers in East Germany,” in East German Distinctiveness in a Unified Germany, ed. Jonathan Grix and Paul Cooke, 46–47 (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2002). 11. David F. Crew, “Consuming Germany in the Cold War: Consumption and National Identity in East and West Germany, 1949–1989, an Introduction,” in Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. David F. Crew, 39–68 (Oxford: Berg, 2003). 12. Cited in Paul Betts, “The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture,” The Journal of Modern History 72 (September 2000): 741. 13. See Crew, “Consuming Germany,” 5–7. 14. Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended. Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 177. 15. Martin Blum, “Remaking the East German Past: Ostalgie, Identity, and Material Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 3 (2000): 231. 16. Berdahl, Where the World Ended, 176–77. 17. For an excellent and concise discussion of how critics have argued against— and for—Ostalgie, see Jennifer M. Kapczynski, “Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin Is in Germany and Good-Bye, Lenin!” Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007): 78–100. 18. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 41. 19. Ibid., 41. 20. Ibid., 43. 21. Ibid., 44. 22. Ibid., 49. 23. Ibid., 49–50. 24. Ibid., 255. 25. Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (New York: Berg, 2005), 116. 26. In a subtle touch that adds yet another level to the nostalgia of the film, Dynamo 5 was not a real GDR era group but rather a band consisting of Robert Stadlober (Wuschel, in the film) and four former members of Selig, a 1990s rock band that played grunge music heavily inflected with a 1970s-style rock sound, and was put together specifically to record the two prominent covers in the film— “Get it On” and “The Letter,” which appear in the closing scene. 27. There is also a repudiation of the West on an intertextual level here. As Paul Cooke has noted, Scheich’s arrival at the East German disco echoes the arrival of “Ace Face” (played by Sting) in Franc Roddam’s 1979 film Quadrophenia. Micha’s climactic visit to Miriam evokes the wildly successful DEFA film, Die Legende von Paul and Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, 1972/1973), when Paul took an ax to Paula’s door to break it down and be with her. Micha ascends the stairs to the 236

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Consumer Culture in Filmic Reconstructions of the GDR sound of the Pudhys’ “Geh’ zu ihr,” a hit from the earlier film. He then encounters Winfried Glatzeder, who played Paul and is even wearing the frilly shirt from the earlier movie. Paul asks him if he needs to borrow an ax, but Micha finds the door unlocked. This moment not only replaces a Western image of the desirable male with an Eastern one but, given its ironic reference to the DEFA film, distances itself from the past rather than merely reconstructing it. See Cooke, Representing East Germany, 114–17. 28. The filmmakers themselves experienced significant difficulties as well in their reconstruction of East Berlin, resorting to a great extent to CGI to “de-Westernize” the city, removing ads for Western products and lightening and graying building colors. 29. Paul Cooke writes that the film highlights the irony of contemporary Ostalgie, namely that those East Germans embracing Eastern products again were initially more than happy to discard them—as Ariane does—arguing that, the film suggests that the contemporary fetishization of consumer products from GDR is all form and no content. See Cooke, Representing East Germany, 134. 30. For a discussion of the status of Coca-Cola in both East and West Germany, see Jeff R. Schutts, “Born Again in the Gospel of Refreshment? Coca-Colonization and the Re-making of Postwar German Identity,” in Crew, Consuming Germany, 121–50. Of course, Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (1961), with James Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who spars with, and eventually loses his job to, a committed East German Communist turned executive (played by Horst Buchholz) similarly played with this notion of appropriation, albeit in reverse. 31. For a discussion of the film’s valorization of the Nischengesellschaft way of life in the GDR, see Roger F. Cook, “Good-Bye, Lenin!: Free-Market Nostalgia for Socialist Consumerism,” Seminar 43, no. 2 (2007): 206–19. 32. Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 274 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 33. Rentschler, “Cinema of Consensus,” 263. 34. See Cooke, Representing East Germany, 106–7. 35. The persistence of the notion that a representation of the GDR must include its eventual demise can be seen in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006). 36. Roger Cook persuasively argues that the symbolism of this dissemination of his mother’s ashes can be understood as an affirmation of the principles of socialism as “part of a founding myth that can unite Germans in the new Federal Republic into an imagined community,” thus positioning the heritage of the GDR as an essential element in the unification of the two Germanys (“Free-Market Nostalgia,” 211). Still, even with this recuperation of GDR culture, the consensus view of the desirability of a unified Germany remained unchallenged.

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Playing Hide-and-Seek with Tradition Games, Aesthetic Form, and Social Critique in German Cinema following the Wende

A couple of games that function as “theories” have become associated with the two decades of commercial German cinema since the fall of the Wall. The first, marking the playful side of the field, is evoked at the beginning of Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 1998). The spirit of Sepp Herberger, West German soccer’s equivalent to Yogi Berra, literally kicks off the film by booting a soccer ball out of this world and explaining, more or less, that it’s all a game: “The ball is round, the game lasts ninety minutes. That much is clear. Everything else is theory.”1 On the other side of the field, lined with a newly relegitimated nostalgia and revisionism, would be Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2003), the story of the world championship in 1954 told as a healing of the family as well as the nation. One end line connecting these two different conceptualizations of the “big game” might be the humorously serious pastime of the underemployed youth in Sebastian Schipper’s Absolute Giganten (Gigantic, 1999), where games are both more earnest and less important than in either of the other films. All three works diverge rather drastically from the parallel roles soccer plays for the “serious” filmmakers of previous generations, be it Konrad Wolf ’s use of the playing field as a metaphor of something larger, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s use of the World Cup victory to intone the social madness of Maria Braun’s demise, or Wim Wenders’s anxious avoidance of the game.2 This stylistic distance from the (supposedly) dominant styles that marked the cinemas from both Germanys in the middle of the Cold War is often read as a kind of overcoming of the cinematic legacy in Germany.3 238

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If these soccer analogies form three sides of the field bordering what some regard as the next golden age of German cinema, there is a fourth side, the end line mirroring that represented by Gigantic but with distinctly “funny games.” I have been struck by how the phrases “documentary style” and “documentary realism” are used to describe some of the award-winning, socially critical features by Fatih Akın, Andreas Dresen, and Hans-Christian Schmid. The implication seems to be that, whereas the other three sides of the field are determined by tricks and conventions, these films gain their critical edge by presenting the social and political problems of the post-Wall era in a relatively unmediated fashion.4 The use of the chronicle form in Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, 1994), which centers on the crumbling world of a clerk just before he runs amok, might tend to support the use of this term. One sequence in particular springs to mind as emblematic of this end of the field: a single take of 170 seconds shows the central figure trying to hone machine-like motions by repetition for his “game” as a high-level table tennis player.5 The relentlessness of this motion is accompanied by the constant whirr of the machine, which makes a “pop” at one-second intervals as it shoots another ball to be returned. The absolutely regular aspects of the machine noise contrast starkly with the unique, irregular sound of the balls striking the racquet and then the table, setting up a multilayered aural field even as it documents this cruel self-training. Whether treating Leistungssport (high-performance sports) or simpler pastimes, filmmakers on the side of the field modified by the notion of “documenting” never seem to forget that games are always in part sanctioned encapsulations of a dehumanizing violence that extends beyond the pounding of the ball, the opponent, and the self. Nonetheless, the notoriety of Dogme 95 and the critical recognition of new neorealisms in some other European cinemas of the 1990s notwithstanding,6 the terms “documentary style” and “documentary realism” are unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. One significant problem is that these terms direct attention away from the constructedness of “realisms,” documentary and otherwise.7 Furthermore, their use reiterates a common marketing ploy used to set new works apart from their contemporaries. For example, Christian Morris Müller, the director of Vier Fenster (Four Windows, 2006), notes that his film “doesn’t follow the classic film dramaturgy. Instead, it uses documentary styles and methods to emphasize authenticity, seeking innovative ways to give the viewer a new, unhindered and intense per239

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spective on the events.”8 “Authenticity” and “unhindered” spectatorship typically arise as the legitimations for a serious critical project, seemingly separating it from its cohort and received tradition. Interestingly, though, that does not seem to be enough positioning for the Four Windows Web site, which goes on to mention that “former Fassbinder colleague Juergen Juerges” is the director of cinematography. It seems that many of the most recent German films have only overcome the New German Cinema when it was convenient. The present essay seeks out and explores a more honest documenting of games of violence, a representational lineage that neither searches for easy consensus nor apologizes for its heritage, which is rooted in the critical cinematic traditions reaching back before 1989.9 At stake here, I argue, are the games of cinematic realism. In exploring this I turn to the early works of Wolfgang Becker and Andreas Kleinert, both of whom won prizes for their student films and have since been associated with the new critical style. They have also become absolutely central figures in the mainstream film world of postWall Germany: in addition to making one of the best known German films since 1990 (Good-Bye, Lenin!), Becker was a cofounder of X-Filme, and Kleinert has been an extremely prolific TV director and producer. Whereas people on the production and criticism sides of the industry have placed much emphasis on the departure of this new age of filmmakers from the previous ones, Becker and Kleinert show distinct roots in the divided Germanys of the late Cold War, West and East, respectively. Easily identified are tendencies of, for example, the revival of the Weimar workers’ film in the New German Cinema, the aesthetic of the anti-Heimatfilm, and techniques from “Eastern” traditions, such as the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR’s) Kombinatsfilm, the long-term documentary, and alternative poetic visions. Thus, the analysis here will show more continuities than breaks with the past, as the new “documentary style” resolves itself into creative variations on the naturalistic conventions of realism—both psychological and poetic. In what follows, I concentrate on two distinct stylistic traits of both Becker and Kleinert’s early work. The first is a repetition of visual elements and sequences associating an empty or ruined environment with the protagonists. A relationship (sometimes real, sometimes imagined) between a character’s interior and the world’s exterior structure arises from the mise-en-scène, a relationship making these figures the focal points of determinate forces. Although this relationship will be devel240

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oped primarily at a visual level, the second marker I observe is the use of sound to imply that the visual space shown is not limited to a reflection of the central character. The tension between the visual and aural tracks in these moments belies the psychologically realistic impulse of the mise-en-scène, opening a space of aesthetic apprehension for grasping structural power palpable only in its effects. This dynamic is particularly evident in Becker’s early films, where claustrophobic working-class interiors and economically ruined neighborhoods of the “rust belt” give form to his characters. Aptly for the current context, Schmetterlinge (Butterflies, 1988), his award-winning final project at the German Film and TV Academy in Berlin, opens with a vivid example of the combination of these elements and closes with the protagonist kicking a soccer ball against a wall between decrepit buildings. The story centers on an unemployed nineteen-year-old in the days after a young girl has gone missing. As she was last seen in his presence, the unspoken question throughout the film is whether Andi did her in and with what motivation. Told without a systematic presentation of time, the plot does not so much unfold as come in interpenetrating waves that deposit layers of alienation in the Ruhrgebiet before the viewer.10 In the opening moments Andi literally arises from the canal and the surrounding ruins, a product of this landscape, yet the diegetic sounds are constant and close, making us privy to the man’s constant panting and footsteps to an extent that seems impossible because of the initial camera placement. The sounds continue unaltered as the following shots come from varying distances and angles. Hence, this conventional insistence on the immediacy of the moment and the embedded nature of the character already contains a tension that naturalizes itself for the viewer into the reflection of a psychological reality. Moments into the film that sense of psychological alienation of this figure will be accentuated by what seem to be nondiegetic sounds: as he hurries past a vacant lot the camera cuts to a medium frontal view of Andi as a shrill, indefinable noise shoots through the constructed realism of the aural track. The viewer, knowing no narrative motivation for this sound, initially interprets it as a further device in the psychological construction of the running figure. In the next shots the man turns to enter the lot, where an eyeline match shows a young boy swinging a perforated piece of drainage tubing through the air to create the sound. This shift from nondiegetic to diegetic sound reconfigures the sense of privileged interiority, so central to the psychological realism with which 241

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Andi (Bertram von Boxberg) rises from the canal in Wolfgang Becker’s Butterflies (1988).

the film began, into a social constellation. A useful parallel can be drawn here to the first instance of diegetic sound in Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe, oder Wem gehört die Welt (Kuhle Wampe, or To Whom Does the World Belong, 1932). The famous opening in a Berlin marked by endless waiting and then a furious, fruitless bicycle-race-for-work is accompanied by Hanns Eisler’s disharmonic, frantic score. The music ceases as the race does, leaving a brief moment of silence as the unsuccessful job seekers slowly walk their bikes through back streets. As one young man turns to enter the inner court of his housing block (Mietskaserne), an alien-sounding, but nonetheless oddly harmonic tune descends on the scene. At first taking this as another associative soundtrack—much like the expression of alienated waiting and unproductive labor in the opening score—the viewer soon learns that this song emanates from two men in the interior of the block, one of whom is playing a saw. After listening silently to the music players, the young rider goes upstairs to listen silently as his family continues its perpetual lifeless quarrel about his lack of character because he cannot get a job—middle-class platitudes serving the parents as an ersatz understanding of “their” world. Zweckentfremdung, Verfremdung, and Verwandlung are the immanent expressions of people and things in Brecht’s world then and Becker’s world now.11 When the sounds and the talking stop in Kuhle Wampe, the young man removes his watch and 242

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Andi meets a young boy swinging a perforated piece of drainage tubing in Butterflies.

jumps from the window because making “one less unemployed” is the only rational way to contribute to the family12; in Butterflies, however, the sound progresses from the “inside” out and does not culminate in the internalization of violence against the self as the alternative to burdening one’s family. In the Gelsenkirchen of the late 1980s the internalized response is to exercise power over others whenever possible. Andi violently grabs the “toy” from the boy and replaces him in the child’s game of making this diegetic music, both naturalized and alien. If one target of Dudow and Brecht’s critique is the manner in which the proletariat has adopted the mores and self-perceptions of the petite bourgeoisie—thus fostering intraclass competition and hindering solidarity—then Becker’s early work lays bare the “prole on prole” violence that stems from class relations but has no means of finding its way back to class struggle. In doing so he generally opts for a more conventionally realistic structure than his Weimar predecessors. Indeed, his next film, Kinderspiele (Children’s Games, 1992), is reminiscent of the naturalism of certain critical anti-Heimat films, especially those built around children, such as Hauff ’s Paule Pauländer (1975/1976). Yet even the glimmer of hope offered at the end of that film is snuffed out in Becker’s reiteration of a social Darwinian dynamic in which one either dominates others or is subjected to their power and violence. Becker’s main figure is Micha, the middle child in a household made up of his father, a construction worker 243

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prone to brutality, his mother, the second wife who dotes on his little brother, his older stepsister from the earlier marriage, and his physically and mentally ill paternal grandmother. The summer following Micha’s unprecedented scholastic successes—he gets grades good enough to take him to the Gymnasium—turns into a nightmare. His mother leaves with “her baby,” Micha’s first views of sexuality repulse him, and the abuse at home and away become more intense. Micha tries to put an end to it by striking back in a self-defensive reflex that kills his dad. Since the exercise of physical and psychological violence is a structural constant, there seems neither a mechanism to elude it nor a means to address it. Even Micha’s year-end grades, signaling that he can get access to the upper levels of the educational system and, perhaps, become socially mobile, make no difference—indeed they seem to raise more anger.13 Instead, because he could not lift his invalid grandmother from the toilet and failed to bring in the coal, he is severely beaten by his father, who is not un- but overemployed as a manual laborer. Left cowering beneath the kitchen table, Micha finds no solace in the rest of the family: his little brother, whom he terrorizes in turn, and his mother, who can no longer cope herself, both take advantage of this moment of weakness to belittle him. “Das hast du davon!” (literally, “That’s what you get from it”), she says, but leaves the referent open. Along with Micha, the viewer suspects that “it” is not his set of actions but rather simply being in the world itself. But as horrible as this world is, Micha fights hard to maintain it. Even though the you-have-to-hit-me game always left Micha lying hurt on the ground of the abandoned warehouse that was among their playgrounds, he is clearly sad when he sees his buddy, the bully Kalli, playing the game with another kid. Of course, he is smarter than Kalli, but that only opens him to more abuse. Aside from being brutalized, and brutalizing others when he can, Micha spends time hammering nails into the walls and posts of his basement. The sounds and images of hammering place the viewer radically in the diegesis, participating in cinematic reality in a manner akin to the realism envisioned by Georg Lukacs. The mise-en-scène links to a character’s psychological state and then gestures through it to a broader milieu that frustrates the utopian impulse. Repeated sequences of this pointless and unproductive child labor become an indication that violence is the only mode of expression familiar to him and simultaneously the expression of a wish for something better.

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The soundtrack changes at two points in the film, attempting to insert a new kind of space into this world. Twice Micha is shown taking bubble baths, shot in long takes with the camera slowly pushing toward him to the accompaniment of ethereal, nondiegetic music and Micha’s voice-over, an internal monologue. During the first bath, which follows the beating described earlier, he fantasizes about the vastness of space, giving in to the urge to forget his predicament by pretending that each of the bubbles contains a whole universe and hosts of inhabitants. But even this, his most peaceful moment of escape, only opens an avenue to express the wish to exercise power over others: “I can destroy them all,” he says as he carefully pops bubbles individually with his finger, “just imagine it.” Here the combination of the nondiegetic sound and the most naturalized convention of psychological realism—the inner monologue—is used to express the individual wish frustrated by the social functions differently from in the Lukacsian tradition alluded to earlier. Micha’s repeated phrase, “just imagine it” (in German “man muss sich das mal vorstellen”), is a constant refrain throughout film, but its link to imagined violence in the tub serves to reinforce the fact that even Micha can imagine no alternatives. In many ways, nothing is left to the imagination in this world, despite the tranquil dreaminess of the music and the brightness of these well-lit images when contrasted with the rest of the film, which has no other nondiegetic sound and few high-key sequences. The second bath scene comes at the film’s end. After his mother has left he begins forging letters from his father to her, stating that she should come back because “Micha needs you.” The only possibility of such personal, vulnerable expression takes place in a forgery, in the guise of another. When this game of lying is discovered by his father and mother, neither recognizes the moment of truth that this lie entails. The beating that his father brings down on him is choreographed exactly as the earlier one in the kitchen, with Micha escaping to cower in a corner. But this time it takes place in the basement, and his father comes after him again because he assumes that Micha’s letters have been crafted to belittle him further. Instinctively Micha grabs his hammer and buries it in the man’s head, then watches in horror as the older figure collapses on the coal unable to rise. After attempts to revive him prove useless, the film jumps abruptly to Micha hammering again, this time nailing the door to the coal room shut. He has been in apprenticeship to this futile

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work of trying to bring closure to this episode of violence throughout his life—without knowing it. After a second, smoother but still indeterminate ellipsis, we return to him soaking in the bubble bath that has been his one refuge. The final interior shot dollies toward Micha but this time disappears into the bubbles and then emerges magically to pull back from the outside wall of the house. This sequence is unique in the film, which has rigorously followed conventions of continuity editing to this point. This exertion of the power of the camera does not lead us to another world, despite being accompanied by the same nondiegetic music that earlier might have carried Micha’s imagination to the stars. Rather, it moves through Micha’s walls only to freeze on an image of his house, one of many “bubbles” containing life to be exterminated. In the image as well is a bubble-like police Volkswagen outside the house, the visual trace of an authority that has been absent throughout the film—one that could perhaps have intervened productively at an earlier stage but now only arrives to ensure that the tragedy is complete. However, since the state does not have a monopoly on legitimized violence in this world, the games will continue even though this one is at an end. Those inside the bubbles remain subject to the crushing power of the less-than-benign indifference of the outside. Andreas Kleinert’s Neben der Zeit (Outside Time, 1995) shows an even more pronounced sense of this dynamic of inside and outside. The premise is simple: there will be no more local train traffic, so the station at Nedlitz will be closing and the town’s already marginal reasons for existence will be significantly reduced. The action opens on a party celebrating the last runs soon to be taking place, even though it means that the bleak economic situation in this former-GDR nest will almost certainly get worse. The main character, Sophie, works at the station and lives at home with her mother and closeted brother, Georg, in an apartment owned by the hairdresser who employs her mother. They keep a threadbare existence together while maintaining the habits of the German Spiessbürgertum (petite bourgeoisie) that have filtered down through the GDR. Something begins to change for Sophie when she chances upon Sergej, a Soviet deserter who still lives at the abandoned base in the area. He wins her sympathy late one night by pretending to have been shot and later will cut himself in the side to complete the illusion and get her to care for him. The romance that follows brings Sergej into the family and then leads to tragedy when Georg kills the stranger out of sexual jealousy tinged by xenophobia and historical resentment. 246

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The final interior shot of Wolfgang Becker’s Children’s Games (1992) dollies toward Micha (Jonas Kipp) and disappears into the bubbles only to emerge and pull back from the outside wall of the house.

The finale shows Sophie on the back of the last train leaving for “the city,” looking back at what was her life. Though somewhat more hopeful than Becker in his early films, Kleinert also uses the interplay of realism’s conventions within its visual and aural tracks to simultaneously naturalize and estrange its depiction of relentless structural pressures that emerge as individuated acts of violence. The most important visual aspects of this film are the decayed complexes that dot the flat Eastern landscape in the wake of the Wende, those that become projections of characters’ fantasies as well as documentations of pre- and post-Wende failures that never smack of nostalgia. The first long shot of the town of Nedlitz is the only one that shows it as a unified image. A 270-degree pan in the first sequence starts with flat, open space then turns to look at a train roaring past. As the express leaves the frame, it reveals the town in the distance, quaint but isolated. Melancholy music intones as a dissolve moves the camera closer to the next train roaring past, uncovering the train station just across the tracks. A woman’s voice is heard on the loudspeaker announcing a delay in the next arrival. After two fades to indicate the passing of time into night, a medium close shot places us directly in front of Sophie’s window as we see her mouth her next announcement, which we again hear over the public address system with no change in volume. Most interesting for 247

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this analysis is the way that Sophie’s announcements do not change their quality even though one is “heard” from across the tracks while looking at the station, whereas the other is heard as we stand close to her. Something is amiss with our realistic perception at the outset: although these are standard techniques of sound segue and editing used in cinematic realism to establish space for the viewer, the denial of changed spatial relations suggested by the unaltered sound quality questions the relations between the outside and the world viewed through the glass. This opening play of sound and sight will soon enter the diegetic world to structure our knowledge of the characters, especially Sophie. After the first meeting with Sergej, for example, Kleinert cuts to a medium shot of the young woman screaming for joy as another express train roars past, taking her sounds with it. The shot resembles one that could have been taken from the opening sequence: the camera shooting parallel and exceptionally close to the train. But this time the shot brings us especially close to Sophie without allowing us to hear her words. Although distance created no hindrance to aural comprehension at first, proximity offers no guarantee of it now. The shift between proximate distance and a distanced proximity sets out and calls into question the field in which the games of social interaction play themselves out. The playing field is given an additional dimension when Sophie steps through the fence of the old Soviet base in search of Sergej. Kleinert takes us on a visual journey that would be worthy of the poetic realism that developed in the USSR, part remnant of the monumental soviet self-image and part aestheticized industrial ruin, injecting historical relations into images that simultaneously are alien and constituent elements of her own psychosocial makeup. The studied pace of the marvelous alternation of camera position and angle of framing injects a visual rhythm into the tensions of interiors and exteriors alluded to above, leaving Sophie a figure subject to various weights of buildings and light. Although she can move unimpeded in and out, the sequence lends a sense that the easy division between the two is not so clear because the aesthetic composition of almost all the images work on the conflict between the two. The film often mitigates the tension between exterior and interior spaces by mediating them across glass, as we saw in the opening sequence. A telling occurrence takes place in the second meeting between the couple in the abandoned air tower that Sergej now calls home. Sophie returns to bring him some new clothing but finds that the control 248

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room is empty. She meanders over to look out of the observation windows, where a sequence of standard shots cut between Sophie’s back as she looks out of the large window, the panorama she views, and images of her shot through the window from outside. She looks at open space for the first time, taking a position in the tower that overlooks the panorama once controlled by the occupiers. The sequence continues, with one cut returning to the eyeline match of the panorama, but now the view is blocked by Sergej’s face pressed against the glass, seemingly the manifestation of the longing implied in the sequence of her looking at the distance. Another standard construction of psychological realism is at work here: our surprise at Sergej’s instantaneous appearance slips into and justifies Sophie’s startled response, which we see in a shot from the Russian’s point of view (POV) outside the window. Because this is also the position from which the camera has looked previously, the tension between the inside and outside both invites and denies identification with the figures in a manner that uses spatial relations across the glass to imply psychological ones. The specter of the former East Bloc is raised by the airbase more concretely than at any other location, but it is present throughout the film. The sociopolitical narrative here is that, as the Soviet forces depart, the Russian mafia arrives. The personal backdrop is the sad story of Sophie’s parents’ failed marriage, which is tied up with the Soviet’s presence

Sophie’s (Julia Jäger’s) view is blocked by Sergej’s (Michael Poretschenkow’s) face when it is pressed against the glass in Andreas Kleinert’s Outside Time (1995). 249

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and which, most importantly, has left Georg with unbridgeable rifts in his desires. His pride and joy is a 1962 Soviet car, fully restored from the junkyard in which he works, but he also despises the Russians. After initially bristling at Sergej’s appearance, they become close friends and often play games together; however, each playful game contains a moment in which Georg snaps and becomes violent toward the Russian. Shot composition and screen placement link spatial relations to these problems as well. As Sergej and Georg explore the base together, shots of the German looking up at the Russian—such as from the bottom of an empty pool and again from the floor in front of a stage—evoke, and exaggerate, conventional tropes of power disparity and of desire. Thus, in a different but parallel manner to Sophie, Georg and Sergej occupy individual, sexual, and historical positions of desire and incompatibility. Overcoming the difference and desire implied in these positions is, of course, the physical and metaphorical aim of their games at this point, which invariably fail. This is translated to the level of film form in moments of exuberant celebration. For example, after her first kiss Sophie runs ecstatically down the tarmac in a variation on her reaction after first meeting Sergej; the audience previously saw her shout but heard only the train; now it sees her run, but only the camera gains ground. Here Kleinert uses an accelerated camera pullback to distance the viewer from the main character in a moment of happiness, as if it cannot be borne. This technique is repeated later when Sophie, Sergej, and Georg play at flying on that same stretch of runway, weaving back and forth with their “wings” spread. The rapid pullback has the effect of seeming to recoil from their happiness and dwarfing them in the distance of the desolate landscape. The camera seems blasted backward into the rest of the catastrophic narrative like Benjamin’s angel of history, with Georg’s eventual murder of Sergej the inevitable result of their games of proximity and desire on top of years of personal and geopolitical tension. The film’s final sequence plays on our memory of this pullback but requires a crucial aural slippage first to reverse the fragmentation of Nedlitz as a “place” noted at the outset. Bizarre sounds that prove to be (initially) diegetic cause locations that have had no established—or imaginable—physical proximity to one another to bleed together. Georg’s beloved opera emerges from the junkyard, transforming it into an aestheticized dystopia at the heart of Nedlitz that expands as the music bridges the cut to the train station, which the viewer “knows” from the opening shots is outside of town and adjacent to nothing. The effect is 250

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a momentary temporal imbalance of these naturalistic images and their relation to one another, one that denies the dynamic of inside and outside, down and up, that has structured so much of the film and, thus, loosens the iron bonds of this social reality long enough to allow Sophie to jump on a train. Once again, we see her looking through glass, but the subsequent POV shot implies that she moves with the receding camera, gazing out of the back of the train. In the best traditions of melodramatic realism, like the final shot of Zarah Leander in Detlef Sierk’s La Habanera (1937), an ironic sense of loss now occupies the space where Sophie looks, for the direction of her gaze echoes that into which she once projected desires, toward which she thought she was moving. Now, however, she is moving away with the camera, into a future that she and the audience know must be better. Kleinert’s Outside Time echoes Becker’s sense of relentless desperation in depicting the “little people’s” situation in the post-Wende period; however, in leaving open the possibility of the young heroine’s escape from this bleak and brutal life, he emulates the gesture that ended the anti-Heimat film Paule Pauländer or, in a different fashion, Konrad Wolf ’s Solo Sunny (1980), both of which involve little people trying to make it big. No such escape is conceivable for the protagonist of Kleinert’s Wege in die Nacht (Paths in the Night, 1999), his best known and most powerful film to date, for Walter can never conceive of himself as the “little man.” A former party functionary who was in charge of a large, now defunct factory, he is having trouble adjusting to the inactivity and loss of status he has endured following reunification. He loathes his old colleagues for having adjusted to capitalism as if there were no ethical difference between the systems; but, really at stake for Walter are authority, individual recognition, and manhood rather than ethics. To reestablish some sense of order he recruits a brother-sister team of rowdies and convinces them to work with him nights patrolling the subways and trains of Berlin, meeting the violence of criminals with superior violence. He deludes himself into thinking that they share his cause (ill defined and tenuous at best) and so finds treasonous their refusal to continue to work with him when they hear that he was a high-ranking “comrade.” He takes them to the factory to explain himself but ends up shooting Gina, the sister, and from that point on slips ever deeper into his own fantasy world, eventually returning to the factory to shoot himself.

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Those familiar with the film’s opening will not be surprised to learn that Kleinert wrote his doctoral study on Tarkovsky, as many of the images seem to be constructed in homage to Stalker (1979), among others. Although he shares Tarkovsky’s penchant for locating the sublime in the empty or twisted ruins of socialism’s industrial creations, Kleinert veers away from reinjecting them with mystery; rather, the projection of psychological states takes precedence over any attempt to gesture beyond the here and now, unless it is back to the “then” of the GDR. A slow pan across the line of the horizon canted slightly for modernist effect accompanies the credits. Continuing to move left, the camera tilts to the ground and then up again to reveal an industrial complex in the distance. The film’s first cut jumps to show several birds in flight within one of the towers we just glimpsed. A simple tilt upward transforms the dark walls and gray sky into a hauntingly close “full moon” as the flapping of the disturbed pigeons’ wings echoes loudly on the soundtrack. This is followed by a series of individual shots that look like images from Kombinatsfilme (factory films) in which the subjects have continued to age. The first is a wide, long shot of the whole complex with a human figure barely discernible in a catwalk. Walter, facing the physical manifestation of the power from which he derived his sense of self, is dwarfed by the weight of the buildings that surround him. A succession of aestheticized, postindustrial images concludes the opening. After introducing Walter in this manner, the film becomes straightforwardly naturalistic, with tensions between the visual and aural tracks, tensions that inhere in realistic cinematic conventions, becoming key at particularly expressive points of the film. The recurring drum track is most noticeable in this regard. Fascinated by the rhythms on Gina’s cassette player, Walter begins to listen through headphones to this pulse of her youth. After one night’s vigilante work, during which he has induced a young skinhead to jump from a moving train, he sits in his car outside the corner bar near his apartment. Although firmly positioned outside the car window, the audience hears what Walter hears, and the psychological boundaries between him and the outer world—and the viewers—begin to dissolve. An eyeline-match furthers this effect when Walter, at the sound of the applause on the concert tape, turns to look at people emerging from the bar. Recognition is, of course, one of the things craved by Walter, so he assumes it is for him; when what he sees does not coincide with the applause, he simply returns to listening. For the viewer, however, the unsettling erasure of boundaries remains. 252

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A slow pan across the line of the horizon accompanies the opening credits of Andreas Kleinert’s Paths in the Night (1999). Continuing to move left, the camera tilts to the ground and then up again to reveal an industrial complex in the distance.

This uncertainty will be enhanced throughout the film, because Walter returns Gina’s Walkman but she gives him the tape to keep. We often hear it as the soundtrack even when we do not see him insert it in a tape player; hence, it often intones in spaces where there is no source. As in the scene outside the bar, the effect is one of hearing what he hears in a manner that is both motivated by the diegesis and impossible at the same time. One particularly telling sequence begins with Walter driving and the drums playing. The cacophonous noises both inside and outside his mind give way to a deafening, nearly tactile stillness in the next shot, a highly stylized aerial take that descends upon him lying on a blanket in a kind of still-life-with-gun-and-lighter. It is, in essence, an ambiguous image containing material manifestations of his past and present: the sense of self associated with the life he had before (the gun) juxtaposed 253

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Walter (Hilmar Thate) witnesses the demolition of an old GDR building in Kleinert’s Paths in the Night.

to his potentially explosive inability to function now (the gold lighter, given to his wife as a tip by a restaurant patron). He is brought out of his nearly catatonic state by a cell phone call from Gina’s mother, saying that she is not doing well but that she idolizes him and everything is all right. Walter hangs up almost without uttering a word but then moves with alacrity as his watch sounds an alarm. He hurries to see the demolition of an old GDR building. Whether computer-generated imagery or telephoto, the shot composition here flattens the image so that he literally stands in the face of the collapsing edifice in which he had so much invested. The constellation of the gun and the lighter corresponds to the possibilities Walter perceives for gaining respect in his old and new countries, power and presents. The change to the new society of commodities is not apprehended directly, but rather he sees power working here in a kind of potlatch that binds receivers to the givers, initiated when Gina gives him the tape. But the golden lighter becomes key; the customer gives his wife the lighter, and then she gives it to Walter. He becomes increasingly frantic and paranoid and even becomes violent with his wife. In an effort at communication she comments on the lighter’s beauty, and Walter vows to give her a present that will make her as beautiful as she can be. He later bestows the lighter on a waitress to show Gina’s brother 254

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that he has power over women, just before they rob a jewelry store in one of the glass-filled arcades of the new Germany. Walter leaves a pearl necklace in a circle on his wife’s pillow, a final effort to be somebody, at least in her eyes.14 The film moves rapidly to its conclusion as Walter drives back to his plant to end his life. He sits in the car momentarily watching four children kick a ball on the spot where he had previously shot Gina. A girl comes over to look in the window, but Walter silently raises it. As the girl begins to move back to the game, there is a cut to view the outside of one of the towers next to which a bird sits on a wire, roughly at the same place and scale as the first shot of Walter at the film’s opening. A gunshot echoes, which sets the bird in flight, the beating of its wings audible despite the distance, now recalling sounds from the opening. There is a cut back to a medium close shot of the girl who turns to look then returns to her friends, but when she joins them there are only three figures, not four. Aside from reducing their number by one, the suicide seems to have no effect as they continue their game. The camera cranes back and up to gradually reduce their size in relation to the ruins around them, as the drumbeat track starts softly and slowly swells. This marks the return of what had become Walter’s “mental” leitmotif, along with the visual and aural associations of the film’s opening and closing, allowing his mania to spread out and over the entire milieu. At the end the camera pans slightly up and to the right to remove the children from the frame entirely, leaving only the visual weight of the abandoned plant weighting both sides of the screen, with the game continuing unseen beneath. After leaving a moment for the viewers to orient themselves in relation to that weight, a final drumbeat marks the cut to black. The critical thrust in all four films discussed here is both post- and pre-Wende, relying on continuities in social realities as much as in film traditions. From the focus on the disenfranchised under capitalism to the graphic depiction of violence to the psychological investment in central characters who fail, the naturalism of these films seems at first brush to be filmed in a documentary style that is unrelentingly realistic. However, it is the moments of aesthetic disharmony in the mise-enscène and soundscape that allow them to become powerfully stylistic documentations of social representation. Neither for getting it “right” in terms of milieu nor in handheld proximity to “real” characters do these films from the 1980s and 1990s deserve to be thought of as having a kind of “documentary style.” If they are remarkable, it is for the aesthetic 255

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embedding of social representation in the illusion of the created world before the camera. Though they are certainly a long way from the selfaestheticizing world of Run, Lola, Run, for them “After the game is before the game,” just as Sepp Herberger would have us believe. Such games of cinematic realism were already transnational, and transcultural, well before the reunification of the German nation.

Notes 1. “Der Ball ist rund, das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten. Soviel ist schon mal klar. Alles andere ist Theorie.” This is a slight embellishment of the Fussballweisheit (soccer adage) “Der Ball ist rund, und das Spiel dauert neunzig Minuten,” generally attributed to Herberger. Der Ball ist rund (The Ball Is Round) was a longrunning soccer broadcast that would have been familiar even to film viewers who had no interest in sports. 2. Wolf, Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz (The Naked Man in the Stadium, 1974); Fassbinder, Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979); Wenders, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1972). 3. See, for example, Christine Haase, “You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide: Transcultural Filmmaking in Run, Lola, Run,” in Light Motives: German Popular Cinema in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy, 395–416 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). 4. Those phrases were frequently dropped at the 2005 European Cinema Research Forum. A portion of this essay investigated this term and was first presented at the 2006 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference on a panel exploring the question of whether a new golden age had begun in German cinema. 5. Since it is precluded in a way by the category of “German” cinema, Michael Haneke’s work cannot be considered here fully, although it might well fit and, in a more expansive discussion, link these trends in Germany to broader ones across Europe. Certainly the transference of social violence and display of overt physical violence explored in Haneke’s early films (see also Benny’s Video [1992] and Funny Games [1997]) are very much at the root of the games documented here. On games in a different but related vein, see Maurizio Viano, “Life Is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory, and Holocaust Laughter,” Film Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1999): 26–34 and David Bathrick, “Rescreening the Holocaust: The Children’s Stories,” New German Critique 80 (Spring–Summer, 2000): 41–58. 6. On this see John Orr, “New Directions in European Cinema,” in European Cinema, ed. Elizabeth Ezra, 299–317 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 7. The most concise treatment of this issue I have found is John Corner’s, especially “Documentary Realism,” in The Television Genre Book, ed. Glen Creeder, 124–29 (London: BFI Publishing, 2001). 8. Christian Morris Mueller at http://www.german-films.de/app/filmarchive/ film_view.php?film_id=1379. 256

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Games, Aesthetic Form, and Social Critique in German Cinema 9. Elsewhere I have traced the roots of a different, openly cynical variation of film violence in the post-Wall era (see John E. Davidson, “Crime and the Cynical Solution: Black Comedy, Critique, and the Spirit of Self-Concern in Recent German Film” in Halle and McCarthy, Light Motives, 259–80). If the “field of play” analogy that I toy with here were taken to its extreme, the Nietzschean black comedies I chart there might be the most apt participants in the game on the field itself. 10. The film takes place in the rust belt industrial area around the Ruhr River. At the end of Butterflies, the audience knows that Andi did spend time with the missing girl in the postindustrial spaces by the canal in Gelsenkirchen, that he did make a very ineffectual attempt to molest her, but that she ignored his exhortations to “touch him.” She died simply by falling down as she ran away. He did not pursue her. 11. There is no easy translation for this first term, which refers to using something in a manner that is different from its intended or “natural” use. Thus, the “alienation” of the saw’s purpose as a tool into a musical instrument (Zweckentfremdung) is the manifestation of both the problematic nature of alienation (Verfremdung) under capitalism and the power for transformation (Verwandlung) under those same conditions. Brecht speaks of the way the potential power in the last has been overlooked by those bemoaning the transformation of culture into commodity in film (“The Three-Penny Trial: A Sociological Experiment,” in German Essays on Film, ed. Richard W. McCormick and Alison Gunther-Pal, 111–32 (New York: Continuum, 2004). In this case the transformation allows something akin to an authentic proletarian cultural expression. 12. “Ein Arbeitlose weniger” is the title of the first portion of the Kuhle Wampe. The young man accomplishes this by jumping out of a window after listening to his family rehearse the “same fight as every day” and being reminded by the family’s wall hanging that one must keep trying to avoid “becoming a burden to one’s loved ones” (“den Geliebten zu Last zu fallen”). To avoid this his final contribution is to fall from the window. 13. While lost within the family drama of Children’s Games, one might want to give space to the notion that anti-intellectualism in response to education as an avenue to social mobility stems neither simply from the schadenfreude of the stupid nor from a false sense of competition but also from a latent recognition that the illusion of “individual overcoming” is part and parcel of that which makes real social change nearly unattainable. 14. Although not possible in the space afforded me here, an intriguing parallel may be drawn between the obsession with presents and the gesture of leaving the pearls on the pillow in Kleinert’s film and in Helmut Käutner’s Romanze in Moll (Romance in a Minor Key, 1943), which uses displaced realism to show unfulfilled longing under the present conjuncture without significantly challenging it. This parallel would also note a high angle “still” life shot that occurs moments earlier in that film following the little man’s quiet breakdown during which his head collapses on his wife’s broken picture.

