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

By Jaimey Fisher

Analyzes a diverse body of films and investigates the renaissance that has taken place in German cinema since the turn of the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Aug 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9780814336885

Jaimey Fisher

Jaimey Fisher, professor of German and of cinema and digital media at the University of California, Davis, is author of German Ways of War; Treme; Christian Petzold; and Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War. With Marco Abel, he coedited The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema, and with Peter Uwe Hohendahl, he coedited Critical Theory: Current State and Future Prospects.

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General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

Ursinus College

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

Lisa Parks

University of California–Santa Barbara

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

© 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.

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 (pbk. : alk. paper)

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

ISBN 978-0-8143-3688-5 (e-book)

Contents

Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager

Introduction

Jennifer M. Kapczynski

Imitation of Life: The Aesthetics of Agfacolor in Recent Historical Cinema

Lutz Koepnick

Public Viewing: Soccer Patriotism and Post-Cinema

Elisabeth Krimmer

More War Stories: Stalingrad and Downfall

Anna M. Parkinson

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

Wilfried Wilms

Dresden: The Return of History as Soap

Johannes von Moltke

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

Jaimey Fisher

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

Michael D. Richardson

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

John E. Davidson

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

Marco Abel

Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold

Kristin Kopp

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

Roger F. Cook

Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei: Edukating the Post-Left Generation

Barbara Mennel

The Global Elsewhere: Ursula Biemann’s Multimedia Countergeography

Brad Prager

Glimpses of Freedom: The Reemergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema

Works Cited

Filmography

Contributors

Index

Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager

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 Fassbinder, 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 Akin, 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 Tag e (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 Filmist 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 (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 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 Filmund 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 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 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 Vol ker 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 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-for-television 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.

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 Hauser, 1974) was honored with the Grand Jury Prize in 1975. They at that time acquired a degree of legitimacy just as Fatih Akin, 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 Heisenberg, 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 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 Vol ker 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 film-making 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 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 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: 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 discourses that emerged in connection with that earlier national tradition.

More evident, however, is that if the phenomenal success of Good-Bye, 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 Akin, 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 Akin’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 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 Akin 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 Akin

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 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 Akin 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 editing 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 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 Ts chirner (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. 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.

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).

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