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Imaging Germany The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold

The task is first of all once again to see something, to hear. —Christian Petzold, “Mailwechsel ‘Berliner Schule’  ”1

In my contribution to this volume, I would like to pick up its central argument—that German cinema at the turn of the century has once again become a politically charged arena—by turning to the work of a director many observers in Germany consider among the most significant of the post-Wall era: Christian Petzold. On the most general level, focusing this essay on Petzold’s work affords me the opportunity to introduce his work into the scholarly discourse on contemporary (German) cinema, which thus far has barely taken note of him, even though his stature in Germany continues to grow and, judging by his films’ reception at home, already outshines that of most of his peers.2 In specific terms of this volume, however, examining Petzold’s oeuvre in some detail has the distinct advantage of dealing with a body of films that raise the question of the “political” precisely by refusing to make explicitly political films. That is, what is of particular interest for the goals of the Collapse of the Conventional is Petzold’s films’ tendency to reopen the question of what counts as political in the first place by insisting, with the likes of Theodor W. Adorno and Gilles Deleuze, that art’s capacity for the political lies in its specific aesthetic nature rather than in its ability to communicate a message.3 Importantly, Petzold’s films’ insistence on cinema as an aesthetic operation—and the notion that these films, in the end, are political precisely because of their specific aesthetics—reflects a larger phenomenon 258

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in contemporary German cinema that by now has been codified under the label “Berlin School.” To get at the political nature of Petzold’s work, then, it might be best to situate his work within the debate on the Berlin School as a means to show how the political discourse on contemporary German cinema has played itself out in recent years and how that discourse itself raises the more general question of political resistance in contemporary Germany in the age, as is often said in Germany, of Hartz IV.4 The latest wave of creatively innovative German films began to emerge subterraneously, largely unnoticed by the (German) press from the mid1990s on—at the very moment when German mainstream cinema was dominated by what film historian Eric Rentschler aptly describes as “cinema of consensus” productions, such as Katja von Garnier’s Abgeschminkt (Making Up, 1993) and Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not, 1994), which appealed to a national “fun culture” audience but were largely ignored internationally.5 This “cinema of consensus” can itself be traced back, as David Clarke argues, to what prominent German film historians Hans-Günther Pflaum and Hans Helmut Prinzler “had already noted in the films of younger directors in the 1980s: namely, a ‘cinema of affluence.’ In this the conventions of commercial cinema and the privileging of technical competence over critical subject matter were significant factors.”6 The Berlin School is distinguished from these cinemas of affluence and consensus. In fact, the Berlin School films neither willfully universalize their cultural-historical specificity—as do, for instance, many postunification German comedies of consensus such as Rainer Kaufmann’s Stadtgespräch (Talk of the Town, 1995)—nor sidestep the difficulties of the present by once again dutifully (re)turning to the by now neatly codified horrors of the past, as did the recent wave of “Hitler films” such as Dennis Gansel’s Napola (Before the Fall, 2004), Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005), and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004). These films’ appeal to international audiences was hardly coincidental, for it is as if they (pathologically) wanted to corroborate the ideologically convenient belief perpetuated abroad that Germany is still almost exclusively reducible to its Nazi past.7 But perhaps most crucially, the Berlin School films also mark the first significant collective attempt at advancing the aesthetics of cinema within German narrative filmmaking since the heyday of the New German Cinema of Rainer Werner Fass259

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binder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, Margarethe von Trotta, Klaus Lemke, and others. So who or what is the Berlin School?8 In its most limited scope, the label originally referred to what is now known as the first generation of the Berlin School: Christian Petzold, Thomas Arslan, and Angela Schanelec. All three attended and graduated from the Deutsche Filmund Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) in the early 1990s and were (in part) taught by avant-garde and documentary filmmakers Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky (the latter served until recently as the president of what has traditionally been Germany’s most intellectual and political film academy). However, the “Berlin School” label is somewhat misleading when it is used to include those who are now considered the second generation of Berlin School filmmakers such as Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winckler, both graduates of the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg; Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, and Maren Ade, graduates of the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München; Maria Speth, who honed her skills at the HFF “Konrad Wolf ” in Potsdam-Babelsberg; and Valeska Grisebach, who studied film in Vienna.9 But it is not merely the different geographical and educational backgrounds of these filmmakers that suggest the problematic nature of this label. From numerous interviews with the main protagonists, as well as from some of their statements made at a symposium on the “New Berlin School” that took place at the dffb in September 2006, one can glean that many who now find themselves considered a Berlin School filmmaker fear that their individuality is being subsumed under an overly generalizing classification. At best, therefore, many so-called Berlin School directors reluctantly tolerate being associated with this label.10 Still, the label “Berlin School” has now become part of the daily vocabulary of German film critics—so much so that at times discussions of the merits of an individual film are quickly subordinated to considerations of the film as a film of this school. Understandably, neither filmmakers nor more adventurous film critics are particularly fond of this tendency.11 But the fact that this label holds much force as a shorthand for describing what many consider the most significant movement in German filmmaking of the past two decades would seem to suggest that I am not altogether amiss in feeling that these films have acquired a certain group identity. Crucially, in my view, most of these films tend to pursue an aesthetics of reduction reminiscent of Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Michael Haneke, the Dardenne brothers, and 260

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the director-producers of the Viennese Coop 99 (also known as the “Vienna School”), in that many of them are dominated by long takes, long shots, clinically precise framing, a certain deliberateness of pacing, sparse usage of extradiegetic music, poetic use of diegetic sound, and, frequently, the reliance on unknown or even nonprofessional actors who appear to be chosen for who they are rather than for who they could become. In so doing, films such as Köhler’s Bungalow (2002), Hochhäusler’s Milchwald (This Very Moment, 2003), Schanelec’s Marseille (2004), Heisenberg’s Schläfer (Sleeper, 2005), Winckler’s Lucy (2006), and Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing, 2006) sharpen the viewer’s attention while effortlessly creating undramatic tensions. And cumulatively, these cinematic aspects stress the characters’ spatiotemporal existence: unlike the films belonging to the “cinema of consensus,” these films unmistakably take place in a specific time and place, in the here and now of reunified Germany. Without going into further detail about the Berlin School, it should be pointed out, however, that notwithstanding the initial critical acclaim these filmmakers have found, their general lack of commercial success has made them vulnerable to polemical attacks from representatives of the German mainstream film industry and media. Notoriously, the Berlin School cinema was recently the implied subject of a highly visible public putdown by the president of the Deutsche Filmakademie, Günter Rohrbach, who once was an important supporter of members of the New German Cinema (he produced, for instance, Fassbinder’s milestone, Berlin Alexanderplatz [1980], but also left his mark on German film culture as the producer of some of the country’s most commercially successful movies of all time, including Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot [The Boat, 1981]). Having presided over the German Film Academy since its founding in 2003, Rohrbach attacked in an essay originally published in Germany’s leading weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, German film critics as vain self-publicists for their tendency to lambaste commercially successful German film productions such as Tom Tykwer’s Das Parfum—Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 2006) while celebrating films such as This Very Moment and Longing, which “wither away in the cinema.”12 In addition to the charge of box office impotence, Ekkehard Knörer reports that another common criticism of Berlin School films is that they allegedly lack interest in the political and instead present us with a rather “bourgeois poetics of middle-class navel gazing,” which has hy261

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postatized in some cases, according to Christina Nord, into a sense of bourgeois melancholic suffering affecting the films’ protagonists and, simultaneously, a formal mannerism affecting the films themselves.13 It is impossible to argue against the empirical evidence of these films’ struggle at the box office.14 However, I do want to insist that the cinema of the Berlin School is a political cinema—and that it is political precisely because of its specific aesthetic, to wit cinematic, nature. In what specific ways, though, does the Berlin School films’ aesthetic quality constitute an essential reason for their political nature? The case of Christian Petzold’s cinema might give us some important clues.15 Arguably the most intellectual, cerebral filmmaker of the Berlin School (matched perhaps only by Hochhäusler), Christian Petzold was born in 1960 in Hilden, a small town not too far from larger German cities such as Cologne and Düsseldorf. In the early 1980s, Petzold moved to Berlin to study German literature. After receiving his Master’s degree with a thesis on one of German literature’s enfants terribles, Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann, Petzold enrolled at the dffb to pursue filmmaking. Working as an assistant on productions by his mentors, it is during this training period that Petzold gradually developed his cinematic style. Noteworthy is that his two main teachers are themselves not known for making narrative films. But, as Petzold points out, “Farocki and Bitomsky love narrative film. If you look closely at their films you see that theirs are films that actually desire narrative cinema, while perhaps simultaneously being about the impossibility or crisis of narrative cinema. But I did not want to pursue their path [of self-imposed isolation]. I still learned more about the art of narrative from them than from people who are so-called storytellers, but do not interrogate themselves.”16 This statement encapsulates one of the most intriguing aspects about Petzold’s oeuvre: that it simultaneously exhibits a desire for narrative and insists on the need to interrogate the constitutive elements of cinema that produce narrative pleasures.17 Crudely put, Petzold’s work offers a critical narrative cinema that draws in equal measures from the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville, Alfred Hitchcock, and Douglas Sirk, on one hand, and Jean-Luc Godard, Haneke, Bresson, Wenders, and, of course, Farocki, who has served as script advisor on all Petzold’s films, and Bitomsky, on the other. One of the effects of Petzold’s particular attitude toward the question of film narrative is that his films frequently end up instilling in the viewer a sense of being exposed to a visualization of a world that is simul262

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taneously familiar and mysterious. This effect is largely brought about through Petzold’s interest in creating a penetrating, precisely framed, often almost austere mise-en-scène, frequently held in long takes and only occasionally interrupted by well-placed close-ups, quick cuts, and slowly creeping steady-cam movements, which affords viewers images whose attitude toward the world they render visible is clearly critical, without ever being patronizing. We might characterize this cumulative effect of Petzold’s cinema’s look—or, better, “imaging,” since “look” usually connotes a representational, phenomenological understanding of images, the theoretical implications of which would run counter to what his cinema is doing—as pursuing what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorize as a micropolitics of desire.18 According to them, the sphere of macropolitics, although certainly not unimportant, cannot sufficiently explain the operations of capitalism precisely because the immanent engine and ultimate limit of capitalism is capital’s own desires, that is, the micromovements of affect, rather than ideology. In the chapter titled “Micropolitics and Segmentarity” in A Thousand Plateaus, for example, they argue that “everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.”19 Acknowledging the importance of the macro level, they nevertheless insist that one relinquishes too much if one’s social diagnosis remains predicated on the (traditionally Marxist) macrological assumption “that a society is defined by its contradictions.”20 This holds true, so they continue, “only on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular.”21 From Deleuze and Guattari’s point of view—one Petzold seems to share—any contemporary politics must carefully attend to these molecular forces precisely because “what makes fascism [as well as the affect-based, consumerist-driven logic of finance capitalism] dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power.”22 Taking his approach to the cinema directly from someone like Farocki and his “micrological” analyses of contemporary power relations, Petzold’s cinema refuses to perpetuate the typical paradigm of sociopolitical analysis rooted in the logic of (ideological) contradiction. It is clear that he has not at all forgotten the failures of various “macrological” political utopias within the history of postwar Germany. Not buying into the failed utopian dreams of a different era, his work nevertheless looks for signs of change, albeit not on the level of macropolitics but rather, in a seeming embrace of Deleuze and Guattari’s political analysis, on the level of desires that permeate contemporary consumer capital263

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ism—desires as they are embodied on the level of work environments (e.g., Pilotinnen [Pilots, 1995], Wolfsburg [2002], Yella [2007], Jerichow [2008]), amorous relationships (e.g., Toter Mann [Something to Remind Me, 2002], Cuba Libre [1995/1996], Jerichow), and family relations (e.g., Die Beischlafdiebin, Die innere Sicherheit [The State I Am In, 2000], Gespenster [Ghosts, 2005]). Put differently, the reason my essay’s title places “political” in parenthesis is that Petzold’s films put the very notion of the political at stake. These films are not political because of their content; most of the time they do not tackle so-called big issues, as, for example, Paul Haggis did recently in Crash (2004), Alejandro González Iñárritu in Babel (2006), Michael Moore in Sicko (2007), and, for that matter, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006). Rather, Petzold’s films can be considered political because of how his images produce the world of their fiction. One of the films’ most intriguing aspects is that their political nature is directly responsive to the conditions of contemporary finance capitalism, namely, its axiomatic deployment of control, as theorized by Michel Foucault and especially Deleuze in his remarks on “control society.”23 Deleuze’s theory deeply impressed Petzold because it persuasively “argues that the extrafamiliar institutions that cropped up everywhere, those hedonistic communities, the patchwork families, the communes, and the shared apartment-living situations, which were established in direct opposition to the traditional father-mother-child neurosis—that these new forms, which were and are perceived as libratory, actually embody the modern control society, that is, are modern forms of oppression that suddenly exert their force upon people.”24 What is so persuasive to Petzold about Deleuze’s analysis of contemporary capitalism is that the degree of affective investment in people that capitalism has achieved is so intense that people experience the ever tightening noose around their neck as pleasurable rather than oppressive.25 Taking this theoretical insight seriously, Petzold makes films that are not primarily interested in producing ideology critique. That is, none of his films suggest that the problems his characters face are a result of their lack of correct consciousness or perception. The protagonists in Pilots know that they are exploited by the patriarchal rules of consumer capitalism; the car salesman in Wolfsburg is clearly aware that he is buying his comfortable bourgeois existence by being with a woman he does not really desire; and the misery of the well-to-do French couple in Ghosts has 264

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everything to do with the fact that Françoise (Marianne Basler) cannot let go of the moment when, more than ten years ago, her daughter was stolen from her—a past moment that she compulsively revisits because of its affective charge that allows her to feel alive, however fleetingly. Her rather passive husband tolerates his wife’s near pathological desire to find their daughter, which frequently lands her in psychiatric care, likely because this allows him to assume the role of the knight-in-shining-armor, as it were. By having to rescue his wife he gets to enjoy the illusion of still mattering to her, when in reality she seems to have long shut down her desire for him, probably from the very moment of their daughter’s disappearance. Again, though, the problem is not that she does not know how implausible, indeed impossible, it is for her to find her daughter (who, as her husband tells Nina [Julia Hummer], the last in a long line of “ghost” daughters that Françoise latches on to, “is dead”). Rather, the melancholic act of serially restaging scenes that enact what a reunion with her lost daughter might feel like provides her with precisely the affective reality of a sense of aliveness denied to her by the normalizing structures of her surroundings: her obligations to her husband, such as the need to represent for the sake of his business, not to mention the general expectations, shaped by psychology and psychiatry, of what it means to be a healthy woman who has successfully mourned her loss, that is, worked through the trauma of losing her infant daughter.26 Petzold’s films, then, do not work based on the assumption that political effectiveness in the age of late capitalism is reducible to practicing ideology critique, let alone political advocacy. Instead, his work is based on the belief that for the films to have any political effect at all, they have to operate on the level of the image itself—on the level of the “mere” image, rather than the “just” image, to paraphrase Godard. Or, as Petzold argues with reference to Harun Farocki’s film Nicht ohne Risiko (Not without Risk, 2004), which was one of the main inspirations for Yella, “We do not even have any new images of capitalism yet. Sure we have these airport loading zones, where we see modern people with laptops, reading high-gloss magazines, wearing Rolexes and Burberry clothes. All this is only a surface, but we do not have images for how this new form of capitalism operates. We have books about it, but we do not find those images in films. In cinema, capitalism is still being imaged as Charles Chaplin did in Modern Times (1936).” The crucial point, as Petzold argues elsewhere, is that “there has to be something sexy about [modern capitalism]. Years ago, racketeers hid themselves away in a tem265

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ple. Like thieves, they were ugly, devious, conniving. These days they are breezy, charming, healthy, Buddhist. But we still portray this world in old pictures, caricatures. We don’t have a picture of it, no story. These new pictures and new stories, that was what it was about for me.”27 Yella can be considered perhaps his most sophisticated effort to invent such new images and narratives to date. From the film’s earliest sequence, the film renders visible the split desire of Yella (Nina Hoss). Yella’s journey westward, which echoes the unidirectional movement of German unification, begins with her temporary return to Wittenberge, an economically devastated eastern German city where her former husband’s blue-collar labor company went bankrupt because of his misunderstanding and, indeed, nostalgia for an outdated form of capitalism. Back in Hanover, host of the World Expo 2000, Yella discovers that the white-collar, new economy firm that recently hired her went bankrupt before she could spend even one day working for them. Before long, though, she meets Phillip (Devid Striesow), a charming venture capital broker who pursues criminal schemes, as Yella quickly finds out. Despite, or rather because of, Phillip’s illegal machinations, the two become a team, both professionally and privately. In the end, however, Yella overplays her hand to devastating effect in her desire to have her dream of a better life come true. The third installment of Petzold’s “ghost trilogy,” the film can be described as a ghost story of white-collar crime in the age of BlackBerrys.28 In this world of venture capital, it is gestures, rumors, and the creation of images that rule. In the context of such seemingly “weightless” (compared to the “heavy” labor characteristic of industrial capitalism) economic operational processes, corruption itself becomes a matter of dreams. Indeed, the film depicts how corruptibility, which the mechanisms of finance capitalism produce as something desirable, is capable of infiltrating the dreams of post-Wall citizens. The film, in other words, sets out to visualize how an economic logic based on rumor and gestures—some of which, such as the so-called broker stretch, are directly taken from contemporary Hollywood films—releases its forces on an affective level upon a citizenry exposed to an increasing level of economic uncertainty in the age of 1-euro jobs and, politically speaking, what Giorgio Agamben calls a “permanent state of exception.”29 The narrative, which takes its basic plot structure from Herk Harvey’s cult horror classic Carnival of Souls (1962) and Ambrose Bierce’s 266

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much anthologized 1891 short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” unfolds in images that alter from believable, seemingly realistic situations to unbelievable, mysterious, dream- or ghost-like levels in which the wind and the cry of crows evoke the otherworldly atmosphere of Japanese horror films.30 But it is precisely this otherworldliness in the ostensible everyday realism that constitutes the film’s immanent response to its larger question: how to render visible finance capitalism without having to have recourse to the level of representational resemblance, which always pretends to know what the object it represents is? That is, instead of weighing the narrative down with the heaviness of traditional realism—for images do have their own weight and speed, as Deleuze teaches—Yella is made up of images that, if anything, are almost ethereal yet never without texture, never without connection to the material. The lightness of the images, whose Gerhard Richter-like blue-grays frequently produce an effect of blurriness; of being just out of focus; of simultaneously evoking representational realism and refusing its logic; of inducing in the beholder a delirious, an almost hallucinatory sense of perspective with which viewers never find the perfect vantage point from which to look at the images, no matter how close or far they position themselves in relation to them—this lightness is the lightness of finance capitalism itself.31 This is literal, not metaphorical. The images we find in Yella are not so much images of capitalism as they are imaging capitalism on its own terms, heeding its affective modulations of speed and weight, of force. It is this affective atmosphere of the weightlessness of late capitalist being that gradually fascinates and soon seduces Yella. Yella knows what is going on in terms of the legality and morality of the business transactions she witnesses. But at no point in the movie are we invited to judge her. Without any transitional markers, the film simply observes how Yella, without much hesitation, very quickly internalizes how business is done in this environment. She responds to the sheer opportunity afforded to her, to being exposed to the very desires circulating so appealingly through the world of finance capital. Her dream—for most of the film appears to be just that—is corrupted by her own desire, a desire that is instilled in her not via ideology or deceptive mechanisms but via affect: everything is in plain sight, nothing is hidden. But it is also this infective quality of the lightness of venture capitalist being that, in her dream, makes Yella go too far. To facilitate one last process of negotiation from which Phillip intends to embezzle more 267

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money to finance his own investment scheme, Yella falls back on the criminal mechanisms typical of an earlier phase of capitalism: blackmail and directly issued threats. What Yella does not realize—perhaps because she is still too new at this game—is that these criminal strategies are, cinematically speaking, too film noirish and not white collar enough. If you will, they are too beholden to the heaviness of the labor theory of value and not attentive enough to the lightness of the logic of control that governs just-in-time capitalism, which derives the majority of its wealth from speculation and the circulation of rumor, as well as the increasingly perfect feedback or control loop of contemporary consumer processes and brand marketing schemes, rather than from oldfashioned labor and the manufacturing of goods sold to us because of their use value. Petzold images all this in such a way that no external object-cause is allowed to explain or signal Yella’s qualitative affective change. There simply is no external cause. Yella’s transformation occurs in rhythm with the immanent logic of capital operations themselves. The longer she is privy to its logic, the more she enacts it.32 Her becoming-venturous is a matter of temporality, of duration, of the affect immanent to duration. And Hans Fromm’s camera renders this affective dimension sensible for the viewer. For his camera effects the sensation of staring, of looking at an object that, because we keep on looking at it, morphs not just in front of our eyes but, literally, in our eyes, in our body. Sensation, the opposite, according to Deleuze, of the facile or the cliché, is that which is transmitted directly to the nervous system, avoiding “the detour and boredom of conveying a story. . . . Sensation is what passes from one ‘order’ to another.”33 As viewers, we experience the sensation only by entering the image, by “reaching the unity of the sensing and the sensed.”34 Whereas painter Francis Bacon achieves this unity, in Deleuze’s view, by painting “the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation,”35 in Petzold’s films it is the staring quality of the camera work that achieves such a double-becoming, where simultaneously subject and object become Other to themselves, so that the object stared at becomes available in its immanent becomings, differentiations, or change, just as the subject is affected by these very becomings with regard to his or her perceptual apparatus. Petzold puts it this way: “You have to behold the most everyday space until it looks back, until it becomes mysterious. [This] staring means duration, and we have to insist upon doing this. You have to stare and find a sec268

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ond view, and then things begin to become mysterious and complex. Bad cinema merely provides us with things that we are asked to decode: one object means richness, another old age, yet another youth, etc. But to find youth in old age, or death in morning . . . that is of interest to me.”36 Striving for such a level of narrative and visual reduction that achieves a level of abstraction—that is, singularity—Petzold’s films are generally characterized by a concurrent feeling of matter-of-factness that derives from their refusal to psychologize. The films’ narrative tensions directly result from the characters’ actions and desires and their way of responding to the forces that impinge upon them—forces that leave their affective impact on their bodies without necessarily revealing what the object-cause for their effects is. One particularly effective image for this overall tendency occurs, for instance, in Die Beischlafdiebin when the camera briefly allows us late in the film to notice a strategically positioned offprint of Gerhard Richter’s famous painting “Betty” (1988). The painting depicts the titular subject sitting with her upper body partially turned toward, partially away from the beholder, although her face remains hidden, looking away from us. Evoking Walter Benjamin’s notion of the angel of history who, turned toward the chaotic past as it piles its horrors at the angel’s feet, moves irrevocably forward, the painting renders sensible the various forces impinging upon its subject, which seem to pull it to us while also holding it back, inexplicably attracting it to something that remains absent from our purview. It is this sensation that Petzold’s films frequently capture, or, better, render affectively sensible for the viewer. They place us in a position of suspended ignorance: though we sense the forces that affect the characters, we are not afforded the reassuring explanation of what causes the characters’ intensely felt situation.37 The cumulative effect of Petzold’s repeated cinematic staging of the sensations his fledgling protagonists’ bodies experience in the absence of direct object-causes is our sense that the characters’ agency, though not denied, is severely compromised; notwithstanding the proliferation of scenes in which Petzold’s characters find themselves on the road in their cars, in the end they are all shown to be passengers struggling to make sense of the complex network of incorporeal operations driving finance capitalism rather than drivers who skillfully negotiate the German Autobahn net. Consider, for instance, Ghosts. The film takes place in a location that forms the borderscape between the Berliner Tiergarten (a large park in 269

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the center of the city) and Potsdamer Platz, a location that before 1990 was a no-man’s-land but now is gradually being developed as the (stale) capitalist heart of the unified city. The characters occupy what Petzold himself calls a “bubble” or parallel world. It is a space that does not immediately provide a social definition for the protagonists; it is a porous space connecting, on one side, a capitalist space that has yet to be really integrated into the larger sociocultural cityscape of Berlin and, on the other, the city’s best known nature sanctuary, which offers Berliners the opportunity to relax, to escape momentarily from their stressful metropolitan existence. Setting the middle part of his “ghost trilogy” in this space reinforces the sense that Petzold tends to make films about people who, by and large, populate in-between spaces—real and dreamlike, indeed ghost-like spaces that constitute, to him, the real heart of post-Wall Germany. In some real sense, Petzold does not make films about outsiders or marginalized people; instead, he is interested in investigating the immanent borderscapes that make up the heart of late capitalist Germany. But in Petzold’s hands, this in-between world around Potsdamer Platz is nearly unrecognizable. Unless one actually knows the area rather well, the viewer is not invited to recognize the mise-en-scène as anything specific—as anything that is represented and that, as such, is supposed to be decodable. Completely refusing to provide establishing shots that would specifically demarcate the cinematic location as an empirically real location—and thus allow viewers to enjoy the comforts of recognition (“ah, it’s Berlin”) and to reterritorialize the images onto the representational plane of the empirically (as well as cinematically) familiar—the film instead operates only on the ground, among the border neighborhoods and its houses and parks. Petzold’s cameraman has his Steadicam almost crawling—very slowly—with the film’s central character, Nina, as she inheres within time and space, clearly not knowing where to go, what to do, but also clearly yearning for a drastic change to occur. Indeed, it is as if Petzold is imaging a nonexisting space, but what he really does is find new images for a space whose images have turned into clichés. By aesthetically abstracting all the images that preexist his film—that already fill the screen while the film has not even begun to project its images—Petzold’s Ghosts intervenes in the real existing social plane of post-Wall Germany generally and reunified Berlin specifically. His film is not giving us an image of Berlin (just as Yella is not giving us an image of finance capitalism), claiming some sort of representa270

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In Christian Petzold’s Ghosts (2005), Nina (Julia Hummer) and Toni (Sabine Timoteo) inhabit an in-between space that, although located at the heart of contemporary Berlin, is all but unrecognizable to the casual viewer.

tional veracity that contains a message about the state of contemporary Germany in the age of the Internet economy. Instead, the film allows us to confront the images as being something in and of themselves, thus asking us to reconsider social normalcy precisely because the film’s images confront us with normalcy as imagined (or, in Yella’s case, literally dreamed) by the characters themselves. Emerging from outside recognizable normalcy, Petzold’s characters’ existence gradually reconfigures normalcy from their point of view, from their very desires to join what they imagine to be normalcy. Yet, precisely by not placing his characters in immediately recognizable representations of empirical reality and thus normalcy (even in Yella the hypermodern mise-en-scène of the corporate environment has something unreal about it, very much in the way that the carnival in Harvey’s film is real and unreal at the same time), this reality avoids becoming a bad caricature of real life and instead assumes a certain measure of aesthetic autonomy. Such an affirmation of aesthetic autonomy has, of course, a famous philosophical precursor within the German tradition—Adorno’s aesthetic theory, which insists that art’s purpose is “not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through 271

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artistic forms, the course of the world.”38 Far from being a promoter of l’art pour l’art, however, Adorno’s conception of autonomous aesthetics must be understood negative-dialectically: Inherently every artwork desires identity with itself, an identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as identity with the subject and thus travestied. Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identity. Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality . . . does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience.39

In striving for a separation from reality such successful works of art are immanently capable of intensifying the experience of reality and offering such experience as “knowledge in the form of a nonconceptual object.”40 Autonomous artworks carry with them the sedimented content of the very empirical life from which they seek to be separated; because the latter inheres as an afterimage in them, however, such works give to the (experience of) life something from which it is blocked in its own sphere.41 What such (moments of) aesthetic autonomy thus afford us is to switch again to the Deleuzean conceptual framework, the affectively generated opening toward a “Different way of feeling: another sensibility.”42 Indeed, Petzold himself articulates such a surprising linkage of seemingly incommensurable thinkers as Adorno and Deleuze when, in an interview during the time of the release of The State I Am In, he described his own process of politicization: “Talking Heads and [the] RAF, this happened at nearly the same time. Disintegrating political groups, no utopias, really good music. That always went hand in hand for me. And the question of how one can produce. That one must be against existing conditions without being able to offer alternatives. And that it is not at all bad if one does not have them.”43 Far from political acquiescence, Petzold articulates here the need for suspending the institutionalized demand to offer alternatives because all political programs subscribing to utopian dreams have disintegrated, indeed failed (and, seen from the perspective of Adorno’s negative dialectics, could not help but fail). The job of art, in this sense, is thus not to be political (qua content) but to produce politically, which, in the case of cinema, entails a (renewed) investigation 272

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of the politics of the image—precisely because contemporary capitalist culture is the lightest, most image-based economic operation to which we have ever been exposed.44 It is this lightness, however, that is precisely the force that allows the culture industry to create with ever greater ease the very identity between subject and object that Adorno (and Deleuze, I might add) insist must be combated. But such resistance must proceed immanently—that is, not by representing an alternative that pretends somehow to stand outside the image-based logic of finance capitalism but by self-critically folding this affective logic into its own process of production. Returning to Ghosts, we might argue that it is perhaps precisely because the film does not “re-present” the city in clichéd images and standard narrative structures that it is able to affect its audience. The film sucks us in, perhaps even getting us close to a state of boredom and sleepiness, only to intensify a vague sense of immobility permeating so much of German culture in recent years. But it is this intensification that ultimately manages to break through into an image of sheer transformation. Nina, a teenaged orphan, has just encountered two potentially life-changing events: she met another young woman, Toni (Sabine Timoteo), with whom she builds a tentative friendship, which includes what may or may not be sexual desire for each other and which is complicated by Toni’s inclination to exploit Nina’s attachment to her for ulterior purposes; and she is confronted by an older, French woman who claims to be her long-lost mother. Both events pull on her psyche and emotions, as Nina, imaged in a constant state of directionless drift, seeks to belong to someone or something. And then a moment of perfection transpires, as if out of nowhere, a moment of intensity that Nina experiences in purely affective ways. In what is perhaps the film’s most arresting scene, Nina, first all alone, ends up dancing with Toni in a tender embrace. Set to a trance-like trip-hop beat, this moment of sheer transformation occurs in a room completely infused with intensely red light, while the Steadicam provides us calm, dreamlike, almost clinically precise pictures. Nina has clearly forgotten the outside world, and we, too, are fully immersed in the image as such. On the verge of melodramatic expressionism, the intensively filtered mise-en-scène disrupts the otherwise drab gray that suffuses the world of her dull existence.45 This visually most intense moment of the film’s refusal to frame its characters in recognizable environments while never pretending to be anything but photographic realism (it is not a fantasy film, for instance) 273

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corresponds to Nina’s refusal to join what others consider normalcy. Instead, the normalcy she desires is the one that she imagines and that the film images at this very moment of utmost intensification: it is a sense of normalcy, indeed security, however fleeting, found in each other’s arms, dancing without regard for anything else at this moment, that is based in a lived refusal to either join the clichéd desires of individual and social security or pursue the equally clichéd liberal bourgeois demand for social upward mobility. Chiasmically revealing both desires as the negative inverse of each other, the film maintains the dialectical tension rather than sublating it into a third term. This suspension confronts the viewer with the image of refusal—not as refusal of something but absolute refusal. It is a ghost-like, abstract, perhaps utopian image—but, so this film suggests in unison with many other Berlin School films, it is a necessary image because it makes sensible a sociopolitical parallel world that is visible neither in empirical reality itself nor in standard cinematic representations thereof. But lest we fall into the trap of hypostatizing this moment of becoming, Ghosts leaves us with no illusion about how difficult it is to produce the reality of a sensation of mobility that is not always already a mere copy of other narratives. Nina’s bliss lasts only for a minute before Toni, who noticed a male onlooker (a film director!) leering at the two women, walks off with him in the hope that she can manipulate him into giving her a job (for which Nina and Toni earlier in the film applied in a casting session). Out of frustration—and the need to belong to someone— Nina seeks out Françoise, whom she encountered earlier, to test whether she can enter the French woman’s narrative. In the end, however, after Françoise’s husband intervenes, we see Nina back in the Tiergarten. As she is walking she recalls that Françoise’s wallet, which Toni had stolen earlier, ended up in a trashcan. Retrieving it, Nina discovers a printout of a computer-generated image of how Françoise’s daughter might look today. The brief glimpse the film affords us of the sequence of stills that depict the possible maturation of the girl does indeed suggest a striking resemblance to Nina: is she the long-lost daughter after all?46 But rather than embracing this possibility, Nina instead affirms, for the first time, her own autonomy. Throwing the photo back into the trashcan, she walks off on an unpaved path farther into the park, finally having arrived at the moment where in her own, real life she does not allow herself to be driven by others’ desires and narratives: not by the porn narrative play-

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ing in the director’s mind, not by Toni’s outlaw narrative, and certainly not by Françoise’s debilitating family narrative. Although Ghosts refuses to provide us with any sense of where Nina’s line of flight is leading, the point the film affirms is the line of flight itself. And this line is imaged by the film at just this moment when the crawling camera follows Nina on the dirt path and then stays behind, depicting her for a few more moments, in motion, slowly but with a newfound sense of confidence—an image that itself is the direct transformation of the earlier transformative moment rendered in deep, romantic, expressionist red. The image mimetically renders available for us the sensation of movement—a mimetic presentation of mobility in just the sense that Adorno theorized it: as the affinity between subject and object as it is felt in one’s body on seeing someone else move theirs. What Petzold’s narratives, especially at moments of peak intensity, seem to say is, to paraphrase Robert Hullot-Kentor’s explanation of Adorno’s theory of musical composition, that we are to what we see what the images are not to us.47 The images do not offer (German) viewers a representation of mobility that they can claim is/as theirs; instead, they present the affective sensation of movement that is, precisely, not theirs—but that in their negativity might leave a very real affective sensation in the bodies of the films’ (German) viewers, thus forcing them to encounter as real something that post-Wall citizens have notoriously felt to be absent in their real social lives since the fall of the Wall.48 As in Ghosts and Yella, Petzold’s oeuvre as a whole is consistently concerned with characters who are on the move—usually against their will— and who are driven by the double desire to find their way home and to maintain a certain amount of independence and autonomy, desires that often turn out to be impossible to obtain precisely because of the sociopolitical circumstances at which Petzold’s films take a close, patiently observing look. In other words, Petzold’s cinema is about the possibility and demand for mobility in post-Wall Germany. As he argues, “People are poorly prepared for modern life and always carry archaic remainders of another life. It is these people who are being pushed out of societies or are put in motion, but they do not even know where to go, where all of this is supposed to lead. They consequently end up in transitional spaces, transit zones where nothingness looms on one side and the impossibility of returning to what existed in the past on the other. There are the spaces

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that interest me.”49 These transitional zones are spaces—material, psychological, atmospheric—in which the protagonists are stuck and, often, die. It is hardly a coincidence that most of Petzold’s films end with death. Notwithstanding the prevalence of death in Petzold’s films, these films should not be mistaken for a cinematic affirmation of a Heideggerian Seinsphilosophie, in which the demand for an authentic encounter with Being territorializes the forces of life unto the transcendental signifier of Death, which in turn governs the realm of possibility according to how well subjects heed Being’s calling. Rather, in Petzold’s films death is usually merely the result of the characters’ failed attempt to escape the transitional zones that hold them captive: the more they try to escape them, the more the noose around their neck tightens. Intriguingly, however, Petzold’s cinematic strategy for examining the issue of mobility so prevalent in his films is by making a cinema that is predominantly characterized by a refusal to deploy the standard ways of representing movement (i.e., quick cutting, action, and escapist narratives capped by happy ends suggesting a transcendence achieved by the characters that manipulatively satisfies viewers’ preexisting expectations and desires). In fact, I submit that Petzold’s cinema is in this respect one of the key models for much of contemporary German cinema of the Berlin School type, namely, that rather than attempting to represent contemporary Germany it seeks to invent new images for a post-Wall reality. Moreover, this refusal to cater to the well-worn strategies of cinematic representation—indeed, to our well-habituated modes of seeing the world—is, if you will, indicative of his films’ political program. Though to call it “program” is misleading, given that his films are not thesis-driven message films. A more exact way of putting the matter is to say that Petzold’s films are political precisely because rather than making political films he makes his films politically. The politics of his moving images lies in their particular style of engagement with the logic of contemporary capitalist culture. Images, as I have hoped to illustrate, are for Petzold not signs but affective forces that have their own, internal duration, speed, and weight. The cinema is a technology of visualization whose greatest power does not lie in its ability to represent more or less accurately a preexisting world (and thus to teach viewers appropriately moral lessons about it) but in its capacity to image a not yet actualized world, or a world in the process of becoming actual. This simultaneous actualization of the virtual and virtualization of the actual is a process that exceeds the 276

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capacities of the logic of representation, which is too beholden to the readymade. Politically speaking, then, Petzold’s cinematic strategy in remarkable ways takes seriously the belief, shared by thinkers such as Deleuze and Adorno, that nothing has ever changed because of representation. To affect the world, so Petzold’s cinema holds, is to intervene in it on its own terms, which means taking its immanent axiomatic processes seriously, rather than approaching them on the level of codes. Reality is not coded; it is a serial deployment of force. Petzold’s films can therefore be considered political—not despite, but because of their affirmation of aesthetics. As a result, his films assume a singular place in contemporary German cinema. Re-imaging rather than merely re-presenting the world from which it emerges, his work affectively modulates habituated modes of seeing and, consequently, experimentally confronts viewers with the ethical demand to re-see their own relation to the social. This provocation is, however, not so much governed by a directorial insistence on a correct way of seeing as the philosophical and, perhaps, political hope that an immanent redeployment of modalities of the visible are capable of affecting a new belief in this world that might be productively juxtaposed to the dominance of a cinema and politics that falsely promises and seeks utopian transcendence of this world.

Notes All translations of German language sources are mine. 1. Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, “Mailwechsel ‘Berliner Schule,’  ” Revolver 16 (2007): 30. 2. Georg Seeßlen, one of Germany’s leading cultural critics, recently called Petzold’s Yella a “masterpiece.” To my knowledge, the only extended discussions of Petzold’s work in English to date occur in discussions of German films’ engagement with the legacy of the Red Army Faction’s terrorism. See, for example, Rachel Palfreyman, “The Fourth Generation: Legacies of Violence as Quest for Identity in Post-Unification Terrorism Films,” in German Cinema since Unification, ed. David Clarke, 11–42 (New York: Continuum, 2006); and Chris Homewood’s two essays, “Von Trotta’s The German Sisters and Petzold’s The State I Am In: Discursive Boundaries in the Films of the New German Cinema to the Present Day,” Studies in European Cinema 2, no. 2 (2005): 93–102 and “The Return of the ‘Undead’ History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of ‘Normalizing’ the Past in Margarethe von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (2001),” in German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the

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Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, ed. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, 121–35 (Boston: Camden House, 2006). 3. Petzold is clearly familiar with the work of these philosophers, both of whom frequently disparaged the concept of communication. For example, in Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes, “One has to resist the near universal compulsion to confuse the communication of that which is cognized with the latter and perchance to rate the former higher, while presently each step toward communication sells out truth and falsifies it” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1973], 41, translation modified). Deleuze, in turn, argues against the late capitalist imperative to communicate by suggesting, “Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. . . . The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, 175 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995]). Petzold refers to Deleuze’s “control society” argument on at least two occasions. See Christian Petzold, “Der fliegende Holländer: Ein Interview mit Christian Petzold von Jörg-Uwe Albig und Christoph Gurk,” Texte zur Kunst 43 (September 2001): 43–53 and Christian Petzold, “The Cinema of Identification Gets on My Nerves: An Interview with Christian Petzold,” by Marco Abel, Cineaste 33, no. 3 (2008), http://cineaste.com/articles/an-interview-with-christian-petzold. htm. 4. Hartz IV is the last phase of recommendations for the reform of the German labor market provided by a commission headed in 2002 by Peter Hartz, who was then the human resources executive of Volkswagen. Since then, Hartz IV has become a lightening rod in German politics, largely because these reforms significantly weakened the traditionally strong social security net of the German welfare state. 5. Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 260–77 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 6. David Clarke, “Introduction: German Cinema since Unification,” in Clarke, German Cinema since Unification, 2. 7. Indeed, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Academy Award–winning Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) strikes me in many ways as also belonging to this list of films that reproduce a preexisting consensus view of Germany, rather than challenging it or finding ways of engaging crucial questions about contemporary Germany without immediately offering sentimental answers to them—answers that are primarily rooted in an ideologically conservative view of art that is more akin to that propagated by nineteenth-century Romanticism than to a contemporary notion of art informed by the discourses of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and post-postmodernism, in short, to the function of art in the age of neoliberal finance capitalism. 8. Other than my own essay, “Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the ‘Berlin School’  ” Cineaste 33, no. 4 (2008), http://cineaste.com/articles/the-berlin-school. 278

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Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold htm, to my knowledge only one English-language source has thus far dealt with this movement in greater detail (see Ekkehard Knörer, “Longshots: Luminous Days—Notes on the New German Cinema,” Vertigo, http://www.vertigomagazine. co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=cur&siz=772). For the best German language discussions, see Rüdiger Suchsland, “Langsames Leben, schöne Tage: Annäherungen an die ‘Berliner Schule,’  ” Film-Dienst 13 (2005): 6–9 and Michael Baute, Ekkehard Knörer, Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, and Simon Rothöhler, “Berliner Film macht Schule,” a special feature on this subject in Austrian film magazine Kolik Film 6 (2006), 7–29. If the movement had something like a house publication, it would be Revolver, which is edited by, among others, two key directors of the Berlin School, Christoph Hochhäusler and Benjamin Heisenberg. 9. One also needs to mention at least two important protagonists of the Berlin School who are not directors: Bettina Böhler, who has edited more than a dozen Berlin School films, and Reinhold Vorschneider, whose work as cameraman has left its mark on more than half a dozen Berlin School productions. 10. In various interviews I conducted with Berlin School directors, it became apparent that notwithstanding their friendship with each other, someone like Hochhäusler seems to be much more in favor of embracing the notion of a collective movement labeled “Berlin School” than directors such as Winckler, Köhler, or Grisebach. For Hochhäusler’s views of the Berlin School, see Christoph Hochhäusler, “Tender Speaking: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler,” by Marco Abel, Senses of Cinema 42 (January–March 2007), http://www.sensesofcinema. com/contents/07/42/christoph-hochhausler.html. 11. In his program notes for the section “A German Cinema,” which Olaf Möller curated for the Indie Lisboa Film Festival in May 2007, he writes that he did not include certain directors usually associated with the Berlin School at least partially because he did not want to perpetuate already existing prejudices and, furthermore, because he sees the danger involved in pigeonholing these directors, citing the reception of the latest films by Arslan (Ferien vom Ich [Vacation from Myself], 2007), Schanelec (Nachmittag [Afternoon], 2007]), and Petzold (Yella, 2007), which were often discussed upon their premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2007 only in relation to each other rather than based on their own, individual merits. See Olaf Möller, “Das Mögliche machen, so Weiteres möglich machen,” New Filmkritik, July 7, 2007, http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-07/ das-mogliche-machen-so-weiteres-moglich-machen. 12. Petzold’s The State I Am In is the Berlin School’s most successful film to date, having attracted roughly 200,000 theatrical viewers—a number that exceeds all Berlin School film productions not directed by Petzold by a factor of more than four. But even Petzold’s other films fell considerably short of the success of The State I Am In, with Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005) attracting 30,000 viewers and his most recent film, Yella, about 80,000. Günter Rohrbach (“Das Schmollen der Autisten: Hat die deutsche Filmkritik ausgedient?” Der Spiegel 4 (January 22, 2007), 156, reprinted at http://www.deutsche-filmakademie.de/744.0.html) specifically singled out Grisebach’s film because German film critics celebrated Longing (seen only by 22,500 theatrical viewers) and complained that it, unlike Tykwer’s mas279

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sively popular Perfume (which attracted more than 5.5 million viewers), received no nominations for the German Film Prize. As of 2005, the prize is awarded by the German Film Academy, a body of voters resembling the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. One of the many dishonest aspects of Rohrbach’s attack on marginalized German filmmakers—from a position of absolute strength, no less!—is that he withholds from his readers the likely reason for his singling out Hochhäusler as the only other filmmaker mentioned by name, to wit, that the director of This Very Moment and Falscher Bekenner (Low Profile also known as I Am Guilty, 2005) publicly criticized the fact that Germany’s government “privatized” the country’s most significant cultural award (measured by the prize money, which totals 3 million euros of public, read tax-based, funds). Pace the academy’s own rhetoric of democratic transparency, Hochhäusler accused the initiators of the academy and its takeover of the German Film Prize in his essay “Klasse oder Masse? Ein paar Einwände gegen die Privatisierung des Deutschen Filmpreis durch die Bundesregierung” (Artechock, September 8, 2003, http://www.artechock. de/film/text/artikel/2003/09_17_filmpreis.htm) as “incapable of laying bare its plans” and of “speaking for the industry without engaging it in a discussion.” The explicit—and, I might add, legitimate—fear articulated by Hochhäusler’s attack on the academy is that this procedural change would result in an “amplifying effect” in favor of mainstream productions but detrimental to smaller films, analogous to the effect the Academy Awards have had for U.S. cinema. It is not a coincidence that many of the Berlin School directors, including Hochhäusler and Petzold, refused to join the academy. 13. Knörer, “Longshots” and Christian Nord, “Notizen zur Berliner Schule,” New Filmkritik, July 7, 2007, http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-07/notizen-zurberliner-schule. To clarify Knörer’s position, he does not agree with this critique of the Berlin School. 14. The majority of Berlin School films have so far attracted between 5,000 and 25,000 theatrical viewers. However, as Heisenberg pointed out to me (tape recording, New York, December 19, 2005), just about all these films reach a 12–15 percent audience share during their respective screenings on German TV, especially as part of the ZDF’s long-standing series, “Das kleine Fernsehspiel,” which often serves as a crucial co-producer for these films. With production costs rarely exceeding 1 million euros, these films are in the end actually seen by millions of viewers, albeit not on the big screen. 15. My ensuing discussion of Petzold’s films should in this context be read as a suggestive key example of this kind of filmmaking, although it would run counter to my argument’s intent and interest to see Petzold’s films as a perfect synecdoche for the Berlin School in toto. Although I disagree with Nord’s assessment of recent Berlin School productions (see above), she has a valid point when insisting that these films cannot be reduced to an “aesthetic program,” not least because they rely on different conceptions of realism. 16. Petzold, “Cinema of Identification.” 17. Other than the fact that German cinema at large has struggled for recog-

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Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold nition for the past twenty years and appears just now to enjoy a resurgence of interest in it, Petzold’s relative obscurity has to do with the sheer difficulty of accessing his films outside (and to a somewhat lesser degree also inside) Germany. Of his nine films to date, only four were released theatrically: The State I Am In, Ghosts, Yella, and Jerichow. The other five films—Pilotinnen (Pilots, 1995), Cuba Libre (1996), Die Beischlafdiebin (1998), Toter Mann (Something to Remind Me, 2001), and Wolfsburg (2003)—were all made for German TV and had theatrical screenings only at film festivals; of these made-for-TV films, only the last two are available on German-language DVD, and it is unlikely that the first three will be released commercially because of copyright issues. So far, then, Petzold’s sixteenyear career has yielded only four proper commercial releases—and of those, even the much celebrated The State I Am In, which won the German Film Prize in 2001, was released on DVD with English subtitles only in 2009 by the Cinema Guild, the company that released Yella and Jerichow theatrically in the United States and, subsequently, on DVD. 18. “Look” usually connotes a “look at something prior,” a look that is conscious of something prior—in other words a representational understanding of images. Godard and Deleuze are thinkers who make available a different, a-representational way of thinking about images. 19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 213. 20. Ibid., 216. 21. Ibid., 216. 22. Ibid., 215. 23. See Deleuze, “Control and Becoming.” See also Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 177–82. 24. Petzold, “Cinema of Identification.” 25. The pressing political problem, in other words, is neither that people somehow “want” to be repressed nor that they are tricked by ideological lure into passive submission to power; rather, as Daniel W. Smith perspicaciously argues, the problem is that people invest serious stakes in social systems (such as contemporary capitalism) although it thwarts their interests because their desires (drives, affects), far from being owned by them as subjects, are part of the capitalist infrastructure itself (“Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics,” Parrhesia 2 [2007]: 66–78). Our desires have been constructed—through, for instance, the education and training industry that increase employees’ aptitudes and thus their affective capacities: their ability to affect and be(come) affected, that is, their ability to do more work and to be(come) more receptive to the values circulating through their work places—so that our desires are positively invested in the very system that allows us to enjoy these particular interests. 26. For a sustained critique of psychoanalysis’ privileging of mourning (working through) over melancholia (acting out), see Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), chapter 5.

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27. “Comments from Director Christian Petzold,” http://www.yella-der-film. de/comments.html. 28. The first two parts are The State I Am In and Ghosts, respectively. 29. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 30. Petzold’s cinema is astonishingly attuned to original sound. His use of nature’s sounds such as that of trees swaying in the wind in his “ghost trilogy” as well as the stillness of the interiors of German-designed cars in, for instance, Wolfsburg, is particularly noteworthy. As his films often depict people who are falling (or have already fallen) out of a preexisting order, their primary access to the world is often reduced to a heightened sense of sight, hearing, smell, or taste—an intensification of their capacity to become affected that often occurs just before they totally crash (the car crashes framing the narrative trajectory of Wolfsburg are only the most literal dramatization of this phenomenon). 31. See, for instance, Richter’s 1971 painting of Mao or the fifteen paintings that make up his infamous “October 18, 1977” (1988) cycle, which “commemorates the day the bodies of [Andreas] Baader and [Gudrun] Ensslin—along with their [RAF] comrades, the dying Jan-Carl Raspe and the wounded Irmgard Möller— were discovered in their cells at the high-security prison in Stammheim, near Stuttgart, where they had been incarcerated during and after their trials for murder and other politically motivated crimes” (Robert Storr, “Introduction: Sudden Recall,” in Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977, 27–39 [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000]). 32. This is notwithstanding her eventual misjudgment, which is clearly caused by her desire to escape the vicissitudes of the current economic system at large by accumulating in one fell swoop enough wealth to be able to live in security. Of course this desire for instantaneous wealth is itself of the age of finance capitalism and the images it circulates and dreams it produces. 33. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 32. 34. Ibid., 31. 35. Ibid., 31. 36. Petzold, “Cinema of Identification.” 37. For example, Hans Fromm’s camera shows us with great care the stooping walk of Jeanne and Nina (both played by the nonprofessional actress, Julia Hummer) in The State I Am In and Ghosts, respectively, with her shoulders slouching as if they were pulled down by the weight of the whole world; the almost somnambulist body movement and eye expressions of Benno Fürmann’s car salesman in Wolfsburg, whose life is irrevocably altered when he, momentarily distracted by a phone conversation with his angry girlfriend, runs over a young boy on a bicycle and subsequently flees the scene of the accident; and the lawyer-protagonist Thomas (played by the gaunt André Hennicke) in Something to Remind Me, whose inexplicable emotional uptightness is perfectly imaged by the way the film shows us early on in a swimming pool how his middle-aged body is remarkably lean and well-trained—a carefully rendered visual detail that quickly elicits in us the sensa282

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Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold tion of an enormous, unseen, unspoken set of forces that seem to squeeze all the life out of him. 38. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 80 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 39. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4. 40. Adorno, “Commitment,” 92. 41. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 5. 42. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 94. 43. Petzold, “Der fliegende Holländer,” 53. 44. Fellow Berlin School director Ulrich Köhler’s recent polemical essay (“Warum ich keine ‘politischen’ Filme mache,” http://newfilmkritik.de/archiv/2007-04/warum-ich-keine-„politischen“-filme-mache/. Also published in English as “Why I Don’t Make ‘Political’ Films,” trans. Bettina Steinbrugge, Cinema Scope 38 [2009], 10–13) explains why he does not make political films. Köhler points out that one of the surest way to receive public funding for a film production in Germany is to make a topical film—films that package political enlightenment in stories. Köhler derides such films as the embodiment of “the aesthetic program of social-democratized cultural politics.” Against this moralistic imperative to be a conscientious filmmaker who uses his art for the betterment of society, Köhler mounts a near Adornoesque defense of the autonomy of art, writing, “Art, which wants to be nothing but art, is often more subversive” than topical art, whose popularity itself is frequently an index for its affirmation of the status quo. Arguing against an instrumentalization of filmmaking, Köhler proposes, “If art is political then it is so in exactly this manner: it resists its appropriation for daily political and social concerns. Its strength lies in its autonomy.” 45. My phrase “melodramatic expressionism” names here a moment of, if you will, generic folding. On one hand, the scene’s visual expressiveness addresses the viewer not on the realistic level but on the level of a subjective rendering of the world’s facticity (that of both the diegetic and extradiegetic worlds, that of the fictional, and that of the real spaces used to stage the fiction); on the other, the reality of the characters’ world is simultaneously heightened, in terms of plot, to the level of melodrama: the drama of Nina and Toni’s relationship peaks at the very moment when they are afforded a moment of utmost intimacy set to diegetic trip-hop music. 46. Earlier, the film planted some suggestive hints with regard to this question. When they first meet, Françoise claims that Nina is Marie, her long lost daughter. Nina confirms that she has a scar on her left ankle, just as Françoise said she would (a result of a swing accident Marie had as a small child). Following the close-up of Nina’s scar, Françoise, encouraged by the evidence, further claims that Nina has a small, heart-shaped liver spot between her shoulder blades. Before she gets the opportunity to take a look at Nina’s back, however, Toni, who has been uneasily witnessing this interaction, drags her friend away. Later, in front of a bathroom mirror, Nina tries to see for herself whether the spot she indeed appears to have 283

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is heart-shaped when Toni intrudes upon her. Sheepishly explaining herself to Toni, Nina asks her to have a look. Shot in a way that our view of Nina’s back is obstructed, the film provides us only with Toni’s highly ambiguous silent response as we see both of their faces reflected in the mirror. When later on Nina meets Françoise again, she tells her, “I think I have the heart on my back. Toni did see it” (my emphasis). Finally, when Françoise learns that Nina would like orange juice for breakfast, she recounts how, when Marie had just been born, Françoise would drink orange juice even though her midwife counseled against it. Notwithstanding deliberately planted clues, the film prevents us from claiming with any empirical certainty that Nina is indeed Marie. Arguably, though, the film’s real interest does not reside in resolving this question, in articulating the truth of Nina’s identity. Ghosts is more interested in the question of how one’s identity—and one’s desire for it—is an effect of narrative and affective processes—that is, how identity is always an effect of prior processes of differentiation. 47. Commenting on Adorno’s explanation of how Schoenberg’s compositions potentiate the fragmentary quality of Beethoven’s late works, Hullot-Kentor incisively writes, “The semblance of wholeness, in which the listening ear recognizes its own unity and finds its image confirmed, is demolished, and what deepens between these fragments is that which the power of likeness gains for the unlike. These compositions are a kind of metaphor that says: ‘You are to this what this is not to you’  ” (Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Things beyond Resemblance,” in Things beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, 45–66 [New York: Columbia University Press, 2006]). 48. That post-Wall citizens indeed felt a lack of movement in their lives is well evidenced by post-Wall German social, cultural, and political discourse, but the fact that two German presidents, Roman Herzog and Horst Köhler, felt compelled, in 1997 and 2005, respectively, to admonish the nation to become more mobile is probably the best indication of the centrality the issue of (lack of) mobility played in Germans’ lives since the reunification. Of course, my point is that Petzold’s (and the Berlin School’s) imaging of mobility is precisely not representational, as if in agreement with the presidents’ neoliberal rhetoric. 49. Petzold, “Cinema of Identification.”

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Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment The Berlin School and the Politics of Spatial Aesthetics in the German-Polish Borderlands

Christoph Hochhäusler’s 2003 debut feature-length film, Milchwald (This Very Moment), is a translation of the traditional “Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale into a contemporary idiom. The film recycles the well-known story according to an easily recognizable set of narrative components: two young siblings are a burden in the house of their remarried father; they are brought to a location symbolically external to the domestic space of the family by their stepmother and abandoned in this realm of the unheimlich (uncanny). The main difference is that This Very Moment is staged across the German-Polish border in the postunification period. Extracted from its conventional home in mythical time and space, the tale is stripped of its supernatural elements to reflect the real, political time of the present. These children are not led into the depths of an enchanted forest but instead mundanely packed into the car and driven across the border. The film thus transposes the fairy tale’s dual spatial order (the everyday world of home vs. the magical space of the forest) over a contemporary national divide. Christoph Hochhäusler has indicated that he intends his film to be read politically, and he has provided a loose set of interpretive impulses gesturing in this direction.1 Yet This Very Moment has been treated primarily as an aesthetic object, with critics generally limiting their analyses to descriptions of the film’s form rather than interpretations of its content. Reviewers have not shown much interest in exploring the ways in which This Very Moment addresses post-Communist realities, critiques assumptions about German unification, or questions Germany’s position in an expanding European Union. Instead, they focus on categoriz285

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ing the film according to stylistic parameters and are typically most interested in identifying the ways in which Hochhäusler’s film participates in the new wave of German auteur cinema and the extent to which his film practice conforms to the precedents set by the Berlin School of recent acclaim.2 Such exclusive attention to the surface of the film does the film injustice on two levels: First, descriptive treatments of the film’s form do not serve the purpose of rendering the film more accessible because they fail to explain how this form interacts with the film’s content to communicate a message (or mediate an experience) to the viewer. Such explication is particularly desirable in the context of the Berlin School, because these films are asking viewers to engage with the filmic medium in an unconventional—and, for many, unfamiliar—way. To a significant extent, Berlin School films minimize the narrative structures on which audiences are so accustomed to focusing their attention and present instead nonnarrative (or only minimalistically narrative) filmic portraits. This shift away from narrative means that Berlin School directors do not guide their audiences along chains of tightly knit plot points. Instead, they closely observe individuals in situations without providing the causal links that would contextualize their behavior. The films thereby generate unanswered questions and frame intriguing narrative absences, a strategy that asks audiences to engage with the films in a more contemplative fashion. Although most Berlin School filmmakers express the desire for their films to reach larger, more mainstream audiences, many viewers have not easily followed the shift from plot to portrait and from narrative to enigma and, as a result, have found the Berlin School films unengaging.3 Analyses focusing on the interaction between form and content are needed to help audiences access these films and find pleasure in the cinematic experiences they mediate. Second, Berlin School films—and This Very Moment in particular— resonate with much more meaning when assessed in relation to the specific social, political, and historical contexts of their production. Indeed, much of the contemplation that these films elicit involves attempting to “fill in the blanks” with information derived from one’s own contextual knowledge. If the film works to carefully frame an intriguing absence and provide the viewer with a compelling enigma, it is to this knowledge of context that the viewer must appeal in attempting to solve the puzzle. In This Very Moment, for example, this “compelling enigma” is the question of the stepmother’s motivations for abandoning the children. 286

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The film never provides an explanation but instead circles around this question, drawing attention to the absence it frames. The viewer is left to carefully observe the stepmother for clues and to draw on external knowledge—perhaps of the fairy tale upon which the film is based, or of contemporary sociopolitical issues, etc.—to complete the story. By excluding reference to such contextualizations, reviewers miss an opportunity to show how these films are both informed by and intervene in contemporary social discourse. In addressing Hochhäusler’s film as text, I will investigate the filmaesthetic practices characteristic of the Berlin School and position Hochhäusler’s film in relation to them; I will also show that aspects of the film’s form invite the viewer to read This Very Moment as a critical appraisal of German identity in the second decade following unification.

Berlin School Aesthetics Christoph Hochhäusler is one of the most noted filmmakers associated with the Berlin School, not only because of the quality of his filmmaking but also because of his role as publicist and agitator for a German auteur cinema.4 Born in 1972 in Munich, Hochhäusler first studied architecture in Berlin before enrolling in the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München. In 1998, while still a student in this program, he teamed up with colleagues Benjamin Heisenberg, Jens Börner, and Sebastian Kutzli to launch the film journal Revolver. The students wanted to complement their film school’s emphasis on hands-on filmmaking skills with an engagement in theoretical discussions about the filmic medium and how it can alter the ways in which stories are told. Partly inspired by the Cahiers du Cinéma, the journal makes this dialogue possible by featuring interviews with contemporary filmmakers exploring these issues in their work. Revolver serves as an intellectual meeting point for several of the Berlin School directors, but, although they exchange ideas about film practice, they have rejected the idea of drafting a Berlin School manifesto of any kind. Nonetheless, a core set of commonalities can be identified. Thomas Arslan, a member of the first generation of Berlin School filmmakers, might indeed speak for all who followed when he identifies as his guiding principle the avoidance of a “dramaturgy of overbearance” (Überwältigungsdramaturgie) and the desire to give both his characters and his viewers space free of his control.5 Arslan criticizes mainstream 287

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cinema’s tendency to present closed narratives that direct and control audience’s emotional responses and moral evaluations: for every action undertaken by a character in a mainstream film, a battery of emotive film music, subjective camera angles, and closure-oriented editing is unleashed, all designed to guide the audience’s reactions. Christoph Hochhäusler refers to this practice as the “sheepherder effect,” which is meant to keep the flock of viewers moving in the intended direction.6 One’s freedom of agency is limited in the face of a totalizing aesthetic uniting camera, narrative, soundtrack, and acting styles. Angela Schanelec, director of the film Marseille (2004), shares in the political condemnation of the “dramaturgy of overbearance” for the ways in which it deindividualizes the viewer. Even though these strategies are usually transparent, Schanalec argues, we are often unable to elude them and become the passive recipients of predetermined experiences.7 Although mainstream audience members may have come to expect and even enjoy passive modes of viewing, Berlin School directors are hoping that they can also discover the pleasure of agency in a more active reception mode. Therefore, the Berlin School’s opposition engages not only a rejection of the elements characterizing “dramaturgies of overbearance” (i.e., emotive film music, subjective camera angles, etc.) but also a promotion of various strategies positioning the viewer as an active subject. Arslan very deliberately speaks of this process in terms of providing “space.” In a figurative sense, providing viewers with space means giving them freedom to interact with the film by not using “sheepherding effects” and encouraging them to create their own meaning from the images presented. In the interest of enabling such autonomy, Arslan indicates that it is also necessary to provide his characters with space, to grant them freedom from the tight confines of directorial intent and to set them loose from their conventional subservience to the dictates of narrative.8 To “provide space” in this context is to communicate information in a way unique to the visual image, such that the act of (visual) showing dominates that of (narrative) telling. Where mainstream films emphasize the linear, and often rapid, presentation of plot points (and focus the viewer’s attention on the task of correctly following the path that they create), Berlin School films remove the plot from the center of attention and focus instead on observing the nondramatic moments occurring at its margins.

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Such a practice of observation necessitates real time, which is delivered through a conspicuous slowing down of both camera work and scene editing. The camera often lingers on its subject significantly longer than would be necessary to deliver narrative information; it might also observe characters engaging in activities having no causal relationship to the plot, for example, or it might continue filming an empty space after all have left it at the end of a scene. Interest in spaces and characters, in other words, is not reduced to the role these can be brought to play in working through a checklist of narrative units; they instead gain value in and of themselves. Provided with the luxury of time, the viewer is invited to take on the role of active observer, entering and exploring the spaces of the film in an undirected way and learning something about the reality of the characters by observing the ways in which they interact with this space. Although each of the Berlin School films meets these two main objectives—of avoiding “dramaturgies of overbearance” and providing “space”—in its own unique way, they all, to some extent, appeal to this slowness in camera and editing style in their work. The long, “contemplative” camera shot is such a distinctive marker of these films that any contemporary German director employing it inevitably faces the assumption that he or she has joined the ranks of the “Berlin School.” However, it is not merely this contemplative aesthetic that distinguishes these films but also its combination with other strategies leading to an overall privileging of portraiture over plot and the creation of compelling enigmas. The list that follows is not prescriptive but instead represents a set of filmic strategies that the Berlin School directors have drawn from in various combinations to achieve this change in focus. Narrative minimalism: In the privileging of portrait over plot, narratives become quite reduced. Often, a film merely introduces a welldefined spatial context in which to observe its characters. There may be a structuring conflict introduced to focus the viewer’s observations, but when present, it is deemphasized and left unresolved. Narrative ellipses/de-dramatics: The role of plot can be further deemphasized by omitting various moments of narrative development from the film altogether. At the end of Marseille, for example, Angela Schanelec’s protagonist is the victim of a mugging. The event itself is neither foreshadowed nor depicted on screen; instead, the camera observes the character as she sits in the police station, coming to terms with the

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event well after the fact. Hochhäusler describes this narrative practice as “de-dramatics” and positions it as an oppositional reaction to mainstream cinematic storytelling: “Where Hollywood would show the explosion, we show the reflection of the explosion, to the very cliché of this opposition. . . . Such omission, such a de-dramatics, of course, tells of the drama of that which is not shown.”9 These elliptical moments call on the viewer to become an active part of the creation process, to account for that which the film either merely gestures toward or elides completely. Avoidance of narrative omniscience: Berlin School directors often approach their characters in a distanced, objective manner reminiscent of late nineteenth-century literary Naturalism. Access to characters and their worlds is, in other words, limited to what one can observe. There is a reluctance to provide information about the characters’ pasts that might guide (or manipulate) the viewer’s process of engaging with the film’s enigmas and ellipses. Faced with this lack of information, the viewer is compelled to carefully observe the behaviors of characters to understand their current attitudes and motivations. Directors even go so far as to treat their characters as if they were real individuals existing independently of the filmmaker’s creation and thus not any more transparent to their creators than to other observers. Thomas Arslan insists on taking his figures seriously by not allowing them to become “slaves of his screenplay.” He therefore “refrains from going inside of their heads” and struggles to respect the border between his figures’ internal and external realms.10 In avoiding omniscience and leaving questions open, filmmakers provide viewers with a creative, contemplative space in which they can consider their own interpretations. Dialogue: It has long been a standard film practice to use dialogue as a means of conveying information viewers might need to follow and evaluate the plot. Characters in conversation can “fill in” information about events that took place in the past; they can also externalize emotions, assess events, articulate desires, etc. In providing such access to internal thoughts, characters perform a role analogous to that of the omniscient narrator often encountered in written texts. Understanding such “narrating dialogue” to be an artificial externalization of information, this type of speech is avoided in Berlin School films. Where speech is nonetheless present, it is usually more important for the form it takes (i.e., how does this character talk? does this character talk at all in a given situation, or does he remain silent?) than for its content. Henner Winckler describes this effect in his film Klassenfahrt (Class Trip, 2002), 290

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where most of the speech of the schoolchildren is restricted to performing social identities through speech acts. Each child’s membership in a peer group, for example, depends on the extent to which he or she participates in its ritualized banter. The children toss standardized empty phrases back and forth, but this speech does not serve the purpose of conveying information: “Not everything works via dialogue. There are scenes in which very little content is conveyed even though everyone is talking, while other scenes communicate a lot of content even though no one says a word.”11 This relationship between speech and the performance of identity reveals the extent to which the act of speaking has been reconfigured to support an aesthetics of the portrait in Berlin School films. Acting: In a conscious move away from “overbearing” film-acting styles, directors increasingly engage actors from outside the medium. Some (most notably Valeska Grisebach) work with amateurs, others engage professionals from the theater (the stepmother in This Very Moment is played by Judith Engel, who, before her appearance in this film, had led a successful stage career). In all cases, the goal is a minimalistic, restrained style; but the resulting strategies range from a direct employment of Brechtian alienation strategies highlighting the effect of performance (quite pronounced in Arslan’s Dealer [1999], where dialogues are presented as detached recitations of standard clichés) to a conspicuous style of realistic nonacting (as in Grisebach’s Sehnsucht [Longing, 2006] in which amateur actors engage in everyday activities from their own milieu as if there were no camera present). Lack of character development: Berlin School films aspire to present portraits of individuals: the question is not how characters change over time in response to given experiences (which is, of course, the concern of conventional narrative forms) but instead—given who they already are as individuals—how characters react when subjected to a specific set of circumstances. As portraits in place and time (and not as narratives of development) the films usually do not cover long periods of time but are limited to the days, perhaps weeks, necessary to establish the context of observation. Sound: In assessing mainstream cinema, Berlin School directors most frequently and emphatically criticize Hollywood’s use of music to emotionally underscore scenes and “shepherd” viewer response. Extradiegetic sound is thus typically eliminated altogether or restrained to a bare minimum in Berlin School films. Much more common is the prac291

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tice of amplifying ambient sound to draw the viewer into the texture of a given space.

This Very Moment The opening scene of This Very Moment appears at first consistent with Berlin School practice, but it also reveals Hochhäusler’s signature style. The camera opens to frame a vast landscape across which a road, lined by dusty sand, lies empty and deserted. The scene evokes the Western genre in its dominant color palette (a pale blue sky weighs heavily over the shimmering green and gold hues of the sand and surrounding fields) and in its soundscape (dry, harsh wind blows across the desolate, dusty road, its sound amplified, as if tumbleweeds might blow in from offscreen). The sound of shoes trudging through the unpaved surface draws our attention to two children who appear far off in the distance and steadily work their way toward the camera. In this desolate environment, they seem out of place; they have appeared out of nowhere, and we see no buildings or other infrastructure to indicate where they might be headed. The camera remains motionless as the children move across its center of focus, even as the older (the nine-year-old Lea, played by Sophie Charlotte Conrad) walks offscreen. A car appears in the distance and slowly approaches the remaining child (the seven-year-old Konstantin, played by Leo Bruckmann); Lea reenters the frame to approach the vehicle. The scene is almost two minutes long and delivers little in the way of narrative explication or development. At first assessment, Hochhäusler seems to be engaging in a straightforward, contemplative aesthetics of portraiture, inviting the viewer to observe the children and their relationship to this desolate space. Indeed, it is unclear how we are to imagine this empty road as part of a larger social space, and we wonder about the children’s presence in the landscape. Here, however, Hochhäusler breaks with the Berlin School practice of excluding extradiegetic music and introduces an ominous soundtrack that overlays the scene with a sense of tension, perhaps even of menace. The amplified sounds of the natural environment (the harsh sound of the wind, the children’s shoes trudging through the sand) are mixed with a discordant music track that stands in tension with the innocuous events portrayed. The minimalistic, nonmelodic soundtrack repeatedly rises to a suspenseful pitch, generating an expectation of narrative development (the music 292

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seems to cue the arrival of an antagonist or other impending conflict), but this aural invitation is never met with any change in the static proceedings on screen. The soundtrack signifies a conflict for which the film’s images offer no signifier; a sense of discord is thereby introduced that Hochhäusler manages to sustain over the course of the entire shot and, indeed, over great stretches of the entire film. The following scene takes place inside the car, where the children’s stepmother, Sylvia, announces her plan for a shopping excursion across the border into Poland. It quickly becomes evident that the relationship between Sylvia and her stepchildren is fraught with conflict. The viewer is shown the children from Sylvia’s point of view: Lea as a chillingly mean child, and her brother as insufferably helpless and needy. Sylvia is not up to the task of parenting these children, and the tensions culminate in her temporarily setting the children out by the roadside on the Polish side of the border. She drives away and attempts to regain her composure on a quiet turnoff in the forest. Throughout this sequence, the editing rhythms are slow, and the images are distinguished by a visual sparseness. There are so few objects present in the various frames, and the camera lingers on them for such extended amounts of time, that they each seem to promise symbolic meaning beyond their referential qualities: Konstantin has a watch whose penetrating alarm proves difficult for him to silence (what event or quality is this alarm marking?), Sylvia has a strand of hair that repeatedly falls across her face (does it represent a larger obstacle to her ability to see the world around her?). As Sylvia now stands smoking next to her empty car, the discordant music returns. It reaches a crescendo as the camera cuts to show a stork crossing the road in front of Sylvia’s car. Here, the music serves to generate semantic dissonance around the meaning of the stork, an animal that does not appear in the traditional versions of “Hansel and Gretel” and whose standard iconographic meaning (as the deliverer of new babies) does not find easy resonance within the world depicted by the film (the spindly and cold Sylvia neither exhibits a maternal nature nor overtly expresses desire to have children of her own). The stork will soon disappear and not be alluded to again in the film, yet it lingers as a marked signifier without a designated signified. This Very Moment presents the viewer with such provocatively resonant yet semantically empty signs in almost every scene. As a result, the viewer is confronted with two separate, yet intertwined realms of 293

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Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment (2003) destabilizes the traditional iconographic meanings. Here, the stork resists interpretation as a sign of joyful maternity.

meaning: one is referential and corresponds to the images as they are presented on screen, whereas the other is nonreferential and is constructed by the viewer through contemplating the potential meanings of the empty signs. In this realm of meaning, the objects and figures function symbolically so that the story itself gains an allegorical quality. The film music therefore supports the Berlin School contemplative aesthetic 294

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because it does not serve to manipulate the audience’s emotional responses but instead invites (or compels) the viewers to contemplate the nonreferential realm of meaning as they observe the referential world portrayed. After briefly recounting the story that transpires in this referential realm, I will show how the nonreferential realm can be read as an extended metaphor of German identity in the postunification period. Sylvia returns to find that the children have disappeared. As she halfheartedly calls for them, the camera frames her against the surrounding Polish landscape. Sylvia’s clothing suggestively repeats the dominant green and beige hues of the fields; the colors are so exactly matched that they appear to indicate some relationship between Sylvia and this space, as if she herself were a product of the landscape, an observation I will return to below. The children fail to return, and, without any apparent sense of malice (but with a certain air of indifference), Sylvia simply gets in the car and abandons the scene. She will later hide the children’s backpacks, claim that they never came home from school, and deny any role in their disappearance. It is this extended act of denial and lying that introduces the film’s structuring conflict as well as its compelling enigma. True to the practice of avoiding narrative omniscience, Sylvia’s motivations are never revealed, and the absence of this information becomes the incentive for closely observing her in the hopes of obtaining clues for her actions. Although the initial act of setting the children outside the car may have presented a recognizable act of parental exasperation, nonchalantly driving away and abandoning the children has introduced a scenario that falls outside societal (and legal) norms. Sylvia might have tried to track down the children or to seek help in locating them, but she instead chooses to lie about the children’s disappearance. Once this choice has been made, her only hope of resuming her comfortable life lies in the children’s failure to return. The film subsequently divides into two parallel tracks, one following Lea and Konstantin’s attempts to make their way back home and the other observing Sylvia as her husband struggles to find the children. Lea and her brother move aimlessly through various landscapes, a wandering that takes on a mythic quality. They do not encounter any other individuals, and the landscapes they move through lack defining contours; whether they are in a field or in a forest, their surroundings are uniform and lack any perceptible boundaries. Appearing to move through a “nowhere,” the children do not appear to make any progress in their desire to arrive “somewhere.” 295

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Sylvia, meanwhile, has returned to her home, which, in a different way, is also presented as a “nowhere.” The house is under construction, with lumber and building tools lying stacked outside and an interior still wrapped in protective plastic dropcloths.12 Inside the house, a cold, blue light reflects off harsh, geometric surfaces, and the sounds of footsteps echo loudly through empty halls. Empty, cold, and barren, the house feels like a tomb. Significantly, the uncanny house seems to stand isolated in the middle of nowhere. There are no establishing shots locating it within any neighborhood or community, and close-ups of the house’s exterior seem to personify it with darkened windows and an eerie silence. In long takes, we watch Sylvia move through the house, but none of its spaces offers comfort or respite—Sylvia appears to be completely out of place. When her husband Josef (Horst-Günter Marx) returns home, Sylvia’s first interaction with him is a hysterical, almost maniacal seduction into bed—an action that, like her abandonment of the children—appears perplexing; in the context of the narrative it only intensifies the sense of enigmatic unease. In the middle of the dark forest, the hungry children chance upon a table spread with a modest meal, and Konstantin is caught by a Polish man as he tries to steal it. Kuba (played by the Polish actor Mirosław Baka, well-known to German audiences through his starring role in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Krótki film o zabijaniu [A Short Film about Killing, 1988] as well as several roles in German films and television series) delivers cleaning supplies to motels and restaurants along the highway, and although his van may offer the structural corollary of the witch’s gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel” (an expectation perhaps heightened by the criminal roles Baka typically plays), the Pole initially has no designs on the children. It is only when Kuba sees that a reward has been offered for their return that he forces Lea and Konstantin into his van, and the analogy to the witch of the fairy tale begins to resonate. Kuba and Josef have arranged to meet on the German-Polish border and exchange the children for the cash award. Sylvia accompanies her husband but suffers a series of physical breakdowns along the way. It has become impossible to imagine a scenario in which Sylvia could maintain her position in the family should the children return, for they will certainly reveal her duplicity. Ultimately, in an apparent delirium, Sylvia walks along the highway and collapses into the stream of oncoming traffic—the stepmother is dead. True to the original tale, the children free themselves from captiv296

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Sylvia’s uncanny, tomblike home as “nowhere” in This Very Moment.

ity. When Lea attempts to poison his coffee with cleaning fluid, Kuba is so horrified that he ousts the children from his van—an echo of Sylvia’s action at the beginning of the film. This Very Moment ends with a long, slow shot of Lea and Konstantin walking down the middle of an empty road away from the camera and over the horizon. The film thus ends with a mirror image of its opening shot, as the children wander along an empty road that appears to lead back into the “nowhere” out of which the children arose at the beginning of the film. 297

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German-Polish Context This Very Moment was released in 2003 at the beginning of a small wave of German films depicting German contact with Polish spaces and characters in the contemporary period (I will refer to these here as “Poland films” for brevity). It was as if the discussions surrounding Poland’s scheduled 2004 accession to the European Union had caused a new generation of filmmakers to consider how Polish figures and Polish space might be incorporated into their creative projects. The resulting films arose out of various commercial and art house sections of the German film industry,13 including three produced by Berlin School directors: Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment, Henner Winckler’s Class Trip, and Jan Krüger’s Unterwegs (En Route, 2004). Both individually and collectively, these films break with the representations of Poland and the Poles that had dominated the German media in the 1990s. Although Poland had been positioned as a threatening, abject Other during the first decade of German unification, in the 2000s, the integration of Poland into the European Union has been accompanied by a productive reconsideration of Germany’s relationship with its eastern neighbor. Contemporary productions present a new set of representational practices reflecting this shift. The first decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall was a period of significant insecurity for both East and West Germans, who were dealing with fundamental social, political, and economic change, on the one hand, and grappling with issues of economic burden, guilt, and responsibility, on the other. Much of the resulting inner-German tensions found expression in mutual East-West stereotyping and caricature, but, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, they were also projected onto ethnic outsiders, who repeatedly became the victims of violent xenophobic attacks.14 During this period of crisis, “Poland” came to perform a specific function as Germany’s Other in German public discourse. Represented as faring much worse in comparison to the Germans, Poland and the Poles became a repository for externalized inner-German anxieties. In language ranging from highbrow feuilleton essays to vulgar popular jokes, “Poland” was identified with cultural backwardness, technological underdevelopment, and criminal tendencies. “Poles,” meanwhile, were mainly associated with car theft rings, border prostitution, and the criminal mafia.15 In the popular imagination, Poland and Germany were separated by an enormous civilizational divide. Seen from this angle, Germany’s internal disparities appeared insignificant, because the dis298

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course united East and West Germans on the same side of such structural binaries as “Western modernity versus Eastern backwardness” or “German order and progress versus Polish chaos and desperation.” The border between German Self and Polish Other thereby came to play a crucial role for Germans in the process of imagining their newly unified nation as a rightful whole. German Poland films of the 1990s reflect this dominant discourse by introducing Polish criminals as the source of German social malaise and establishing the Polish border as the site of contaminating threat. Both Michael Klier’s Ostkreuz (Eastern Crossing [1991], starring Baka in a criminal role) and Helke Misselwitz’s Engelchen (Little Angel, 1996) feature Polish swindlers in Berlin who seduce economically vulnerable German women into their criminal underworlds, while in Kaspar Heidelbach’s 1993 thriller Polski Crash (Polish Crash, in which Baka stars as a Polish mafia leader) and Oskar Roehler’s 1997 Silvester Countdown (In with the New), Germans traveling into Polish space become the victims of violent crime or fall into the hands of powerful mafia organizations. Even such popular films as Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (Run, Lola, Run, 1998) and Vanessa Joop’s Vergiß Amerika (Forget America, 2000) employ the trope of the abject Polish borderlands to frame their narratives; the male protagonist in each film becomes involved with a Polish car theft ring, and his blunders provide the film’s structuring conflicts.16 Time and again, German protagonists are shown to be naïve in their belief that they can control any dangerous consequences that might result from involving themselves with Polish elements; in each case, they quickly find themselves proven wrong as they encounter criminal power structures for which they are no match. These films suggested that the lack of rational and effective governing structures in Poland had created an economic and social desperation in which criminal organizations thrived. Although the chaos in Poland may have seemed to offer the chance to make a quick fortune, these films of the 1990s argued that the costs were too high and that patiently abiding by the German system promised a better long-term outcome. The stereotype of Polish crime thus provided films of the 1990s with a convenient source of narrative conflict while reinforcing a radical divide between a homogeneous German Self and its abject and threatening Polish Other. Films of the following decade, in contrast, move away from such a binary logic through two parallel sets of deconstructions. First, these films reassert the heterogeneity of German society by introducing 299

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narratives reflective of specific regional, class, and ethnic identities: East and West Germans no longer present identical subject positions but are instead shown to be the products of different histories and experiences. Second, this differentiated view of German society allows Poland films to draw lines of identity that run perpendicular to national categories (e.g., class, relationship to crime, political persuasion). Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (Distant Lights, 2003) is exemplary in this regard, because the film argues that Germans and Poles of the marginalized borderland region have more in common with each other than with those hailing from the centers of their respective countries. Schmid’s film shows the borderlands to be woven together by a series of economic, social, and political flows but also makes it clear that this system of exchanges only exists as an incidental by-product of globalized power and commerce. In this portrait of Frankfurt (Oder) and its counterpart, Słubice, on the Polish side of the Oder river, the main social and economic distinctions separate those able to fluidly cross the political border (a group that includes both Germans and Poles) from those legally prevented from doing so (Ukrainians, for example). Germans and Poles residing in the borderlands are united on one side of the gates of Fortress Europe, but this does not mean that they share in the power of this geopolitical structure. Instead, representatives of economic and political power hailing from Berlin and Warsaw are positioned as the interconnected agents of global power and wealth whose interests are usually at odds with people coping with the border area’s economic difficulties. Distant Lights is the only contemporary film directly thematizing the political relationship between Germany and Poland. This singularity is conspicuous because the beginning of the current wave of Poland films coincided with preparations for the 2004 accession of Poland to the European Union. Although this development affected border traffic and increased the ease with which Poles could cross into German space (i.e., the concerns of criminal traffic characteristic of border discourse in the 1990s), German films have largely abandoned depictions of threat arising from this context. Indeed, if we look at other contemporary films portraying Frankfurt (Oder), we see this prominent eastern border town positioned not as the site of German-Polish conflict but instead as the battleground upon which the contested issue of inner-German unity (vs. lack thereof) is staged. Is Frankfurt (Oder) the up-and-coming space of international 300

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transit with an optimistic and adaptable population (as presented in Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe [Grill Point, 2002]) or is it the economically and socially abandoned frontier outpost that has turned into a hopelessly violent, neofascistic abyss (as presented in Mirko Borscht’s Kombat sechzehn [Combat 16, 2005])?17 In these contestations over the successes and failures of unification, Polish space and characters are almost absent—they have been refigured and redeployed to serve a different set of discursive needs. In one set of films, Polish characters are introduced into German space as agents of personal rescue. After these films introduce German protagonists trapped in calcified, self-destructive behavior patterns, Polish characters arrive on the scene to offer them a new set of options, usually by providing themselves as libidinal objects. In other films, German characters are the ones on the move, and their travel to Poland holds out the chance of achieving personal liberation. For, as the new and unknown, Polish space becomes the product of their own imaginative projections: “Poland” is cast as an uninscribed terra incognita that German characters recast as the space of fairy tales and “Wild West” adventure fantasies. This Very Moment is one of the very few German films of the 2000s to depict Germans in Polish space: in addition to the Berlin School films Class Trip and En Route, this list includes only Schmid’s Distant Lights.18 It is significant that three of these films are of the Berlin School, because their slow, contemplative aesthetic renders them particularly well equipped to move into a new space so underexplored by German film. With these Poland films in mind, Rüdiger Suchsland considers their approach to Polish space: German cinema is still conquering this foreign terrain, its gaze is still as slow and curious as the American gaze upon the West once was, that of the French upon Africa. Nothing seems recognizable; there aren’t even stereotypical ways of looking. [These films] aren’t about Poland or the discovery of another country, because one still doesn’t know what Poland is; instead, they are about foreignness itself [“das Fremde an sich”].19

Reflecting this lack of an established filmic discourse on Poland, the Berlin School directors do not take their viewers to places that exist on the German mental map of the East. Neither famous Polish cities such as Krakow nor infamous sites of historic atrocity such as Auschwitz figure 301

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in these films, which instead travel into spaces that are not inscribed with recognizable meaning for the German characters.20 They respond by projecting childlike fantasies of adventure or fairy tale onto the surrounding terrain. In Winckler’s Class Trip, German youth lacking the funds to travel to a more conventional destination take their class trip to a small town on the Polish coast of the Baltic Sea. The students feel as if they are in the middle of nowhere, which they seem best able to express through clichéd references to the North American “Wild West”: visiting a museum of the region’s history, the main protagonist gives vent to his feelings of alienation by entering an exhibit and imitating an “Indian” dancing around the fire. Kruger’s En Route performs a similar projection of meaning onto space when Sandra follows Marco to his family’s cottage in the middle of a forest in Poland. In a scene rich in ambiguity, Sandra’s young daughter believes Marco’s promise that she can become a princess if she manages to find her way home alone through the “enchanted forest.” This Very Moment engages both of these spatial tropes: Poland is a nonplace onto which childlike fantasies of the “Wild West” as well as visions of fairy-tale enchantment are projected. When Sylvia drives over the border into Poland, both the scenery outside the window and the photographic means of capturing it simultaneously change to reflect a change in the status of the space. During the drive through Germany, the landscape through which the car moves is only visible in the background of shots framing individuals in the car. Accompanied by discordant tones, the viewer catches glimpses of a barren terrain littered with building equipment: excavators, drainage pipes, and piles of sand. Once in Poland, however, the soundtrack becomes less discordant, the camera leaves the figures in the car to focus on the passing scenery, and recognizable features of the landscape are suddenly rendered as strange objects of enchantment: geometric patterns appear in the sky created by utility lines, hazy blurs of color are painted by the passing fields, a fluttering filmstrip is cast by the rows of forest trees. The landscape maintains this enchanted character until the children meet up with Kuba, at which point the surroundings subtly shift. Now the world becomes a space of childhood fantasy replete with scenes reminiscent of Karl May’s “Wild West” adventure novels. The soundtrack resumes its dissonant chords but adds an additional track of Indian-like drumming. As Konstantin jumps from square to square on the patterned hotel carpet, navigating his way through a pretend landscape of imaginary dangers, the “Wild 302

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West” soundtrack seems to reflect his subjective point of view. We hear this music again as the children are later confronted by a group of Polish youths while collecting coins from a fountain—in Lea and Konstantin’s eyes, they are fighting off a rival tribe as they collect the “fortune” that will buy them tickets back home. Poland in Hochhäusler’s film, as in the other two Berlin School films, is a nonspace that becomes the projection screen for a childlike fantasyscape of adventure and enchantment. Although this naïve aesthetic runs counter to representations of Poland as criminal, abject Other, it is not without its pitfalls, because the film succumbs to affirming certain aspects of this fantasy on the plane of the real. Despite, for example, the multiple Polish adults (including police officers) who realize that the children are lost, there is never a responsible effort to return Lea and Konstantin to their parents. Poland thus comes across as anarchic and devoid of adult organization, an effect exacerbated by the introduction of real danger, not the product of childhood fantasy; on their second night in Poland, Lea loses her brother. When he is found the next day standing disheveled and disturbed at the roadside, it is obvious that he has been the victim of some form of abuse.

The Politics of This Very Moment Thus far, I have indicated two ways in which we might understand Hochhäusler’s film to engage politically: first, as an illustration of the Berlin School’s interest in promoting an engaged and actively reflective spectatorship practice and, second, as participating in an attempt to deconstruct stereotypes of Polish criminality. But Hochhäusler has indicated that he also intends for his film to be read politically on a symbolic level. This intention is textually enacted by the filmmaker’s practice of using music to gesture toward a nonreferential realm of meaning, as well as his creation of resonant, yet empty, signifiers. In several interviews, Hochhäusler has indicated the direction he intended this symbolic political reading to take: I really enjoy reading the film’s symbols. Like the house that isn’t fully constructed, etc. These are all signs that can and should be read politically. Germany naturally changed a lot in the reunification and the liberalization of the East Bloc. For the most part, this has been energizing, but also occasionally anxiety arousing and has led to a lot of distress, because of course, every change is distressful.21 303

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If the house represents “Germany under construction,” then it follows that the marriage of Sylvia and Josef represents the uneasy unification of East and West Germany. It is easy to position Sylvia as the Eastern partner of this union, most provocatively when she is brought into alignment with the Polish landscape through scenes in which her clothing, skin, and hair so closely match the hues of the surrounding fields. In contrast, Sylvia always appears alienated from the cold, blue space of the new house. There is also an economic component to this reading, for Josef is, of course, the one who works, the one who financially supports this new union. In his profession as architect, Josef is the one who determines the form the emerging landscape will take, whereas Sylvia merely moves into the space Josef has created. Following the analogy further, Josef brings Lea and Konstantin into this marriage. Children represent a legacy, an investment of one’s values and goals, wishes and hopes for the future, and Josef expects Sylvia to adopt his as her own. This then, can be understood to be the starting point for the “Hansel and Gretel” tale of abandonment. The alignment between Eastern German stepmother and Western German progeny is unsuccessful, and upon closer inspection, the abandonment appears mutual: it is not only the East German who has discovered that the Western legacy is not her own (Sylvia struggles to mother the children but fails) but also the Western progeny who reject the East German as guardian (Lea refuses to respect Sylvia’s authority, even attempting to escape her by jumping out of the moving car). The East German is rejected as the guardian of the Western legacy. Understood as such, the stork Sylvia encounters in the forest now gains new resonance as a symbol of Sylvia’s desire for children (as the embodiment of her own dreams for the future) but also as an empty promise—as a dream unfulfilled. Sylvia’s maniacal desire to have sex with Josef after the abandonment of Lea and Konstantin would thus represent her desire to replace his legacy with a set of mutual dreams arising out of their new unity. Sylvia dies in the process of retrieving Josef ’s children, symbolizing the real loss of German unification: the West German remains standing on the East German frontier, his arms outstretched toward his missing progeny. Having literally lost track of his vision for the future, Josef has failed in the project of unification. The children, meanwhile, have entered Polish space, and the other half of the film tracks the progress of this encroachment of Western values onto Eastern space. At first, the contact seems innocuous. Kuba picks

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This Very Moment’s concluding image returns to the lingering shot of Lea (Sophie Charlotte Conrad) and Konstantin (Leo Bruckmann) with which the film began.

up the children and takes them with him to the hotels he services along the highway, and, at least at first, they don’t seem to have any effect upon his economic or moral value systems. But suddenly, the children offer a seduction of sorts. It begins as Kuba refills soap containers and Konstantin begins to question him about why he has to work so hard, whether he is in need of more money than he has. It is obvious that Kuba is strug-

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gling to make ends meet for his growing family. Lea and Konstantin will soon represent a fantasy of easy wealth, and Kuba will be led astray by temptation. In the films of the 1990s, German characters underestimated the danger of contact with Polish elements. Thinking they could outsmart their Polish counterparts and make quick money, their paths always led to death or disaster. Now, symbolically, we observe the reverse: Kuba thinks that he can manipulate a Western dream (a capitalist, rags to riches fantasy?) for his own quick gain. But he has also underestimated the danger involved in such a transgression and almost dies when Lea poisons him—she has turned the tables and become the wicked witch of the fairy tale. The last shot of This Very Moment echoes the first: a long take of the children walking along the roadside toward the camera frames the start of the film, while a lingering view of the children walking in the road away from the camera frames its end. The first shot is located in Germany, the last in Poland, the symmetry working to link these two spaces in a conceptual unity. In this fairy tale of European realignment, Germany and Poland are not divided by a civilizational divide but are connected by a shared set of challenges and anxieties.

Notes 1. Marco Abel, “Tender Speaking: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler,” Senses of Cinema 42, January–March 2007, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/07/42/christoph-hochhausler.html. 2. Although some of the filmmakers addressed by the label “Berlin School” reject its use, I join those who find the term useful in describing a subset of contemporary films sharing a key set of defining traits. For a history of the “Berlin School” and an identification of those affiliated with it, see Marco Abel’s contribution to this volume. 3. Christoph Hochhäusler, “Right to Reply: A Cinema of Challenge,” Vertigo 3, no. 5 (2007), http://www.vertigomagazine.co.uk/showarticle.php?sel=bac &siz=1&id=773. 4. Marco Abel, “Tender Speaking.” 5. Achim Forst, “Der nicht erklärte Rest,” Interview with Thomas Arslan, 3Sat. de, http://www.3sat.de/film/news/festivals/104121/index.html. 6. Christoph Hochhäusler, “Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Kino.” Lecture held at the Goethe Institute, Berlin, July 2006. Manuscript provided by author. Hochhäusler describes Hollywood practice in this lecture as one “in der die Musik das Publikum wie ein ‘Hirtenhund’ in die ‘richtige Richtung’ jagt.” 7. Julian Hanich, “Ein Recht auf Liebe gibt es nicht,” Der Tagesspiegel, February 306

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Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment 13, 2007. 8. Ibid. 9. Marco Abel, “Das Seltene und Kostbare,” filmtext.com, http://filmtext.com/ start.jsp?mode=3. 10. Achim Forst, “Der nicht erklärte Rest.” 11. “Polnisches Seebad als Schauplatz,” Interview with Henner Winckler von Claudius Lünstedt, and Ansgar Vogt, reprinted on ZDF.de, http://www.heute.de/ ZDFde/inhalt/14/0,1872,2054862,00.html. 12. In his work on This Very Moment, David Clarke describes the house more overtly in terms of frontier settlement: “This borderland is depicted as largely empty and featureless, so that the newly built house is reminiscent of a settler’s homestead in a newly colonized land (in this case the Wild East rather than the Wild West). Equally, the Polish side of the border is also shown to be a largely vacant space, marked out by empty roads and deserted service stations, reminiscent of the spaces of transit so characteristic of Bungalow and Ghosts.” David Clarke, “   ‘Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies’: Space and Politics in the Films of the ‘Berlin School’  ” (paper presented at the 57th Political Studies Association Annual Conference, University of Bath, April 11, 2007). 13. Michael Gutmann’s Herz über Kopf (Head over Heart, 2001), Franziska Meletzky’s Nachbarinnen (Wanted!, 2004), Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (Distant Lights, 2003), Till Endemann’s Das Lächeln der Tiefseefische (The Smile of the Deep Sea Fish, 2005), and Sabine Michel’s Nimm dir dein Leben (Take Your Life, 2005). 14. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York, Routledge, 1995), 81. 15. For a more in-depth treatment of this discourse, see Kristin Kopp, “Reconfiguring the Border of Fortress Europe in Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter,” Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007): 31–53. 16. Lola’s path through Berlin does not trace a linear route but splices together segments filmed in various locations in both East and West Berlin; Lola’s zigzag run stitches the two halves of the city together into one conceptual whole, performing a unification of the city as an allegory for that of the nation. (See Karin Hamm-Ehsani, “Screening Modern Berlin: Lola Runs to the Beat of a New Urban Symphony,” Seminar 40, no. 1 [2004]: 50–65.) Frequently overlooked in this reading is the national dimension of the spatial construction—not only is this “unified Germany” presented as an ethnically homogenous space in the film (the largely Turkish neighborhood of Kreuzberg is inexplicably rid of its residents as Lola runs through it) but it is also positioned in opposition to the criminal space of Poland with which Manni has come into contact. 17. Randall Halle addresses the ways in which patterns of global flow affect Dresen’s positive depiction of Frankfurt (Oder) in “Views from the GermanPolish Border: The Exploration of Inter-national Space in Halbe Treppe and Lichter,” The German Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2007): 77–96. 18. I do not include in this list films such as Dresen’s Grill Point or Till Endemann’s The Smile of the Deep Sea Fish, which only involve brief cross-border episodes. 307

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19. Rüdiger Suchsland, “Sehnsucht nach Erlösung,” Artechock, http://www.artechock.de/film/text/kritik/m/milchw.htm. 20. An exception is Robert Thalheim’s Am Ende kommen Touristen (And along Come Tourists, 2007). This film, which premiered at Cannes in 2007, follows a young German who undertakes his civil service at the museum in Auschwitz, Poland. This film presents a very different relationship to the Polish space it inhabits insofar as it is concerned primarily with the role Holocaust memory plays in contemporary German youth culture. 21. Abel, “Das Seltene und Kostbare.”

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Roger F. Cook

Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei Edukating the Post-Left Generation

German filmmakers and their domestic audience are exuding a new confidence about German film. International audiences have also rediscovered Germany, but unlike the reception of New German Cinema in the 1970s this interest is not generated by a few high-profile auteur directors—such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, or Werner Herzog. The successful directors of this new trend are from the generation between the ages of thirty and fifty and have graduated from various German film schools.1 They have come out of these schools with an attitude and approach different from those of the previous generation. For direction they look as much to popular cinema as to auteur cinema and they accept that entertaining their audiences and commercial success are an important part of their filmmaking. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of this new group of directors is that they have not created a new wave of filmmaking or even a new “German cinema.” They address many specifically German social, historical, or national issues, but they no longer seem compelled to deal with them through the veil of a distinctive German film aesthetic. More than just a new trend in German film, this is a sign that Germans as a whole have come to accept that their cultural and national identity need not be defined by a situation seen as exceptional or as specific only to Germany and its peculiar history (Sonderweg). In this regard German film has adapted to the general national feeling that in the wake of a successful unification of the two Germanys the nation had established itself again as “normal”—that is, as an accepted member of the community of advanced Western European nations 309

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that stand for liberal, democratic principles. For German filmmaking this means among other things a shift toward the mainstream of representational narrative cinema as it has been propagated globally by the Hollywood film industry. Although Austrian by birth, the director Hans Weingartner belongs to this genus of recent German filmmakers. After studying physics and computer science and conducting brain research at the University of Vienna, he studied film and television at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (1997–2001). His first two feature films follow the aesthetic trend typical of recent German film. Drawing on his neurological research, his successful debut film, Das weiße Rauschen (The White Noise, 2001), traces a student’s descent into schizophrenia. In Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004) Weingartner adheres again to the conventions of realist narrative but takes up the theme of political activism in a way that distinguishes the film from a number of recent German movies. The story centers on a trio of young German protestors (the Edukators [Erziehungsberechtigte] Jan, Jule, and Peter) who devise situationist-style stunts aimed at the wealthy in Berlin. Though venturing outside the law, their antics are relatively harmless until unforeseen circumstances lead them to kidnap a high-paid business executive (Hardenberg), whose greed has coincidentally had a disastrous effect on Jule. This unexpected development causes them to question their purpose, tactics, and commitment to a self-devised campaign against capitalist exploitation. Despite the film’s favorable representation of this borderline protest cell, Weingartner has stated that he does not consider The Edukators a political film.2 On the other hand, he has also said that the viewer should come out of the film with a feeling, almost a rage, that something is not right with the world and with a compelling need to convert that feeling into action.3 With this aim Weingartner sets himself apart not only from other contemporary German filmmakers but also from his generation of fellow Germans in general. Born in 1970, he is a member of “Generation Golf ”—as the German generation born between 1965 and 1975 is sometimes called in reference to Florian Illies’s book of that name (2000). Repulsed on one hand by what they perceived as the 68ers’ overbearing adherence to a compulsive sense of political correctness, the thirty- and fortysomethings of Generation Golf, according to Illies (born in 1970), cynically embraced a vacuous consumer culture. Weingartner has ascribed this cynicism to a pervasive lack of orientation and sense of direction his generation felt growing up in the 1980s.4 He attributes it not 310

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to the excesses of the 68ers’ political rebellion, as Illies would have it, but rather to their lack of perseverance, their failure to remain outside the system and in radical opposition to it. Trying to explain why he and others of his generation have only recently overcome their resistance to political involvement, Weingartner suggests that maybe they “just needed some time to develop new strategies against a system that doesn’t reveal itself openly; time to see through the co-optive strategies of capitalism.”5 In the following analysis, I first explore how the effects of normalization on German cinema play out in the case of The Edukators. Particular attention is given to the role German terrorism has played in the broader path to normality and, more specifically, in recent German film’s ability to question the place of the unified Federal Republic in the new global order. The discussion then turns to the alternative theoretical and tactical approaches to radical protest as they are espoused in the film’s depiction of “the Edukators.” The last section looks at Weingartner’s aesthetic choices and examines how they relate to the political philosophy that informs the film’s perspective on resistance to global capitalism.

Terrorism, Cinema, and Germany’s Path to Normality In the mid-1980s German historians and German filmmakers each took major first steps along parallel paths toward “normalization.” With the Historikerstreit of 1986 (the debate between conservative and liberal historians), a reassessment of the recent past began to chip away at two ideas that had saddled the German nation with the stigma of abnormality: the singularity of the Holocaust and the peculiarity of the course of German history (Sonderweg). The need to shed the burden of historical guilt became less pressing with the sudden and unexpected end to the Cold War and divided Germany in 1989–1990. It eased even more when the new Berlin Republic was able to quell rather quickly fears that a more powerful unified Germany would rekindle feelings of nationalism. The success of the Red-Green coalition (1998–2005) offered, then, the final touches to the notion that Germany had become normal. With the formation of a government whose leadership included members of the 68-protest movement, the claim of German normality that had served the agenda of conservative historians and politicians in the 1980s became a talking point for the politically established German Left. The fact that two of the coalition’s leaders, Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer, were 68ers helped disengage the idea of normality from revisionist or 311

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nationalist historical thinking. It became associated instead with the vision of a democratic, liberal, and tolerant Berlin Republic. Many on the German Left saw the Schröder government as the culminating moment in a Leftist renovation of the Federal Republic that had begun in 1968. According to this version of the path to normality, the student protest movement restarted the painful process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung that had stalled in the founding years of the Federal Republic, and the crisis years of the 1960s and 1970s were simply part of the extended labor pains involved in the democratization of the German nation. Parallel to this shift in national consciousness, German film has undergone its own path to normalization. For some, The Edukators offers evidence that this normalization has taken hold fully in German cinema. It belongs to a recent wave of German films that shows neither a pointed disinclination toward political issues and historical topics nor a compulsive need to work through the past. Rather, as Paul Cooke has claimed, it reflects “the internalization by these filmmakers of German normalization.”6 For Cooke this includes a shift toward Hollywood-style aesthetics but also a willingness once again to engage certain political issues and, specifically, German historical questions. Surveying German film at the beginning of the new century, it seems that normalization has been more complete with respect to the Nazi past than to German terrorism. Recent films, such as Aimée & Jaguar (1998), Der neunte Tag (The Ninth Day, 2004), Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005), and Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), among others, indicate that German filmmakers can now tackle almost any topic from the Nazi period in conventional narrative film. And with respect to the role of the German military, this normalization had started even earlier, with Das Boot (The Boat, 1981) and Stalingrad (1993). Eric Rentschler’s now canonical term “cinema of consensus” accounts for the prevailing tendencies in this passage from New German Cinema to the normalization of German film. He traces the developments from Doris Dörrie’s Männer (Men) in 1985 through the first ten years of the Berlin Republic. But even as Rentschler’s seminal essay appeared in 1999, this first phase, which produced a “formulabound profusion of romantic comedies, crude farces, road movies, action films and literary adaptations” was coming to an end. Driven by “an overdetermined German desire for normalcy,”7 this almost compulsive reaction against the aesthetics of New German Cinema faded as the national need to feel and display a sense of normality also waned. By the 312

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beginning of the new millennium, German filmmakers were reveling in the ability to create freely with all the tools at their disposal, regardless of their origins or how they may have been applied in Hollywood film. This broader sense of aesthetic freedom in German cinema is part of a newfound confidence that one can rework the past according to the needs of the present without becoming bogged down in a sense of national guilt or shame. To the extent that The Edukators brings the history of terrorism in the Federal Republic into play it opens up a critical perspective on normalization. To claim credit for Germany’s unqualified entry into the world community of liberal democratic nations, Leftist supporters of the Red-Green coalition must “play down the blind spot of ’68, namely the terrorism of the 1970s.”8 The series of events that reached its climax in the fall of 1977 (the “German Autumn”) left West Germans unable to work through all the implications of this traumatic period. Most notably, the relationship between German terrorism and the failure of Vergangenheitsbewältigung was left largely unexplored. German cinema offers an example of how quickly the blind spot formed. Three well-known films from these years of New German Cinema, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1975), Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1978), and Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981), examine how the outbreak of terrorism had mesmerized the German nation and reveal how the memory of it was quickly repressed. Just after the release of Germany in Autumn Alf Brustellin, one of the film’s many directors, commented on how the German Autumn was already fading from public consciousness by the end of 1977. In Marianne and Juliane a newspaper editor tells Juliane shortly after the suicide of her sister, the fictional Gudrun Ensslin figure Marianne, that as a news story terrorism is “snow from the year before last” (Schnee vom vorletzten Jahr). This suggests that the collective desire to leave it all behind was already in place immediately after the traumatic events of 1977. The recent debate over the possible early release of the last two Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) members still in prison, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar, has given some indication of how thoroughly this past has been pushed out of the public consciousness over the past thirty years. An article in Der Tagesspiegel arguing for their release opens by declaring that in this matter the courts are being asked to transport themselves back to “the Paleozoic era of German terrorism.”9 With its depiction of youth in the new Germany staging radical 313

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protest against global capitalism, The Edukators hits squarely up against the blind spot of 1970s terrorism. The protagonists are confronted with this history when they abduct Hardenberg (Burghart Klaußner). As they stand at a crossroads analogous to the one the Baader-Meinhof group faced in 1970, every action they take or decision they make is seen against the inescapable foil of 1970s terrorism. Their attempt to devise an independent course of radical opposition to global capitalism is also complicated by the recent narratives of normalization. The success of the Red-Green coalition lends credence to the neoliberal argument that a radical Leftist movement outside the normal channels of government, if once feasible, is certainly at least now obsolete. At times the film draws attention to the group’s struggle with this part of Germany’s past. In their political discussions with Hardenberg, the Edukators offer up arguments about the authoritarian state and capitalist exploitation that recall the political rhetoric of the 1960s protest movement in the Federal Republic. When they speak angrily about exploitation, fat cats, and the corrupt system, they often resort to a “moldy language from the past”10 that threatens to fix them as latter-day proponents of a movement that dead-ended almost thirty years ago. Even though comparisons with Baader-Meinhof and the RAF are inevitable, Weingartner clearly avoids letting this part of the Federal Republic’s history disrupt the film’s focus on globalization. When Jan (Daniel Brühl) talks about the commercialization of past revolutionary heroes and movements, he refers to Che Guevara T-shirts but ignores recent obvious examples from Germany. From the popular novel Rosenfest to the hip-hop song “Söhne Stammheims” by Jan Delay and the ultrahip fashion magazine displays of the “RAF-look,” referencing the BaaderMeinhof group has become one of the hottest new motifs. This retro fashion trend is itself an indication of how thoroughly the actual events and their sociopolitical significance have been relegated to the past. Still, the film contains no signs or mention of this cultural trend. Also, when Hardenberg compares his captors to the RAF—“Actually you’re no better than the terrorists. . . . So, you’re the saviors of the FRG! The RAF of the new millennium!”11—the three refuse to get drawn into this discussion. Rather they set themselves apart resolutely from the terrorists of the 1970s. Jan, the intellectual and theoretical leader of the group, rejects Hardenberg’s comparison: “We find it much more original when what we’re doing is meaningful. When it makes a difference.” And when Peter (Stipe Erceg), Jan’s less cerebral, more impulsive partner, raises the pos314

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sibility of resorting to the RAF tactic of sending a picture of Hardenberg to the newspapers with a sign hung around his neck, the idea meets with silence from Jan and their newly recruited accomplice, Jule (Julia Jentsch). Although this past casts its shadow even in its absence, Weingartner seems determined to disassociate the present context for Leftist opposition as much as possible from the 1960s and 1970s. As a film that critiques a transnational form of capitalist exploitation while also employing globally familiar patterns of narrative cinema, The Edukators would seem to be a prime example of the German filmmakers’ internalization of normalization. However, it is situated at the intersection of two diverging notions of normalization. On the one hand, there is the sense that Germany has become, or at least has been accepted as being, like its “long-term friends and allies in the European Union and NATO, that is, oriented to the West, democratic, liberal, and tolerant.”12 On the other, there is the neoliberal idea that the inevitable progress of free market democracy has now established its “natural” hegemony worldwide, laying at least the foundation for a normalized global culture. The fundamental contradictions between the social justice one would expect to be a guiding principle of a “democratic, liberal, and tolerant” nation and the inequitable distribution of wealth produced by global capitalism leave these two ideas of normalization at odds with each other. As Stuart Taberner has concluded in an analysis of recent German literary fiction, texts by writers of different backgrounds show “how a younger generation may feel trapped between a version of normalization associated with the ‘old’ FRG and the 68ers and the new, encroaching normality of a world increasingly shaped by the imperatives of a neoliberal globalization.”13 In other words, the secure sense of a morally grounded soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market economy) in the cozy confines of a West Germany14 has given way to “the reality of the mass and global consumer society writ large.”15 With its critical focus on the global exploitation of underdeveloped countries, The Edukators calls for another look at Germany’s path to normality. The film’s focus on a group of contemporary political activists set against the historical backdrop of the 1960s student movement raises questions about the decision of many 68ers to abandon radical protest from the margins and seek out influential roles in the economic and political system of the Federal Republic. With the formation of the Red-Green coalition in 1998, the environmentalist party that had grown out of the Extraparliamentary Opposition (APO) became an important 315

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player in the alliance of leading economic powers supporting the neoliberal global politics of the Clinton administration. According to those of the 68er generation who have become fully integrated back into the Federal Republic, their rise to positions of power is conclusive evidence that Germany has finally become normal after years of struggling to come to terms with its past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). They see it, however, as more than just confirmation of Germany’s normalization. The RedGreen coalition provided the leadership from the Left that was needed to make it possible and credible.16 The counterpart to the film’s youthful heroes is the high-paid business executive Hardenberg, who we later discover was one of the leaders of the 1960s student movement. He was, as he confides to his captors, in the circle close to Rudi Dutschke. His path from a leadership role in the APO to a top position in business parallels that of Schröder and Fischer in politics. Hardenberg’s betrayal of the Edukators suggests an alternative view on normalization and in particular on the role of the 68ers. It implies that the 1960s protest movement moved from radical rejection of West German capitalism to compliant participation in globalization. Or as Weingartner has asserted in interviews, the opposition movement of the 1960s and 1970s lost its momentum when it started its “long march through the institutions” too quickly.17 The film’s support for an innovative form of antiglobalization protest outside the normal channels entails, then, an implicit rejection of this quick turn to establishment party politics in the 1980s. In addressing these tensions between past and present, Weingartner does not simply navigate around the blind spot of 1970s terrorism. Rather he conjures it up and exposes it as a specter that threatens to unhinge any contemporary attempts at radical protest. This act of exorcism as Vergangenheitsbewältigung lays the foundation for a cinema that can confront the thorniest issues of moral responsibility facing the Federal Republic today. In terms of activism against oppressive regimes, it works to dissolve a fixation on past contexts and practices so that a normalized German cinema can develop appropriate strategies for confronting the present state of capitalist exploitation and Germany’s involvement in it.

Biopolitical Resistance to Global Capitalism Now that it has traversed this path to normalization, Germany may face the greatest pressure on its national identity no longer from the past 316

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but rather from the present and its position in a globalized economy. In terms of political freedoms, safeguarding civil rights, and allowing political refugees entry and resources, the Federal Republic would fare well in comparison with any nation. The one vulnerable point in Germany’s continuing efforts to establish an irreproachable ethical standing is its role in the new global order of capitalism. Like all other advanced countries, the Federal Republic profits from the cheap labor employed in sweatshops throughout the Third World. Not only does it do little to alleviate the plight of impoverished workers in these poorest countries but it too is complicit in an economic system that sustains these conditions for the benefit of those at the top. Thus, ironically, the flurry of films examining a long-repressed Nazi past may also be contributing to a new phase of cultural diversion. In other words, a cinema intent on examining issues from this troubled past might be well suited for deflecting criticism away from current potential sore spots without being labeled escapist.18 Going against the dominant trend of a normalized German cinema, in The Edukators Weingartner aims his critique at a global corporate culture that dominates in Germany as well as in every leading economic nation. At certain points in the movie the protagonists address the real-world injustices created by global capitalism, even offering hard data about First World gross national product (GNP) and Third World debt relief. In keeping with the supranational scope of the film’s critique, the points of comparison and the data do not reference Germany in particular but rather draw distinctions between the First and Third Worlds as a whole. Inspired by the creative activism of the antiglobalization movement, the Edukators believe that a diversity of loosely structured, autonomous resistance groups offers the best chance for success against the forces of contemporary capitalism. The crisis they encounter in the film indicates that they are still struggling with what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called “the first question of political philosophy today”—“not if or even why there will be resistance and rebellion, but rather how to determine the enemy against which to rebel.”19 Unencumbered by a historicizing perspective that requires a reworking of the layered past of the Federal Republic as a necessary first step, the Edukators embark on a radically new course of political opposition. The naïve, exuberant force expressed in such slogans as “Jedes Herz eine revolutionäre Zelle” (Every heart a revolutionary cell) or “frei und wild leben” (live free and wildly) serves almost as an antidote to the brooding self-searching or endless 317

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theorizing that had long characterized Leftist opposition in the Federal Republic. For these rebellious young Germans, political commitment and the youthful desire for fun and adventure go hand in hand in a way that recalls the American protest movement of the 1960s more than the German 68ers.20 Whereas the hippie generation in America was seeking freedom from the oppressive social mores of American culture more feverishly than political change, the rebellious youth in the Federal Republic focused more on the state and its political institutions. Burdened by a national guilt that they associated with their parents’ generation, the German youth of the 1960s and 1970s remained attached to the classical revolutionary idea of sacrificing oneself for a better world in the future. After their own fashion the Edukators adhere to an old anarchist adage—“If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”21—that was never applicable to the 1960s protest movement in Germany. Throughout the film the three protagonists struggle with making sense of what they are doing. Both Jan and Jule almost give up at times and accept that global capitalism is unassailable. Early on Jule asks Jan what he hopes to achieve with his activism. She then expresses her own resignation, lamenting that all the protests are useless, that everything has already been tried and has failed. However, she is gradually won over by Jan’s ideas and by the Edukators’ innovative approach to activism. But after she convinces the others that they have to let Hardenberg go, Jan loses hope and is ready to abandon their scheme. It is left to Peter and Jule, the two members of the triangle who are more intuitive and less concerned with theoretical justifications, to keep Jan from giving in. Their responses to him are more emotional and seemingly grounded in a naïve sense of solidarity rather than any careful consideration of the larger picture. Peter admonishes, “If you do that, you’re one of them. I believe in this thing.” And Jule supports Peter, citing the principle that Jan had pitched to her: “The best ideas survive.” At this point the viewer may begin to lose faith in the film’s young heroes. When Jan tells Jule that in each failed attempt at rebellion something survives within the individual that makes the person stronger, we sense a pseudo-Nietzschean existentialism being served up to idealistic youth once again. In fact, the film sets the viewer up to expect that the three have naïvely believed Hardenberg when he promised not to turn them in. The audience begins to accept the inevitable—the three winsome protagonists will fall prey to the more cunning and tyrannical power of capital. But the surprise twist at the end of the film22 leads us 318

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The young radicals of Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004), including Jule (Julia Jentsch), are suspended between pseudo-Nietzschean existentialism and political idealism.

to conclude that the Edukators are not as naïve as we were led to believe. It also arouses in the viewer a surge of relief, exhilaration, and perhaps the sense that in this situation Jan and Jule’s maxim has proven true: the best idea has survived, and the Edukators have avoided dogmatic belief in a fixed ideological vision and relied rather on unpredictable, changing dicta. As the film shows its protagonists avoiding various pitfalls in their efforts to fashion a viable form of resistance, it also provides some answers to the question of who the enemy is. When Jan wavers and almost gives up, we sense him coming to the conclusion that their actions lack Konsequenz. As the German word suggests, his loss of faith in their scheme stems from more than just the failure to produce substantial results. After all, when asked by Jule what he and Peter wanted to achieve with their break-ins, he says simply, “So that they [the wealthy] don’t feel so secure in their lives.” It must be, then, not the inability to change things directly and radically that causes him to question the viability of their protest actions. Rather he seems to want a resistance movement that can maintain logical consistency—that can be konsequent in its adherence to certain philosophical underpinnings. At this point Jan is not able to let go of an epistemological assumption that serves to keep revolutionary 319

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forces in check. But this same demand for logical consistency can also be turned against the hegemonic power system it serves. In his first serious conversation with Jule, Jan points out that her compliance with the legal decision that she pay Hardenberg for the Mercedes she had damaged in an accident contradicts her political beliefs: “On one hand you protest, but you let yourself be a serf to this top manager.” Jan’s arguments convince her that a confluence of conventional legal and moralistic notions (Jule: “But I was at fault. He has the legal right.”) keeps her from following a simple, more intuitive ethical judgment (Jan: “Right? What kind of sense of justice is that. . . . To ruin a young woman’s life, that is immoral.”). In these inner conflicts we discern one part of the film’s answer to the first question of contemporary political philosophy. The enemy to overcome imposes a “disciplinary regime” that extends from the social and political realm through all reaches of the work and finance world into the most private and intimate spheres of life.23 The film seems to suggest that a viable form of opposition must maintain autonomy from legal, philosophical, moral, social, cultural, and even self-disciplinary forms of control. To avoid being sidetracked it must understand that normativity, sanction, and repression issue from a singular, yet deterritorialized source and pervade material, cognitive, and psychic forms of experience. The Edukators reject more traditional forms of radical opposition in favor of a biopolitical solution that can yield self-liberation from this pervasive regime of control. The trio’s small and tenuous victory at the end of the film neither points to a unified international movement that can uproot the global power of capitalism nor suggests a utopian vision of some ultimate victory in an indefinite future. What drives the Edukators to take the radical next step revealed in the film’s surprise ending is a different notion of resistance. They come to the realization that fulfillment for them lies in a form of opposition built on their own desires and needs in the present, one that can secure for them individual self-determination, autonomy, and fulfillment. To cite an adage of contemporary political philosophy, this mode of liberation poses “against the misery of power the joy of being.”24 The Edukators can best maintain this posture as a small group that devises its own form of opposition, rather than as members of a large political front that subsumes individual subjectivities within a disciplinary regime on the Left. They devise an approach that is flexible and not part of any “great revolution,” as Jan tells Hardenberg.25 They follow no master plan, nor do they belong to any grand movement of world his320

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tory that seeks to replace the existing capitalist system with an alternative. Their approach rejects not only the orthodox Communist idea of a historical world struggle between opposing ideologies but also all theories that seek to establish an alternative power structure. In keeping with a central maxim of the new Left, they belong to an amorphous global movement that wants to change the world but has no designs for assuming power. With their self-devised strategies and actions, they distance themselves from utopian socialist or Leftist visions that posit a historical chasm between a desolate present and an indeterminate future when alienation will have been overcome. Just as their protest tactics avoid direct confrontation with the authorities, they also reject doctrinaire political ideologies that would place them in diametrical opposition to the hegemony of globalized capital and compromise their autonomy. If they were to become fixed in a binary opposition to the system they are attacking, they would risk succumbing to its system of legitimacy and taking on its structures and practices unwittingly. When Hardenberg accuses them of employing the same tactics as terrorists, Jan replies that they actually do everything possible to avoid harming anyone. He turns the tables on Hardenberg, countering that he and his kind actually cause much greater harm by disenfranchising large portions of the world’s population. They get away with it, he charges, because their form of violence is authorized by the state. In their role as the Edukators they are guided, Jan asserts, by an alternative form of legitimacy: “We have our legitimation from ourselves.” Radical forms of biopolitical resistance rooted in small autonomous groups may avoid lapsing into binary forms of opposition, but the global sovereignty of capitalism presents them with other challenges. As the antagonist to the Edukators, Hardenberg dismisses their resistance as futile. Ideologically, he represents the neoliberal idea that all opposition to the global establishment of free market democracies is not only doomed to fail but also an impediment to the inevitable progress of history. He counters Jan’s arguments, however, not by claiming the inevitability of globalization; rather he raises the historically charged memory of German terrorism to suggest that the Edukators are on a false path, one he himself had rejected when he was a member of the inner circle of SDS (Der Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund [Socialist German Student Union]) leaders in the late 1960s. Exploiting the stigma attached to memories of the RAF, he warns his captors that with their initial step toward violence they stand on the abyss of becoming the terrorists of 321

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a new generation in the Berlin Republic. Seemingly swayed at least in part by his appeal to this specific German history, his captors release Hardenberg unharmed. Once freed, he reverts to the position he took in their first discussion in the cabin when Jule asked him why the First World would not simply relieve the Third World of its debts, thus relieving the hardships of hundreds of millions around the world. After all, she argued, this would only cost the leading economic powers 0.01 percent of their collective GNP. His response—“Then the financial system of the whole world would collapse”—reaffirms the neoliberal notion that there is one unitary structure of power and eventually everything must conform to it. According to this logic the Edukators, if allowed to continue in their resistance, would serve as an internal contradiction and threat to the teleological idea of globalized neoliberalism. The violent force of the action against them in the final scene makes one point clear: even if the tactics are playful, the forces and institutions that protect the systematic integrity of capital will see them as a danger. Weingartner has his protagonists turn to solutions that the antiglobalization movement has adopted in the face of such a monolithic, seemingly invulnerable opponent. The Edukators see themselves as a small node in an amorphous network of independent cells that function singularly but coalesce into a deterritorialized movement. They fit the concept of autonomous local resistance groups to a T: “Unstable, in return flexible, small, always transforming itself, experimental, capable, quick to react. And ambivalent rather than bolstered by certitude.”26 The sense of solidarity with a large, international movement that has historical certainty on its side is replaced with uncertainty and a new demand for self-initiative and self-sufficiency. The slogans for the network of small cells fighting globalization bear this out: “Do something! Realize your potential, express yourself, prove yourself!” With the larger burden of individual responsibility comes the awareness that one is no longer engaged in a battle for someone else of a future generation but rather for oneself in the here and now: “Save yourself!”27 This form of protest movement also has a greater repertoire of resources available to it than a fixed opposition that stands outside and opposed to everything within the system. With phrases such as “Workers of the world unite!” the internationally organized Left generated its own language to incite revolution. However, it also deprived itself of a wealth of rhetorical power because it considered so much language unserviceable, contaminated by

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its use for capitalist interests. The self-liberating activist, on the other hand, believes that all discursive weapons, even those most effective in the service of global capitalism, can be appropriated and turned against their creators: “Just do it!” This approach to political discourse applies as well to the innermost spheres of subjectivity. Just as this form of political resistance employs any rhetorical strategy, regardless of its use by the opposition, the newly produced subjectivities that are the driving force behind it do not try to eliminate everything they oppose. In fact, the opposite is the case. Nothing should be eliminated. This theory of political opposition rejects the idea that “authentic” desires can be cultivated, exploited, and expanded to produce an oppositional public sphere that is unadulterated by commercial culture. The new approach accepts that there is no longer any outside to capital. Producing such new subjectivities means reclaiming, reappropriating, and remixing what society has constructed through its reach into the most intimate individual sphere, through the enforcement of its most internal disciplinary regime. In The Edukators Jan’s use of fear provides a good example of this. He explains to Jule that fear can serve as a powerful intoxicant, one they can use for their activism. By isolating fear and gaining control over it he is reappropriating it from a mediagenerated political manipulation that envelops it in an aura of hysteria and uses it to paralyze all opposition.28 The course of rebellion charted by the Edukators does not provide any definitive answers to the question of who is “the enemy against which to rebel.” It does, however, offer insight into the structures of power that support it and effective ways to subvert that power. When Jan turns fear into a weapon for change he is tapping into a source of biopolitical energy that can produce alternative subjectivities infused with strong libidinal energy—precisely the kind of energy needed to fuel their protest movement. This approach also creates a multiplicity of diverse subjectivities that is in itself a structural form of resistance to a dominant culture that employs homogenization as a means to maintain its hegemony. On the other hand, the creation within this homogenous order of seemingly inescapable dualities is a crucial element in a regime of production that stops potential forms of opposition at their inception. Much of the Edukators’ energies are devoted to bypassing these binary divisions in every sphere of action. In the case of protest movements such as that of the Edukators, those where the participants are seeking results in the here

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and now, the production of new and heterogeneous forms of subjectivity is more than just a tactic. It is both the starting point of resistance and the liberation to be achieved.

Film Aesthetics and the German Antiglobalization Movement The biopolitical philosophy put into practice by the Edukators extends to all aspects of life, including film aesthetics. Weingartner applies it when he appropriates the cinematic strategies of Hollywood and turns them back against the capitalist system that invented them. He embraces aesthetic elements that Leftist filmmakers in the past have generally rejected as manipulative tactics of commercial production unsuitable for their political purposes. Weingartner does not shy away, for example, from using popular music to control viewer identification, the choice of a lead actor (Daniel Brühl) with strong German and international star appeal, or closing with an exhilarating ending. Through visceral identification with the protagonists, the viewer is able to experience vicariously the emotional highs and lows they go through before reaching a plateau of liberated subjectivity from which they can continue their resistance. Like other German filmmakers of the 1990s and beyond, Weingartner has rejected the art house aesthetics and Autorenkino that had defined German film in the old Federal Republic. Still, as a film about the possibility of a new terrorist movement hatched by middle-class German youth, it will inevitably draw comparisons to a New German Cinema that was in its prime at the height of German terrorism. Just as he keeps connections between his protagonists and 1970s terrorism to a minimum, Weingartner also avoids any references to the film movement of that period. Stylistically, The Edukators is almost an antithesis to New German Cinema. The upbeat mood sets his film off against the heavy, leaden atmosphere of the films made in the wake of the German Autumn. Nor does the film contain any of the hallmarks of the auteur style that was largely responsible for the movement’s international success. There are no defamiliarizing techniques, no foregrounding of aesthetic touches, no conscious play with genre, no visual imagery detached from the narrative. Weingartner chooses, rather, the heightened realist style of representational narrative film that has become the lingua franca of global cinema.

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By contrast, recent films about 1970s terrorism have continued more in the mode of New German Cinema, whereas German film in general has gone through a process of normalization. Aesthetically they seem rooted specifically in the films of Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. With their heavy, melancholic mood Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000) and Schlöndorff ’s own Die Stille nach dem Schuß (The Legend of Rita, 2000) are reminiscent of those New German Cinema films made around the time of the German Autumn. This tradition of German films about 1970s terrorism displays what I would call a “leaden aesthetics.” A “review” of The State I Am In on Amazon.de tends to confirm this. The reviewer protests too much that Petzold’s film does not slip into the dogmatism and “leaden heaviness” of the earlier films about terrorism. In its effort to set the film off from previous films on terrorism this sales pitch is actually more a confirmation that Petzold’s film has many of the same characteristics.29 His film, much like The Legend of Rita, is enveloped in a pervasive heavy atmosphere that casts a depressing pall over the story. They also have in common with New German Cinema films certain specific features that contribute to the overall effect. The main characters often maintain blank, expressionless stares and move about in a trance-like manner. Christopher Homewood picks up on these in his reading of Marianne and Juliane and The State I Am In. He argues that The State I Am In is a postmodern reworking of von Trotta’s film, in which Petzold applies motifs from vampire films to conjure up the repressed history of German terrorism. According to Homewood, Petzold resurrects the theme of terrorism as “Germany’s ‘undead’ history”—that is, as the blind spot of ’68—to drive a stake through its heart “in order that the nation might truly move on from it and finally embrace the new, now ‘normal’ republic.”30 One can take Homewood’s analogy a step further and apply it to the style of The State I Am In as well. That is, Petzold returns to the leaden aesthetics of New German Cinema films on terrorism one more time to finally put it to rest. In The Edukators Weingartner departs from this tradition in favor of a film style more fitting to the freewheeling protest movement of the Edukators. Throughout the film he plays up the exuberant side of their protest actions, having, for example, Jan and Jule cap off their rearranging of Hardenberg’s house with a playful romp in his indoor swimming pool accompanied by energetic rock music. And after they have successfully avoided the police when leaving the upper-class Zehlendorf neigh325

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borhood, they enjoy an adrenalin rush as Jan pumps his fist out the car window and lets out a whooping cry of enthusiasm—all bolstered by a driving rock beat. Weingartner also employs popular music to engage the viewer in moments of soulful reflection. When Peter discovers that Jan and Jule have become romantically involved, Jeff Buckley’s version of the slow, mournful Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” begins playing on the soundtrack. The song pauses and then picks up again at intervals as we watch scenes of the three of them working through their emotional distress in silence. A new verse along with the chorus plays over each of three subsequent sequences showing them slowly reaching the decision to leave the cabin, driving back to Berlin, and then lying together in bed as the audience awaits the SWAT team to come crashing through the door of their apartment. Weingartner draws attention to the film’s appropriation of Hollywood aesthetics by referencing a well-known example from popular cinema. In a moment alone at the cabin, Jule tells Jan how as a child she was never able to participate in play like other children—“I could never forget that they were dolls. I always felt more like an observer than a player.” Jan admits that he too always felt as if he were observing everything from the outside. He compares it to the idea of the Matrix from the Wachowski brothers’ films: “It’s the Matrix; you see it, but you aren’t living in it—me either!” They both laugh at the naïveté of explaining their own innermost experience in terms of a cult sci-fi trope. But as it turns out, the Matrix analogy applies well to their form of political opposition. At the end of the film, with Hardenberg waiting in the patrol car outside, the SWAT team bursts into their vacated apartment like the agents in The Matrix (1999), only to find the note for Hardenberg pinned to the wall: “Some people never change.” With this unexpected reversal at the end, comparing their situation to a popular film fantasy no longer seems silly or naïve. More than just a decision by one individual, Hardenberg’s actions confirm that the Edukators are indeed up against a Matrix-like system that draws opposing elements back into its all-encapsulating structure. Ultimately the viewer may be willing to abide the naïveté of the protagonists’ discourse and schemes in part because the three learn to accept contradictions and inconsistencies as a legitimate part of a vibrant, effective opposition. In this regard, the reference to the Matrix films stands paradigmatically for a cinematic strategy that employs the most effective Hollywood techniques in the service of social and political opposition. 326

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When Jan and Jule laugh sheepishly about his Matrix analogy it recalls a similar moment in an earlier scene. After they had dinner together, Jule offered Jan a joint. He responded with a clichéd phrase one might expect from a staunch Marxist: “Smoking pot stifles revolutionary energies.” Then they both laughed, aware of his doctrinaire posturing, and Jan smoked the joint with her. Once again, the disciplinary regime that supports the existing political and social hegemony exerts influence on the level of individual subjectivity. Here the teacher-disciple relationship is reversed, as it is later when Jule helps Jan overcome his resignation. Whereas Jan rescues Jule from her pessimism and provides the guiding vision for the group, Jule makes needed corrections when that vision is applied to the intimate private sphere. Her unaffected, down-toearth assessment of the moment exposes his rigid, disciplined stance as contradictory to the goal of liberation that motivates them. As they get stoned, she frees up some of his “stifled revolutionary energies” and helps steer them back toward their innovative and flexible form of resistance. The two different endings to the film provide a good focal point for examining the relationship between Weingartner’s use of popular film aesthetics and its take on social and political resistance. When the film screened at Cannes in May 2004 Weingartner had not finished filming the final scene. He prepared a version for the Cannes screening that ends abruptly with a close-up of the note on the wall at the abandoned apartment followed by a cut to the credits rolling while the last installment of Buckley’s “Hallelujah” plays. He then subsequently finished the film with an extended ending that was a part of the original screenplay. The added sequence shows the three protagonists going over a map of the Mediterranean island with the European television transmitter on it before boarding a yacht in appropriate sailing attire and taking it out of a harbor into the open sea. A brief shot of identity papers on the yacht indicates that it belongs to Hardenberg. The narrative action ends there, but near the end of the credits the black background fades slowly into a shadowy shot panning across several satellite dishes. The credits, this time rolling to the more energetic beat of the indie rock song “Knights of the Jaguar,” end with a crackling sound and the screen suddenly becoming distorted, followed by a buzzing sound over a blank screen. The implication is clear. The Edukators have followed through on Jan’s plan to disrupt television broadcasts across Europe by destroying the transmitter. Without this final episode the earlier scene where he mentions the

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plan and shows Jule and Peter a photograph of the transmission tower would have no purpose. This longer version played only in German theaters and was included on only the German DVD. The alternative endings have been the source of much confusion and speculation, even though there is a simple explanation for the discrepancy. The shorter version was shown at Cannes only because they did not finish filming the final scene in time. All the foreign theatrical and DVD versions exclude the scene as well, because the distribution rights were sold shortly after Cannes and before the final scene was added. As the active debate in the forum section of the film’s official Web site indicates, the added final scene raises questions about Hardenberg’s betrayal. Roughly half of the bloggers conclude that he was actually working secretly with the Edukators when he ostensibly turned them in. According to this reading of the final scene, Hardenberg actually let them take his yacht so that they could continue their antiglobalization campaign and even take it to a new level. In this case, the note left by the Edukators would refer to Hardenberg, but with a positive connotation: reinvigorated by the idealistic zeal of this new generation of protesters, he has reverted to his old self, the Hardenberg who had been a leader of the SDS—that is, deep down he had always remained opposed to a capitalistic system based on exploitation, even if he saw no alternative but to go along with it. Regardless of the ending, my reading of the film posits that Hardenberg betrays the Edukators and turns them in to the authorities.31 The message conveyed by their note would then go something like this: “It is not coincidental that the Hardenbergs of the world (or of the Federal Republic) have become self-serving, ambitious, and calculating. They were always that way, only back then they veiled their ambitions in a rhetoric of protest and revolution.”32 This interpretation is certainly more in keeping with the care Weingartner takes to distance his protagonists from the German student movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, if Hardenberg were won over by the arguments and tactics of his captors this would downplay the tenacity of the forces and institutions that protect the preeminence of capital in the new global order. An episode at the cabin establishes just how subtle and ingrained the control exerted by global capitalism can be. In a moment alone with Peter in the meadow outside the cabin Hardenberg confides how he often thinks about quitting his job and giving up all the money. He fantasizes that he and his wife would teach school and go back to living 328

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according to the principles they embraced in the 1960s. However, just as he is describing his occasional visions of an idyllic escape from his present life Peter happens to reveal that he is unaware of the relationship between Jan and Jule. Upon hearing this Hardenberg’s look displays not only surprise but also an almost instant awareness that here is an opportunity to drive a wedge between his captors and stop their “game.” This moment discloses just how deeply Hardenberg has become entrenched in the capitalist system. His desire to drop out and live a more fulfilling life apart from the rat race of a competitive free market society is itself an illusion produced and nurtured by the cultural forces of capitalism. As such, these fantasies of escape actually work to anchor the individual more firmly within a closed system that offers only imaginary alternatives.33 The wistful longing expressed by Hardenberg is far removed from the path actually taken by the Edukators. Nor would placing Hardenberg in a positive light serve to generate a need and urgency to undertake protest action, which according to Weingartner was one of his intentions with the film.34 It acts rather as a foil against which to examine the Edukators’ choices. The liberation they achieve does not enable them to escape from the system but rather to attack it from within. In this regard, the note left in the apartment also refers to the change they have undergone. Only because they were able to disencumber themselves from fixed conceptions of how political opposition should operate, conceptions imposed by the epistemological regime of the system they are rising up against, did they avoid its trap. Their escape suggests that a certain flexibility, a constant acceptance of fundamental change, is needed to evade “all the philosophical, sociological, and political conceptions that make the fixity of the epistemological frame an ineluctable point of reference.”35 The fortuitous absence of the final scene from the international version of the film serves Weingartner’s purposes well. The closure attained by showing the Edukators carrying out their next protest action eliminates the possible assumption that they will abandon their resistance and live in hiding under assumed identities. This is offset, however, by what is gained by an open ending. When asked about the note, Weingartner stated that it referred to Hardenberg and his inability to get free of the value system that controls him. He then added you could maybe also read it as a reference to Jan, Jule, and Peter.36 The version of the film that ends with a close-up of the note promotes this reading. The surprise 329

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felt when the police break down the door to find an empty apartment highlights the lesson they have learned from their run-in with Hardenberg. When the Edukators simply disappear at the end of the film the viewer is left pondering what has enabled them to outfox the system. Thus the film does more than merely impart an “edukational” message about the need for political action; it also proposes a guiding strategy for opposition to the new global order, the one that the Edukators had followed. It teaches that only by continually adapting to changing contexts and by accepting contradictions and contingencies can a viable resistance movement stay one step ahead of the controlling regime, rather than set up against it and fixed in a self-defeating posture.

Notes 1. In a 2006 article Dieter Kosslik, the director of the Berlin Film Festival, responded to a question about new talent in Germany with the following examples: “Munich has produced Hans Christian Schmid and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; Cologne, Hans Weingartner; Berlin, Christian Petzold; Potsdam Babelsberg, Robert Thalheim; Ludwigsburg, Stefan Krohmer and Lain Dilthey; Hamburg, Fatih Akın.” “German Cinema: New Mix New Rules,” Sight and Sound 16, no. 12 (2006): 29. 2. “Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei: Das Interview mit Hans Weingartner,” Outnow, December 1, 2004, http://outnow.ch/specials/2004/FettenJahreSindVorbei/. 3. “Wenn du aus dem Kino herauskommst, sollst du das Gefühl haben: Wenn ich, als junger Mensch—und ‘jung sein’ hat hier überhaupt nichts mit dem Alter zu tun—, das Gefühl habe, es stimmt etwas nicht mit der Welt, ich bin nicht glücklich, ich bin wütend, dann muss dieses Gefühl raus, in Aktion umgesetzt werden, weil man sonst krank wird.” “Die private Revolte ist nie privat,” Interview with Hans Weingartner by Dietmar Kammerer, die tageszeitung, November 25, 2004, http:// www.taz.de/pt/2004/11/25/a0120.1/text. 4. Although Austrian, Weingartner has spoken of his generation in a way that indicates he feels that he belongs to the disaffected generation described by Illies: “Gerade in meiner Generation herrschte eine Orientierungslosigkeit und Ratlosigkeit.” Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Paul Cooke, “Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema,” in German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization, ed. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, 234 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006). 7. Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 263 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 8. Stuart Taberner and Paul Cooke, “Introduction,” in Taberner and Cooke, 330

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Edukating the Post-Left Generation Beyond Normalization, 11. 9. Axel Vornbäumen, “RAF-Häftlinge: In der Geschichte gefangen,” Der Tagesspiegel, January 23, 2007, http://archiv.tagesspiegel.de/archiv/23.01.2007/ 3036798.asp. 10. “. . . einen angeschimmelten Vokabular von gestern.” Katja Nicodemus, “Denn sie wissen, was sie tun. Hans Weingartners Film Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei sucht mit seinen Helden nach der Revolution von morgen,” Die Zeit 49, November 25, 2004, http://www.zeit.de/2004/49/Fette_Jahre. 11. All quotations of film dialogue are my own translations from the German. 12. Taberner and Cooke, “Introduction,” in Taberner and Cooke, Beyond Normalization, 10. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. For a discussion of how the division of Germany shored up the West German sense of moral rectitude in this regard, see Roger F. Cook, “Recharting the Skies above Berlin: Nostalgia East and West,” German Politics and Society 23, no. 1 (2005): 39–57. 15. Andrew Plowman, “Normalizing the ‘Old’ Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction,” in Taberner and Cooke, Beyond Normalization, 148. 16. See Taberner and Cooke, “Introduction,” in Taberner and Cooke, Beyond Normalization, 8–11. 17. Hans Weingartner, “Die private Revolte.” 18. Many Germans’ response to this argument might go something like this: “What!? We can’t win no matter what we do!” I think this reaction has merit. My reply to them would be in the form of a catchphrase that might be used by the Edukators: “That’s right—you can’t win, but you can play.” As my discussion of the film in this section indicates, this phrase also goes to the heart of their approach to radical activism. 19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 211. 20. In her review in Die Zeit, Katja Nicodemus highlights this aspect of the film, writing, “dass Politik und Party, politisches Engagement und jugendliches Draufgängertum einander bedingen” (that politics and partying, political engagement and youthful recklessness go hand in hand). See Nicodemus, “Denn sie wissen.” 21. This statement, occurring in a few variant forms, is commonly attributed to the American anarchist Emma Goldman. 22. My reading refers to the shorter version of the film that played at Cannes and in all the theatrical screenings outside of Germany. 23. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, 272–76. 24. Ibid., 413. 25. When Hardenberg accuses them of being “the RAF of the new millennium,” Jan responds, “We’re not hanging around in pubs talking about the great revolution.” 26. “Instabil, dafür flexibel, klein, sich stets wendend, experimentell, fähig, schnell to reagieren. Und eher zweifelnd als mit Gewißheiten ausgerüstet.” Katja 331

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Diefenbach, “Ecstasy. Empire. Immanenz (April, 2002),” http://www.republicart. net/disc/empire/diefenbach02_de.htm. 27. Diefenbach includes these slogans as typical of “a subjectivity that always relies on its own initiative” (die permanent zur Selbstunternehmung mobilisierte Subjektivität) to foment collective, biopolitical resistance to global capitalism. 28. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, 323. 29. “Die innere Sicherheit [rutscht] . . . nie in den Dogmatismus und die bleierne Schwere früherer Filme zum Thema Terrorismus ab,” http://www.amazon.de/ Die-innere-Sicherheit-Julia-Hummer/dp/B00005U8PS/sr=1-1/qid=1168548465/ ref=pd_bowtega_1/303-8510744-0796253?ie=UTF8&s=dvd. 30. Christopher Homewood, “The Return of ‘Undead’ History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of ‘Normalizing’ the Past in Margarethe von Trotta’s Die belierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (2001),” in Taberner and Cooke, Beyond Normalization, 133. 31. For an extensive discussion of the narrative elements that speak both for and against Hardenberg betraying the Edukators, see the “Forum” discussion on the film’s official Web site. http://www.diefettenjahre.de/index_flash.html. 32. In a review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tobias Kniebe interprets the note similarly when he writes that this phrase suggests that the old Leftists “nicht zufällig ehrgeizig, machtbesessen und rachsüchtig geworden sind: Sie sind es immer gewesen, auch wenn sie ihre Ambitionen einst in einen Traum von Veränderung gehüllt haben. Alles war nur Strategie.” Tobias Kniebe, “Generation Nix: Im Kino: Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 23, 2004, http:// www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/artikel/529/43486/4/. 33. Compare Robert Misik, Genial Dagegen: Kritisches Denken von Marx bis Michael Moore (Berlin: Aufbau, 2005), 20. 34. See Hans Weingartner, “Die private Revolte.” 35. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 28. 36. In the 2004 taz interview at the time of the film’s first run in Germany, Weingartner said, “Das war bezogen auf Hardenberg, der sich nicht ändert, der eben nicht aus seiner Haut rauskann. Er müsste ja seine ganze Identität aufgeben, wenn er die drei nicht anzeigt. Er muss zurück in sein altes Wertesystem.” He concedes that one could also relate it to the Edukators and their determination to continue their struggle: “Man kann das vielleicht auch so lesen, dass Jan, Jule und Peter jetzt ihr Ding durchziehen, nicht aufgeben, sondern weiterkämpfen.” Hans Weingartner, “Die private Revolte.”

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The Global Elsewhere Ursula Biemann’s Multimedia Countergeography

Ursula Biemann’s videos, installations, and web archives offer an artistic and political response to contemporary globalization with particular emphasis on how labor migration, gender, and sexuality intersect. Her work most often centers on liminal spaces between nations to negotiate the global with the national and the local. In addition to video work, Biemann has also curated short- and long-term installations, exhibitions, and archival projects in Austria, Egypt, England, Spain, Switzerland, and Turkey. Biemann studied art and cultural theory in Mexico and the United States, in a reversal of the traditional movement from the periphery to the center, the European metropolis. She has published academic essays and edited volumes, often bilingually, on the web and in book form on the topics of the video essay, globalization, gender, and geography. Biemann’s 2001 video Remote Sensing traces the movement of women who work in the global sex industry and crosscuts their routes with NASA satellite images. The video thereby contrasts the embodied experience of migration across borders with the geographic practice of “remote sensing,” which creates a scientific fantasy of a borderless, visually accessible global world. By focusing on Remote Sensing, this essay attempts to outline a feminist aesthetic response to globalization. In particular it addresses gendered migration and sexualized exploitation in the global economy and situates this formation in the tradition of earlier feminist film aesthetics. Helke Sander’s film Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit—REDUPERS (The All-Around Reduced Personality, 1977) serves as a foil to map connections between two different historical moments via their cinematic 333

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representation of borders, female subjectivity, and alternative geographies, connections that also provide national and transnational frameworks for feminist media practices. Biemann’s multimedia oeuvre constitutes a “countergeography” that maps the world from the perspective of women who migrate, capturing the fragmentation of their experiences through the conventions of avantgarde experimental cinema. Saskia Sassen links “counter-geographies of globalization” to “cross-border circuits,” where she diagnoses a growing number of women who function to increase profit when they circulate in illegal trafficking for the sex industry and other formal and informal labor markets.1 The key actors, Sassen proposes, are “the women themselves in search of work” but also “illegal traffickers and contractors as well as the governments of home countries.”2 Digital new media enable processes of globalization but also provide a medium to articulate a critical response. Remote Sensing captures this dialectic relationship, since the video itself is part of digital new media, but it also critically reflects on the fantasies created by the process of remote sensing, a digitally enabled imaging process that conjures a simultaneous and continuous visual moving image of a borderless world. Remote Sensing foregrounds the possibilities of digital media through the use of the split screen, the deployment of text and image, the access and mobility that the camera provides, and the incorporation of the images created by the NASA satellites. Biemann’s work belongs to what John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann call “adversarial transnational documentaries.”3 In their manifesto about transnational documentaries, Hess and Zimmermann claim that “new media practices” employed by “new transnational media organizations . . . challenge and remake connections between people across borders.”4 According to them, the “oppositions of dominant and alternative media formulated during a different period of late capitalism” are not productive for the contemporary situation of globalization, which is characterized by concentrations of transnational media that dominate the world market. New documentary work on video, film, and the Internet intervenes in a corporate structure of globalization to create virtual and local sites that address social justice in a global context. Hess and Zimmermann’s notion of “adversarial transnational documentaries” suggests “a constant shuttle between domination and resistance, between hegemonic power and multi-oppositional alliances, between repression and hope.”5 The dominant discourse on 334

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Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing (2001), which foregrounds the possibilities of digital media, incorporates images from NASA satellites.

globalization in cinema studies, they propose, emphasizes transnational conglomerates without paying attention to plural, heterogeneous, decentralized work that circulates in alternative networks of globalization. The transnational documentary that they highlight, however, is not entirely new, instead “it is one that has transmuted out of the old for a new set of social and political conditions.”6 Their manifesto thus challenges us to think about the political and aesthetic roots of transnational documentaries, which in the case of Ursula Biemann can be found in the work of experimental, feminist political filmmakers, in the German-speaking realm.

New German Cinema: Feminist Documentary and Avant-Garde Aesthetics The intimate connection between feminist activism and feminist aesthetics characterizes feminist filmmaking from New German Cinema to 335

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the contemporary transnational cinema of German-speaking European countries. New German Cinema’s feminist filmmaking emerged out of the second women’s movement, which in turn developed out of and differentiated itself from the students’ movement of the late 1960s in West Germany, articulated particularly in West Berlin. Julia Knight identifies the “birth of the new women’s movement in West Germany” as the moment when feminist activist and filmmaker Helke Sander spoke at the meeting of the SDS (Socialist German Students Union) in September of 1968 in West Berlin, “in which she drew attention to [the] oppression of women and the fact that there was not a single level within the student movement at which women’s interests were represented.”7 Her speech was followed by Sigrid Rüger’s (in)famous act of throwing “tomatoes at the board of executives.”8 This public event symbolizes the beginning of the second women’s movement in West Germany. It includes the double move of participating in the student movement and distancing itself from its patriarchal structure, similar to the relationship that feminist filmmaking developed to New German Cinema. Even though this public display retroactively took on the significance of the inception of the second women’s movement, feminists had begun to organize earlier that year. In January of 1968 a group of women had set up the Action Council for Women’s Liberation (Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen) in Berlin, which focused on women’s health, the economic exploitation of women, and violence against women.9 Feminist film of that period shared the women’s movement’s principles of activism and collectivity and addressed its topics in documentaries, often with an emphasis on visual experimentation. Knight provides a long list of titles of documentary films, addressing childcare (1968– 1969), contraception and abortion (1972–1977), labor (1971–1975), and violence against women (1970s), many of which were made by female collectives with a cinéma vérité style and relied on “grassroots” activism.10 The movement’s pivotal slogan “the personal is political” criticizes the division and gendering of the private and public sphere and shapes the understanding of traditional film genres, such as documentary, coded as public and male, and melodrama, coded as private and female.11 Knight’s description of Helke Sander’s film Der subjektive Faktor (The Subjective Factor, 1981) captures the aesthetic choices that enable the deconstruction of the division between the personal and the political: “Largely autobiographical, and intercutting news footage from the period, the film recounts the beginnings, in 1967 to 1970, of the new 336

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women’s movement in West Germany.”12 The documentary, activist, and collective characteristics of feminist film of the period contrast with the conventional understanding of the auteur, central for most definitions of New German Cinema. The way in which feminist New German Cinema and contemporary transnational feminist film share documentary and experimental aspects points to how feminist political concerns and aesthetics continue across the historical breaks between postwar and contemporary cinema. The continuation also sheds new light on the general association of the former with the political and of the latter with the entertainment film. The emphasis on these characteristics of feminist filmmaking also allows us to excavate some of the forgotten aspects of New German Cinema that are marginalized when New German Cinema is described as a cinema of auteurs, male and female. Despite the intention of the slogan “the personal is political” to denounce the split that reduces women into the private sphere, the “overtly autobiographical and semi-autobiographical”13 films that documented the lives of real women based on notions of “authentic” and “personal experience”14 lead to the prevalence of the portrayal of middle-class, white, straight West German women and ultimately reinscribed women into the private sphere. With the breakthrough successes of feature films by individual feminist filmmakers, such as Helma Sanders-Brahms and Margarethe von Trotta in the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist films began to reach a wider audience. Films such as Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1980) and von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981) became representative of feminist New German Cinema. These two films represent the subtle shifts that feminist New German Cinema underwent, despite their integration of documentary aspects into their fictionalized narratives and the films’ feminist aesthetics. I will briefly address these two examples to illustrate the continuation of political and aesthetic choices from feminist New German Cinema to contemporary transnational feminist documentary, something that serves as well to highlight developments within New German Cinema. Germany, Pale Mother recounts the semiautobiographical story of one woman belonging to the generation who lived through World War II. The story of Lene and her daughter Anna is intercut with archival footage from World War II, which connects and contrasts the private experience of history, particularly as it affects women, to its public representation. Despite this film’s political aesthetics that create a dialectic relationship 337

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of personal and political, the film ultimately validates the private sphere, which is inhabited by the German woman portrayed as victim. Marianne and Juliane is structured in a similar way: the film investigates the personal dimension of terrorism of the late 1970s through the personal but fictionalized story of the Ensslin sisters. The linear narrative is interrupted by flashbacks of childhood memories blaming the patriarchal bourgeois family for their daughter’s radicalization. Again, however, the political analysis of the public is subordinated to the analysis of the private sphere as an explanation for the motivation of West German terrorism. These narrative films occupy the position of feminist West German film in the public eye, whereas the above mentioned collectively made early political documentaries are neither taught nor distributed and are therefore less familiar to general audiences and academics. Cinematic experimentation became less associated with political film than with video and installation art.15 New German Cinema was intimately tied to the West German nation-state through its funding sources, the themes depicted, and the fact that its filmmakers belonged to a generation born at the end of World War II. Even though it is generally seen as a representative national cinema, John E. Davidson argues that it appropriated a “colonized” position. He suggests that the films of New German Cinema repeatedly created “an ‘othered’ German identity in order to integrate Germany into the West more fully and resolidify the West in the face of continuing crisis.”16 Davidson shows that New German Cinema “increasingly makes the ‘nomadic’ a mark of privileged otherness,” which is manifest in the role that is accorded to the movement and travel in such famous New German Cinema films as Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, Wrath of God, 1972), his Fitzcarraldo (1982), Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), Percy Adlon’s Out of Rosenheim (1987), and Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (Joan of Arc of Mongolia, 1989).17 Biemann’s video, then, breaks with this rhetorical self-positioning of New German Cinema in very explicit ways. In Remote Sensing the movements are detached from a nation-state as an organizing principle for travel. Remote Sensing radically undermines New German Cinema’s appropriation of the figure of the colonial Other and its feminist conception of German femininity as white, middle-class, heterosexual, yet victimized Self. Feminist New German Cinema by such filmmakers as Jutta Brückner, Helke Sander, Sanders-Brahms, and von Trotta were and continue to be indebted to the feminist paradigms developed in the late 1970s that 338

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emerged from and responded to the West German nation-state. Even though radically critical of patriarchy and fascism, many of the feminist films that came to represent New German Cinema reproduced Germanness as white, middle-class, and straight.18 West German feminist activism, however, underwent a paradigm shift in the late 1980s under the influence of North American feminism, which in turn responded to the pressure of women of color, lesbians, and working-class women to address interrelated forms of discrimination, such as racism, classism, and homophobia.19 These kinds of critiques created a more inclusive feminism that did not find its way into German feminist cinema until a postWall, second generation of migrants began to create its own cinematic language.20 This discussion about the continuities and discontinuities between earlier and contemporary feminist cinematic practices is complicated by Biemann’s Swiss nationality. Switzerland created an independent profile neither for the auteurist film movements of the late 1960s and the 1970s in Western Europe nor for its feminist movement, both of which were subsumed in West German cultural production and its social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. References to Swissness disappear in the cultural production in Germany by many Swiss cultural producers dependent on the German language marketplace.21 We can read the example of the career of Bruno Ganz as symptomatic of the way that visibility of Swiss specificity in auteurist cinema decreased while the success of New German Cinema increased. Although his character in Wim Wenders’s early film Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1977) is Swiss, a decade later, in Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), the character Ganz portrays is central to the film’s negotiation of Germanness. References to Ganz’s Swiss identity have generally disappeared from his work and have been substituted with an assumption of Germanness also expressed by his repeated use as a voice-over in German film, which traditionally connotes neutrality and nonspecificity. In contrast to this national nonspecificity in the case of Switzerland, New German Cinema is well known for its preoccupation with the West German nation-state and its historical and political particularities, such as the history of National Socialism, Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), the specificity of the divided nation-state, West German terrorism, and the West German formation of feminism. Cultural products from German-speaking countries other than West Germany were consistently subordinated to and incorporated into West 339

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German culture. Yet, these historically conditioned power dynamics now function within the complex web of globalization in which Swissness signifies something different for a German audience than for a Third World audience, the same way that Germanness and Swissness echo differently on a global stage where Switzerland is seen as a hegemonic center in transnational financial exchange. Self-reflection on the nationstate within the transnational context is therefore paramount for a radical deconstruction of the legacy of a Eurocentric hegemony of representation. To abandon this self-reflection runs the danger of representing globalization as a process that takes place elsewhere and leaves the place from which one speaks intact and unquestioned, as if it were not imbricated in the processes of globalization.

Voice/Image Remote Sensing both invokes and breaks from the conventions of New German Cinema, particularly the feminist cinematic practices of the relation of voice and image across the shift from a national to transnational framework. To illuminate this constellation, this section will pay particular attention to Sander’s REDUPERS, which, according to Judith Mayne, foregrounds “the female voice as it embodies the complexities of female narration.”22 In this as in several other feminist films, “the female voice does destabilize the conventional symmetry whereby the register of vocal authority is presumed to be male, the realm of the visible, female.”23 To illustrate the continuities and differences between these two representative examples, REDUPERS and Remote Sensing, I focus on the relationship of voice and image to the screen, which negotiates notions of objectivity and subjectivity, public and private, local attachment to place and global detachment from it. REDUPERS portrays the daily life of Edda Chiemnyjewski, who is a photographer in West Berlin covering official functions in the city. With a feminist group of female photographers she attempts to participate in a photo competition about West Berlin. The film is accompanied by a voice-over, which, according to Mayne, “slides between the registers of objectivity and subjectivity” because it “does not provide authoritative commentary, however; rather, the voice emphasizes shifting perspective and a plurality of vantage points.”24 Extensive tracking shots of West Berlin move along houses, streets, and the Berlin Wall accompanied by the female voice of the narrator, creating, according to Mayne, the “public 340

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sphere of Berlin, a public sphere made up of detached voices speaking in different tongues.”25 In one scene, REDUPERS uses multiple screens, a forerunner of the strategy employed by Remote Sensing. In REDUPERS, three small screens appear as insets in the page of a newspaper, each citing a contemporary feminist film: Ursula Reuter-Christiansen’s Danish film The Executioner (1972); Yvonne Rainer’s Film about a Woman Who . . . (1974), made in the United States; and Valie Export’s Austrian film Unsichtbare Gegner (Invisible Adversaries, 1976).26 The screen collage of feminist artistic work contrasts with the supposedly neutral representation of the public sphere represented by the newspaper. The image is accompanied by a voice-over quoting a letter from Edda’s aunt. Mayne interprets this moment as creating a connection “between the sophisticated, experimental film practice of the three directors who are cited, and the everyday narration of the fictional aunt,” which captures the film’s “sense of fragmentation” that “cohere[s] around the cityscape of Berlin.”27 REDUPERS filmically reflects the built environment of West Berlin: the film is primarily shot in Kreuzberg, the historic working-class neighborhood close to the border of East Berlin. Extensive tracking shots show the nineteenthcentury housing that characterizes Kreuzberg marked by political graffiti; radical political culture is inscribed into the urban landscape that is locatable and recognizable for anyone familiar with Berlin. REDUPERS therefore also develops a countergeography, but from a local perspective set within the divided nation-state simultaneously functioning within a global world order, at that point of the Cold War. Biemann’s own interdisciplinary and multimedial transgression of boundaries overcomes the separation of artistic and scholarly work, since she theorizes her artistic work in her academic writing and creates a visual language for her theoretical and political concerns in her multimedia work. The video essay, the form the majority of her work takes— for example in Performing the Border (1999), Writing Desire (2000), Europlex (2003), and Remote Sensing—constitutes Biemann’s preferred genre, which she situates somewhere between documentary and art. As Nora Alter explains, the essay film “problematizes binary categories of representation.”28 Biemann values the productive ambivalence of that in-between position for a visual practice that integrates art, theory, and politics, and she contextualizes the video essay in the technical “development of new media, the Internet and digital image production,” on the one hand, and the theoretical importance of a “postcolonial cultural 341

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studies perspective,” on the other.29 These two aspects then imply the question of the relationship of the postcolonial and the global condition, the vital premise of this essay. The video articulates an explicit, critical postcolonial stance, which demands, in turn, a critical engagement from the perspective of postcolonial and globalization studies: Is Remote Sensing able to undo the inscription of the hegemonic center in its visual commentary on globalization in a postcolonial context? Biemann’s video addresses how to create a discourse critical of globalization as it emerges in Europe. We are left with the theoretical conundrum: How does one undo the hierarchical inscription of the Western, speaking subject and its privilege while simultaneously seeking to undo the related Western tradition of the historical hierarchy of sound over image? In the history of film, hierarchies of subject versus object, knowledge versus spectacle, rational versus irrational, civilized versus primitive are inscribed via the relationship of sound over image. This hierarchy of sound over image, in which the image is associated with the pleasure of looking at the object, is the hallmark of the traditional documentary, particularly colonial anthropological and ethnographic film. These films have invested the voice-over with an explanatory authority over the image assumed to be in need of explication. We are called on as audience, then, to pay particular attention to the reconceptualization of the historically and politically weighted relationship between image and sound, or to put it differently, the relationship between visual plentitude (associated with images of sexuality) and theoretical framing (articulated by the voice). The construction of the “primitive body,” however, associated with the image, predates sound, argues Assenka Oksiloff in Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema. She claims that “the filming of the non-Western body is not simply incidental to the history of cinema.”30 Instead, the representation of that body “forms the basis for a type of reciprocal legitimization of the cinematic and the ethnographic gaze” that integrates ethnography with early cinema.31 Oksiloff emphasizes this regarding German colonialism: “One of the important ideological functions of ethnographic film was to mobilize the ‘science’ of truth in addressing a troubled image of colonialism specific to German history.”32 Thus, even before the invention of sound, “film proved to be an important validating device of the supposedly truthful scientific glance cast upon the colonies, moving from inanimate to animate bodies as artifacts.”33 Sabine Hake traces a continuation of 342

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the native body as spectacle into the cinema of the Third Reich, where she claims for the Nazi film Germanin (1942/1943) that the natives are identified with the “visual spectacle . . . by the means of which questions of race, ethnicity, and nation are mapped onto the spatial topographies of Africa.”34 Lisa Gates finds these dynamics in Leni Riefenstahl’s photos from the Sudan. Gates differentiates ethnography into “scientific category of ethnography” and “popular ethnography,” which she sees as “ethnography’s commercial cousin . . . dominated by first-person narrative and subjective impressions.”35 These popular ethnographic discourses, seen in National Geographic and the German Geo, especially sexualize the “non-Western female body.”36 Remote Sensing similarly captures fragmentation through the means of experimental cinema and separating voice from image. But what kind of “scape”—to invoke Arjun Apparudai’s term “ethnoscape”—can global fragmentation cohere around?37 Remote Sensing’s shots of landscapes portray the uprootedness created by global migration. Similar to REDUPERS, landscapes are captured with extended tracking shots, often from the point of view of the traveler out of a car or bus. Most often, however, these shots show unrecognizable roads through landscapes without national or urban markers. Routes traveled during migration, these roads do not evoke spectators’ attachments to them as places, as was the case with REDUPERS. Whereas the accented cinema that Hamid Naficy describes nostalgically endows the place left behind with an affective memory, Remote Sensing implicitly proposes that globalization will effect more radical changes in the relationship of affect, memory, and place on a global scale than will the history of war and displacement up to this point.38 The places portrayed in Remote Sensing are stations en route or locations geographically predetermined as sites of exchange. Although seemingly innocuous landscapes are exposed as sites of sex trade, we are also shown images of self-confident women enjoying themselves. For example, Remote Sensing crosscuts several shots of women riding together on scooters through an urban landscape smiling at the camera. Remote Sensing shows us a gendered modernity brought on by globalization when women experience upward mobility and changing gender roles by moving to richer metropolitan and urban sites with possibilities of increasing their income. This contrasts with Ulrich Beck’s analysis of globalization as “second age of modernity,” in which gender does not play a role.39 Agency is also accorded to women when they narrate the memories of their journeys. 343

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Remote Sensing’s landscapes portray the uprootedness created by global migration. Places portrayed are stations en route or locations geographically predetermined as sites of exchange.

Throughout the video, the director’s voice reflects on the conditions and possibilities of representation. The mere depiction of visible reality has become insufficient, especially when addressing the clandestine realities of globalization, such as human trafficking, illegal migration, and global sex work. The self-reflexive voice-over asks “how to shoot a clandestine life?” That self-reflexivity urges the audience to question the images when the video depicts seemingly benign images of men, women, or doors with numbers, images whose hidden meaning can only be understood through context provided by a voice-over. The voice-over reflects on the conditions of clandestinity without sacrificing the explicit naming of sexual negotiations and transactions that motivate the clandestine existence of women in the sex trade in the first place: “Locked up in tiny rooms . . . guarded step by step, number by number, trick by trick . . .” The voice-over explains the monetary transaction of sex and 344

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the violence that ensures that exchange. It is simultaneously explicit and poetic in its descriptions, attempting to capture the crude conditions of these women’s reality and to do justice to their humanity. In REDUPERS’s shot with multiple screens that cite other feminist films, Mayne detects “a feminist desire for affiliation.”40 But how can affiliation be established, maintained, articulated, and represented in the long-distance relations created by globalization? Biemann’s own critical use of the apparatus of long-distance tracking and remote sensing undermines the possibility of creating long-distance affiliation or empathy. Biemann’s reproduction of categories of remote sensing and surveillance—namely, routes and markers of identification, such as name, ID number, height, and weight—keeps women locked into the status of commodity. In addition, the women are not accorded any space to articulate desires, subjectivity, interiority, emotion, or relation beyond what takes on a function within the sex industry, reproducing the lack of humanity that we are to assume the video intends to criticize. Thus, instead of what Leslie Adelson, following Arjun Appadurai, has termed “forms of long-distance affiliations,” we are left with remote sensing.41 The video’s title, we are to assume, critiques the remote sensing of the NASA satellite images but also poses the question about the possibilities of creating sensory relations across remote distances. Ultimately, Remote Sensing neither suggests a possibility for long-distance affiliation nor mourns those emotional states lost in the rootlessness, fragmentation, and alienation created by globalization. Andreas Huyssen suggests that cultural globalization engenders a significant shift from “national history within borders” to “memory without borders.”42 But how do we conceptualize the paradox that the global cultural production of “memories without borders” is increasingly shaped by the trauma of border crossings and their frequent impossibility? Biemann’s video complicates the juxtaposition of “national history within borders” and “memory without borders” by illustrating how national and international histories, particularly those of military conflict, create national sex industries, which, in the context of global inequalities, produce transnational trafficking of women’s bodies. Memories circulate globally and are not bound by one national imaginary. Remote Sensing integrates two aspects of globalization that seem at odds with each other: the time/space compression, which makes borders and nations seem to disappear, and trafficking bodies that move through national spaces, highlighting through their very movement the space of the 345

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nation and its borders. Biemann proposes that the nonlinear montage of multimedia reflects the global structure of memory and recollection,43 and, according to Alter, the essay film “recall[s] the operation of memory.”44 The fact that the women articulate their memories and act as agents of their journeys counters the representation of women in the global sex industry as absolute victims. In the video’s section on the legacy of military occupation in Angeles City in the Philippines, the voice-over explains the way prostitution functions differently from in Western Europe. Instead of efficient monetary transactions, the voice-over explains that prostitution is “open ended” and can establish a rapport that can last anywhere from days to weeks or months. The voice-over then interviews Naomi, a woman whom we see briefly. The voice-over asks, “Did you ever have a boyfriend on the side, someone you love?” And Naomi answers, “I have no boyfriend. Never have. Customer yes. Free no. Why?” Although the women are not portrayed as victims of traffickers, pimps, or customers, they nevertheless remain portrayed as victims of their own commodity status.

Countergeographies of Cross-Border Circuits Remote Sensing mirrors the multimedial, interdisciplinary labor that Biemann’s oeuvre performs as a whole: it speaks to an overarching argument about visual culture and globalization. It includes layers of visual and audio tracks and brings together several topics that tend to be segregated in discourses on globalization, including sexuality and economics, national histories and transnational memories, the national and the global, scientific accounts of geography and the experience of global movement and place. Remote Sensing underscores the complexity of women’s migratory routes that are multiple and multidirectional without claiming a comprehensive account of women’s movement in the global trade of sex, false adoption, and marriage. The stories of migration are not limited to movement from an imagined periphery to an imagined center, such as from “peripheral” nations to Switzerland, Germany, or Europe for that matter—such a trajectory would reinscribe a Eurocentric worldview often displayed in liberal accounts about the sex trade. Instead, Remote Sensing tracks women traveling from Thailand to Tokyo, from Russia to Korea and Israel, from Cambodia, Laos, and Burma to Thailand, from Eastern to Western Europe, from Nigeria to Germany, from 346

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Vietnam to China, and from Latin America to the United States. It intercuts the different accounts of the routes that women travel in the global sex industry with NASA satellite images of the abstract landscapes that the women traverse. Individual women recount their migratory routes while Czech, Indian, Thai, Swiss, and Filipina activists contextualize global trafficking in national or regional frameworks. In a voice-over the filmmaker meditates on the relation between gender, sexuality, and globalization, on the one hand, and the conditions and ramifications of representations of the global sex trade, on the other. Repeatedly, routes are shown in the form of computer screen texts akin to air travel itineraries layered over images. Remote Sensing relies on multiple sources of knowledge, including facts and numbers, narrations of movement, and meditations on places as well as the NASA satellite images, which are emblematic of a global geography and create an imaginary world without visual borders. The NASA images reflect David Harvey’s concept of “space-time compression,” which he defines as signaling “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves.”45 Huyssen explains that “the experiential dimension of space has shrunk as a result of modern means of transportation and communication.”46 In globalization, space and time have undergone changes, which, according to Huyssen manifest themselves in relationship to history and memory.47 He sees a current “fundamental disturbance” of “history itself and its promise” that leads to a “voiding of time and the collapsing of spatial boundaries.”48 To emphasize the multinational, multidirectional characteristic of human trafficking, a section of the video titled “Filipinas in Nigeria: A Case of Re-routing” highlights the story of two Filipina women who are involuntarily trafficked to Nigeria and take years to return to the Philippines. The two women tell their story: Lured by the promises of Bernadette and Wolfgang Stromberg, presumably two German nationals, of work in a German restaurant, they find themselves in a brothel in Nigeria forced to work for Chinese customers. The screen—split sometimes in three, sometimes in four sections—shows us Filipina Arlene Banson and Nilda Vibar in one of the top sections of the screen telling their stories while satellite images of the Philippines and Nigeria move across the other sections of the screen. The split screen captures the complexity of globalization, in which the categories of nation, gender, and ethnicity 347

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are pried apart from their presumed essential relation to each other. The multinational and multidirectional movements are captured when the trafficking routes are layered over the NASA satellite images, for example, Metro Manila to Oriental Club, Lagos/Nigeria to Nightclub, Lome/ Togo to Nostalgia Club, Larnaca/Cyprus to Metro Manila. Whereas in traditional documentaries the commentary interprets the simultaneous image, in Biemann’s video sound and image diverge to capture the asynchronous experience of time and place within globalization generally. Such asynchronicity is, above all, characteristic of the experience of the women portrayed in this video in particular.

Transnational New Media Remote Sensing reflects on globalization, in which the decreasing role of the nation-state makes borders increasingly open to the flows of capital and commodities but closed for those traversing the globe while facing the violence and exploitation associated with illegality. Electronic communication and digital culture are also increasingly detached from the nation-state; for example, Remote Sensing neither invokes a country of origin nor addresses a national audience in an explicit recognizable framework of national culture. Taking stock of transnational cinema, Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden diagnose the difficulty in assigning “a fixed national identity to much cinema.”49 They suggest that the “stable connection between a film’s place of production and/or setting and the nationality of its makers and performers” does not exist anymore.50 They correctly outline the substantive changes cinema and new media have undergone with the changes in transnational production, education, and reception of films and filmmaker; however, they map these changes solely onto the duality of Hollywood and former colonial and Third World filmmakers. According to them, “Transnational cinema” includes “Hollywood’s domination of world film markets” and “filmmakers from former colonial and Third World countries” that create “counterhegemonic responses” to the global dominance of Hollywood cinema.51 Both hegemonic and counterhegemonic cinematic cultures circulate in transnational structures of funding, training, and distribution. Yet Ezra and Rowden problematically reduce the complex network of hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces to the binary of “Hollywood” and “Third World countries.” Similar to Ezra and Rowden, Ella Shohat focuses on the cinematic production by contemporary Third World filmmakers in 348

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their countries of origin and in the diaspora: “In the face of Eurocentric historicizing, the Third World and its diasporas in the First World have rewritten their own histories, taken control over their own images, spoken in their own voices, reclaiming and reaccentuating colonialism and its ramifications in the present in a vast project of remapping and renaming.”52 Artists such as Biemann and works such as Remote Sensing deconstruct “Eurocentric historicizing” from within and perform a different political and aesthetic labor. The forces of globalization are not always as clearly demarcated as these authors suggest when they symptomatically map the divergent and sometimes contradictory forces onto a binary of Hollywood versus filmmakers from the Third World. Such mappings leave out the complex relationships between Asian, European, and Central American film industries in exchange with Hollywood, each other, and Third World countries.53 This essay attempts to trouble this binary by focusing on a European text that moves beyond the binaries that shape these discourses about global cinema. The visual culture that accompanied and reinforced the hegemonic projects of Eurocentric anthropology and history inscribes hierarchy through its politics of voice and image. Trinh T. Minh-ha describes the gendering of voice in traditional colonial film: “Remember, the minority’s voice is always personal; that of the major-ity, always impersonal. Logic dictates. Man thinks, woman feels. The white man knows through reason and logic—the intelligible.”54 Remote Sensing reverses these traditional dualities by contrasting the sex trafficking driven by male heterosexual desire and the purchasing power of men from the global North over women’s bodies from the global South—and it does so via the absence of men at the level of description, analysis, interpretation, and commentary.55 It thus rewrites the underlying gendered division of rationality coded as male versus emotionality coded as female. The antihuman-trafficking feminist activists who are shown in talking heads describe and criticize the conditions that lead women to undertake the risks of illegal migration and labor, while the women engaged in these clandestine and dangerous activities narrate their stories that rely on rational choices within the parameters of their possibilities. Their voices and their descriptions of their interactions with their male customers are neutral, rational, and sometimes disengaged and lack the emotionality often attached to claims of victimhood or moral outrage that characterizes Western feminism’s portrayal of women in the global sex industry. 349

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Instead of constructing one voice that represents a universal truth, Remote Sensing integrates multiple voices by women from the so-called Third World who advance arguments against sex trafficking, often based on emotional and experiential proximity to the women who narrate their own stories of sex trafficking and transnational prostitution. Activists and sex workers are staged in similar ways so that the video does not create a hierarchy between presumed objects and subjects of knowledge. The conditions of globalization have changed the underlying paradigm, from the traditional anthropological and colonial cinematic discourse in which the disembodied voice of white masculinity represents objectivity, to the abstract NASA images that are assumed to represent objective and neutral truth without human translation. Remote Sensing contrasts the digital disembodied image of the world without national borders with the lived experience of women who embody alternative and oppositional knowledge. Activism is not presented as “help” by the West but instead is embodied by women of color who explain, theorize, and strategize, often with an accent. The presence of multiple “accents,” which represent traces of the roots in the local and national within the global context, reminds one of Naficy’s influential theoretical concept of “accented cinema” for exilic and diasporic cinema. The video shares with Naficy’s concept of “accented cinema” its “multivocal, multiauthorial, calligraphic, and free indirect discourse,” which according to Naficy “challenges the authority of the classic realist films and their omniscient narrator and narrative system.”56 In addition, Remote Sensing shares with many examples of “accented cinema” its characteristic that it “emphasize[s] territoriality, rootedness, and geography.”57 Like the films analyzed by Naficy, Remote Sensing creates a counterhegemonic multivocal discourse and is deeply concerned with territory. But accent functions differently in Naficy’s theory than in Biemann’s video. The similarities and differences between the function of accent in Naficy’s theory of accented cinema and Biemann’s video are instructive about the possibilities of and theories about counterhegemonic cinema. The gap between Naficy’s description and Remote Sensing’s characteristics points to the limitations of Biemann’s attempt to deconstruct hegemonic cinematic conventions. Naficy contrasts “dominant cinema,” which is “considered universal and without accent” with “accented” films by “diasporic and exilic subjects.”58 He proposes that “the accent emanates not so much from the accented speech of the diegetic characters as 350

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from the displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production modes.”59 In Remote Sensing, this relationship is reversed. Accents are associated with women who appear in the diegesis; the activists and the women who were trafficked or worked in the sex industry speak with heavy accents or in their native language. Biemann’s own extradiegetic voice that articulates concerns on the metalevel speaks clearly and deliberately, and we can hear only a faint trace of her Swiss accent. Her voice-over thus takes on the neutrality of universalism that is so often associated with the disembodied and unmarked voice. Biemann’s voice-over raises and meditates on questions of representability and the preconditions of forced transnational prostitution. For example, the voice-over describes the conditions in the brothels: “Clandestinity is an obscure form of living the locality of culture: locked up in tiny rooms, confined in semi-darkness, guarded closely, she lives in the ghetto, in the bars and the underworld, the semi-world, living a halflife.” Her commentary moves beyond the diegesis and her voice consequently takes on an entirely different function from those of the women of color who tell the stories of their experience or speak as activists and experts. In that way, in the final instance, Remote Sensing is unable to entirely escape the hierarchy of voice over image associated with center and periphery, universalism and particularity, Europe and elsewhere, metadiscourse and diegesis, theory and experience, unmarked neutral Switzerland and marked others. Globalization reconfigures the model of center and periphery, but a representation of decentering brings with it the danger that the center, the nation at home, is left intact, as if it were not imbricated in processes of globalization. But leaving the center intact, projecting the global onto elsewhere, as the title of my essay suggests, can perpetuate the colonial relationship of center and periphery in the representation of processes of globalization. I would like therefore to return to the question of the relationship between the national and the global by paying specific attention to the staging of Switzerland in Biemann’s account of global movements in the sex trade. The video inscribes proximity into the geographical and the theoretical place, from which the voice-over originates. In contrast to the remoteness of remote sensing, proximity is neither theorized nor deconstructed, and we are left to assume that proximity encapsulates home, which coincides with the nation of Switzerland. Thus, I want to end by putting pressure on the video’s attention—or lack thereof—to Switzer351

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land. Western Europe appears in the form of the eastern German border with the Czech Republic, when viewers see a snowy landscape where women prostitute themselves along a transit road. Again addressing the national dimension in the global sex trade, the voice-over tells us, “Two new nations come together: one united, one dissolved. . . . Here everything is transitory.” Viewers also learn that 500,000 women per annum come from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, which provides the context for Switzerland to make its entrance into the film’s discourse. In contrast to all other national and transnational sites visually captured in the video, Switzerland is represented only in the form of a talking head. Eva Danzl Suarez from Zurich explains the increase of women who work in the cabaret and as dancers as a result of the state’s migration politics. The lack of images associated with Switzerland is striking and politically revealing because it becomes the place from which to speak, a place of knowledge that implicitly coincides with the voice of the filmmaker that is disembodied and unmarked by an accent and that exceeds the diegesis.

Conclusion For feminist activists and theorists, sex trafficking in women is not an entirely new phenomenon or topic brought on by globalization. However, with the collapse of the former East Bloc and processes of globalization underway, sex trafficking has undergone significant qualitative and quantitative changes.60 The role it plays in feminist discourses on globalization extends the central position accorded to domestic violence and rape in the second women’s movement of the 1970s. In contrast to feminist approaches to globalization, most of which focus on female labor and migration, gender as analytical category is absent in the seminal texts that have shaped the field of globalization studies. Concepts that are integral to theoretical paradigms critical of globalization, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s “Empire,” Immanuel Wallerstein’s “World Capitalist System,” Ulrich Beck’s “world risk society” and “globalization as second modernity,” and Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “ethnoscapes” ignore gender as a category of analysis.61 This undercuts the possibility of a differentiated account that integrates the intersectionality of gender, class, and the economic restructuring of the world under globalization: these theoretical paradigms cannot account for the experience of poor, disenfranchised women from the global South. 352

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The absence of gender in these methodologically diverse and theoretically sophisticated approaches contrasts with the rhetorical function sex trafficking takes on in the popular media. For example, in 2003 accusations were leveled against Michel Friedman, then the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, that he had engaged in paid sex with illegally immigrated Ukrainian women forced into prostitution in Germany. Public discussions exhibited moral outrage while simultaneously manifesting concern about German anti-Semitism in post-Holocaust Germany. In these public debates, the figure of the illegal prostitute from the East has become the linchpin in negotiating Germany’s relationship to Jewishness in a post-Holocaust era. Whereas women are absent from influential theoretical frameworks of globalization, they are centrally present in a fetishistic economy of public popular discourse where, especially, trafficked women can be deployed for different kinds of rhetorical gains. Kamala Kempadoo suggests that sex trafficking is “cast by political leaders, alongside terrorism and drug trafficking, as one of the three ‘evils’ that haunts the globe, and it has become the subject for much academic research, policy work, and action in a wide variety of disciplines and fields.”62 But because it is associated with sexualized victimization, the discussion of sex trafficking is often accompanied by a voyeuristic sexual gaze or an antisexual moral stance. Kempadoo’s collection of essays that addresses the intersections of migration, sex work, and human rights represents one of the few contemporary academic works that offers an alternative view to entrenched positions marked by either voyeurism or antisex morality. Instead it proposes to understand trafficking “not as the enslavement of women, but as the trade and exploitation of labor under conditions of coercion and force, analyzed from the lives, agency, and rights of women and men who are involved in a variety of activities in a transnationalized world.”63 Kempadoo’s and Biemann’s shared emphasis on “the centrality of women” importantly reconceptualizes and reconfigures the discourses on globalization that I have outlined above.64 By emphasizing women’s experience and reflecting on the performativity of prostitution, Remote Sensing also integrates two different strands of contemporary feminist theory that seem at odds with each other. Recent feminist paradigms in the humanities, emerging from queer studies, particularly the works of Judith Butler, privilege the analysis of the performativity of gender. Butler’s work radically reconfigures feminist discourse by pointing out that “gender is the cultural signifi353

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cance that the sexed body assumes.”65 Butler unsettles the category of “woman” as reifying a “binary gender system” that is produced by a “system of compulsory heterosexuality.”66 Yet, gender, according to Butler, “is instituted through the stylization of the body,”67 while the body in turn is not sex materiality but only read as sexed through the lens of gender. To uphold the illusion of natural biology, the construction of gender has to conceal its genesis, and gender can then take on “the cultural significance that the sexed body assumes.”68 In that context, Butler highlights the “performative,” which according to her “carries the double-meaning of ‘dramatic’ and ‘non-referential.’  ”69 She highlights the example of the figure of the “transvestite” to claim that “the transvestite’s gender is as fully real as anyone whose performance complies with social expectations.”70 The paradigm shift in feminist theory severed the tie of sex to gender that the sex/gender system still entailed and on which feminist theory of the second wave relied. This move, not coincidently, left behind the Marxist analysis of economic materialism. Butler and Judith Halberstam highlight marginal performative practices associated with subversive and liminal gender/sex configurations. Parallel, however, Third Wave feminists gave rise to a different cultural performativity, that of “ironic femininity,” which relies less on a “dissonance between anatomical sex and gender identity (as in the instance of drag) than on a tension between opposing discourses of gender within female-embodied sexed identity.”71 In contrast to these discourses that dominate contemporary feminist theory inflected either by queer studies or Third Wave feminism, contemporary feminist discourses emphasize social and political science approaches to account for quantitative and qualitative social changes for women under the condition of globalization. Remote Sensing does not question the authenticity of women’s experience in sex trafficking; it articulates the real and symbolic violence in forced migration and prostitution. At the same time, the women narrate their own constructions of the performance of prostitution as a form of labor when they talk about their work. Thus, in Remote Sensing authentic experiences of exploitation and migration and the performativity of sexual labor and femininity are not mutually exclusive phenomena. Rather, they constitute the interwoven experience and agency of women who are mired in poverty in the global South under, and by, the conditions of globalization. Remote Sensing offers a countergeography to an idealized image of a global world without borders by rereading shots of NASA satel354

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lite images and traveling shots of seemingly innocuous landscapes. The video integrates national histories and border crossings in its memory work across borders. It foregrounds the way gender shapes globalization and globalization shapes gender. It continues the aesthetic and political trajectory of feminist New German Cinema and leads us to revisit the documentary and experimental aspects of the feminist cinema from an earlier period. REDUPERS and Remote Sensing both propose a feminist countergeography, the former from the perspective of the local in relationship to the national based on the built material environment, the latter from the perspective of the transnational in relationship to the global based on remote sensing. Yet, Remote Sensing is not able to undo the representational commodification of women in the sex trade because it does not move beyond the traditional categories employed for surveillance: distant accounts of routes and lists of identificatory classifications. Remote Sensing also does not ultimately undo the hierarchy of center and periphery because of the lack of awareness that the place from which it speaks is imbricated in processes of globalization. This lack is indicative of a potential problem in the discourse on globalization, when globalization is cast as that which takes place elsewhere. In that configuration, the place from which one speaks becomes the new terra incognita in a kind of reversed colonial geography in which the center stays intact because it is not subjected to the same kind of interpretative scrutiny as the global elsewhere.

Notes This essay is dedicated to the students of my course “Feminist Theories” in fall of 2007. I thank Amy Ongiri, Brad Prager, and Jaimey Fisher for helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay and Jamie Trnka for pointing me to the correct source of the “time/space compression.” 1. Saskia Sassen, “Women’s Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival,” Journal of International Affairs 53, no. 2 (2000): 503. 2. Ibid. 3. John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Transnational Documentaries: A Manifesto,” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, eds. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, 97 (New York: Routledge, 2006). 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 100. 6. Ibid., 102. 355

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7. Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992), 74. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 78–86. 11. The phrase created by Carol Hanisch through the title of her essay “The Personal Is Political” has taken on a life of its own in feminist activism and theory, detached from its original formulation, in which it was aimed against theory, particularly Marxist and Socialist. See Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” in Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader, ed. Barbara A. Crow, 113–16 (New York: New York University Press, 2000). 12. Knight, New German Cinema, 82. 13. Ibid., 86–87. 14. Ibid., 85. 15. Important examples are the works of Valie Export and Ulrike Ottinger. 16. John E. Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 9. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. There are strikingly few examples of feminist films of New German Cinema that address questions of migration to West Germany: Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin’s Wedding, 1975) and Argentinean-born Janine Meerapfel’s Die Kümmeltürkin geht (The Turkish Spice Lady Is Leaving, 1985). For an analysis of the inscription of whiteness as Germanness in West German feminist literature, see Leslie A. Adelson, Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 19. For one of the influential books initiating the paradigm shift in the United States, see Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982). For the West German discourse on multicultural feminism based on intersectionality, see Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz (Ayim), and Dagmar Schultz, eds. Farbe bekennen: Afro deutsche Frauen auf der Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Berlin: Orlanda, 1986); Ika Hügel-Marshall, Chris Lange, and May Ayim, eds. Entfernte Verbindungen: Rassismus, Antisemitismus, Klassenunterdrückung (Berlin: Orlanda, 1999). For one study that investigates the possibility and the pitfalls of speaking for the Other by German language feminist drama authors, see Britta Kallin, Presentation of Racism in Contemporary German and Austrian Theater: Six Women Playwrights. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). 20. This radical break is more often discussed regarding the difference between films by migrants made in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, which portrayed Turkish women as helpless victims, such as Tevfik Başer’s 40m2 Deutschland (40m2 Germany, 1986) and the contemporary films by minority filmmakers in Germany that show self-confident migrant women of the second generation in films by Angelina Maccarone and Fatima El-Tayeb, Seyhan Derin, Thomas Arslan, and Fatih Akın. See Deniz Göktürk, “Turkish Delight—German Fright: Migrant Identities 356

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Ursula Biemann’s Multimedia Countergeography in Transnational Cinema,” in Mediated Identities, ed. Deniz Derman, Karen Ross, and Nevena Dakovic, 131–49 (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2001) and Barbara Mennel, “Bruce Lee in Kreuzberg and Scarface in Altona: Transnational Auteurism and Ghettocentrism in Thomas Arslan’s Brothers and Sisters and Fatih Akın’s Short Sharp Shock,” New German Critique 87 (Fall 2002): 133–56. 21. I thank Andrea Reimann for bringing this point to my attention. 22. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 51. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 52, 53. 25. Ibid., 52. 26. Ibid., 55. 27. Ibid., 56. 28. Nora Alter, “Memory Essays,” in Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age, ed. Ursula Biemann, 12 (New York: Springer, 2003). 29. Ursula Biemann, “The Video Essay in the Digital Age,” in Biemann, Stuff It, 8–9. 30. Assenka Oksiloff, Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid. 34. Sabine Hake, “Mapping the Native Body: On Africa and the Colonial Film in the Third Reich,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, 175 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 35. Lisa Gates, “Of Seeing and Otherness: Leni Riefenstahl’s African Photographs,” in The Imperialist Imagination, 235–36. 36. Ibid., 241. 37. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33. 38. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 39. Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity,” trans. Martin Chalmers, British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 1 (2000): 79. Beck explains globalization as second modernity in the following way and demands certain subsequent paradigm shifts in the social and political sciences to account for it: “Reference to a second age of modernity is intended to make it clear that there is a structural and epochal break—a paradigm shift—and not merely a gradual increase in the significance of knowledge and reflection as is mistakenly suggested by the term ‘reflexive modernization.’ Theory and sociology of the second age of modernity elaborate, therefore, the basic assumption that toward the end of the twentieth century the conditio humana opens up anew—with fundamentally ambivalent contingencies, complexities, uncertainties and risks which, conceptually and empirically, still have to be 357

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uncovered and understood. A new kind of capitalism, a new kind of economy, a new kind of global order, a new kind of politics and law, a new kind of society and personal life are in the making, which both separately and in context are clearly distinct from earlier phases of social evolution. Consequently, a paradigm shift in both the social sciences and politics is required” (81). 40. Mayne, Woman at the Keyhole, 57. 41. Leslie Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 15. 42. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4. 43. Biemann, “Video Essay,” 10. 44. Alter, “Memory Essays,” 12. 45. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 240. 46. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 1. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 2. 49. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, “General Introduction: What Is Transnational Cinema?” in Ezra and Rowden, Transnational Cinema, 1. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ella Shohat, “Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation, and the Cinema,” in Ezra and Rowden, Transnational Cinema, 39. 53. For a discussion of different configurations of transnational cofunding from a perspective of German Studies, see Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). For an account of Hong Kong film as transnational cinema, see Esther C. M. Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 54. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 28. 55. “Global South” is a term commonly used by those who see the term “Third World” as outdated, since it was associated with the Cold War, and derogatory. However, global South is not meant solely in geographic terms; instead it also reflects a global digital divide. According to the Center for the Global South at the American University, 157 out of 184 recognized states belong to the global South, which is characterized by “poverty, environmental degradation, human and civil rights abuses, ethnic and regional conflicts, mass displacements of refugees, hunger and disease” (see http://www.american.edu/academic.depts/acainst/cgs/ about.html). 56. Naficy, Accented Cinema, 5. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 4. 59. Ibid. 60. For a discussion of sex trafficking as a result of the changes brought about 358

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Ursula Biemann’s Multimedia Countergeography by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the former East Bloc, see Sally Stoecker and Louise Shelley, eds., Human Traffic and Transnational Crime: Eurasian and American Perspectives (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 61. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Beck, “Cosmopolitan Perspective”; Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System,” in The Globalization Reader, ed. Frank J. Lechner and Joh Boli, 63–69 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). 62. Kamala Kempadoo, “From Moral Panic to Global Justice: Changing Perspectives on Trafficking,” in Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights, ed. Kamala Kempadoo with Jyoti Sanghera and Bandana Pattanaik, vii (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2005). 63. Ibid., viii–ix. 64. Ibid., ix. 65. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 1 (1988): 524. 66. Ibid., 531. 67. Ibid., 519. 68. Ibid., 522, 524. 69. Ibid., 522. 70. Ibid., 527. 71. Rebecca Munford, “   ‘Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss’: Gender, Generation, and the (A)politics of Girl Power,” in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration, ed. Stacey Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford, 145, 146 (New York: Palgrave, 2004).

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Brad Prager

Glimpses of Freedom The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema

For the directors of the New German Cinema, utopian longing is an important source of inspiration both on and off the screen. When the protagonist of Margarethe von Trotta’s Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, 1978) receives an anonymous donation to the children’s home for which she has spent the whole of the film fighting and stealing, the donation comes accompanied by a note that reminds her “Even utopia has its timetables.” The film here borrows directly from the pages of Ernst Bloch’s lengthy utopian treatise The Principle of Hope.1 Bloch titled a section of his work “Utopias Have Their Timetable” (Utopien haben ihren Fahrplan), and he there acknowledged that utopian dreams are not abstract from history; they do not appear out of the ether, but are, on the contrary, socially conditioned.2 For Bloch, and presumably for von Trotta as well, utopia is not a dream set apart from material history. It instead obeys social laws and emerges from specific desires that have been repressed at a given historical moment. Seen in this way conceptions of utopia communicate more about the present than they do about the future, and they reveal tendencies that bespeak the moment of their formation. In The Second Awakening of Christa Klages the protagonist’s journey leads to an optimistic and utopian ending, one inflected by its feminist perspective: another woman, one not generally given to political action, learns from observing Christa and facilitates her journey out from under the shadow of the police from whom she has been running. In von Trotta’s film, utopia is a promise embedded in political practice; it is a freedom that comes from encountering a justice more just than is permitted by conventional legal systems. 360

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Films by von Trotta, as well as those by Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others, are marked by the promise of subjective happiness, a happiness that always appears to be at odds with the totally administered worlds in which the filmmakers’ protagonists find themselves.3 The presence of these desires introduces frictions between the characters and the worlds they inhabit, frictions that often lead to acts of violence; the films’ heroes typically long to do away with an unjust world and put a just one in its place. These same utopian tensions also generate aesthetic innovations. How does one evoke an elusive, inscrutable freedom of this sort cinematically, and what do glimpses of freedom look like? To reflect on the continuities and differences between older and newer German films, the following asks what role utopian desire plays in today’s German cinema. Subsequent to a discussion of the tradition of utopianism in German thought—a tradition that includes thinkers such as Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, and Walter Benjamin for whom utopia is defined as something “not yet” and is thus aesthetically represented as an intuition or a wish—this essay considers whether and how utopia has returned to the German screen. The edenic spaces found in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (2002) and the fleeting, emancipatory territory staked out in Yüksel Yavuz’s Kleine Freiheit (A Little Bit of Freedom, 2002) are examples of cinematic visions constructed around utopian dreams—ones based on a longing for “heaven” or “freedom,” even in small, transitory doses. These utopian moments are characterized by intersubjective relations, and they are intimate, yet they are also found in films in which acts of violence play a critical role. In an essay titled “The Politics of Utopia,” Frederic Jameson expresses regret that following the Cold War the term “utopian” “has come to be a code word on the Left for socialism or communism; while on the Right it has become synonymous with ‘totalitarianism’ or, in effect, with Stalinism.”4 Jameson’s concern may stem less from the concept’s metonymic association with political oppression than from the fact that the term—one that has a powerful critical and interpretive force—may now be subject to overdetermination. The apparent reification of utopianism, however, may only be a reification within the terms of critical, academic discourse, where it is associated with the legacy of Marxists and social theorists such as Bloch, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the Left can hardly claim to have cornered the market on utopian dreams. To take one example, in the sphere of Evangelical discourse in the United States, which has by and large associated itself with the political Right, messianic uto361

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pianism plays a key role. Ideological programs that set the agenda for how the world should look, and especially those that pay little mind to how it does look, belong as much to the economic, political, and religious Right as they do to the Left. Jameson illuminates why utopian ideas continue to be associated with Leftist thought: changing the system, turning it into something other than it actually is, is a gesture generally associated with anticapitalism because it appears to reject the present state of affairs; it asserts that the world could be otherwise than it appears to be. Jameson explains that a politics that wishes to change the system radically “will be designated as utopian—with the right wing undertone that the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature; that any attempt to change it will be accompanied by violence; and that efforts to maintain the changes (against human nature) will require dictatorship.”5 The post–Cold War predominance of the free market is challenged by the radical assertion that the present state of affairs is neither the best nor the only way to live. Jameson thus makes a link between change and violence and alludes to the fact that violence is a constitutive part of any passage to utopia. The jarring effect of being compelled to consider that there are alternatives to the world as it is presented to us, or that the world could be other than it is, comes as a rude shock. Challenging ideological provocations are literalized in the form of actual destruction; the building of a better world and the abolition of the old one are two sides of the same coin. By itself, the term “utopia” is generally taken as a reference to a perfect society, one that actually exists “nowhere” (the Greek word “utopos”) except in the imagination. Since Thomas More’s 1517 coinage there has been no shortage of attempts to imagine economic, social, political, and sexual “nonplaces” of this sort, yet the variety of conceptual manifestations only underscores the idea’s elusiveness. Moreover, apart from “utopia,” the concept of “the utopian moment” has its own history and meaning. It is more directly tied to aesthetics than to social theory (the utopias of the nineteenth-century socialist Charles Fourier and his followers, for example). To borrow from Bloch, utopian moments present themselves as compressed or condensed forms—as brief glimpses or gestures—through which the desire for happiness is filtered. They are the glimmering manifestations of hope that now and again pour through cinematic images, poetry, and music. In The Principle of Hope Bloch was driven to account for the prevalence of utopian desires in art, and he 362

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viewed the failure to illuminate the concept properly as a symptom of the inadequacies of conventional and undialectical aesthetics. Bloch sees utopia wherever there is hope. For Jameson, he is akin to a detective who ferrets out collective wishes. Jameson declares, “Bloch’s interpretive principle is most effective when it reveals the operation of the Utopian impulse in unsuspected places, where it is concealed or repressed.”6 What is meant, however, when one refers to “utopia,” or “utopian moments” in terms of cinematic aesthetics? Although Kluge’s 1983 assessment of New German Cinema twenty years after Oberhausen includes a reference to “utopia” in its title—Bestandsaufnahme: Utopie Film (Taking of Stock: The Utopia Film)—Kluge does not much concern himself with the word itself.7 His project is “utopian” insofar as it lays out a vision of German cinema in terms of what is missing from it; it is a description of how things could be.8 The work speaks from an anxiety about the impending irrelevance of New German Cinema in the face of television and other media.9 Kluge’s concept of utopia, as it appears in Taking of Stock, follows from a negative principle: he posits a utopia to represent the difference between the state of cinema and its ideal or to present something in juxtaposition with what it is not. From the perspective of German feature films, the desire for utopia often yields acts of violence; it emerges as a consequence of the gap between the world as it is and our wishes. To take one example, Rudolf Thome’s Rote Sonne (Red Sun, 1970) presents an intersection along these lines. Though Thome’s film was made after Oberhausen it is not a typical work of the New German Cinema—in fact it may have even been meant to express opposition to Oberhausen hegemony. Noting that it was part of the filmmaking of the “New Munich Group,” Johannes von Moltke points out that it typifies a transition from the German filmmaking that followed the Manifesto into the era of New German Cinema, the one defined by auteurs such as Herzog, Wenders, von Trotta, and Fassbinder.10 The film centers on a group of women who kill men in the name of an elusive, collective feminism, the philosophy of which is never clearly articulated. The women inhabit a small living community, and their covenant seems to consist of murdering any man with whom they begin to build a relationship. Red Sun’s violence ridicules anxieties about domestic terrorism; the “red sun” in the title of this somewhat unserious work retrospectively sounds like a harbinger of the Red Army Faction, although more likely its political stakes connect to a feminism akin to that articulated in the SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto 363

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and related texts.11 The film indeed had some connections to the world of radical student politics: its lead actress Uschi Obermaier was a member of Kommune Eins, the well-known collective that existed from 1967 to 1969 as a Leftist alternative to German bourgeois norms. Red Sun, however, only loosely dovetails with political agendas of that or any sort. Thome may have been roguishly asserting that revolution in the West as urged by “red” groups had more to do with exercising the libido in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) than with the distribution of wealth. Red Sun is generally more connected to extending the annihilating power of the id, or to the conflicts stemming from sex and aggression, than with any clearly stated Leftist program. Its violence can be construed as lighthearted, even parodic, and “utopia” was the term Thome himself used to describe a dream space of cinema, one in which the director’s visions had been freely realized. In an essay on the topic of cinema and utopia Thome acknowledged that his films reinvent the world as though they were the material of his dreams. He wrote, “The cinema of my dreams is recalcitrant, it thinks and feels like me, it’s audacious, challenges me, takes risks, is sloppy, and knows every second what it wants. . . . (I know that’s a utopia, because when I make films, I move through the world like a sleepwalker). . . . The cinema of my dreams is a cinema of innocence and naïveté—and that is a utopia.”12 The sentiments expressed in Thome’s essay suggest that a film such as Red Sun is “utopian,” yet an interpretation of this sort would present itself even if it were not indirectly authorized by the film’s director. Von Moltke identifies a “laconism” in the film, and its tone suggests that the world it depicts moves at a wholly different speed.13 In doing so, Red Sun opens up a vista onto a nonplace. Its utopian impulse stems less from the representation of an ideal, politicized feminist community than from particular aesthetic constellations, ones that might be described as “dream-like.” The speech patterns and color combinations native to the world Thome depicts suggest a displacement into the other world in which the film transpires. Von Moltke points out that Red Sun “pays attention to surfaces in a rather literal sense: in what is perhaps the film’s defining aesthetic gesture (its ‘dominant’ in neoformalist terms) we are presented over and over again with ‘flat’ images that frame the characters at a medium distance against monochrome walls.”14 Thome’s work dwells on its surfaces, which leads to comparisons with the panels of comic books. Similar to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964), the 364

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film in this way constructs a totality, one enhanced by the fact that all things in this stylized, two-dimensional world are colored by the glow of an unusual sun, one that is either more erotic than ours, more bloody, or both. In some respects Thome’s film presents itself as a parody of Leftsympathetic perspectives. But because the fall of the Berlin Wall brought about a change in social relations, utopias have changed as well. What might have constituted a utopian moment in 1968 at the time of the Prague Spring or when Alexander Kluge released Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed, 1968) differs from the utopia one might associate with today’s cinema. The utopias of More, Marx, and Marcuse differed in conformity with the expectations of their respective ages. Utopia is thus nothing more than an expression of the society that produces it. As Jameson writes in an earlier essay on the topic, types of readers may under certain conditions “become extinct because the level of tolerance for fantasy is suddenly modified by a change in social relations.”15 As the world changes so changes our vision of what is possible, along with our willingness to see things other than “as they actually are.” We may experience a depreciation of our ability to think that things could be different. This condition is amplified the more we are discouraged from understanding that our vision is socially and historically mediated and are instead made to believe that the world is static and unchanging. To his observation about the historicization of utopian dreams, Jameson adds, “In the windless closure of late capitalism” it appears “increasingly futile and childish for people with a strong and particularly repressive reality-and-performance-principle to imagine tinkering with what exists, let alone its thoroughgoing restructuration.”16 Here Jameson’s term—“windless closure”—refers to an absence of possibility and imagination. As ideological systems become more total, more complete, “the way things are” takes on the appearance of being the only way things could ever be. When reflecting on the impact of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War one has to ask whether and how far the Left and Right were ever removed from one another when it came to the question of utopia. In this respect Volker Schlöndorff ’s Die Stille nach dem Schuß (The Legend of Rita, 2000) serves as a touchstone insofar as it is a work by a filmmaker once associated with the New German Cinema that engages with an intersection of East and West Germanys. The film may be seen as an apt coda for a certain kind of utopian thinking. Its title character is an ideal365

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istic West German terrorist, who, along with members of her group, robs banks in the name of social and economic justice. When a prison break leads to murder, she and her partners are forced to hide in Paris. Rita there kills a police officer and flees to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to avoid her pursuers. In the East she is kept hidden from the West German authorities that seek her. The film then shifts: rather than concerning itself with West German terrorists, it becomes a film about what it means to live in East Germany as an idealistic anticapitalist. Rita remains in the East until the fall of the Wall, devoting herself to living life as a productive citizen. Although some suggest that Schlöndorff ’s film is geared toward providing an excessively sympathetic view of East German history—that it is an effort to generously rewrite the story of those decades—others see it as a contemporary effort to provide a unified, synthetic narrative that explains the decline of the GDR. Still others take the position that the film is singularly critical of the GDR and its sympathizers insofar as it depicts Rita as a naïve Westerner who fails to perceive the oppressiveness of her adopted country, even as she stands within its borders.17 The Legend of Rita, though it was made more than twenty years later, echoes von Trotta’s The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, which also begins with a bank robbery and follows its protagonist’s journey of self-discovery. However, Schlöndorff ’s film contrasts sharply with von Trotta’s later, paradigmatic post-Wall consensus film Das Versprechen (The Promise, 1994). Unlike that later film, which unambiguously presented East German life and the Wall as a painful political and personal intrusion into the German story, Schlöndorff ’s film considers the possibility that one might have lived in the GDR and believed in its values. To what extent are the film’s impulses utopian? Following the Wall’s fall, at the point when Rita’s East German Secret Police attendant, Erwin, explains to her that the East is now part of the past and that she is wanted in the West for her old crimes, he presents to her the two streams of traffic and reminds her that both now lead more or less the same way. It is not only because she is on the run from the law that Rita has nowhere to turn. The predicament must also be understood in terms of ideological confinement. The post-Wall dilemma is one in which Rita has been engulfed by the winds of progress, which blow now in a uniform direction. The cars and commerce from both East and West now move with a singular trajectory. Jameson’s apt metaphor—the windless closure of which he writes—recalls Walter Benjamin’s ekphrasis of Paul 366

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Klee’s painting Angelus Novus (1920). Describing the painting Benjamin imagined a storm moving forward, pushing against an angel whose face is turned toward the past. In Benjamin’s account the angel is victimized by the storm of progress and looks back helplessly on the debris. For a moment, through the angel’s eyes, we glimpse history as if by way of a dark, inverting lens. Benjamin writes, Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise. It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.18

The angel’s sense of helplessness is redoubled by its sense of loss: it would like to stay and make whole what has been smashed. In Schlöndorff ’s film, Rita’s victimization at the hands of “progress” recalls Benjamin’s rhapsodic description of the storm. Her tragic death can thus be seen as a reillustration of Benjamin’s image—a recomposing of Klee’s work. Finding sanctuary in neither East nor West, Rita takes flight on her motorcycle. She is likely aware when she rides away from the border guards that she will be fired upon. With her arms raised like Klee’s angel that can no longer close its wings, she gives herself over, and this final shot—the gunshot—and the quiet that follows it, can be seen as a suicide. This is not to suggest that Schlöndorff intended to adapt Benjamin for the screen but rather that the idea of a storm blowing from paradise functions in a manner akin to that of utopia: it eulogizes the GDR and means to remind us of a lost possibility. In a joint 1964 interview with Adorno, Bloch noted that utopian thinking had altogether vanished from the socialist countries of the East, but Bloch added that he would acknowledge this only if it were also acknowledged that such thinking had likewise disappeared from the West—that the two were similar in their pathological inability to imagine the future. When he was asked in that same interview “Would you accept . . . the utopian element [has] entirely disappeared from the socialism that rules the eastern world today?” Bloch replied, “With the amendment that it has also disappeared in the West and that similar tendencies exist that reproduce the unity of the epoch despite such great 367

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In the final moments of Volker Schlöndorff ’s The Legend of Rita (2000), Rita Vogt (Bibiana Beglau) is shot and falls from her motorcycle, arms in the air.

contrasts . . . East and West are d’accord. They are sitting in the same unfortunate boat with regard to this point: nothing utopian should be allowed to exist.”19 As far as Bloch was concerned, East and West were one despite the Wall that had been newly installed between them; each side prohibited the thought that things could be other than as they were. The one leveled its prohibitions in the name of real existing conditions, and the other in the name of what it presumed to be fundamental hu368

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man nature. From this perspective the enemies resembled one another. If it can be said, however, that East and West were once of a piece, what can be said differently today insofar as that particular historical division lies now in the past and has been still further effaced?

The Rolling Landscapes of Heaven Utopian impulses can be found everywhere in postmillennial German cinema, yet today’s utopias are less about the divisions between East and West than they are about finding intimate and often romantic avenues of escape. Although one should not confuse “heaven” with “utopia,” the heaven envisioned in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven converges with a utopian standpoint; its utopia is the refuge that love takes outside the law. The film is a love story: its two protagonists merge romantically, disappearing first into one another (becoming “as one”) and then vanishing together into the blue sky. Written by the late Krzysztof Kieślowski—a Polish graduate of the Lodz film academy—along with his frequent collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, the film was then directed, after Kieślowski’s death, by Tykwer. It opens in Turin where Philippa, a woman avenging her husband’s murder, places a bomb in the office of a major drug dealer. The bomb inadvertently kills innocent visitors to the building and she is arrested. Filippo, who works for the Turin carabinieri and who takes on the job of translating her confession, falls for Philippa during her interrogation and conceives of a plan whereby the two can escape together. They succeed in getting away but not before he helps her finish the job of executing the drug dealer. At the end of the film, the lovers ascend into heaven in a stolen police helicopter and thus appear to evade the agents pursuing them. Rather than leaping to their deaths while on the run from the law (as did Thelma and Louise in a similarly concluded film), the two escape into the thin air of abstraction; they gently and romantically vanish into the ether. As they begin their escape, the protagonists leave the space of the city behind. Christine Haase notes, “At the beginning of Heaven, images of bustling Turin serve as markers of an urban center of labyrinthine structures, beautifully visualized in an early overhead shot of the city.”20 The passage to utopia is here an effort to get away from that which Kluge’s Taking of Stock describes as the concrete life-world (konkrete Lebenswelt).21 Haase adds, “In the film’s second half, once the protagonists have fled Turin to the bucolic region of Tuscany, Heaven’s visuals 369

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seem to lose connection with the reality of the space of its Italian settings. Tykwer begins to use space and landscape purely metaphorically rather than as concrete places of living that act and interact.”22 In this way Tykwer’s film fulfills an ideal goal of the cinema—at least according to Kluge’s Taking of Stock, which states, Film history tells us that the first cinemas were established at the exits of factories. On the way home from work and before returning home: an hour enjoying the cinema. The emergence of the first centrally located cinema-palace (near to the church or the marketplace) does not contradict that. . . . This settlement of cinemas on the roads and stretches of the life-world (Lebenswelt) corresponds in no way to present conditions. Neither is the city-center, where cinemas often emerge, a place for wishes or utopias, nor do the roads home reliably lead past them. The cinema will only retake its basis as a medium, or be able to reconstitute it, after it addresses the fact that it can only produce responses to concrete life-worlds, and that these life-worlds are more and more thoroughly distinct from one another.23

Seen from the perspective of the viewing public, the cinema—if it is to stay relevant—has the task of providing its audience with a utopian alternative to the world that produces it. Once beyond the city, Heaven’s two protagonists begin to realize their closeness. They are free to overcome their isolation through becoming one with each other. The similarity between Philippa and Filippo goes beyond their almost identical names. They discover that although they were born some years apart, they share the same birthday: May 23.24 The film also underscores their union from the very first moment of identification: after seeing Philippa doused with water on the floor of the interrogation room, Filippo subsequently wets his bed. Eventually the two of them, while on the run, take on the same close-cropped hairstyle and wear matching clothing that is meant to seem nondescript. The choice of music highlights the union between them as well: Avro Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” (“Mirror in the Mirror”) plays on the soundtrack when they emerge at the end of a train tunnel into the idyllic Tuscan landscape and realize their near identity with one another. Over the course of the scenario that unfolds they grow closer, and in distinction to, say, the protagonists of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (1949), who assert their individual identity by becoming less like those around them, these two desire mainly to de-differentiate from one another. Uto370

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pian emancipation is here depicted through de-individuation—the momentary dissolution of the subject that presents itself as a temporary relief from anomie. These attempts at synthesis function as a prelude to the film’s climax, in which Philippa and Filippo make love on a sloping hill before a picturesque Italian farmhouse. On what they believe may be their last night of freedom, with federal officers closing in behind them, the lovers eat a wordless meal, in the silent agreement that comes of inhabiting a wishful space beyond the reaches of both language and the law. Tykwer introduces the moment with a slow semicircular pan, but at the end of the sweeping movement the camera takes up a position 180 degrees away, alongside the far wall, giving the impression that Philippa and Filippo have switched places. The two refugees then proceed into the outdoors where they strip and entwine their bodies with one another beneath the branches of a tree. The silhouettes are made to appear almost identical. This rural idyll with its rolling landscape recalls the utopian moments that Bloch finds throughout literature—the sublime symbols of utopia that include “the evening breezes in Mozart’s Figaro, the snowstorm in Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illyich, the starry sky above the death of the

While on the run from the police in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (2002), Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi) and Philippa (Cate Blanchett) adopt the same close-cropped hairstyle and wear matching clothing. 371

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wounded Andrei Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, [and] the high mountains at the end of Faust.”25 Their wordless, connubial utopia is presented as a return to the point of origin. Adorno writes of the appeal of utopian daydreams of this sort, noting that in utopia, “lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, ‘being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfillment,’ might take the place of process, act, satisfaction, and so truly keep the promise of dialectical logic that it would culminate in its origin.”26 The thought that one would move through reason to return to a state before reason is a particularly eschatological fantasy insofar as it is predicated on the presentiment of Eden—a return to the very beginning. When writing of film, Bloch notes that the medium has the potential to be as broad as painting and that “the wishful landscape” that is “essential to the film” now “advances into the main floor of the theater (parterre).”27 He observes, about the work of painters such as da Vinci and Rembrandt, that what was previously fit only for the cathedral, the depth of the third dimension, now becomes pictorial space. According to Bloch, film can be akin to painting, and the world may become the artist’s nave.28 Along these lines, one notes that the proportions of the two figures as they make love in the Italian landscape of Tykwer’s film recall those figures that inhabit Hieronymous Bosch’s art, especially the ones in the Garden of Eden panel of the triptych known as the Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1504). Heaven was likewise once meant to be part of a series of three, but owing to his untimely death, Kieślowski left the other screenplays, Purgatory and Hell unfinished.29 And though Bosch was capable of drawing well-differentiated figures, the ones in these works are all quite similar to one another. They are de-differentiated just as the utopia in Heaven is one in which the lovers’ individual identities are subsumed. Tykwer’s protagonists simply disappear from the screen. They commandeer a helicopter out from under their pursuers and in it they ascend to “heaven.”30 Their agreement—apparently beyond language or reason—is assented to simply with the single word “now.” The film began with a subjective perspective of Filippo navigating a flight simulator, and it suggests that fate has long been preparing him for this moment. Reason tells us that the two have died, yet the fateful dreamlike logic of the film suggests that they will live forever.31 Although Thelma and Louise were punished for transgressing, Heaven does not surrender its protagonists to us. There is a sharp contrast between the concrete to which Rita, 372

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In Heaven, Philippa and Filippo eat a wordless meal in the silent agreement that comes of inhabiting a wishful space beyond the reaches of both language and the law. At the end of the sequence, the two have reversed sides of the screen.

who was also fleeing the law, fell at the end of The Legend of Rita and the boundless sky at the close of Heaven, a contrast that may underscore the distinction between the one film as an elegiac requiem for the GDR and the other as a fairy tale, which attempts to separate itself from historical reality. The moment of Rita’s death is associated with surrendering the dream of social justice; the hard ground beneath her suggests the end of possibility, whereas the open sky into which Heaven’s helicopter ascends evokes love’s unboundedness. 373

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The character at the center of Heaven, Filippo, is a romantic dreamer. When he explains his intentions to Philippa, he expresses confidence that following their escape, “there will be something, and that it will be beautiful.” He has faith not only in their love but in the power of its aesthetic dimension as well. Wish fulfillment presents itself as an antidote to the injustices of the present. The film holds as long as possible its final moment in which justice fleetingly transcends the life-world: the two seem to get away and the law’s grasp is suspended. It is thus a fairy tale, which, in Bloch’s terms, justifies a belief in castles in the sky. For Bloch, such tales have political content. He asserts, “This kind of happiness is such that it will cause the bourgeoisie to laugh on the other side of its face, and it will cause the giant, otherwise known as the big banks today, to believe in the power of poor people.”32 Filippo is motivated by the revelation that the law for which he works is in cahoots with the criminals. As a small-scale version of the military-industrial complex, the carabinieri are complicit with the high-profile, drug-dealing executive Philippa puts out of business. With the help of Filippo, Philippa has succeeded in standing up to this “big bank,” and although she is remorseful about the innocent bystanders she has killed, we never witness remorse on her part for the criminal’s execution.

The Streets of Hamburg: A Little Bit of Freedom Yüksel Yavuz’s A Little Bit of Freedom takes place in another concrete lifeworld, that of Hamburg. In Yavuz’s film, the city is depicted as a restricting, closed loop, one in which someone who might long for freedom has no opportunity to drive or fly away. The film’s Kurdish protagonist, Baran, works without legal documentation and is presented as though he were a part of the city itself. In early montages in the film we see him linked to life on the streets; he is hardly noticed by passersby, even when he is in plain sight. Baran bikes around the city making deliveries for a restaurant, and Yavuz’s images dissolve into one another. Night becomes day and Baran takes comfort in watching video footage of family members who still live in Turkey on the small screen of a camera. He escapes through this screen as if into a burrow, and A Little Bit of Freedom both begins and ends in this private refuge of memory. The cinematic device calls to mind the fact that the filmmaker is using his camera to tell a personal story; Baran’s camera thus allegorizes the role of the filmmaker.33 Simultaneously, the repeated use of the video camera also contributes 374

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to the perception that the film is framing its narrative in terms of the subjective space of internal consciousness or what has been termed the film’s “radical subjectivity.”34 In highlighting this interior space of fantasy it underscores its protagonist’s “small” intuition of freedom relative to the bigger, perhaps unattainable ideals of freedom associated with a just society. Baran sometimes shares his bike rides with his friend Chernor, who is from Africa but also lives in Germany without legal documentation. The scenes in which the two of them ride together simulate actual travel and are among the small glimpses of freedom to which the title refers; at one point Baran rides his bike with Chernor on the back, and at another point Chernor drives while Baran rides. The two of them feel imprisoned in Hamburg—immobilized both by their undocumented status and by their lack of resources—but the mobility the bicycle provides them is part of their dream of getting away. Here there is no expansive countryside as there was in Heaven, and there is no bucolic outside to the city. When Baran sees Chernor selling drugs and asks him why he does it, his answer is to make enough money where I can “go somewhere and not do this shit.” The closest they come to travel in the film is a carnival ride in which they go around in circles. Their only other window into the world of travel comes from sitting on a public bench with an indigent man known as “Käptn” (Cap’n) who has apparently seen faraway places and who tells them travel stories. The Captain alludes to his own homosexuality and that he has had partners in Istanbul (even though, as Baran points out, they are all supposedly “machos” there). He thus symbolizes not only travel but also adult queer sexuality, which intrigues both Baran and Chernor, who are themselves growing more attached to one another. At one point, the Captain recites to them Joachim Ringelnatz’s poem “Die Ameisen” (“The Ants,” 1912), which is particularly resonant because it references Hamburg (although this detail is left out of the film; the original begins “In Hamburg lived . . .” whereas the film’s version begins with “There once were . . .” [Es gab schon mal]). The poem is particularly relevant to the protagonists’ problems: “In Hamburg lived two ants, / Who wanted to travel to Australia. / But in nearby Altona, just along the road / Their legs began to ache. / And wisely they gave up, / On the last part of their journey” (In Hamburg lebten zwei Ameisen, / Die wollten nach Australien reisen. / Bei Altona auf der Chaussee / Da taten ihnen die Beine [“Füsse” in the film] weh / Und da verzichteten sie weise / Dann auf den letzten Teil der Reise). The Captain does not include the 375

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final two lines, which contain the poem’s moral: “So often one wants to yet can’t, / And happily relinquishes the task” (So will man oft und kann doch nicht / Und leistet dann recht gern Verzicht). One often wants to achieve something (in this case travel to a place away from German law, such as Australia, which is a recurring motif in the film) yet cannot (in this case making it only as far as Altona) and would do better to give up. Chernor recognizes enough of himself in the ants to ask whether he has just been made fun of. The two protagonists of the film appear to become physically intimate, which is something that the film unambiguously indicates but only modestly depicts. Baran and Chernor lie together in bed, and their physical relationship emerges in part out of the identification they feel with one another. This closeness is dramatically underscored when they pay a visit to a photo-booth. Baran draws attention to Chernor’s hair, and, at the moment the machine snaps their picture, a negative image of the print appears on screen. In the image, which itself recalls a filmstrip and thus again the motif of the protagonist as filmmaker, Baran’s brownblack hair has turned white and Chernor’s bleached white-blonde hair has turned dark. As black is switched to white and the shades of their skin are inverted, it is evident that the close relationship between these two has enabled them to fleetingly transcend the bonds of their anomic identities. The image resonates with images from Heaven: in both films, the partners’ sympathies with one another become literal as they transform and find themselves in one another’s places. Yavuz’s film is about the closeness between its protagonists—made material to the point where identities begin to dissolve—and the liberation with which that solidarity provides them. Here as in Yavuz’s Aprilkinder (April Children, 1998), intimacy is a refuge from alienating labors. Kim, a prostitute, is getting older and for that reason ultimately loses her regular place for picking up customers, whereas that film’s other protagonist, Cem, works long hours in a meat-packing plant and feels estranged from his more traditional family. There, as in A Little Bit of Freedom, love is strengthened by the characters proximity to one another; Kim falls for Cem, and the congruity in their names underscores their closeness. At one point, when Baran and Chernor appear to be especially close to one another, another character tosses a pomegranate their way. According to the Qur’an the pomegranate is one of the fruits of paradise and the synecdoche reminds us of the edenic happiness their friendship brings.35 At the same time, however, because the pomegranate (Granat376

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In Yüksel Yavuz’s A Little Bit of Freedom (2002) the protagonists, Baran (Cagdas Bozkurt) and Chernor (Necmettin Çobanoglu) step into a photo booth. In the photo, Baran’s brown-black hair turns white and Chernor’s bleached white-blonde hair turns dark.

apfel) is tossed at them, it also recalls a grenade (Granate), whose name it shares. Although their friendship is liberatory—it transcends nation and is in this way utopian—for some it may be explosive. Real trouble eventually comes to the restaurant where Baran works, trouble stemming from Turkish political conflicts, specifically from his co-workers’ past connections with the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên 377

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Kurdistan, or PKK). Baran is embroiled in the affair both because his parents were denounced for having aided the PKK and because he is asked to dispose of a gun that was fired during an altercation. Baran also believes he has happened upon the man responsible for the denunciation and thus the execution of his parents. Like Baran, the man, Selim, is from Diyarbakir, and like Baran he is living in Germany without documentation. Baran’s cousin Haydar, who had been a guerilla, recognizes Selim as a traitor, and now that Baran has a gun, he goes hunting for him.36 Gun in hand, Baran pursues Selim in a circle, and from our perspective as viewers, trapped in this Möbius strip of a concrete life-world, we are reminded that this is a place without broad horizons. As day and night merge, there is nowhere for either Baran or Selim to go. Although the information ultimately proves to be right and Selim confesses, Baran cannot bring himself to take revenge. Yavuz frequently reminds us that we are seeing this world through Baran’s eyes. At the onset of the film’s climactic sequence, Baran films a bird (a pigeon), which is as close as he and Chernor will come to flight. The two sit on a bench telling jokes about how full of shit the police are, but their moment of reprieve is interrupted when they are noticed, asked for their papers, and pursued. Here again the film is similar to Heaven: the law is oppressive, and more important, it is unjust. The two take off running. Trapped in the alleys of Hamburg, neither a motorcycle (as in The Legend of Rita) nor a helicopter (as in Heaven) presents itself to them. They flee, first together and then separately. Chernor is caught and taken away. Baran decides to take action and retrieves his gun. Before he arrives on the scene reality and fantasy merge and the film depicts everyone close to him attempting to stop him from intervening. As he turns the corner, these visions of friends and family vanish. He points the gun at the police and in the subsequent fracas—during the attempt to save his friend—a shot is fired. Baran is arrested and may have been shot (although the film does not make this explicit). Yavuz leaves ambiguities. Did the bullet come from his gun? Was he hit? The camera turns upward toward the open sky, toward unbounded space, just as it had in Heaven. The deafening sound of the shot closes out other noise, and here, in the virtual silence following the shot, we are alone with this deflated wish for justice. Christina Kraenzle observes, “With no apparent cameraman, and presumably no one to retrieve the camera after Baran’s arrest, the audience becomes the sole witness of this intimate footage of Baran’s detainment. This clip thus acts as a video message to the viewers, prompting 378

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them to consider how they might be implicated in the broader politics of citizenship rights, immigration policies, and transnational networks and power relations.”37 Were we not already aware that the camera was an extension of Baran’s subjective space, the fact that we see through its lens in this moment and note that its batteries have now almost entirely run down makes the connection evident. In voice-over, one policeman can be heard asking, “How do you turn this thing off?” The film then adds a coda—recorded images of the family back home, as we had seen at the film’s beginning. Although Heaven and A Little Bit of Freedom are quite different— one is an aestheticized, romantic fairy tale about lovers in Italy and the other is a film by a minority filmmaker in Germany that centers on undocumented laborers in Hamburg—the protagonists of both are on the run from the law. What differentiates them from one another is how they resolve the dilemma and where they find freedom in relation to the modern life-worlds—the windless enclosures—they inhabit. Heaven gives the illusion that lovers can escape for good, but to do so, they must disappear wholesale from the law’s terrain. A Little Bit of Freedom, on the other hand, seems to say that love and friendship provide moments of reprieve but that the law will finally have its way. Both films, however, engage with the idea that something else—something better—is possible and thus provide a glimpse of things as they might be otherwise.

Conclusion Rather than provide a collective solution or draw up a utopian blueprint, these films work through their protagonists—setting them in confrontation with the law—to present the impression that there is an alternative. Although Bloch had advocated utopian thinking, he offered no plan for utopia and avoided presenting specific schemes. Discourses that focused on the concrete realization of engineered communities bothered Marx as well, who wrote that we should reject the designs of those who “still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalanstères . . . and realiz[ing] all these castles in the air.”38 The plan was, for him, the problem. Marx adds that such thinkers are “compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois” and that they are only differentiated from them by “their more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.”39 Marx here seems to oppose blueprints of uto379

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pia, a sentiment later echoed by Adorno. In his extended aphorism sur l’eau, Adorno addresses the question of utopian thinking and explores the distinction between a utopia defined by social justice and one defined simply by “doing nothing.” He avers that only the most basic claims about justice elicit his sympathies. As for the rest, however, visions of a happy life only raise the specter of a fatted bourgeoisie and are rooted in barbarism like all similar fantasies.40 Here then are the rock and the hard place of utopian thinking. As Terry Eagleton summarizes, “If you can spell out what a radical future would look like, you are the prisoner of a soulless blueprint; if you refuse to do so, you are an idle visionary.”41 It is a long held tenet of critical theory that visions of utopia are ones onto which we cannot hold. From an aesthetic perspective utopia is elusive; its reflection appears, reveals, and disappears again, hence the need for a temporal description such as “utopian impulse” or “utopian moment.” Utopia is not an agenda but is instead a glimpse of something better—a sublime intuition that appears yet cannot be integrated into our everyday world. As Jameson writes, “Utopia is somehow negative.” He continues, “It is most authentic when we cannot imagine it. Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future—our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity—so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined.”42 For contemporary filmmakers the problem is the same as it was four decades ago: how do we imagine something—how do we envision it— while avoiding the barbarism of blueprints? How do we access future visions or come into contact with the intuition that Bloch—in a state of continual prolepsis—refers to by using terms such as “backward dawning” or “anticipation of the not yet.”43 Utopia may never arrive, but it remains necessary to intuit an elsewhere—an ambiguously concluded escape to the skies, or a fleeting yet truly intimate friendship—beyond the windless closure. In Kluge’s Artists under the Big Top: Clueless, Leni Peickert, who is searching for ways to transform her circus into politically relevant art, observes that such intuitions are part of the permanent state of affairs. Her conclusion stands as an epigram in the pages of Kluge’s Taking of Stock: “Utopia gets better and better, while we wait for it.”44 For this reason utopian intuitions remain aesthetic. Reason strains to impose a concept on twilight moments in works of art—on that 380

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which appears just beyond the horizon. The “backward dawning” Bloch described in connection with Freud resembles the process of recovering memories. It is thus no wonder that such sentiments come on us in the darkness of movie houses. This understanding of cinema echoes psychoanalysis in that we are meant to access repressed memories of a lost perfection or unity. Bloch’s argument works outward from the presentiment that things were once better and that they could one day be so again. Along these lines, Kluge’s Taking of Stock treats cinema as a time machine,45 one that is, according to him, far more than a hundred years old, because it is as old as the imagination itself.46 What transpires in that dark auditorium is merely an externalization of what has long been transpiring in our minds. By this definition, as long as there are utopian impulses there will also be cinema. But for cinema to fulfill its potential it has to offer the promise of an alternative to the patterns that compose the life-world surrounding us. Utopian cinema of this sort is thus at its best when it avoids mimetic representation and expends little energy re-presenting things as they appear to be. In his essay “Why I Don’t Make ‘Political Films,’  ” filmmaker Ulrich Köhler implies—if one extrapolates from his negative examples (films such as Der Untergang [Downfall] 2004, and Saving Private Ryan, 1998)—that he longs for a cinema that rejects crude mimesis as well as commonplace truths about history.47 In this sense, cinema’s politics should not only react to terrorism, for example, or concern itself with breaking the power of the mainstream media but should also intimate that there is another way of seeing, and of living in, the world. To borrow Kluge’s phrase and “take stock” of cinema today, it is apparent that German films are again evoking that things could be other than how they are, or how they seem to be.

Notes 1. See Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung: In fünf Teilen, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959), 555. 2. Ibid. 3. See Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Die Anarchie der Phantasie. Gespräche und Interviews, ed. Michael Töteberg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986). Fassbinder explains that his film Despair—Eine Reise ins Licht (Despair, 1978), an adaptation of Nabokov’s novel by that name, made shortly before Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979), is really about having “the courage to recognize Utopia” and to be open to it (103). He also explains that he derives the 381

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strength to work, “aus der Utopie heraus, der ganzen konkreten Sehnsucht nach dieser Utopie” (115). 4. Frederic Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 35. 5. Ibid. 6. See Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 3. 7. Alexander Kluge, ed., Bestandsaufnahme: Utopie Film (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1983). Regarding this text, see Eric Rentschler’s “Kluge, Film History, and Eigensinn: A Taking of Stock from the Distance,” New German Critique 31 (1984): 109–24. Rentschler translates the title of Kluge’s book as Taking of Stock: The Utopia Film, and I adopt that translation here. 8. Rentschler’s critical reading of Kluge notes that although Kluge points out what is missing from contemporary German cinema, his assessment itself misses a good deal about what was going on at the time. Rentschler writes, “Kluge’s Bestandsaufnahme deserves closer scrutiny not only for its considerable moments of insight and soaring flights of fantasy, but likewise for its gaps and oversights” (114). 9. Rentschler writes, “Kluge and his collaborators fully recognized the endangered status of alternative film-makers. With the proliferation of cable networks and media consortia, of electronic software and satellite television, this status had become even more precarious. . . . New German Cinema, which over the years had encouraged experimentation and militated against the powers of exclusion, amnesia and repression, was reduced to an anachronistic outpost in a radically transformed public sphere.” See “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 268 (New York: Routledge, 2000). 10. According to von Moltke, Red Sun has been effaced as a “vanishing mediator” between Young and New German Cinemas. See Johannes von Moltke, “Between the Young and the New: Pop Sensibilities and Laconic Style in Rudolf Thome’s Rote Sonne,” Screen 41, no. 3 (2000): 260. 11. A connection made by von Moltke, “Between the Young,” 263. 12. Rudolf Thome, “That’s Utopia: The Cinema of My Dreams,” in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler, 53 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1989). This is an abridged translation of “Das ist eine Utopie: Das Kino, von dem ich träume,” in Jahrbuch Film 79/80, ed. Hans Günther Pflaum, 76–79 (Munich: Hanser, 1979). 13. Von Moltke, “Between the Young,” esp. 264 and 266. 14. Ibid., 268. 15. Fredric Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches. Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse,” in The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986, vol. 2, Syntax of History, 75 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 75. Published in 1988, it appeared earlier under the same title in 1977. See Diacritics 7, no. 2 (1977): 2–21. 16. Jameson, “Islands and Trenches,” 75. 17. On the film as a post-Wall attempt to create a common German-German 382

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The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema story and history out of a forty-year period of political disunity, see Jennifer Marston William, “When West Meets East and Decides to Stay: Shared Historical Experience in Volker Schlöndorff ’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss,” German Studies Review 28, no. 1 (2005): 127–40. 18. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. and introduction Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 257–58 (New York: Schocken, 1955). 19. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 13. 20. Christine Haase, When Heimat Meets Hollywood: German Filmmakers and America, 1985–2005 (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 189. 21. In his observations on Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Geschichte und Eigensinn (1981), Jameson notes Negt and Kluge’s inheritance from Marx, specifically Marx’s notion of “the body of the earth,” and adds that for Negt and Kluge (at least where that text is concerned), “the vision of a purely urban utopia is impossible.” See “On Negt and Kluge,” October 46 (1988): 163. 22. Haase, When Heimat Meets Hollywood, 189. 23. See Kluge, Bestandsaufnahme, 146–47. Italics in original. 24. Tykwer’s birthday is May 23 as well. 25. See Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1:276–77. 26. Theodor Adorno, “Sur l’eau,” in Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, [1951] 1974), 157. 27. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1:478. 28. See ibid., 2:935. 29. L’Enfer (Hell, 2005) was subsequently filmed by Bosnian director Danis Tanović in 2005. See Steven Woodward, “Introduction” (3), and Marek Haltof, “Still Alive: Kieślowski’s Influence on Post-Communist Polish Cinema” (22), in After Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, ed. Steven Woodward (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009). 30. Lutz Koepnick, “Free Fallin’: Tom Tykwer and the Aesthetics of Deceleration and Dislocation” (Germanic Review 82, no. 1 [2007]: 7–24), connects the images at the end of the film to the image of Benjamin’s Angel of History. He observes, “Tykwer’s adaptation of Kieślowski’s script here plays with the dual meaning of ‘Himmel,’ ‘sky,’ and ‘heaven,’ leaving it up to the viewer to decide exactly where to locate the film’s protagonists after the end of the narrative.” Koepnick’s argument focuses on the question of slow motion and speed in Tykwer’s films. On the angel, see especially 19–21, and 23–24. 31. Haase describes this ending as “ambiguous”; see When Heimat Meets Hollywood, 188. 32. Bloch, Utopian Function, 184–85. 33. That the filmmaker is expressing his own exilic or diasporic voice suggests a distinction from the “paternalistic” tendencies of New German Cinema filmmakers. See Deniz Göktürk, “Beyond Paternalism: Turkish German Traffic in Cinema,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk, 131–39 (London: BFI, 2002) and Christina Kraenzle, “At Home in the New 383

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Germany? Local Stories and Global Concerns in Yüksel Yavuz’s Aprilkinder and Kleine Freiheit,” The German Quarterly 82, no. 1 (2009): 92–93. 34. Hanns-Georg Rodek refers to Yavuz’s “radikale Subjektivität” in “Spirale der Demütigungen,” Berliner Morgenpost 143, May 27, 2004. 35. See, for example, the sixth Sura: 141. “It is He who grew the gardens, trellised and bowered, and palm trees and land sown with corn and many other seeds, and olives and pomegranates, alike and yet unlike. So eat of their fruit when they are in fruit, and give on the day of harvesting His due, and do not be extravagant, for God does not love those who are prodigal.” 36. Haydar seems traumatized by his guerilla experiences. The sound of fireworks sets off bad dreams. It is worth noting that Haydar has fallen asleep reading Mem û Zîn (Mem and Zin), the epic poem by Ehmedê Xanî from 1692. The story, about Mem, a young Kurdish boy, who falls in love with Zin, the daughter of the governor of Butan, is a symbol of Kurdish nationalism. Ehmedê Xanî not only discussed Kurdish issues but also used Kurdish language in written works. The film based on Mem and Zin was banned in Turkey because it was made in Kurdish. A Little Bit of Freedom, in which Kurdish is heard, can be seen here to be inscribing itself into this cultural and cinematic history. In March 2005 Turkey’s Radio and Television Council (RTUK) closed down two digital film channels for having shown A Little Bit of Freedom. See Welat Lezgin, “A Little Bit of Democracy,” KurdishMedia.com, March 7, 2005, http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=6382. 37. Kraenzle, “Home in the New Germany?” 102. 38. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 499, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978). Phalanstères are buildings designed as utopian living communities, part of the plans of Charles Fourier originating in the early 1800s. 39. Ibid., 499. 40. See Adorno, “Sur l’eau,” 156. 41. Terry Eagleton, “Just My Imagination,” The Nation 280, no. 23 (2005): 20. (In this article, Eagleton reviews Russell Jacoby’s Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age.) 42. Jameson, “Politics of Utopia,” 46. 43. See Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1:10. “Dämmerung nach rückwärts” and “eine Vorwegnahme von Noch-Nicht-Gewordenem,” respectively. 44. The German reads, “Die Utopie wird immer besser, während wir auf sie warten.” See Kluge, Bestandsaufnahme, 443. 45. See the passage reflecting and inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk in Kluge, Bestandsaufnahme, 443–44: “Der Spieler, der Flaneur, und der Wartende haben sich gemeinsam eine Zeitmaschine gebaut, ihr Lieblingsspielzeug: das Kino.” 46. Kluge writes, “Compared to the refinement of forms from which music, architecture, literature, oil painting, and sculpture cultivated over the centuries, supported by the traditional unity of culture and property, the cinema displays an amazing vigor, robustness, at least in its early days. . . . [F]ilm takes recourse to the spontaneous workings of the imaginative faculty which has existed for tens 384

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The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema of thousands of years.” “Utopian Cinema” in Rentschler, West German Filmmakers, 54. See also Kluge, “Die Utopie Film,” Merkur 201 (1964): 1135–46, esp. 1144 (“Film ist auf Erkenntnis gerichtet”). 47. “Why I Don’t Make ‘Political’ Films,’  ” trans. Bettina Steinbrugge, Cinema Scope 38 (2009): 10–13.

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R3. William, Jennifer Marston. “When West Meets East and Decides to Stay: Shared Historical Experience in Volker Schlönodorff ’s Die Stille nach dem Schuss. German Studies Review 28, no. 1 (2005): 127–40. Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revisited.” In Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick Browne, 42–88. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. ———. Playing the Race Card: Melodrama of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. “   ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama.” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (1984): 2–27. Wilms, Wilfried. “Taboo and Repression in W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction” In W. G. Sebald. A Critical Companion, edited by J. J. Long and Anne Whitehead, 175–89. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Wittek, Bernd. Der Literaturstreit im sich vereinigenden Deutschland: eine Analyse des Streits um Christa Wolf und die deutsch-deutsche Gegenwartsliteratur in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. Marburg: Tectum, 1997. Wood, Mary P. Contemporary European Cinema. London: Hodder Arnold, 2007. Woodward, Steven, ed. After Kieślowski: The Legacy of Krzysztof Kieślowski. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. Wortmann, Sönke. Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen. Ein WM-Tagebuch. With Christoph Biermann. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2006. Wright, Melissa W. “From Protests to Politics: Sex Work, Women’s Worth, and Ciudad Juárez Modernity.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94, no. 2 (2004): 369–86. Wydra, Thilo. “Berlin 1932-Berlin 1943-New York 2001. Drei Zeitebenen, zwei Farbgebungen.” In Rosenstraße. Ein Film von Margarethe von Trotta. Die Geschichte. Die Hintergründe. Die Regisseurin, 133–35. Berlin: Nicolai, 2003. ———. Margarethe von Trotta: Filmen, um zu überleben. Berlin: Henschel, 2000. Yau, Esther C. M., ed. At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/3/0,1872,3881 603,00.html. “Zur Lage der Nation.” http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/kino/Kino-Tom-Tykwer-Fatih-Akin;art137,2635297.

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Filmography

40m2 Germany (40m2 Deutschland). Dir. Tevfik Başer. 1986. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls). Dir. Michael Haneke. 1994. 100 Jahre Hitler—Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker. Dir. Christoph Schliengensief. 1989 Agnes and His Brothers (Agnes und seine Brüder). Dir. Oskar Roehler. 2004. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes). Dir. Werner Herzog. 1972. Aimée & Jaguar. Dir. Max Färberböck. 1998. The Airlift (Die Luftbrücke—Nur der Himmel war frei). Dir. Dror Zahavi. 2005. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Angst essen Seele auf). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1974. Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten). Dir. Wim Wenders. 1974. All about My Mother (Todo Sobre Mi Madre). Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. 1999. The All-Around Reduced Personality (Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit— REDUPERS). Dir. Helke Sander. 1977. Amen (Der Stellvertreter). Dir. Constantinos Gavras. 2002. The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund). Dir. Wim Wenders. 1977. And along Come Tourists (Am Ende kommen Touristen). Dir. Robert Thalheim. 2007. Angst (Der alte Affe Angst). Dir. Oskar Roehler. 2002. Arsonist (Brandstifter). Dir. Klaus Lemke. 1969. Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed (Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos). Dir. Alexander Kluge. 1968. Autumn Milk (Herbstmilch). Dir. Joseph Vilsmaier. 1988. The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex). Dir. Uli Edel. 2008. Babel. Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2006. Before the Fall (Napola). Dir. Dennis Gansel. 2004. Die Beischlafdiebin. Dir. Christian Petzold. 1997/1998. Benny’s Video. Dir. Michael Haneke. 1992. Berlin Alexanderplatz. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1980. The Black Forest Girl (Schwarzwaldmädel). Dir. Hans Deppe. 1950. 411

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filmography

Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (Im toten Winkel—Hitlers Sekretärin). Dir. André Heller. 2002. The Boat (Das Boot). Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. 1981. Braveheart. Dir. Mel Gibson. 1995. Bungalow. Dir. Ulrich Köhler. 2002. The Bunker. Dir. George Schaefer. 1981. Butterflies (Schmetterlinge). Dir. Wolfgang Becker. 1988. Capricorn One. Dir. Peter Hyams. 1978. Carnival of Souls. Dir. Herk Harvey. 1962. Children’s Games (Kinderspiele). Dir. Wolfgang Becker. 1992. Class Trip (Klassenfahrt). Dir. Henner Winckler. 2002. Colonel Chabert (Le Colonel Chabert). Dir. Yves Angelo. 1994. The Colorful Animal Kingdom (Bunte Tierwelt). Dir. Ulrich K. T. Schultz. 1931. Combat 16 (Kombat sechzehn). Dir. Mirko Borscht. 2005. Comedian Harmonists. Dir. Joseph Vilsmaier. 1997. The Conversation. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. 1974. Conversation with the Beast (Gespräch mit der Bestie). Dir. Armin Müller-Stahl. 1991. The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher). Dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky. 2007. Crash. Dir. Paul Haggis. 2004. Cuba Libre. Dir. Christian Petzold. 1995/1996. The Dancing Heart (Das tanzende Herz). Dir. Wolfgang Liebeneiner. 1953. Dealer. Dir. Thomas Arslan. 1999. Deep Play. Dir. Harun Farocki. 2007. The Deer Hunter. Dir. Michael Cimino. 1978. Despair (Despair—Eine Reise ins Licht). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1978. Destinies of Women (Frauenschicksale). Dir. Slatan Dudow. 1952. Distant Lights (Lichter). Dir. Hans-Christian Schmid. 2003. The Doctor of Stalingrad (Der Arzt von Stalingrad). Dir. Heinz G. Konsalik. 1956. Does the Pill Liberate? (Macht die Pille frei?). Dir. Helke Sander and Sara Schumann. 1972. La Dolce Vita. Dir. Federico Fellini. 1960. Downfall (Der Untergang). Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel. 2004. Dresden. Dir. Roland Suso Richter. 2006. Dresden Admonishes Germany (Dresden mahnt Deutschland). 1949/1954. Dresden. Memory and Reminder (Dresden. Erinnerung und Mahnung). Dir. Max Jaap. 1965. Eastern Crossing (Ostkreuz). Dir. Michael Klier. 1991. The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite). Dir. Fatih Akın. 2007. The Edukators (Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei). Dir. Hans Weingartner. 2004. Elementary Particles (Elementarteilchen). Dir. Oskar Roehler. 2005/2006. Elizabeth. Dir. Shekhar Kapur. 1998. Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Dir. Shekhar Kapur. 2007. En Route (Unterwegs). Dir. Jan Krüger. 2004. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jacques Anneau. 2001. 412

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filmography

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle). Dir. Werner Herzog. 1974. Ernst Thälmann: Leader of the Working Class (Ernst Thälmann—Führer seiner Klasse). Dir. Kurt Maetzig. 1955. Ernst Thälmann: Son of the Working Class (Ernst Thälmann—Sohn seiner Klasse). Dir. Kurt Maetzig. 1954. Europlex. Dir. Ursula Biemann. 2003. The Executioner. Dir. Ursula Reuter-Christiansen. 1972. Film about a Woman Who . . . Dir. Yvonne Rainer. 1974. Fitzcarraldo. Dir. Werner Herzog. 1982. The Flight (Die Flucht). Dir. Kai Wessel. 2007. The Flood (Die Sturmflut). Dir. Jorgo Papavassiliou. 2005. Forget America (Vergiß Amerika). Dir. Vanessa Joop. 2000. Four Windows (Vier Fenster). Dir. Christian Moris Mueller. 2006. Fratricide (Brudermord). Dir. Yilmiz Arslan. 2005. Friends and Husbands (Heller Wahn). Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. 1983. Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. 1997. Gandhi. Dir. Richard Attenborough. 1982. The German Chainsaw Massacre (Das deutsche Kettensägen Massaker). Dir. Christoph Schlingensief. 1990. Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation (Deutschland 09—13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation). Dir. Angela Schanelec (Part 1); Dani Levy (2); Fatih Akın (3); Nicolette Krebitz (4); Sylke Enders (5); Dominik Graf (6); Hans Steinbichler (7); Isabelle Stever (8); Hans Weingartner (9); Tom Tykwer (10); Romuald Karmaker (11); Wolfgang Becker (12); Christoph Hochhäusler (13). 2009. Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale (Deutschland. Ein Sommermärchen). Dir. Sönke Wortmann. 2006. Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst). Dir. Volker Schlöndorff (Prologue and Parts 2, 12, 13); Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1); Alexander Kluge (2, 8, 10, 11, 13); Alf Brustellin (3, 4, 5); Bernhard Sinkel (3, 4, 6); Katja Rupé (5); Hans Peter Cloos (5); Edgar Reitz (7); Maximiliane Mainka (9); Peter Schubert (9). 1978. Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter). Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms. 1980. Germanin. Dir. Max W. Kimmich. 1942/1943. Ghosts (Gespenster). Dir. Christian Petzold. 2005. Gigantic (Absolute Giganten). Dir. Sebastian Schipper. 1999. The Giraffe (Meschugge). Dir. Dani Levy. 1998. Go Trabi Go. Dir. Peter Timm. 1990. Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter). Dir. Wim Wenders. 1972. The Golden City (Die goldene Stadt). Dir. Veit Harlan. 1941/1942. Gone with the Wind. Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939. Good-Bye, Lenin! Dir. Wolfgang Becker. 2003. 413

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filmography

Green Is the Heath (Grün ist die Heide). Dir. Hans Deppe. 1951. Grill Point (Halbe Treppe). Dir. Andreas Dresen. 2002. La Habanera. Dir. Detlef Sierck. 1937. Hanna Amon. Dir. Veit Harlan. 1951. Head-On (Gegen die Wand). Dir. Fatih Akın. 2003. Head over Heart (Herz über Kopf). Dir. Michael Gutmann. 2001. Heaven. Dir. Tom Tykwer. 2002. Hell (L’Enfer). Dir. Danis Tanović. 2005. Heroes Like Us (Helden wie wir). Dir. Sebastian Peterson. 1999. Hidden (Caché). Dir. Michael Haneke. 2005. Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hitler: Ein Film aus Deutschland). Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. 1978. Hitler: The Last Ten Days. Dir. Ennio De Concini. 1973. Hitler: The Rise of Evil. Dir. Christian Duguay. 2003. Holocaust. Dir. Marvin Chomsky. 1978. Homeland. A German Chronicle (Heimat. Eine deutsche Chronik). Dir. Edgar Reitz. 1981–1984. The Hunger Years: In a Land of Plenty (Hungerjahre). Dir. Jutta Brückner. 1979. I Am Guilty (Falscher Bekenner). Dir. Christoph Hochhäusler. 2005. I Am the Other Woman (Ich bin die Andere). Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. 2006. I Often Think of Piroschka (Ich denke oft an Piroschka). Dir. Kurt Hoffmann. 1955. In a Year with 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1978. In with the New (Silvester Countdown). Dir. Oskar Roehler. 1997. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport. Dir. Mark Jonathan Harris. 2000. Invisible Adversaries (Unsichtbare Gegner). Dir. Valie Export. 1977. Joan of Arc of Mongolia (Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia). Dir. Ulrike Ottinger. 1988. Katyn. Dir. Andrzej Wajda. 2007. Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit). Dir. Wim Wenders. 1976. Kolberg. Dir. Veit Harlan. 1943/1945. Kuhle Wampe, or To Whom Does the World Belong (Kuhle Wampe, oder Wem gehört die Welt). Dir. Slatan Dudow. 1932. The Last Ten Days (Der letzte Akt). Dir. Georg Wilhelm Pabst. 1955. The Last Train (Der letzte Zug). Dir. Joseph Vilsmaier. 2006. The Legend of Paul and Paula (Die Legende von Paul und Paula). Dir. Heiner Carow. 1972/1973. The Legend of Rita (Die Stille nach dem Schuß). Dir. Volker Schlöndorff. 2000. Lightning over Water (Nick’s Film—Lightning over Water). Dir. Nicholas Ray and Wim Wenders. 1979/1980. Lili Marleen. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1981. Little Angel (Engelchen). Dir. Helke Misselwitz. 1996. A Little Bit of Freedom (Kleine Freiheit). Dir. Yüksel Yavuz. 2002. The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. 2006. 414

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filmography

Lola. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1981. Longing (Sehnsucht). Dir. Valeska Grisebach. 2006. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum). Dir. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta. 1975. Love Is Colder than Death (Liebe ist kälter als der Tod). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1969. Lucy. Dir. Henner Winckler. 2006. Making Up (Abgeschminkt). Dir. Katja von Garnier. 1993. Malou. Dir. Jeanine Meerapfel. 1981. The Man Who Wasn’t There. Dir. Joel Coen. 2001. Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit). Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. 1981. Marlene. Dir. Joseph Vilsmaier. 2000. The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1979. Marseille. Dir. Angela Schanelec. 2004. The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. 1999. Max. Dir. Menno Meyjes. 2002. Maybe, Maybe Not (Der bewegte Mann). Dir. Sönke Wortmann. 1994. Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer—Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler). Dir. Dani Levy. 2007. Men (Männer). Dir. Doris Dörrie. 1985. The Miracle of Bern (Das Wunder von Bern). Dir. Sönke Wortmann. 2004. Modern Times. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. 1936. Moloch. Dir. Aleksandr Sokurow. 1999. Münchhausen. Dir. Josef von Baky. 1942/1943. The Murderers Are among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns). Dir. Wolfgang Staudte. 1946. The Naked Man in the Stadium (Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz). Dir. Konrad Wolf. 1973. Nachmittag (Afternoon). Dir. Angela Schanelec. 2007. Die Neugier immer weiter treiben: Margarethe von Trotta. Dir. Peter Buchka. 1995. Night and Fog. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1955. Nikolai Church (Nikolaikirche). Dir. Frank Beyer. 1995. Ninotchka. Dir. Ernst Lubitsch. 1939. The Ninth Day (Der neunte Tag). Dir. Volker Schlöndorff. 2004. No More Mr. Nice Guy (Wir können auch anders). Dir. Detlev Buck. 1993. No Place to Go (Die Unberührbare). Dir. Oskar Roehler. 2000. Nosferatu. Dir. F. W. Murnau. 1922. Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night. Dir. Werner Herzog. 1979. Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika). Dir. Caroline Link. 2001. NVA. Dir. Leander Haußmann. 2005. One, Two, Three. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1961. Out of Rosenheim. Dir. Percy Adlon. 1987. Outside Time (Neben der Zeit). Dir. Andreas Kleinert. 1995. Paris, Texas. Dir. Wim Wenders. 1984. 415

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filmography

Paths in the Night (Wege in die Nacht). Dir. Andreas Kleinert. 1999. Paule Pauländer. Dir. Reinhard Hauff. 1975/1976. Performing the Border. Dir. Ursula Biemann. 1999. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Das Parfum—Die Geschichte eines Mörders). Dir. Tom Tykwer. 2006. Pilots (Pilotinnen). Dir. Christian Petzold. 1995. Pleasantville. Dir. Gary Ross. 1998. Police Film (Polizeifilm). Dir. Wim Wenders. 1969. Polish Crash (Polski Crash). Dir. Kaspar Heidelbach. 1993. The Promise (Das Versprechen). Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. 1994. Quadrophenia. Dir. Franc Roddam. 1979. Queen Margot (La Reine Margot). Dir. Patrice Chéreau. 1994. Rama dama. Dir. Joseph Vilsmaier. 1990. Rear Window. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1954. Red Desert. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. 1964. Red Sun (Rote Sonne). Dir. Rudolf Thome. 1970. Remote Sensing. Dir. Ursula Biemann. 2001. Revenge of the Musketeers (La Fille d’Artagnan). Dir. Bertrand Tavernier. 1994. Rob Roy. Dir. Michael Caton-Jones. 1995. Romance in a Minor Key (Romanze in Moll). Dir. Helmut Käutner. 1943/1944. Rosenstrasse (Rosenstraße). Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. 2003. Run, Lola, Run (Lola rennt). Dir. Tom Tykwer. 1998. Saving Private Ryan. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1998. Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1993. The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages). Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. 1978. Shirin’s Wedding (Shirins Hochzeit). Dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms. 1976. The Shoe of Manitu (Der Shuh des Manitu). Dir. Michael Herbig. 2000/2001. A Short Film about Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu). Dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski. 1988. Short Sharp Shock (Kurz und Schmerzlos). Dir. Fatih Akın. 1998. Sicko. Dir. Michael Moore. 2007. The Sins of Rose Bernd (Rose Bernd). Dir. Wolfgang Staudte. 1956/1957. Sleeper (Schläfer). Dir. Benjamin Heisenberg. 2004/2005. The Smile of the Deep Sea Fish (Das Lächeln der Tiefseefische). Dir. Till Endemann. 2005. Solo Sunny. Dir. Konrad Wolf. 1980. Something to Remind Me (Toter Mann). Dir. Christian Petzold. 2002. Sonnenallee. Dir. Wolfgang Staudte. 1953. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage). Dir. Marc Rothemund. 2005. Spider-Man. Dir. Sam Raimi. 2002. Stalingrad. Dir. Joseph Vilsmaier. 1993. Stalker. Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. 1979. The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit). Dir. Christian Petzold. 2000. 416

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filmography

The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge). Dir. Wim Wenders. 1982. Stella Dallas. Dir. King Vidor. 1937. The Stone Flower. Dir. Aleksandr Ptushko. 1946. The Story of Little Muck (Die Geschichte vom kleinen Muck). Dir. Wolfgang Staudte. 1953. The Subjective Factor (Der subjective Faktor). Dir. Helke Sander. 1981. Take Your Life (Nimm dir dein Leben). Dir. Sabine Michel. 2005. Talk of the Town (Stadtgespräch). Dir. Rainer Kaufmann. 1995. The Third Generation (Die dritte Generation). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1979. This Very Moment (Milchwald). Dir. Christoph Hochhäusler. 2003. The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel). Dir. Volker Schlöndorff. 1979. Tokyo-Ga. Dir. Wim Wenders. 1985. Traffic. Dir. Steven Soderbergh. 2000. The Trapp Family (Die Trapp-Familie). Dir. Wolfgang Liebeneiner. 1956. The Trapp Family in America (Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika). Dir. Wolfgang Liebeneiner. 1958. The Tunnel (Der Tunnel). Dir. Roland Suso Richter. 2001. The Turkish Spice Lady Is Leaving (Die Kümmeltürkin geht). Dir. Janine Meerapfel. 1985. Two Cities (Zwei Städte). Dir. Stuart Schulberg. 1949/1950. Unveiled (Fremde Haut). Dir. Angelina Maccarone. 2005. Vacation from Myself (Ferien vom Ich). Dir. Hans Deppe. 1952. The Vanished City (Die verschwundene Stadt). Dir. Curt Engel. 1954/1955. Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1982. Wanted! (Nachbarinnen). Dir. Franziska Meletzky. 2004. What Now, Nursery School Teacher (Kindergärtnerin, was nun?). Dir. Helke Sander. 1969. When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüh). Dir. Hans Deppe. 1953. The White Noise (Das weiße Rauschen). Dir. Hans Weingartner. 2001. Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?). Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 1970. Windows on Monday (Montag kommen die Fenster). Dir. Ulrich Köhler. 2006. Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). Dir. Wim Wenders. 1987. Winter in the Woods (Waldwinter). Dir. Wolfgang Liebeneiner. 1956. The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939. Wolfsburg. Dir. Christian Petzold. 2002. A Woman in Berlin (Anonyma—Eine Frau in Berlin). Dir. Max Färberböck. 2008. Women Are Better Diplomats (Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten). Dir. Georg Jacoby. 1941. Writing Desire. Dir. Ursula Biemann. 2000. Yella. Dir. Christian Petzold. 2007. Yesterday Girl (Abschied von gestern). Dir. Alexander Kluge. 1966. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. Dir. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno. 2006. 417

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Contributors

Marco Abel is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Nebraska. The author of Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (2007), he is currently at work on the monograph The Berlin School: Toward a Minor Cinema. His essays on and interviews with German filmmakers Oskar Roehler, Dominik Graf, Andreas Dresen, Christian Petzold, Christoph Hochhäusler, the Kölner Gruppe (Cologne Group), and the “Berlin School” have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as New German Critique, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, and in various collections. He has also published articles on twentieth-century American literature and theoretical topics in PMLA, Electronic Book Review, and Angelaki. Roger F. Cook is professor of German studies and director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Missouri. He studied at the University of Freiburg and at the University of California–Berkeley. He co-edited (with Gerd Gemünden) The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (1996) and has written extensively on New German Cinema and contemporary German film. He has also written on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature, with a particular emphasis on Heinrich Heine. He is the author of By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine’s Late Songs and Reflections (1998) and the editor of A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine (2003). His current work engages research in neuroscience and media theory to investigate issues of embodiment and affect in film viewing. John E. Davidson is director of the Ohio State University Film Studies Program and associate professor of Germanic languages and literatures. His research interests cover German film and visual culture, post-Enlightenment literature, and contemporary critical theories. He has published articles on New German Cinema, Uwe Johnson, and Wolfgang Liebeneiner, as well as the monograph Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (1999). He co-edited with Sabine Hake Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany (2007). Recent scholarly work includes chapters on Eberhard 419

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Fechner’s televisual aesthetic, Alexander Kluge’s “minute films,” and the documentary work of Hartmut Bitomsky. He is completing a manuscript entitled Life is Work: Ottomar Domnick, The Father of the Other German Cinema. He serves as executive editor of The Journal of Short Film, a quarterly DVD publication of original artistic work. Jaimey Fisher is associate professor of German at the University of California–Davis. He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (2007) and is co-editor (with Peter Uwe Hohendahl) of Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects (2001). He has published articles in Iris, New German Critique, Genre, German Quarterly, and Germanic Review. Currently, he is co-editing, with Barbara Mennel, the forthcoming volume Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. His current project analyzes war films from the 1910s to the 1950s. Jennifer M. Kapczynski is assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture (2008). She is coeditor (with Michael D. Richardson) of A New History of German Cinema, to be published by Camden House. She has also published articles on a range of topics from Heinrich Böll to Heinrich von Kleist, American war films to post-unification German cinema. Her current work addresses the reconstruction of masculinity in 1950s West German cinema. Lutz Koepnick is professor of German, film, and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written widely on German film, visual culture, and literature; on media arts and aesthetics; and on critical theory and cultural politics. Book publications include Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (2007), The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (2002), and Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (1999). Co-edited or co-authored volumes include After the Digital Divide? German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Media (2009); Window | Interface (2007); The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, 1945 to the Present (2007); Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (2007); and Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture (2004). Kristin Kopp is assistant professor of German studies at the University of Missouri– Columbia. She received her PhD in German studies with a designated emphasis in film studies from the University of California–Berkeley. She has written articles on contemporary German cinema focusing on representations of German-Polish borderland space, heritage cinema, and German colonialism. She is co-editor (with Klaus Müller-Richter) of Die Großstadt und das Primitive. Text, Politik, Repräsentation (2004) and (with Werner Michael Schwarz) of Peter Altenberg: Ashantee. Afrika und Wien um 1900 (2008). She has written widely on the construction of Eastern

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Europe as German colonial space, including visual representations thereof in cartography and film. Elisabeth Krimmer is associate professor of German at the University of California–Davis. She is the author of In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women around 1800 (2004), The Representation of War in German Literature: From 1800 to the Present (2010), and co-author (with Susanne Kord) of Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens, and TV Heroines: Contemporary Screen Images of Women (2004). Her articles have appeared in journals such as PMLA, German Quarterly, Seminar, German Life and Letters, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction. She was awarded the essay prize of the Goethe Society of North America in 2006 and the Max Kade prize for best article in German Quarterly in 2009. Her most recent project is a co-edited collection (with Patricia Simpson) titled Enlightened War: Theories and Cultures of Warfare in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Barbara Mennel is associate professor of film and German studies at the University of Florida. She has published The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature (2007) and Cities and Cinema (2008). Her articles and essays have appeared in New German Critique, Germanic Review, Modern Austrian Literature and elsewhere. She is completing her monograph Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys as well as the volume Spatial Turns: Place, Space, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, co-edited with Jaimey Fisher. Her research addresses the intersections between gender and sexuality in transnational visual culture. Anna M. Parkinson is assistant professor in the Department of German at Northwestern University. She studied at Melbourne University, Cornell University, and the Free University, Berlin, and was assistant professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2007 to 2009. She has published articles on theories of affect and psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theories in post-war literature and culture, and post-wall West German film. Currently she is working on a book manuscript on affect in postwar West German culture, titled In an Emotional State: The Politics of Affect in Post-war West Germany. Brad Prager is associate professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri. He specializes in contemporary German cinema, Holocaust studies, and the art and literature of the German Romantics. He has authored two monographs: Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (2007) and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (2007). His articles have appeared in New German Critique, Modern Language Review, and Art History, and he has coedited (with David Bathrick and Michael D. Richardson) Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (2008). Michael D. Richardson is associate professor of German studies and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Ithaca College. He is the author 421

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of Revolutionary Theater and the Classical Heritage: Inheritance and Appropriation from Weimar to the GDR (2007), and co-editor (with David Bathrick and Brad Prager) of Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (2008), as well as co-editor (with Jennifer Kapczynski) of the forthcoming volume A New History of German Cinema. He has also written and presented on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German film, literature, and theater. Johannes von Moltke is associate professor for German studies and screen arts and cultures at the University of Michigan. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (2005), for which he was awarded the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for best book in German studies. He has published widely on German cinema and popular culture and is currently working on a monograph that situates the work of Siegfried Kracauer between the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals. He serves as co-editor of Germanic Review and of the book series Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual. Wilfried Wilms is associate professor of German studies at the University of Denver. He studied at the University of Cologne, the University of California–Berkeley, and Indiana University. Together with William Rasch, he co-edited Bombs Away: Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan (2006) and German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins (2008). He has published numerous scholarly articles on German intellectual history, literature, and film. Presently he is working on two larger projects—one focusing on Germany under Allied occupation, the other on Bergfilm and Weimar culture.

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Index

Abel, Marco, 8, 35nn11–12 Ade, Maren, 260 Adenauer, Konrad, 144 Adorno, Theodor W.: and aesthetic autonomy, 1, 271–73; and communication, 278n3; and mimesis, 275; and political art, 258, 271–73, 277; and resemblance, 284n47; and utopian thought 361, 367, 372, 380; and working through the past, 6, 132n19 Agamben, Giorgio, 266 Agfacolor: and cinema post-1989, 41; and coming to terms with the past, 42; and DEFA, 48; and the Heimatfilm, 48; and history of, 46–49; and The Miracle of Bern, 52–55, 57, 61n44; and national identity, 41, 46 Agnes and His Brothers (Roehler), 17, 19–23, 28, 183n16 Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog), 338 Aimée & Jaguar (Färberböck), 15, 36n21, 81, 117, 124, 312 The Airlift (Zahavi), 152 Akın, Fatih: and “documentary style,” 239; and The Edge of Heaven, 25–28; and Fassbinder, 23–28; and Germany 09, 15; and Head-On, 15, 23–25; and international recognition, 9; and national vs. transnational discourses, 15–16, 37n41; and New German

Cinema, 17, 23–28; and politics, 2; and terrorism, 16 Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder), 8, 24 Alice in the Cities (Wenders), 13 All About My Mother (Almodóvar), 163 And Along Come Tourists (Thalheim), 308n20 The American Friend (Wenders), 13 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 260 Aprilkinder (Yavuz), 376 Arndt, Stefan, 12 Arnheim, Rudolf, 44 Arslan, Thomas: and acting, 291; and the Berlin School, 8, 9, 260, 287; and narrative omniscience, 288 Arsonist (Lemke), 7 Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed (Kluge), 365, 380 Ash, Timothy Garton, 187 Assmann, Aleida, 82, 93–94, 102–3 Autorenkino/Auteurist cinema: and the 1990s, 3; and aesthetics of reduction, 6; and Akın, 24, 25, 26, 28, 38n41; and the Berlin School, 286; and Fassbinder, 20, 25, 37n35; and Hochhäusler, 286, 287; and the New German Cinema, 4, 5, 20, 164, 337, 363; problematization of, 34n5, 36n25; and Roehler, 30, 37n35, 159, 160, 163, 181n4; and Tykwer, 36n25; and von Trotta, 109; and X-Filme

423

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index

Autorenkino/Auteurist cinema (continued ) (production company), 12 Autumn Milk (Vilsmaier), Baader, Andreas, 5 The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Edel), 190 Babel (Iñárritu), 26 Baka, Mirosław, 296, 299 Ballack, Michael, 63, 64 Becker, Wolfgang: and Butterflies, 240– 43; and Children’s Games, 243–47; and the dffb (German Film and Television Academy Berlin), 4; and Fellini, 231; and Germany 09, 15; and Good-Bye, Lenin!, 11, 39, 184n33, 217, 231, 240; and Kleinert, 251; and Ostalgie, 11, 217; and politics, 12; and X-Filme, (production company), 12, 240 Before the Fall (Gansel), 259 Benjamin, Walter: and the “angel of history,” 250, 269, 366–67; and utopia, 361; and “weak messianic power,” 126, 134n36 Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder), 23, 261 Berlin School: and aesthetics, 31, 287–92, 301; and Autorenkino (auteurist cinema), 164, 286; criticism of, 11–12, 40, 59n6, 279–80n12; definition of, 35n11, 36n20; and the dffb (German Film and Television Academy Berlin), 8; and historical film, 10, 12; as a “legitimate” cinema for Germany, 35n12; and music, 288, 291–94; and Petzold, 258–62, 276; and Poland, 301, 303; and politics, 31, 258–62, 274, 276 Biemann, Ursula, 32, 333, 335, 341, 345–46, 348, 350–51, 353; and background, 333, 339; and “countergeography,” 334; and New German Cinema, 338 Bierhoff, Oliver, 75–76, 77 Biermann, Wolf, 186–87 Biopolitics (Foucault), 32, 264, 320–24 Bitomsky, Hartmut, 4, 260, 262

The Black Forest Girl (Deppe), 48 Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary (Heller), 81, 97, 98 Bloch, Ernst: and fairy tales, 374; and utopia, 360–61, 362–63, 367–68, 371–72, 379, 380–81 The Boat (Petersen), 36n21, 90, 261 Börner, Jens, 287 Borowski, Tim, 64 Bosch, Hieronymous, 372 Boym, Svetlana, 221 Braun, Eva (as depicted in Downfall), 94, 97–98, 101 Brecht, Bertolt, 87, 145, 223–24, 243, 257n11 Bresson, Robert, 260, 262 Brückner, Jutta, 110, 112, 132n23, 338 Brussig, Thomas, 186–87, 218, 223, 234, 235n6 Brustellin, Alf, 313 Bungalow (Köhler), 1, 4, 261 Butterflies (Becker), 241–43 Cambiasso, Esteban, 64, 65 Cannes Film Festival, 8 Capricorn One (Hyams), 73 Carter, Erica, 42, 59n13 Children’s Games (Becker), 243–46, 257n13 cinema of consensus: and actors, 9; and cinema post-2000, 8, 159, 164, 180, 194; and Dresden, 137, 150; and heritage cinema, 149, 150, 193, 194; and historical film, 81, 150, 194; and Ostalgie, 234; and recent responses to, 8, 32, 164, 261; Rentschler’s concept of, 3, 34n5, 34n7, 233, 234, 259, 312; and Roehler, 149, 164, 180 cinematic realism, 240, 248, 256, 324 Class Trip (Winckler), 290, 298; and Poland, 301–2 color: and aesthetics, 52–53; and German cinema, 43, 45–48 Combat 16 (Borscht), 301 Comedian Harmonists (Vilsmaier), 86, 117 Cooke, Paul, 36n22, 195, 312

424

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index

The Counterfeiters (Ruzowitzky), 190 Crabwalk (Grass), 82, 156n36 The Dancing Heart (Deppe), 48 Davidson, John E., 33n1, 86, 338 Dealer (Arslan), 291 Deep Play (Farocki), 78, 79 The Deer Hunter (Cimino), 85 Deleuze, Gilles: and “control society,” 264, 278n3; and images, 267; and the “look,” 281n18; and the micropolitics of desire, 263–64; and political art, 258; and sensation, 268; and sensibility, 272–73 Deppe, Hans, 6 Destinies of Women (Dudow), 48 Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), 48 Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb, German Film and Television Academy Berlin), 4, 8, 9, 11, 260, 262 Distant Lights (Schmid), 300–301 The Doctor of Stalingrad (Konsalik), 88 Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel von, 186–88, 196–97, 201–2, 207, 209, 210 Dörrie, Doris, 3 Downfall (Hirschbiegel), 2, 8, 10, 15, 29, 40, 81, 84, 92–102, 136, 150, 181, 190, 259, 312, 381; and female characters, 98–102; and the female gaze, 93 Dresden (Richter), 12, 30, 82, 136–43, 148–56 Dresen, Andreas, 3, 239 Eastern Crossing (Klier), 299 The Edge of Heaven (Akın), 9, 25–28 The Edukators (Weingartner), 32, 309–30 Eichinger, Bernd, 92–94, 96, 164 Eisler, Hanns, 242 Eisner, Lotte, 8 Elsaesser, Thomas, 9, 164 Elsner, Gisela, 163, 178, 182n6 Elsner, Hannelore, 158, 171, 175 Enemy at the Gates (Anneau), 88

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Herzog), 8 Ensslin, Gudrun, 5, 110, 313 Ernst Thälmann: Leader of the Working Class (Maetzig), 48 Ernst Thälmann: Son of the Working Class (Maetzig), 48 Exile on Main Street (The Rolling Stones), 223, 225, 227 Fährmann, Tom, 51, 54, 61n46 Farocki, Harun, 4, 260, 262, 265; and Deep Play, 78–79, Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 18, 34n9, 37n36, 43, 81, 110, 182n4, 259–60, 309, 361, 363; and Akın, 23–28; and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 8, 24, 25; and Berlin Alexanderplatz, 23, 261; and The BRD Trilogy, 25, 43; and coming to terms with the past, 6; and female protagonists, 164–65, 183n16; and Germany in Autumn, 7, 17; and historical film, 43; and In a Year with 13 Moons, 17, 18–22, 26, 28, 37n35, 183n16; and The Marriage of Maria Braun, 6, 25, 26, 34n9, 57–58, 59n14, 164, 199, 238; and Roehler, 17, 18–22, 37n35, 159, 164–65, 175, 183; and Sirk, 6, 214n40; and terrorism, 5, 7, 16; and The Third Generation, 7 Feminist filmmaking: and “feminine aesthetics,” 112; and melodrama, 120; and Helke Sander, 111; and Margarethe von Trotta, 109, 111–13, 121–22, 124–25, 128; and New German Cinema, 335–39, 355 Fest, Joachim, 92, 98 FIFA World Cup, 64–70, 73, 74, 77–79 Filmverlag der Autoren (production company), 12 Fischer, Joschka, 22, 69, 311, 316 Fitzcarraldo (Herzog), 338 The Flight (Wessel), 82, 136, 151, 152 The Flood (Papavassiliou), 152 Forget America (Joop), 299 Four Windows (Müller), 239 425

06 Fisher_Prager BM.indd 425

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index

Fratricide (Arslan), 25 Frei, Norbert, 82–83 Friedrich, Jörg, 82, 84, 145, 148 Friends and Husbands (von Trotta), 113 Frings, Torsten, 63, 64, 76 Ganz, Bruno, 21, 94; and Swiss identity, 339 “Generation Golf,” 310 The German Chainsaw Massacre (Schlingensief ), 216 German Federal Film Board (FFA), 40, 49 German victimhood in World War II, 82–85, 87–88, 91–93, 101–3 Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation (various directors), 15, 16–17 Germany: A Summer’s Fairy Tale (Wortmann), 49, 63–80 Germany in Autumn (various directors), 5, 7, 17, 110, 313 Germany, Pale Mother (Sanders-Brahms), 43, 110, 119, 164, 337 Ghosts (Petzold), 9, 264, 269–75, 279n12, 282n37, 283–84n46 “Ghost Trilogy” (Petzold), 266, 270, 282n30 Gigantic (Schipper), 238, 239 The Giraffe (Levy), 117–18 Godard, Jean-Luc, 262, 265, 281n18 Goebbels, Josef (as depicted in Downfall), 101 Goebbels, Magda (as depicted in Downfall), 98 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 18, 28 The Golden City (Harlan), 47 Good-Bye, Lenin! (Becker), 11, 12, 15, 31, 36n25, 39, 40, 50, 170, 178, 184n33, 187, 190, 195–96, 202, 211n5, 217, 222, 228–32, 234, 240 Gordon, Douglas, 72, 73, 74 Göring, Hermann, 87 Grill Point (Dresen) Grisebach, Valeska, 8, 11, 260, 291 Hake, Sabine, 33n1, 342

Halle, Randall, 14 Haneke, Michael, 239, 256n5, 260, 262 Hardt, Michael, 317, 352 Harlan, Veit, 47 Hartz IV, 258, 278n4 Haußmann, Leander, 217, 223, 224–25, 235n6 Head-On (Akın), 15, 23–25, 28 Heaven (Tykwer), 32, 361, 369–74, 375, 376, 378, 379 Heisenberg, Benjamin, 9–10, 11, 260, 287 Herberger, Sepp, 62n50, 238, 256 heritage cinema: and Dresden, 30, 150; and Higson’s concept of, 30, 116; and “historical film,” 212n21; Koepnick’s definition of, 85, 116, 127, 133n25, 149, 213n23, 213n25; and melodramatic genre, 197–99, 201, 203, 209; and national cinemas, 40; and Ostalgie, 193–97; as postmodern pastiche, 209; as production trend, 149–50, 188, 189–93; and Rosenstrasse, 132n22; and victimhood, 122 Herzog, Werner, 309, 363; and aesthetics, 259–60; and international impact, 4, 13; and “legitimate” film culture, 8–9; and Murnau, 20; and national and transnational filmmaking, 13 Hidden (Haneke), 28 Higson, Andrew: and heritage cinema, 30, 116, 190–92, 194–95, 197–98, 201 Hirsch, Marianne, 118, 124 Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 92, 93, 94, 101 Hitler, Adolf, 2, 10, 46, 87, 144; as depicted in Downfall, 92–102 Hitler: A Film from Germany (Syberberg), 81 Hochhäusler, Christoph: and aesthetics, 31–32, 290, 292–93; and the Berlin School, 8, 260, 279n10; criticism of, 279n12; and the French New Wave, 39; and the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München, 11, 260, 287; and Petzold, 262; and Poland, 303;

426

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index

and Revolver (journal), 9, 35n18, 279n8, 287; and This Very Moment, 261, 279n12, 285–305 Holocaust: and Downfall, 95, 101; and Friedrich’s The Fire, 84; and Marianne and Juliane, 122; and responsibility for, 83; and Stalingrad, 91; and victimhood, 83; and the Wehrmacht exhibition, 83 Holocaust (television miniseries), 137 The Hunger Years: In a Land of Plenty (Brückner), 110, 119 Huyssen, Andreas, 171, 179, 345, 347 I am Guilty (Hochhäusler), 28 I Often Think of Piroschka (Hoffmann), 49 Illies, Florian, 310–11 In a Year with 13 Moons (Fassbinder), 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26, 37n35, 183n16 In with the New (Roehler), 181n4, 299 Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (Harris), 45 Jaap, Max, 145 Jameson, Fredric: and mass culture, 55; and utopia, 361–63, 365–66, 380 Jerichow (Petzold), 264, 281n17 Joan of Arc of Mongolia (Ottinger), 338 Junge, Traudl (as depicted in Downfall), 92–94, 97–99, 101 Kaes, Anton, 34n9 Kahn, Oliver, 74–75 Kalmus, Natalie M., 44 Kapczynski, Jennifer M., 13 Kieślowski, Krzysztof, 369, 372 Kings of the Road (Wenders), 8 Kleinert, Andreas, 3, 240, 247–48, 250–52 Klemperer, Victor, 138, 153n6 Klinsmann, Jürgen, 29, 66–71, 73–75 Kluge, Alexander: and Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed, 365, 380; and Autorenkino (auteurist cinema), 30; and cinema post-1989, 12, 159; and coming to terms with the past, 10;

and film schools, 9; and Germany in Autumn, 5, 7; and New German Cinema, 260, 382n8; and the Oberhausen manifesto, 6; and politics, 1, 2, 12; and Portrait of a Battle, 88; and Roehler, 30, 159, 165–69; and the suffering of German soldiers, 88; and Taking of Stock: Utopia Film, 363, 369–70, 380–81, 382n8; and terrorism, 5, 7; and utopian thinking, 360, 363, 365, 369, 370, 380, 381; and Yesterday Girl, 30, 165–69 Knight, Julia, 129n3 Knörer, Ekkehard, 261, 280n13 Koepnick, Lutz: on Akın, 28; and The Cosmopolitan Screen, 14, 28; on heritage cinema, 85, 116, 127, 149–50, 191, 192, 193–95, 196, 201, 213n25; and Tykwer, 383n30 Köhler, Ulrich, 1, 39, 260, 279n10, 283n44, 381 Kolberg (Harlan), 47 Kuhle Wampe (Dudow), 242, 257n12 Kutzli, Sebastian, 287 La Habanera (Sierk), 251 Lahm, Philipp, 63 The Last Train (Vilsmaier), 86 The Legend of Rita (Schlöndorff ), 11, 325, 365–66, 373, 378 Lehmann, Jens, 63–65, 71, 76 Lemke, Klaus, 260 Levy, Dani, 10, 12, 36n24 Lightning over Water (Wenders), 13 Lili Marleen (Fassbinder), 165 Little Angel (Misselwitz), 299 A Little Bit of Freedom (Yavuz), 25, 32, 361, 374–79, 384n36 The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck), 2, 8, 10, 15, 30, 35n19, 170, 186– 215, 264, 278n7 Lola (Fassbinder), 25, 43, 164 Longing (Grisebach), 261 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Schlöndorff and von Trotta), 112, 313 Love is Colder than Death (Fassbinder), 6 427

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index

Lucy (Winckler), 261 Lukacs, Georg, 244 Luthardt, Matthias, 39 Maaz, Hans-Joachim, 220 Maccarone, Angelina, 39 Mainka-Jellinghaus, Beate, 7 Malou (Meerapfel), 119 The Man Who Wasn’t There (Coen), 46 Marianne and Juliane (von Trotta), 110, 113, 122, 313, 337 The Marriage of Maria Braun (Fassbinder), 6, 25, 26, 34n9, 43, 57, 164, 199, 200 Marseille (Schanelec), 261, 288, 289 Marx, Karl, 365, 379 The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski), 326 May, Karl, 302 Maybe, Maybe Not (Wortmann), 3 Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler (Levy), 12, 92 Melodrama: and Christine Gledhill, 200, 214n41, 214n42; and Fassbinder, 18, 19, 20; and E. Ann Kaplan, 120; as genre, 120, 188, 194; and heritage cinema, 188, 194, 196, 197–210; and the historical film, 10, 28, 85, 97, 188; and Hollywood melodrama, 97, 121;and Linda Williams, 120–22, 200, 210, 214n42; and The Lives of Others, 188, 194, 196, 197–210; and the maternal melodrama, 114, 116, 120–22; and memory, 125–28; and moral legibility, 122, 196, 197, 200, 202, 206, 210; and music, 202, 209; and Peter Brooks, 202, 210, 214n41; and police thrillers, 203–6; and politics, 120; and the restraint of emotions, 208; and Roehler 18, 19, 20; and Rosenstrasse, 120–28; and Sirk, 201, 214n40, 214n46; and tears, 201, 206, 209; and temporal logic, 121 Men (Dörrie), 3 Merkel, Angela, 76 Micropolitics, 263 The Miracle of Bern (Wortmann), 41, 42,

43, 49–58, 81, 181, 238 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarethe, 6, 82 mother films (Mütterfilme), 109, 119–20, 128 Naficy, Hamid, 343, 350 National Cinema: 13 and contemporary German cinema, 15–16, 40; and New German Cinema, 13; and transnationalism, 14 Negri, Antonio, 317, 352 New German Cinema: and aesthetics, 39–40, 42, 182n10, 259, 312, 313, 325; and Akın, 23, 26, 27, 28; and Autorenkino (auteurist cinema), 5, 159, 164–5, 309, 324; and the cinema of consensus, 3, 233; and cinema post-1989, 16–17, 20–28, 30, 240, 259; and coming to terms with the past, 81; and feminist filmmaking, 110, 119, 129n2, 132n23, 335–39, 355; and film culture, 9; and Germany 09, 17; and historical film, 43; history of, 2, 8–9, 16, 39–40, 240; and international impact, 6, 13; and the police, 197; and politics 4–7, 20, 42, 182n10, 197; and Roehler, 20–23, 164–65; and Rohrbach, 261; and terrorism, 7; and the Weimar workers’ film, 240; and utopia 360, 363, 365 Night and Fog (Resnais), 122 Nikolai Church (Beyer), 170 Ninotchka (Lubitsch), 147 The Ninth Day (Schlöndorff ) 10, 312 No More Mr. Nice Guy (Buck), 184n33 No Place to Go (Roehler), 15, 30, 157–81 Nosferatu (Murnau), 16, 185n44 Nowhere in Africa (Link), 8, 10, 15, 39, 40, 81, 190 NVA (Haußmann), 181 Oberhausen Manifesto, 2, 3, 9, 110, 165, 363 Obermaier, Uschi, 364 Ostalgie: and Boym’s concept of nostalgia, 221; and consumption, 217; and 428

06 Fisher_Prager BM.indd 428

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index

critiques of, 170, 218; and Good-Bye, Lenin!, 12, 184n33, 232; and The Lives of Others, 195–96, 199, 222; and Sonnenallee, 170, 222; and the Stasi controversy of the early 1990s, 213n28; and the wave of, 217; and Yella, 11 Out of Rosenheim (Adlon), 338 Outside Time (Kleinert), 246–51 Papa’s Cinema, 3, 110 Paris, Texas (Wenders), 338 Parreno, Philippe, 72, 73, 74 Paths in the Night (Kleinert), 251–55 Paule Pauländer (Hauff ), 243, 251 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tykwer), 12, 261, 279–80n12 Petzold, Christian, 258–84; and Adorno, 278n3; and Autorenkino (auteurist cinema), 181; and Berlin, 16; and the Berlin School, 8, 11; biographical information about, 262; and critique of Western capitalism, 11; and death, 276; and Deleuze, 258, 264, 272–73, 278n3; and the dffb (German Film and Television Academy Berlin), 4, 9; and Ghosts, 9, 264, 269–75, 279n12, 282n37, 283–84n46; and Harun Farocki, 9; and politics, 31, 258–84; and The State I Am In, 9, 264, 272, 279n12, 281n17, 282n37; and Yella, 10, 11, 31, 35n19, 264, 265–68, 271, 275, 277n2, 279n12, 281n17 Pleasantville (Ross), 45 Polish Crash (Heidelbach), 299 Podolski, Lukas, 71, 76–77 Portrait of a Battle (Kluge), 88 postmemory, 118, 124 production trend: definition of, 190– 91,211n10; and heritage cinema, 188, 190–92; and The Lives of Others, 188, 190–92,194–96, 199; and Ostalgie, 194–96, 199 The Promise (von Trotta), 170 Rama dama (Vilsmaier), Raspe, Jan-Carl, 5

Ray, Nicholas, 6 Red Desert (Antonioni), 364 Red Sun (Thome), 363–65 REDUPERS (Sander), 110, 333, 340–41, 343, 345 Reitz, Edgar, 5, 7, 9 Remote Sensing (Biemann), 32, 333–34, 338–55 Rentschler, Eric: and Autorenkino (auteurist cinema), 5, 34n5, 34n7; and the cinema of consensus, 3, 5, 81, 150, 194, 233, 234, 259, 312; and Fassbinder, 17, 34n7, 37n36; and New German Cinema, 34n7, 34n8 Revolver (journal), 9, 35n18, 279n8, 287 Richter, Gerhard, 267, 269, 282n31 Richter, Roland Suso, 30, 140, 148 Ringelnatz, Joachim, 375 Roehler, Klaus, 163 Roehler, Oskar: and Agnes and His Brothers, 17, 18–23, 28, 183n16; and the Berlin School, 40; and Fassbinder, 17, 18–23, 37n35; and New German Cinema, 2; and No Place to Go, 157–81 Rohrbach, Günter, 11–12, 36n21, 261, 279n12 Rökk, Marika, 47 Romance in a Minor Key (Käutner), 257n14 Rosen, Philip, 15 Rosenstrasse (von Trotta), 30, 81, 109, 111, 114–35, 150 Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), 5, 16, 110; and The Edukators, 313–15, 321 Run, Lola, Run (Tykwer), 16, 36n25, 39, 187, 196, 211n5, 238, 256, 299, 307n16 Rupé, Katja, 5 Sander, Helke, 4, 336, 338 Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 110, 132n23, 337–38 Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg), 85, 381 Schanelec, Angela, 15, 37n32, 260 Schindler, Stephan, 14, 28 Schindler’s List (Spielberg), 45, 124 429

06 Fisher_Prager BM.indd 429

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index

Schleiermacher, Detten, 9 Schlingensief, Christoph, 3, 216 Schmid, Hans-Christian, 34n5, 239 Schneider, Helge, 92 Schneider, Peter, 171, 174 Schröder, Gerhard, 50, 55–56, 69, 311–12, 316 Schweinsteiger, Bastian, 76–77 Schygulla, Hanna, 26, 27 Scott, A. O., 42 Sebald, W. G., 82–83, 136, 150, 153n2 The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (von Trotta), 360, 366 Seismograph (film protagonist as), 159, 167, 169, 172, 177, 183n22 Shirin’s Wedding (Sanders-Brahms), 24–25 The Shoe of Manitu (Herbig), 190 A Short Film about Killing (Kieślowski), 296 Short Sharp Shock (Akın), 23 The Sins of Rose Bernd (Staudte), 48 Sirk, Douglas, 6, 214n40 Sleeper (Heisenberg), 261 Solo Sunny (Wolf ), 251 Sonnenallee (Haußmann), 31, 170, 195, 196, 217, 222, 223–29, 231, 234, 235n6 Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Rothemund), 2, 10, 81, 150, 259, 312 Speth, Maria, 260 Spielberg, Steven, 7 Stalingrad, the Battle of, 87–88 Stalingrad (Dehnhardt), 88 Stalingrad (Vilsmaier), 29, 36n21, 81, 84–86, 88–93, 102 The State I Am In (Petzold), 9, 264, 272, 279n12, 281n17, 282n37, 325 The State of Things (Wenders), 13, 70 Stella Dallas (Vidor), 200 The Story of Little Muck (Staudte), 48 Straub, Laurens, 12 The Subjective Factor (Sander), 336 Surveillance, 186, 187, 188, 197, 209 Talk of the Town (Kaufmann), 259 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 252

teamworx (production company), 140, 151, 152 The Third Generation (Fassbinder), 7 This Very Moment (Hochhäusler), 285–305; and the Berlin School, 286, 292; and German identity, 15, 285, 287; and Poland, 31, 298–305; and Rohrbach’s criticism, 261 Thome, Rudolf, 364 The Tin Drum (Schlöndorff ), 6, 16, 81, 213n30 Tokyo-Ga (Wenders), 13 Traffic (Soderbergh), 26 The Trapp Family (Liebeneiner), 49 The Trapp Family in America (Liebeneiner), 49 Treut, Monika, 3 The Tunnel (Richter), 152 Tykwer, Tom: and art cinema, 10, 12, 34n5, 36n25, 164; and Autorenkino (auteurist cinema), 34n5, 36n25, 164; and Germany 09, 15, 16–17; and Heaven, 32, 369–72; and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 12; and politics, 12–13; and Run Lola Run, 16, 39; and Wenders, 16; and X-Filme (production company), 12 Ufacolor, 46 Unveiled (Maccarone) 15, 28 Vacation from Myself (Staudte), 48 Veronika Voss (Fassbinder), 25, 164, 183n17 Verstegen, Marc, 73 Vilsmaier, Josef, 81, 85–86, 88, 90, 91 Von Moltke, Johannes, 93, 363–64 Von Trotta, Margarethe: and aesthetics, 260; and Arsonist, 7; and feminist filmmaking, 337, 338; and the historical film, 81; and the maternal melodrama, 120–22; and politics, 12, 30; and The Promise, 233; and Rosenstrasse, 81, 109–18, 120–22, 124–28; and The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, 360, 366; and utopia, 361 430

06 Fisher_Prager BM.indd 430

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index

Weingartner, Hans: biographical information about, 310; and Germany 09, 15; and Hollywood cinematic style, 324, 326–27; and politics, 310, 316, 317, 322, 328–29; and realist narrative 324 Wenders, Wim: and aesthetics, 238; and Autorenkino (auteurist cinema), 4, 20–21, 159, 259–60, 309; and coming to terms with the past, 10, 28–29, 94, 98; and Filmverlag der Autoren (production company), 12; and Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 238; and the historical film, 28–29, 94, 98; and Japan, 13; and Kings of the Road, 8; and New German Cinema, 259–60; and Nicholas Ray, 6; and Petzold, 262; and Police Film, 197; and politics, 1, 4; and Roehler, 20–22, 23, 159; and The State of Things, 70; and “That’s Entertainment: Hitler,” 28–29; and Tykwer, 16; and the United States, 13, 70; and Wings of Desire, 20–22, 179 When the White Lilacs Bloom Again (Deppe), 49 Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (Fassbinder and Fengler), 6 Williams, Linda, 120–22, 132n24 Winckler, Henner, 290

Windows on Monday (Köhler), 1 Wings of Desire (Wenders), 16, 20–22, 179 The Wizard of Oz (Fleming), 54, 61n46 Wolf, Christa, 218 Wolf, Konrad, 238 Wolfsburg (Petzold), 264, 281n17, 282n30, 282n37 Woll, Felicitas, 138, 148 A Woman in Berlin (Färberböck), 190 Women Are Better Diplomats (Jacoby), 47 Wortmann, Sönke: and the cinema of consensus 3, 29; and Germany, A Summer’s Fairy Tale 29, 63–65, 67–79; and Maybe, Maybe Not, 3; and The Miracle of Bern, 41, 49–58 X-Filme (production company), 12, 240 Yavuz, Yüksel, 32, 361, 374–78 Yella (Petzold), 10, 11, 31, 35n19, 264, 265–68, 271, 275, 277n2, 279n12, 281n17 Yesterday Girl (Kluge), 5, 30, 159, 165– 69, 177, 179, 181n2 Young German Cinema, 2, 9 Zidane, Zinédine, 67, 72, 75 Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Gordon and Parreno), 72

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Cinema and television studies

“The Collapse of the Conventional offers a comprehensive introduction to contemporary German cinema and is bound to stimulate new debates about the legacies of New German Cinema and its politics of the aesthetic. A must for everyone interested in German cinema and contemporary culture.” —Sabine Hake, Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin “Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape.” —Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds

Jaimey Fisher is associate professor of German at the University of California–Davis. He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Wayne State University Press, 2007). He is also co-editor (with Peter Uwe Hohendahl) of Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects and (with Barbara Mennel) of Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture. Brad Prager is associate professor of German and film studies at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. He is also co-editor (with David Bathrick and Michael D. Richardson) of Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. Contributors: Marco Abel, Roger F. Cook, John E. Davidson, Jaimey Fisher, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, Elisabeth Krimmer, Barbara Mennel, Johannes von Moltke, Anna M. Parkinson, Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson, Wilfried Wilms

The Collapse of the Conventional

—Marc Silberman, chair of the Department of German at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

On cover: Yella (Nina Hoss) suddenly awakens on the shore following a car crash in Christian Petzold’s Yella (2007). (Photo courtesy Christian Shulz) / Cover design by Maya Rhodes

“Fisher and Prager have assembled a significant group of essays by the emerging generation of German cinema experts in the US. The anthology is the first serious attempt to retell the history of the New German Cinema and the ‘consensus’ cinema of the 1900s through the lens of contemporary, post-2000 films in all their diversity. Film scholars, students of the German cinema, and the general reading public will discover here why ‘Deutsches Kino’ is once again in the limelight.”

Fisher and Prager

The Collapse of the Conventional

German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series

Wayne State University Press / Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager