Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering (Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual)

Edited by CONTRIBUTORS: Seán Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sab...

Author: Paul Cooke | Marc Silberman

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Edited by

CONTRIBUTORS: Seán Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sabine Hake, Jennifer Kapczynski, Manuel Köppen, Rachel Palfreyman, Brad Prager, Johannes von Moltke.

IMAGE CREDIT: British soldiers watch a newsreel of the Nuremberg Trials in a makeshift cinema. DVD-capture from Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), reproduced by kind permission of MTM Medien & Television Munich.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.camden-house.com www.boydellandbrewer.com

Screening War Perspectives on German Suffering

Perspectives on German Suffering

PAUL COOKE is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and MARC SILBERMAN is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.

Screening War

The recent “discovery” of German wartime suffering has had a particularly profound impact in German visual culture. Films from Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse (2003) to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and the two-part television miniseries Dresden (2006) have shown how ordinary Germans suffered during and after the war. Such films have been presented by critics as treating a topic that had been taboo for German filmmakers. However, the representation of wartime suffering has a long tradition on the German screen. For decades, filmmakers have recontextualized images of Germans as victims to engage shifting social and ideological discourses. By focusing on this process, the present volume explores how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both of the postwar German states and the nowunified nation have attempted to face the trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world.

Cooke & Silberman

Edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman

Screening War

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Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual Series Editors: Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College) Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)

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Screening War Perspectives on German Suffering Edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman

Rochester, New York

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Copyright © 2010 the Editors and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2010 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-437-0 ISBN-10: 1-57113-437-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Screening war: perspectives on German suffering / edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman. p. cm. — (Screen cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-437-0 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-57113-437-9 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. World War, 1939–1945 — Motion pictures and the war. 2. War films — Germany — History — 20th century. 3. Suffering in motion pictures. 4. Psychic trauma in motion pictures. 5. Germans in motion pictures. I. Cooke, Paul, 1969– II. Silberman, Marc, 1948–III. Title. IV. Series. D743.23.S37 2010 791.43.'6581 — dc22 2010002833 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgments

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Introduction: German Suffering? Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman

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I. Hidden Screens: Soldiers, Martyrs, Innocent German Victims 1: Armchair Warriors: Heroic Postures in the West German War Film Jennifer M. Kapczynski

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2: German Martyrs: Images of Christianity and Resistance to National Socialism in German Cinema David Clarke

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3: The Rhetoric of Victim Narratives in West German Films of the 1950s Manuel Köppen

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II. Projection Screens: Disavowing Loss, Transforming Antifascism, Contesting Memories 4: Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia in the Sissi Trilogy Erica Carter

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5: Political Affects: Antifascism and the Second World War in Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf Sabine Hake

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6: Shadowlands: The Memory of the Ostgebiete in Contemporary German Film and Television Tim Bergfelder

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CONTENTS

III. Display Screens: Generational Traumas, Untimely Passions, Open Wounds 7: Links and Chains: Trauma between the Generations in the Heimat Mode Rachel Palfreyman

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8: Resistance of the Heart: Female Suffering and Victimhood in DEFA’s Antifascist Films Daniela Berghahn

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9: Suffering and Sympathy in Volker Schlöndorff’s Der neunte Tag and Dennis Gansel’s NaPolA Brad Prager

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IV. Split Screens: Ambiguous Authorities, Decentered Emotions, Performed Identities

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10: Eberhard Fechner’s History of Suffering: TV Talk, Temporal Distance, Spatial Displacement John E. Davidson

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11: The Politics of Feeling: Alexander Kluge on War, Film, and Emotion Johannes von Moltke

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12: Post-unification German-Jewish Relations and the Discourse of Victimhood in Dani Levy’s Films Seán Allan

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Works Cited

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Notes on the Contributors

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Index of Film Titles

293

Index of Names and Subjects

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Preface and Acknowledgments

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of a three-year collaboration that grew out of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), “From Perpetrators to Victims? Discourses of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present.” The editors first discussed the rewriting of postwar German film history over beers in Berlin in summer 2006. We invited a trans-Atlantic group of interested colleagues to join us in June 2007 at the University of Leeds for a daylong brainstorming session, where we discussed the project and agreed on preliminary topics. Using a coauthored position paper, we challenged the participants to submit detailed abstracts that were then refined and coordinated over the next half year. Drafts of the essays were presented in November 2008 at the forty-first Wisconsin Workshop in Madison, and based on discussions and feedback from the encounter, the present volume took shape with the goal of exploring ways in which film has contributed to postwar “memory work” in Germany. Along with the AHRC, the editors wish to thank the British Academy, the Worldwide Universities Network, the University of Wisconsin Department of German, the University of Leeds School of Modern Languages, the University of Wisconsin Center for German and European Studies, and the Max Kade Foundation (New York City) for their generous funding of the project. We also are grateful for the careful readings of the manuscripts by two anonymous readers as well as for the support and input from our editor at Camden House publishers, Jim Walker. HIS ANTHOLOGY IS THE FRUIT

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Introduction: German Suffering? Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman

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Third Reich and the Second World War is sufficient to conjure up thoughts about the Holocaust and crimes against humanity. The stories that have filtered into public memory depict racial genocide, civilian and military losses in the Soviet Union, resistance and partisan movements throughout Europe, and heroic Allied battles at Stalingrad and Normandy. However, in the late 1990s the focus on the victims and heroes in Germany began to shift from these internationally recognizable points of reference to examine how Germans “suffered,” or how they might be presented as “victims” during and in the aftermath of the war. With the publication of W. G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (On The Natural History of Destruction, 1999), Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002), and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–45, 2002), along with the four-part special on “Deutsche als Opfer” (Germans as Victims) in the weekly national news magazine Der Spiegel, popular documentaries by the TV historian Guido Knopp, and countless feature films and TV miniseries, it seemed that the story of previously “taboo” topics could at long last be told, from the fire-bombing of German cities and the mass rape of German women by soldiers of the Red Army, to the treatment of German POWs and the plight of the twelve million people expelled from the previously German regions east of the “Oder-Neisse Line.”1 As has been well documented, this was not, in fact, the first time these issues had been addressed. Robert Moeller, for example, makes the point that in the early postwar years “a past of German suffering was ubiquitous” across German culture, the specific emphasis being, to a degree at least, contingent on the ideological system articulating the story.2 In the West official gestures of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) emphasized atonement and reconciliation, but popular memory nourished the sentiment of German victimization, first perpetrated by the Nazis during the Third Reich and then by the communists after the war. In the East the official rhetoric of socialist solidarity and integration promoted the idea that only those who were willing to identify with HE MERE MENTION OF THE

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PAUL COOKE AND MARC SILBERMAN

the suffering of the antifascist resistance and with the Soviet losses in the war could reinvent themselves as victims of fascism, understood to be an extreme form of capitalist exploitation. The aim of this volume is to trace the changing ways German film has addressed the legacy of its recent past, focusing in particular on the place of German wartime and postwar “suffering” within this legacy. Taking as its starting point the multiple connotations of the word “screen,” the authors of the following chapters examine thematic choices and aesthetic strategies in a range of films from the 1950s to the present, reconsidering familiar features and genres and drawing attention to new or overlooked material. Which screens have artists chosen to project their representations of the past and why? How have they framed the screens and, just as important, what do these screens hide? If we might extend the metaphor of Freud’s seminal essay, “Screen Memories,” how does the choice to present one story in a cinematic text relate to the many untold stories? To what extent does film function as a split screen in Germany, working as a synecdoche, giving expression to a broader social trauma? Or, as Freud uses the term, is it largely a form of diversion, the vivid display of the “screen[ing] memory” being in our case rendered explicitly through celluloid and implicitly highlighting the continued power of this same trauma within the nation’s social psyche?3 In order to contextualize the volume’s discussion of the cinematic representation of German wartime and postwar “suffering,” in this introduction we wish initially to look at the changing status of German “victimhood” in cultural and political discourses more broadly. As we shall see, any perceived novelty in the current perspectives on Germany’s recent history are largely related to the events of the 1960s, when attitudes towards the war and the Third Reich began to change radically, particularly in West Germany. That said, the roots of this counter discourse can be traced back to the early postwar period. From November 1945 until October 1946, the first Nuremberg Trials initiated the triage of perpetrators and victims, identifying the Nazi elite as those individually responsible for crimes against humanity. Karl Jaspers’s lectures on Die Schuldfrage (The Question of Guilt), conceived in late 1945 and presented publicly in January/February 1946, responded to the widespread, even obsessive, refusal among the Germans to react to accusations of collective guilt for Nazi crimes.4 His careful differentiation between individual criminal guilt and collective political responsibility was an early and remarkable attempt to navigate the shame and disorientation that came to mark the postwar years, when the process of selective remembering and forgetting was setting in. This tendency continued in the 1950s with the publication and subsequent dramatization of The Diary of Anna Frank, a moment that first saw the Holocaust turned into a media event, in turn providing a starting point for a wider,

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INTRODUCTION: GERMAN SUFFERING?

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albeit still limited, public confrontation with the question of German guilt as millions were moved by this young girl’s story.5 It was not until the following decade, however, that the question of guilt became the dominant focus of public debate through several high profile events. The 1961 trial of the SS officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem together with Hannah Arendt’s commentaries on the “banality of evil” detailed the machinery of the Nazi state and revealed the empty excuses of the Schreibtischtäter (desktop perpetrators), thus raising questions generally about those who claimed to have been innocent bystanders. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963–65, the first postwar trials after Nuremberg, brought the victims of the “banality of evil” right into Germany’s evening news and living rooms.6 The controversy surrounding the staging of Rolf Hochhuth’s attack on the Catholic Church’s failure to challenge Nazi rule in Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy, 1963) effectively dismantled the comforting illusion that at least the church had done everything possible to resist Hitler.7 Finally, seminal studies — foremost among them Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn, 1967) by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich — began to redefine Germany’s expression of its victim status as what might today be called a self-pitying post-Nazi stress disorder.8 In short, the image of Germany was reconfigured: not as a society that had suffered during the war but as one that had allowed the mass murder of the Holocaust to take place and that, moreover, had done little to atone for its complicity, however passive, in the events. In the view of West Germans who grew up after the war a nation of victims was replaced by a nation of perpetrators, as they began to question their parents’ generational code of silence and amnesia, of refusal to name names and expose crimes. By the end of the 1960s the members of this younger generation were taking to the streets to force their parents to account for their relationship to the National Socialist regime. Gudrun Ensslin, soon to become a member of the terrorist Red Army Faction (RAF), spoke for many political activists at the time when she ostensibly stated bluntly that those currently in charge of society belonged to “the Generation of Auschwitz,” which had not only not dealt with its past, but had also allowed prewar fascistic structures to flourish in a West German state that for some was only superficially democratic.9 In a larger sense the rebellious generation of 1968 offered a history of the war in its own terms of political victimization. In the 1970s in particular the family became the preferred narrative setting for films, literature, and memoirs: melancholic tales of orphans, broken families, and neglected children seeking escape or revenge. Yet for all their media treatments of the war and its consequences, the postwar generation failed to bring about in the general population the desired mindset. The tremendous public response to the broadcast in 1979 of the American TV series Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky and Gerald Green, 1978) on West German television screens

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was the glaring proof of this failure. Shaped by the opposing fates of two families in Berlin, one Nazi and one Jewish, it confirmed on the one hand the continuing widespread amnesia about the Nazi past and on the other the willingness on the part of the popular audience to acknowledge at last a measure of complicity for past crimes. Relying on typical (American) television codes to personalize the catastrophe of the Holocaust, the depiction of racial exclusion and genocide for the first time was able to convey effectively to German audiences the terror of everyday life and personal experience during the Third Reich.10 In the larger perspective political discourse in East Germany inversely parallels the developments in West Germany. While West German leaders initiated reparations and restitution for Jewish survivors (Wiedergutmachung) and supportive relations with Israel as concrete gestures of their moral and legal responsibility for the National Socialist legacy, the party leadership in East Germany maintained that West Germany not only was the heir of Nazi crimes but also harbored Nazi criminals in high public offices. Meanwhile East Germany laid claim to being the “better Germany” of the antifascist resistance. The idea that East Germany was the product of the suffering endured in the antifascist struggle against the Nazis grounded the strong loyalty of many returning exiles and provided effective strategies of self-explanation and self-exculpation for the survivors, who were now suddenly on the “right” side. But just as in West Germany, institutions and families wrapped the lived trauma and felt shame of the past in silence. Only in the sphere of cultural expression, one of the few domains where official views could be contested and negotiated, even if sometimes in densely coded form, did other voices begin to raise uncomfortable questions. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 — officially referred to in the East as the “antifaschistischer Schutzwall” (the antifascist protective rampart) — was a signal for many intellectuals and artists that open discussion might at last be tolerated “within the ranks,” since the ideological contamination feared by the political leadership would now be contained. Thus Heiner Müller’s 1965 rewrite of Sophocles’s Philoktet (Philoctetes), for example, addressed generational guilt, primarily in the context of Stalinist crimes but also more generally in its representation of lying as a political strategy of survival. Generational novels by Christa Wolf (Kindheitsmuster [Patterns of Childhood], 1976) and Hermann Kant (Der Aufenthalt [The Sojourn], 1977, filmed by Frank Beyer for DEFA in 1983) explored through the eyes of young narrators their own experiences during the war as well as the gradual coming to consciousness of the larger issue of German guilt, while Frank Beyer’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, 1975), a film that addressed the Holocaust and German crimes more directly than any other previous DEFA feature film, marked a high point in East German cinema. Consequently, from the 1960s until

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at least the 1980s, a perpetrator discourse increasingly framed public and official understanding in both East and West, providing a split screen for representations of Germany’s burdensome past.

Challenging Perpetrator Discourse and Rediscovering Victimhood During the 1980s a further shift became evident, when controversial public interpretations of historical events seemed to anticipate what would become the hyper-visibility of memory and the notion of victimhood in post-unification Germany. Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost threatened not only the historical narrative of East Germany’s triumphalist rise from the ashes but also the regime’s very legitimacy in the eyes of the country’s citizenry. Critical voices recalled the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution, the twentieth anniversary of the Prague Spring, and the right to freedom of thought in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg on the seventieth anniversary of her murder. Meanwhile, during the fortieth anniversary commemorating Germany’s capitulation, United States President Ronald Reagan visited the Bitburg military cemetery in West Germany, where members of the Waffen-SS were buried alongside German and American soldiers, an event that gave rise to sharp criticism about attempts to “normalize” Germany’s past. The Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) that unfolded in the following two years began with the claim that the genocide of the Jews had to be seen within the context of Stalin’s prior murderous politics, leading to accusations of historical revisionism that exculpated Germany. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s plans for a historical museum in Bonn that would showcase Germany’s “geistig-moralische Wende” (spiritual and moral change), as well as Bundestag President Phillip Jenninger’s 1988 speech commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Kristallnacht with its ambiguous references to the fascination generated by the Nazis, also seemed to test the boundaries of acceptable discourse about the dark past. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the postCold War redrawing of Europe’s map resulted in a seeming “depoliticization,” however brief, of German history. Bill Niven points out that a new openness became possible, since the relative weakness in the way each side approached the question of German responsibility for past crimes no longer figured in the superpowers’ competitive propaganda armory.11 But what seemed like openness quickly devolved into a careful instrumentalization of the past. The former “political correctness” of the West German student movement (as its critics would have it) — manifest in its obsession with the question of German culpability for the crimes of National Socialism — had apparently been overcome.

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Simultaneously revelations about criminal activities of the Stasi, the East German state security service, began to redefine the meaning of victimhood and Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Coming to terms with past Stasi crimes resuscitated the idea that Nazism and Communism were both totalitarian regimes and, as such, comparable in their criminal actions. Under these conditions a new phase could begin in which the country accepted its culpability for the past but also faced the trauma(s) of its own suffering. The concrete notion of the victim shifted to a more abstract concept of victimhood, referring to traumatic change more generally and its aftereffects on subsequent generations.

Reconfiguring National Identity and German Memory Work At the same time the issue of national identity emerged in a new light in post-unification Germany. By the mid-1980s the relation of German identity to the historical events of the Holocaust had already arisen in the context of the Historians’ Debate, but the shifting contours of the national “imagined community” began once again to alter individual and collective memory after 1990.12 Those who remembered how nationalism enflamed Nazi dreams of domination were increasingly alarmed by reinvigorated displays of German identity: the national anthem, the national flag, and new policies privileging Germans resettled from the former Soviet Union over asylum-seekers from other parts of the world. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued forcefully for a “post-conventional” German identity, that is, a non-national identity based on universal principles of the Enlightenment rather than on the particularism of the nation-state.13 Echoing Adorno’s early judgment that the catastrophe of the Holocaust throws into question the entirety of German cultural tradition, he suggested that any collective identity in Germany should be anchored in the consciousness of Auschwitz, the open wound that keeps alive both the memory of the Holocaust’s victims and the need for a transformative culture of atonement.14 Others rejected the notion of non-national German identity, insisting that the twelve-year history of the Third Reich might cripple but could not erase the entire German past. Equally indebted to Adorno, a writer like Martin Walser views the Holocaust as “unmasterable,” an event so excessive in its violence that it allows no epistemological grounding for meaning and therefore for many Germans has become dissociated from their sense of identity and from the idea of the German nation in whose name it was perpetrated.15 This polarization of German identity discourse around issues of victims and perpetrators replicates the divided screens of collective memory into official and popular modes of commemoration or public

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ritual, on the one hand, and family recollections, on the other. Resisting the tendency to equate collective memory with the notion of a collective subject or agent, Reinhard Koselleck coined the term “negatives Gedächtnis” (negative memory) to differentiate personal experience from secondary memories, especially those maintained as public efforts to remember and educate about perpetrator groups and their crimes.16 Examples in Berlin include sites like “Topographie des Terrors” (The Topography of Terror), commemorating the headquarters and torture chambers of the Gestapo; “Haus der Wannseekonferenz” (House of the Wannsee Conference), where Hitler’s decision to liquidate the Jews of Europe was made; and the Holocaust Memorial. This raises the question, however, of whether institutions and the state, by assuming the responsibility for public displays, also relieves individuals and families of the burden of personally recognizing and dealing with guilt. In a similar vein, Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall found in their empirical sociological study Opa war kein Nazi (Grandpa Was No Nazi) that family narratives about the Third Reich have invented oral fictions over three generations that produce a parallel structure of cognitive knowledge (about the historical events), on the one hand, and emotional memory (about relatives’ presumed victimization or even courageous acts of resistance against the Nazis), on the other.17 In short, the process of screening out historical knowledge from emotional memory constitutes generational identity.

German Suffering and the Changing Landscape of German Film There are at least four factors that have altered the projection screens we use for representing this historical period. First, as the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust recede into the past, our relationship to them has grown more complicated. Witnesses pass away, and oral narratives and memoirs of lived experience are displaced by historical scholarship and mediated stories. The end of the Cold War, with its binary, polarized structures of remembering, has opened a space in which “other” national and ethnic memories of the war, especially in Eastern Europe, begin to challenge established narratives. At the same time the migrant communities inside Germany — the Turks, Russians, Poles, Italians, and others — are seeking to be recognized and to negotiate their claims to cultural memory in an ever-more-complex mapping of local heritage. Second, media technology is transforming the relationship to the past. The Internet enables unprecedented access to archival resources, while also increasing the danger of forgetting against the backdrop of a flood of available information. The automation of memory through computer

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databanks allows for the storage and retrieval of “knowledge,” but the choice of what to remember becomes increasingly difficult. Similarly, new media and traditional screen media like the cinema and television are becoming reservoirs for our very image of the past, in a literal sense as the source of the images that dominate our imagination. Third, the millennial turn in the year 2000 and the events of 9/11 catalyzed the fundamental sense of crisis that quickly followed the initial euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall. When times are perceived to be problematic, memories are more likely to be activated, and as orientation is disrupted, the dynamics of remembering the past intensify. Finally, poststructuralist and postmodern theories have taught us that “the past” is constituted by signifying practices and media-specific representations and that historiography is a constructed narrative, not a given set of stable truths. Within the context of these discursive and generational shifts this volume examines postwar media representations of the Second World War and its aftermath, particularly the recent avalanche of films and television programming looking at stories of German wartime suffering. In films such as Dennis Gansel’s NaPolA (Before the Fall) and Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse (both 2003), Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Oscar-nominated Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) and Max Färberböck’s Anonyma — Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, 2008), audiences are offered stories of individual heroism and suffering amid the violence of war and its aftermath. Even more noticeable, public television broadcasters in recent years have commissioned a wave of miniseries, invariably presented to viewers as home-grown “event movies,” in the tradition of Chomsky and Green’s 1978 US hit Holocaust, from Die Flucht (March of Millions, ZDF, 2004) and Dresden (ZDF, 2006) to Die Gustloff (Ship of No Return: The Last Voyage of the Gustloff, ZDF, 2008). In their marketing and their media reception the films and television series are repeatedly said to have taken up and overcome a decades-old taboo topic for German filmmakers, and also to have made a radical break with the work of the New German Cinema of the 1970s as well as the antifascist “classicism” of the East German DEFA studios. Yet when one probes the history of German postwar film, it becomes clear that the representation of suffering caused by war has a long tradition on Germany’s divided screens. Indeed, it has never been “taboo.” Nonetheless, while filmmakers have more often than not offered images of Germans as victims, the shifting social and ideological contexts have seen similar images recontextualized to engage the dominant discourses of the day. The process of recontextualization is of particular interest to the contributors to this volume, as they explore how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both postwar German states and the now unified nation have attempted to face the trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world.

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Screening War in Germany The essays presented here address the issues raised above from four interlinked perspectives. In Part 1, “Hidden Screens,” Jennifer Kapczynski revisits the 1950s war film, which critics regularly cite as evidence for West Germany’s efforts to rehabilitate the soldier and recuperate male authority in the context of remilitarization within the Atlantic Alliance and political restoration. Paying close attention to differences and conflicts among the male soldiers in these films, she concludes that the new heroes, whose wounds are psychological rather than physical, represent compromise formations. Marked by damaged agency, they are led rather than leading; they are soft rather than hard; they retreat rather than advance. By acknowledging the complexity of the 1950s war film, Kapczynski shows how this new soldier hero disavows a discredited tradition and becomes an “armchair warrior.” If Kapczynski reveals the hidden agenda of the postwar soldier hero, David Clarke exposes the hidden appeal of passive and active Christian resisters who became Nazi victims. Surveying the thin but constant thread of such film figures from the 1950s into the new millennium, he explains how the Christian imagery of martyrdom is variously called upon to articulate collective memories of guilt and redemption. West German features of the 1950s emphasize Christianity’s centrality to German cultural identity, a system of values that may not always have sufficed to motivate active resistance but that remained intact during the Nazi reign and continued to endure against the new, godless threat of Soviet Communism in the Cold War. A more suspicious view of religion as complicit in the nation’s authoritarian traditions emerged in the New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, while in post-unification Germany the Christian martyr as film hero/victim revitalizes patterns from the 1950s by transforming the figure into a full-fledged national martyr whose religious convictions function as a shorthand for democratic, liberal values to which any spectator can subscribe, even the non-religious. Manuel Köppen lays bare the hidden Holocaust discourse in a wave of popular West German films about the Third Reich produced in the second half of the 1950s. Contrary to the received wisdom that the persecution of the Jews was repressed in postwar West Germany, he provides compelling evidence that allusions to genocide and concentration camps in fact played an important role in the rhetorical strategy of figuring anti-Nazi resistance as a moral act. From this perspective Jewish victims appear in these films, even if only episodically or in subplots, as a stand-in for the German as a victim of collective fate and as a justification for the suffering of the Germans. Part 2, “Projection Screens,” broadens the corpus of films to include Austrian and East German features while focusing attention on cinematic strategies of identification, disavowal, and mourning. Erica Carter takes an oblique approach to (German) suffering by considering the phenomenally

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successful Sissi trilogy, starring Romy Schneider in the role of the Empress of Austria, as a document of imperial nostalgia and as a melancholic expression of imperial territorial loss. The historical costume drama’s melodramatic aesthetic coupled with the film’s Biedermeier visual conventions resonated with both German and Austrian audiences, who were subject to the postwar shock of loss and the subsequent search for mechanisms of defense and disavowal in the face of mastering memories of suffering and victimhood. Sabine Hake reconsiders 1960s films by two of East Germany’s most celebrated directors, Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf, who participated in deconstructing the conventional antifascist master narrative of heroic resistance. By examining how a younger generation of filmmakers combined the antifascist with the war narrative, she reveals in their aesthetic strategies an unusual and powerful attachment to the position of victimhood and a new, empathetic identification with suffering and loss. In this respect their films project an aura of mourning and melancholy through the crisis of the antifascist hero while seeking still to produce a socialist imaginary. Tim Bergfelder discusses another cause for mourning and melancholy, tracing postwar stories of expulsion and traumatic loss related to the former eastern regions that were part of the German Reich. Similar to the appeal of Sissi’s imperial loss, the stories of expellees’ displacement aimed at integrating a cohesive postwar community within the new borders of “Heimat.” The end of the Cold War transformed the politically extinct regions and the culturally forgotten landscapes in the East into projection screens for a nostalgia that articulates or mediates a response to the present. Bergfelder identifies in the documentary films of Volker Koepp a “softer” kind of melancholy resuscitated by this nostalgic loss that potentially contributes to a positive form of contemporary memory work through its investment in processes of fantasy, desire, and identification. In Part 3, “Display Screens,” Rachel Palfreyman analyzes another dimension of lost Heimat, the representation of generational rupture in the popular 1950s Heimat film and its later reincarnations. Heimat narratives often put on display dysfunctional families and victims of domestic abuse as allegories of complex historical legacies, in this case not the physical suffering of war but rather the experience and transfer of guilt with its traumatic effects on family relations. As Palfreyman demonstrates, Heimat is a protean concept, and its genre conventions continue even into the new millennium to provide a model for negotiating various levels of identity: national, generational, familial, and personal. In the previous section, Hake’s contribution points to the affective registers of mourning and melancholy that accompanied the crisis of antifascist heroism in 1960s DEFA films. Daniela Berghahn brings to light a further shift in DEFA films of the 1970s and 1980s. She focuses on two key films that emotionalize the representation of antifascist resistance by foregrounding female protagonists in what had been defined as a male genre and

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by relocating the conflict from the realm of collective political pathos to the private passions of romantic couples. Privileging the personal over the political, these later antifascist narratives display scenes of individual grief and suffering, implying that not only ideology but also feelings are central to the construction of socialist identity. Brad Prager reflects on strategies of audience identification that explain how depictions of suffering function in contemporary heritage films about German perpetration. Acknowledging the exhaustion of paradigms that engage the affects of generosity, romantic attraction, or pity toward Jewish victims, Prager sees filmmakers turning to non-Jewish protagonists who share in the suffering of victims, but that suffering is now embedded in a Christian iconography of martyrdom. Like Clarke, he regards the display of wartime suffering as a means to construct national narratives based on a relationship to the wounds of (past) violence. In Part 4, “Split Screens,” the three contributors assess alternative approaches to representations of German suffering. Like Prager, John Davidson is concerned with modes of audience identification. Eberhard Fechner’s television documentaries about the Third Reich, produced in the 1970s and 1980s, attempt to shift the portrayal of historical suffering away from representations of an internal subjective state to a media-specific temporal and spatial constellation inherent in television aesthetics. Unlike Volker Koepp, who offers layered reflections on space, time, and memory, Fechner employs “eyewitness testimony” but then intervenes and contextualizes their telling, splitting his witnesses’ “presence” now from their memories of “back then.” Indeed, television emerges in his documentaries as the medium whose intrinsic properties most resemble the very operation of “cultural memory.” Johannes von Moltke’s point of departure is the split between the nature of war as an untotalizable totality and as a ubiquitous, emotionally charged plot. The proliferating war stories in contemporary “event-television” elicit the spectators’ identification with innocent, suffering victims by means of melodramatic dramatization. Alexander Kluge, who also draws on the inexhaustible repository of historical affect associated with war, dissociates feelings from clearly demarcated subject positions to create a sense of emotional but affectively charged disorientation. His poetics of emotions counters the conventional structure of melodrama that characterizes so many of the films discussed in this volume by treating feelings as autonomous participants in the public sphere. Finally, as Seán Allan argues, Dani Levy, who belongs to the generation of filmmakers that emerged in the 1990s, also seeks a counteraesthetic to the melodramatic presentation of victimhood and the realist conventions of pseudo-historical authenticity. A Swiss-born self-identified Jew, Levy uses irreverent and often “politically incorrect” comedy to split off categories of national identity and (Jewish) victimhood from a contemporary understanding of moral agency. His anti-essentialist concept of

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identity as “performance” destabilizes the perpetrator/victim opposition and substitutes for it a position from which the contradictions and absurdities of conventional social structures can be exposed. The general consensus that the German past will never be adequately “bewältigt” (dealt with) because of the extreme nature of its historical and moral guilt does not contradict the fact that postwar Germany’s own discourse on Vergangenheitsbewältigung has in some ways become the model for efforts of international institutions to think about guilt in the context of tribunals and truth commissions. Memory is inevitably constructed from a contemporary perspective, and the struggle over the “right” way to remember is one that shapes both cultural discourses and political legitimacy. In recent times the flood of media and mediated images of the past has triggered a mini-boom in critical memory studies and generated new strategies of remembering as well as insistent questions about who is remembering what. The inflation of oral histories and “private” memories enriches the archive with a proliferation of different stories, but the swelling archive also challenges the epistemological privilege of professional historiography and its preference for coherent, linear explanations. The shifting definition of victims and victimization belies the established discourse of contrition, while at the same time various groups vie for recognition of their victim status. Clearly, mnemonic practices are ideological activities of individuals and groups who engage in the production of meaning. These practices are themselves historical in nature, subject to counternarratives, realignments in social and political relations, and modifications in dominant discourses. Screening War focuses on phases, generations, continuities, and ruptures within the field of memory construction on film. The power of past events, persons, images, and narratives to generate new stories and reflections on the present marks the proverbial persistence of memory, and the essays assembled here show how this kind of memory is put to public use onscreen and offscreen in the continuing process of shaping and forgetting the past.

Notes 1

Winfried G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999; repr., Munich: Hanser, 2001); Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002); Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Munich: Propyläen, 2002); and “Deutsche als Opfer,” Der Spiegel, 23 Mar., 30 Mar., 8 Apr., and 15 Apr. 2002. 2

Robert G. Moeller, “Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), 83–109; here 85. For a discussion of the relationship between politics and constructions of German victimhood, see Graham Jackman, “Introduction,”

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13

German Life and Letters 57.4 (2004): 343–56; and Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 3

Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 3:47–69.

4

Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1946); Norbert Frei lays out the way in which the discourse of collective guilt was constructed for the “German imaginary.” See “Von deutscher Erfindungskraft,” in Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen (Munich: Beck, 2005), 145–56. 5

For further discussion see Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor, “Gedanken über die Repräsentation und Rezeption des Holocaust am Beispiel des Tagebuchs der Anne Frank,” in Kulturelle Repräsentationen des Holocaust in Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn, Jürgen Fohrmann, and Helmut J. Schneider (New York: Lang, 2002), 23–41. 6

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963); the translation into German appeared the same year in the Munich Piper Verlag.

7

For details of the debate surrounding Hochhuth’s play see Jan Berg, Hochhuths “Stellvertreter” und die “Stellvetreter”-Debatte (Kronberg: Skriptor, 1977). 8

Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967).

9

Stefan Aust, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Munich: Goldmann, 1990), 60.

10

See Michael E. Geisler, “The Disposal of Memory: Fascism and the Holocaust on West German Television,” in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, ed. Bruce Murray and Christopher Wickham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992), 220–60; here 235. 11

Bill Niven, “Introduction: German Victimhood at the Turn of the Millennium,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–25; here 4. 12

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991; repr., London and New York: Verso, 1996). 13

Jürgen Habermas, “Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität,” in Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 632–59. 14

See Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft” (1951), in Gesammelte Schriften 10/1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 11–30. 15

Walser argued this position more and more distinctly in the course of the 1980s and 1990s and distilled it into his controversial speech on the occasion of receiving the Peace Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair on 11 October 1998: Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998). For an elaborated discussion of Habermas’s and Walser’s views on German national identity, see A. Dirk Moses, “The Non-German German and the German German:

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Dilemmas of Identity after the Holocaust,” New German Critique 34 (2007): 45–94, esp. 61–80. 16

Reinhard Koselleck, “Formen und Traditionen des negativen Gedächtnisses,” in Verbrechen erinnern: Die Auseinandersetzungen mit Holocaust und Völkermord, ed. Volkhard Knigge und Norbert Frei (Munich: Beck, 2002), 21–32. 17

Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall, Opa war kein Nazi: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Famliengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 48.

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I. Hidden Screens: Soldiers, Martyrs, Innocent German Victims

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1: Armchair Warriors: Heroic Postures in the West German War Film Jennifer M. Kapczynski

Recuperating the German Soldier

O

11 AUGUST 1950 a carefully selected commission composed of former German Wehrmacht officers convened at the behest of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. They were charged with drafting a position paper on the possibilities for German rearmament — a subject that had been discussed in political circles since the earliest days of the Federal Republic but had gained new international support through the events of the Korean War. What emerged from the meeting was the so-called “Himmeroder Memorandum,” a top-secret document that outlined in roughly forty pages a series of political and psychological rationales for the restoration of the German military. The memo served as a foundational text for the German army, not only for its detailed discussions of military structure and planning, but also for its articulation of a new concept of soldiering. At the forefront of this latter effort was the young Wolf Graf von Baudissin, who would become a leading figure in the West German effort to rethink the German soldier’s function. During the Himmeroder discussions, Baudissin took the occasion to push for two concepts that would eventually define the ideal Bundeswehr participant: the principles of “innere Führung” (inner guidance) and “der Staatsbürger in Uniform” (the citizen in uniform).1 Both notions were meant to aid in the construction of a new form of German military, no longer reliant upon a Prussian code of absolute obedience and instead promoting a more democratic institution compatible with the preservation of civilian liberties. The memorandum pursued a patently missionary project. In order to influence Germans’ negative perceptions regarding national defense, the study advised that the Federal Republic and its Western allies should take as its first priority a comprehensive project for the “rehabilitation of the German soldier.”2 Many of the suggestions offered by the commission appear to the present-day observer as part of an obvious effort to retouch the past and foster the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht,” notably the release N

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JENNIFER M. KAPCZYNSKI

of Germans convicted of crimes against humanity, as long as they had acted under orders and not violated laws preexisting the National Socialist state, and the cessation of all official disparagement of Wehrmacht soldiers including those drafted into the Waffen-SS. Without downplaying the deeply troubling implications of these policies and the continuities in military hierarchy before and after 1945 to which they speak, it is important to note that the tract also illuminates key areas of transformation in postwar thinking about the German military. That is, the memo tells us as much about change as it does about tradition. The Himmeroder document records a sense not only that the German soldier’s reputation has fallen into such disrepair that only an international effort can fix it, but also that the fix will require fundamental shifts in the philosophy of soldiering that had framed German military life until the defeat. Recuperation of the German soldier would come about, in other words, not simply through a strategy to change perceptions of the German soldier but also through changes in the German soldier himself, through a new emphasis upon a personal, civic code of conduct that would not just complement but also potentially compete with traditional military hierarchies. This process of rehabilitating the soldier unfolded in a cultural moment more broadly concerned with the notion of German recuperation. As historian Frank Biess has shown, the 1950s reception of returning POWs represented part of a larger project to recuperate German masculinity. This idea is seconded by the work of scholars such as Erica Carter, Dagmar Herzog, Elizabeth Heinemann, and Atina Grossmann, who each have demonstrated that the negotiation of postwar gender roles — from the politics of consumption to conception — was central to the work of formulating a vision of postwar West German recovery.3 My own research on German cultural production of the immediate postwar years identifies a wide-scale discourse of national regeneration that cast National Socialism as a disease of collective proportion and offered palliatives in its aftermath. Much of the writing on West German cinema of the 1950s has similarly focused on the question of rehabilitation, as scholars have traced the return of heroic masculinity to the era’s movie screens. Critic Manfred Barthel, for one, finds postwar cinema of the FRG wholly preoccupied with “four articles of men’s clothing . . . : the Catholic priest’s frock; the doctor’s white coat; the German soldier’s uniform (type of weapon was immaterial); and the detective’s trench coat.”4 At the same time, studies of 1950s cinema have until recently been dominated by what Carter (borrowing from Foucault) dubs the “repressive hypothesis.”5 This model has largely been driven by the work of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The Inability to Mourn, 1967) and was shored up by 1960s film critics who saw postwar cinema as little more than a continuation of fascist film politics, because it overlooked its own complicity in National Socialism and produced films that avoided direct

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confrontation with the recent past. In the process, 1950s West German film culture has been condemned alternately as a cinema of continuity and one of amnesia. As the growing body of work on the interconnections between German culture before and after 1945 tells us, continuity does not connote stasis. In a roundtable discussion on the subject of continuity in the German military from 1871 to 1945, historian John Röhl observes that “continuity doesn’t mean sameness; it means development along a more or less straight line.”6 If we understand continuity as a necessarily imperfect process of cultural transmission or adaptation, the question then becomes: Which aspects of a discourse survive, and which are subject to renewal or rejection? In an effort to open up for further reflection the question of continuity in the construction of heroic masculinity after 1945, this article aims to examine the little fissures in the line of tradition. It takes as its central question not whether postwar war films attempt to recuperate the German soldier but rather how: that is, what are the conditions of possibility for militarized heroism after 1945? For if one presumes that heroism does stage a comeback on the West German screen — and clearly the corpus of films created in the 1950s suggests that there is every reason to do so — the interesting questions become: What does that hero look like? How does he relate to the sorts of heroic figures offered up by National Socialist cinema? And how does the 1950s cinema construct the non-heroic? This article proposes that 1950s West German war films register a subtle but important shift in the representation of the postwar hero. This necessitates not only an engagement with the films themselves but also a reexamination of some of the persistent presumptions about 1950s cinema. In particular, it demands reexamination of the position advanced by the directorial rebels of 1960s and 1970s, who declared that “Papa’s Kino” was dead, and in the process found 1950s cinema guilty of perpetuating the very sort of male heroism and agency valorized in National Socialist filmmaking. To be sure, it is not difficult to find war films made during the 1950s that offer a straightforward glorification of the German Wehrmacht, a trend criticized sharply by many contemporary observers.7 Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Der Stern von Afrika (The Star of Africa, 1957) and Harald Reinl’s Die grünen Teufel von Monte Cassino (The Green Devils of Monte Cassino, 1958) come to mind, although even these films, which on their surface seem to represent a largely unbroken continuity with the National Socialist construction of the soldier, show signs of adaptation to the postwar discourse of antimilitarism. But to stop the investigation at this point is to lose sight of the greater complexity of the war-film genre in this period. In fact, close examination reveals that a significant number of 1950s war films offer compromise formations in their construction of male

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heroes — presenting men who do not so much lead as they are led, men who are marked by a damaged agency. In the process, these films privilege a particular form of male woundedness. While few warriors in West German war films sustain actual physical injuries — indeed, these films are strikingly bloodless — they frequently reference the psychic toll of war and, more broadly, they exhibit a characteristic failure to match traditional models of masculine soldiering. These male protagonists reject both politics and military regulations and are presented as admirable precisely for their anti-ideological behavior. They do not display the classic canon of what Carol Cohn terms “‘masculine’ emotions — such as feelings of aggression, competition, macho pride and swagger,” but rather dismiss notions of heroic glory altogether.8 Perhaps more importantly, these “wounded men” embrace a general posture of reluctance, not only casting doubt on the German military enterprise but also favoring strategies of retreat rather than advance and generally appearing as a “soft” alternative to their commanding officers. Taken together, these various shades of refusal suggest that the classic “warrior pose,” defined by physical and psychic hardness, has become untenable in the postwar moment. In its stead, these films put forth a new model of male heroism predicated upon the very failure to fulfill a traditional but bygone heroic ideal. To be sure, there can be no doubt that this woundedness constitutes a central strand of the postwar discourse of the German soldier as victim rather than perpetrator. It also played a key role in the work of these films to construct the Wehrmacht as an unblemished, even anti-authoritarian institution — in direct contrast to the National Socialists, who are systematically cast in 1950s war films as the real enemy. Fostering a revised “stab-in-the back” myth, these films deny the Wehrmacht’s role in wartime atrocities, while simultaneously suggesting, as Manuel Köppen notes in his contribution to this volume, that the National Socialist leadership ruined a “perfectly good war” by allowing ideological interests to outweigh strategic concerns. Although these films admit to the presence of some Nazis among the military ranks, West German war films as a rule treat these men as bad apples, that is, as stand-ins for the pernicious influence of fascism, which is cast as having brought down a German military culture otherwise represented in highly positive terms. At least as important, however, is the manner in which the German soldier’s vulnerability — his softness rather than hardness, his refusal and reluctance rather than fighting spirit — appears frequently in these films as the precondition for the development of a new model of postwar masculinity. The films of the early Federal Republic foreground a tempered masculinity, privileging male figures that are borne along by history rather than actively shaping it. The new hero thus frequently appears not as the man who takes charge but rather as the one who sits back or even walks away altogether. Even when he fights valiantly, he does so largely in defense.9 He

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thus stands in distinct opposition to the male enemy constructed in these films: the National Socialist officer. It is in this figure that West German war movies routinely locate the violence of war. The Nazi men, whether devoted ideologues or party members out of opportunism, are the only figures in these films to exhibit any desire for bloodshed, and they universally bear the blame for leading the German soldier to the slaughter. However, their ideological Härte (hardness) is matched in these films by damning physical and psychological weakness. Their violence and cruelty read as a crass form of compensation intended to disguise these inadequacies, while their well-tempered counterparts evince an air of appealing ease. The following pages offer a closer look at this complementary strategy — of praise for male softness, on the one hand, and critique of hypertrophic hardness, on the other — with a particular emphasis on the case of the most successful 1950s war film series, Paul May’s trilogy 08/15.

Praise for the “Schlappschwanz” The emergence of a new postwar hero can be traced at least as far back as 1946, to the first film produced after the German defeat, Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), a work centrally concerned with the knotty questions of German guilt, suffering, and the possibility of male redemption — and a film that has more in common with the 1950s war films than is generally realized, not least for the ways in which it sets forth a model masculinity predicated upon failure.10 It tells the story of Hans Mertens (Ernst Borchert), a surgeon drafted into military service who, having survived the war, now suffers from traumatic flashbacks about his own failure to stop his former commander from ordering a massacre of civilians. Hans is contrasted in the film with his ebullient former commander, Captain Brückner (Arno Paulsen). Brückner has survived the war a little too well — cued throughout the film by the smug smile and potbelly that he sports, and the real glass in his windows. Although Brückner appears on the surface to be the very picture of postwar well-being — he has returned to a intact family and his business is booming — the film characterizes Brückner’s health as highly suspect and casts Hans’s suffering as a condition that, while requiring remedy, nevertheless also serves as a marker of his eligibility for the role of new German man. Whereas the unrepentant Brückner is so healthy that he is beyond curing, Hans may still be won over to the “kingdom of the well” — not in spite of, but rather because of the fact that he was, as Brückner puts it, “ein hundsmiserabler Soldat” (a lousy soldier).11 Hans’s trauma serves as a positive index of his sensitivity to the horrors of war, and his very susceptibility identifies him as a worthy candidate for the formation a new, anti-fascist German society.12 Hans’s psychic devastation, in other words, is the price of entry into the postwar democratic order.

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In 1950s war films one finds a similar emphasis upon the merits of failure, or what I have termed here “Praise for the Schlappschwanz” — a term literally meaning “limp dick,” but perhaps best translated as “wuss” or “wimp.” Consider the case of Falk Harnack’s 1958 Unruhige Nacht (The Restless Night). The film centers on a Wehrmacht priest, Father Brunner (played by Bernhard Wicki), who receives orders to travel to a German military prison in order to counsel a condemned man on the eve of his execution — the young Fedor Baranowski, convicted of passing military secrets and then going AWOL. Hansjörg Felmy appears in the role of Baranowski, a detail worth noting, since he played characters similarly defeated by National Socialist wartime politics in other films of the period.13 Baranowski’s nemesis is the unrelenting ideologue Major Kartuschke, played by Werner Peters. Peters more than once appeared in the role of the Nazi petty official, and his round face and figure moreover hew to the postwar iconography of the middleman perpetrator (in type, strikingly similar to Arno Paulsen, with his round face, balding pate, and prominent paunch). His onscreen presence serves as a cipher for the regime’s bureaucratic cruelty, hypocrisy, and excess.14 This is best captured in a scene in which Major Kartuschke summons Brunner to justify the harsh sentence for Baranowski: “Die Vorsehung kann an diesem Kampf, wo es ums große Ganze geht, keine Schlappschwänze gebrauchen” (Everything is at stake in this fight — the future has no use for wimps.)15 The accusation of “limpness” pertains principally to Baranowski’s lack of enthusiasm for the war effort, and as such, it becomes part of the larger positive evaluation of his character. But it also prompts a moment of critical reflection regarding the ideal of militarized Härte that Kartuschke represents. Through the figure of Kartuschke the film aligns hardness not with bravery or fortitude but rather with a merciless and sadistic rigidity, and in the process the film suggests that perhaps softness represents the real virtue. In practice, of course, these films make a point of demonstrating that the so-called Schlappschwänze are never that schlapp after all, while those officers who most demand hardness are generally cowards. Schlappschwänze invariably perform valiantly when the situation calls for it, and more often than not they also “get the girl.” In Unruhige Nacht, for example, we see Baranowski bravely attempt to evade capture, dashing across an open field in the middle of a bomb attack. But Harnack’s film is also careful to underscore the emotional rather than ideological source of his inspiration in fleeing the military. Baranowski is driven by a combination of erotic and paternal sentiment, aroused when he falls in love with a beautiful Russian peasant, Ljuba, and her young son. This move not only situates the war in the highly personal terms of melodrama and avoids the messy terrain of politics, but also feeds into a broader discourse operative in the 1950s that sought redemption for German men as fathers.16 As is typical in these films, Baranowski’s softness in the face of the enemy — his

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weakness for this woman and her child — earns him his bona fides as a model subject. Baranowski, perhaps predictably, does not survive the film: in a powerful closing sequence, Brunner must watch as the young man is executed by firing squad. Brunner, whose own soul-searching over the execution, much like Hans Mertens in Die Mörder sind unter uns, establishes his goodness and qualifies him as an exemplary postwar man, is left to carry on in Baranowski’s place. The film ends as the priest walks across a field of white military crosses in search of Ljuba. Inspired by Baranowski’s example, he chooses to be a “Mensch” and deliver the dead man’s parting letter to his lover. While Unruhige Nacht frames Baranowski and Brunner as heroic figures, it identifies the source of their heroism not as an outgrowth of their allegiance to the military order, but rather by the way in which their specific form of softness brings them out of alignment with the surrounding world of fascist rigidity. Nor is Harnack’s film the only one to bandy about the term Schlappschwanz. Indeed, it comes to represent something of a running motif in 1950s war films. In Frank Wisbar’s Haie und kleine Fische (Sharks and Little Fish, 1957), the gruff U-Boot captain applies the label to his men whenever he is dissatisfied with their performance. Typically, Wisbar’s film demonstrates that even (or perhaps especially) Schlappschwänze commit heroic acts, while also redeeming the ambivalent figure of the U-Boot captain when he sacrifices his own life to save his men. Yet the film does not ultimately privilege the image of the hard soldier. The captain’s counterpart and the movie’s real hero, Teichmann (again, Hansjörg Felmy), matures through the course of the film, but he remains to the end a sensitive rebel, railing against the excesses of the Nazi “sharks” and suffering acutely at the loss of his comrades. Teichmann’s traumas briefly tempt him to give up on life altogether, and his closest friend in the film actually does commit suicide. While this despair marks these men as victimized by Nazi Germany, it also highlights their worthiness for contemporary admiration. Their heroism is tied not so much to their bravery in uniform as to their disgust for the war itself, their vocal rejection of National Socialism, and their very propensity to suffer. Perhaps no work better exemplifies the postwar elevation of this particular form of male woundedness than the wildly popular 08/15 trilogy, based on the eponymous serial novel by Hans Hellmut Kirst, directed by Paul May, and released in 1954 and 1955 — during the same span of years in which West Germany was preparing its rearmament and entry into NATO. The series divides the war into three phases, each of which accords to a key soldierly experience: training, battle, and homecoming. The first of these, 08/15: In der Kaserne (At the Barracks), emphasizes the process of making ordinary men into soldiers. Through its two male leads, the fim offers a calculated study in contrasts, presenting two

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possible alternatives to fascist masculinity in the figures of Private Asch (Joachim Fuchsberger), a dashing, wise-cracking prankster who disdains military culture despite a long family tradition of service, and Gunner Vierbein (Paul Bösiger), the quintessential softie, who prefers literature and classical music to the rough life of the recruit. While the two might be construed as polar opposites, their characters must be understood in relationship to a third form of dominant masculinity in the film: that represented by the sadistic training-camp staff, who delight in finding new ways to punish their charges, and who disguise their own inadequacies through crassly exaggerated displays of male prowess. The opening of 08/15 encapsulates beautifully this triangulated structure. The film begins with a strangely prescient piece of opening narration about the semiotics of walls. This is accompanied by various illustrative shots, including one image of a fence topped with barbed wire that recalls concentration-camp architecture, subtly introducing the idea that the soldiers contained within the camp are themselves victims of National Socialism (an association made all the simpler because the series elides mention of those groups actually persecuted by the regime). The camera then cranes up and over the exterior boundary of the training academy. Once over the wall, the camera captures a group of recruits running in the distance and then continues its downward track to rest at knee-level, its lens trained on the gravel of the exercise grounds. This literal base perspective reveals the military experience through the lowly foot soldier’s eyes. A seamless fade introduces the second shot, which begins at the same low level but tilts up, coming to rest as a pair of heavy, black leather boots occupies the center of the frame. The outdoor lighting is stark, so the wearer’s body casts a sharp dark shadow, accentuating the imposing nature of his figure and further recalling the visual iconography of fascism synthesized by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and widely, if not always universally, disseminated by Nazi propaganda in the era’s entertainment cinema. Although the face of the man in boots is not yet revealed, we hear him bark a series of orders to the recruits before him: Attention! At ease! A subsequent shot shows the rote scissoring of their legs as they keep time with his commands. The scene’s fourth shot finally exposes the giver of the orders: from an extreme low-angle close-up, the camera reveals in grotesque detail the sweaty, fleshy visage of Sergeant Schulz (played by Emmerich Schrenk), soon to be revealed as one of the film’s central villains. He appears in marked contrast to the men under his command, particularly Vierbein and Asch. While the longer scene reveals Vierbein as unkempt and generally miserable, his counterpart Asch, although he deftly assumes the pose of the erect soldier, clearly does so with a sense of charade and always reverts back to his usual relaxed and insolent stance. Although Asch is never identified with the Americans — indeed, in the final film of the

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Fig. 1.1. The face of fascist masculinity is strained in 08/15 (1954). DVD capture.

Fig. 1.2. The new postwar hero appears at ease in 08/15 (1954). DVD capture.

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trilogy, the Americans appear to be nearly as dangerous a foe as the SS — his slouching and sarcastic ways align him with popular contemporary images of the GI. Subtly, the film suggests that he represents a physical and philosophical posture that ultimately will defeat the ramrod authoritarian tradition within the German army.17 These contrasts in strategies of representation and performance distinguish the various masculinities on display, while clearly privileging those that deviate from the ideal of militarized hardness. In the figures of Asch and Vierbein we find two versions of the new hero type: men who look and act in a manner out of step with the military hierarchy, and who by disposition and constitution will never wholly fall in line. Schulz, on the other hand, stands in for an outdated and excessively rigid conception of soldiering, and his figure serves throughout this scene and the remainder of the film as a locus of repugnant excess. His perspiration, stupid cruelty, and propensity for excessive drunkenness are matched only by that of his counterparts in the academy administration — those representing the mid-level, bureaucratic officer class so commonly singled out for censure in postwar war narratives. This unflattering portrait harks back to Weimar-era war films that emphasized the fraught divide between the front line and the command post, but after 1945 this divide is invested with an acutely ideological dimension: 08/15 frequently highlights the swastika adorning Schulz’s chest, for example. One cannot always easily lump Schulz together with the “real” Nazis that people the series, such as the two cold-blooded SS-men who become the primary antagonists in the final film — Schulz is frequently held up as a figure of fun, and his cruel deeds are made to pale in the light of the greater evil that the Nazi regime represents. In this respect 08/15 resembles certain American films made during the early days of the Second World War, which had not settled on a uniform depiction for its German characters (such as Raoul Walsh’s Desperate Journey [1942], in which the enemy appears alternately as buffoonish and monstrous). Similarly, 08/15 declines to vilify outright the military tradition with which Schulz is associated, and while the film consistently lampoons him as a classic “fellow traveler,” it also, in typical fashion, sets the Wehrmacht as an institution apart from and above the National Socialist regime. Yet the trilogy is careful to associate Schulz’s particular form of rigidity and sexual inadequacy with a segment of military culture complicit in Nazi politics. Not coincidentally, the second film of the trilogy shows Schulz literally in bed with National Socialism: a phone call from his commanding officer finds him asleep, turned away from the figure of his voluptuous wife and instead curled up with a copy of the National Socialist newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. The appeal of the Schlappschwanz figure — Vierbein is consistently dubbed a “Würstchen” or “weenie” by his impatient commander —

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becomes evident in the scenes immediately following the opening sequence. After morning exercises Schulz offers Vierbein a choice: clean the latrines or help Mrs. Schulz to beat rugs. Choosing the latter, Vierbein stumbles into the lair of the ever-ready Lore, played memorably by Helen Vita as a very bored and oversexed Hausfrau. Intercut with the scene of Lore’s attempts at seducing the naive Vierbein, a parallel sequence shows Schulz and one of his lackeys ridiculing Vierbein as “not a real man,” because he is a rotten soldier and even likes to read. When Asch reminds Schulz that women like that sort of thing, the sergeant rushes home to discover that Lore has just lured Vierbein onto the sofa with compliments about his lovely, delicate hands. To wit: soft is sexy. While this plays into a running joke about Schulz as the perpetual cuckold, the contrast further aligns Schulz with a general state of coarseness, while Vierbein — the would-be pianist, reader, and writer of love letters — stands in for a gentle, highly desirable form of cultivation that stands no chance against the brutality of Nazi masculinity. The second film of the series will unveil a partially transformed Vierbein: he successfully carries out a secret mission to procure new radio equipment, and he sports a medal on his chest awarded for single-handedly destroying several Russian tanks. Even Schulz none-too-subtly notes that he has gone from a “weenie” to a “Kanone” (canon). But Vierbein suffers from traumatic memories and hallucinations as a result of his war experiences, at one point even imagining that the new recruits have become walking skeletons — a trope familiar from numerous returnee texts of the post First and Second World War eras, from the writings of Ernst Toller to those of Wolfgang Borchert. He has also lost his capacity to play the piano, once the proudest link to his prewar dreams of becoming a professional musician. While Vierbein has thus succeeded by some measure as a German soldier, he has grown less rather than more enthusiastic about the war, and he has maintained a degree of psychological sensitivity inimical to surviving the war unscathed. But, of course, he does not survive: at the end of this film, he dies in a horrific assault ordered by yet another incompetent Nazi commander. As we watch while a Russian tank intentionally buries Vierbein alive in a snowy trench, we sense that he has been devoured by the larger war itself, and more specifically, that he has fallen victim to an ideology that knows no strategy, coupled with an ideal of masculinity so hardened that it destroys everything in its wake. Vierbein’s corpse is never shown. As is typical for these films, the dead appear either not at all or at a discreet and sanitary remove. Instead, what remains is Vierbein’s parting letter to his fiancée. In it he fantasizes about their future daughters — girls, because “sie ein bisschen weniger stramm stehen müssen,” that is, they are not forced to stand quite so erect.

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Against Authority Central to the German soldier’s construction as an unwilling participant in his own fate is the manner in which 1950s West German war films treat the historical record. The films evince an almost obsessive return to documentary footage, borrowing heavily from Nazi-era newsreels in order to invest their narratives with the weight of authenticity and to resurrect without critique the aesthetic memory of the Second World War. Haie und kleine Fische creates all of its battle scenes by intercutting staged and documentary footage, giving the scenes a frightening sense of immediacy, since it is not always obvious whether the on-screen crises are real or reproduced. In Der 20. Juli (The Plot to Assassinate Hitler, 1955), director Harnack utilizes dramatic footage of burning cities to underscore the terrible costs of the bombing war. And the list goes on. Carter interprets the use of documentary material in Weidenmann’s Canaris (1954) as evidence of a “repetition compulsion” that through this recycling “reproduces . . . precisely that psychic investment in fascism’s pleasures that the film sets out to repudiate.”18 While Carter is right to single out the conflict between this old footage and the new hero, and the restorative impulse it entails, this tension may be read alternately as a move temporarily to turn over the narrative reins. The switch to documentary footage in these cases becomes part of the larger project to disengage the German soldier from the war’s negative legacy, liberating him from certain tasks of storytelling and letting these archival sequences, often coupled with an anonymous voiceover, assume authorial control in his stead. Postwar war films offer numerous instances of this sort of narrative redirection. In Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor of Stalingrad, 1958), it becomes a key strategy in Géza von Radványi’s construction of the central character, Dr. Böhler (played by O. E. Hasse in a characteristic role), as a humble and unassuming hero. When, at a critical juncture, the doctor remembers the moment of his capture at the Battle of Stalingrad, the flashback sequence is “narrated” not by an interior monologue — which we might expect, since the flashback takes place from his perspective — but rather by an acoustic bit of archival material, in the form of a radio address by Adolf Hitler, delivered over blaring loudspeakers, in which the dictator boasts of his refusal to contemplate surrender. Accompanying this, however, fictional shots of the home front indicate a population anything but eager to continue fighting. Weidenmann employs a similar tactic in Der Stern von Afrika: the news that war has broken out literally interrupts the narrative flow, as the film cuts from a scene of flying ace Marseille happily boating on the Wannsee to a bombastic documentary segment that offers a stunningly agentless narrative: “Und es kam doch Krieg, und die Welt veränderte sich, so als habe sie zwei Seiten, und zeige nun die andere, dunkle, die grausame, erbarmungslose. Straßen verödeten, Häuser verbrannten, Qualmwolken

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verhängten den Himmel, Schutt, Abfall, Trümmer,” and so on. (War came, and the world changed, as though it had two faces and was now showing its other one, the dark, terrible, merciless one. Streets became desolate. Houses burned. Clouds of smoke darkened the skies, debris, waste, rubble . . . 19) While both of these samples from the archive have the effect of establishing the authenticity of the films’ larger narrative, the disconnect between image and sound — between the soldier, on the one hand, and the rhetoric of warfare, on the other — brackets off the hero from the dominant discourse of his day, so that he appears more a bystander than an agent. The 08/15 trilogy departs from the usual pattern of 1950s war films by recreating all of its battle scenes rather than making use of existing Nazi-era newsreel footage. It is thus all the more striking that the film, much like Der Stern von Afrika, makes use of an authentic radio address to bridge the transition from peace to war. It is the sole instance in which any of the three films in the series deploys documentary material, and as with Weidenmann’s film, the insertion suggests historical authenticity while carefully separating the film’s heroes from National Socialist policies of aggression. Through a deliberately imperfect overlay of sound and image, May constructs a soldiery that remains outside the dominant fascist media narrative of the war. The scene comes at the conclusion of the first film and begins with a medium-long shot capturing the academy recruits standing in formation. They are awaiting the approach of camp commander Major Luschke (Wilfried Seyferth), a figure whom the film casts as an honorable officer, unlike the despotic incompetents under his command. When the film cuts to show a long shot of Luschke striding toward the parade grounds and the camera, we hear no trace of diegetic sound, despite the fact that he is treading upon gravel. Instead, the soundtrack throughout the scene consists exclusively of an official radio broadcast reporting the first exchange of fire along the Polish border. As the camera scans the faces of the graduating class, we discern no sign of jubilation on the faces of these men, although we hear it in the crowds captured by the radio recording. The broadcast concludes with a military march, but the camera captures the newly minted soldiers in a rearward-tracking crane shot that emphasizes their stasis — with the result that they never become “fellow travelers,” but instead appear to resist the pull of the martial music. The film’s final sequence comes as the camera tracks away from the scene of the military school, arcs back and up over the wall that it first scaled in the opening sequence, and then trains on the sky. Clear heavens fade to ominous storm clouds, and as lightning strikes, we hear not its natural report but rather the rat-a-tat of machine gun fire. The “storm” of war is upon Germany. The men of the military, the viewer is encouraged to conclude, will soon be caught up in it; that is, the military conflict will happen to them, rather than by them. Like so many West German filmmakers of the 1950s,

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May presents the German soldier as an outsider to National Socialism and a victim of an ideology gone awry, while the conflation of war and natural disaster — like the popular postwar discourse of catastrophe popularized by historian Friedrich Meinecke — frustrates efforts to consider the crucial questions of responsibility and complicity.20 The German soldier’s suffering, it would seem, silences questions of guilt and instead ensures him a place in the postwar pantheon. It is as if the soldier’s damaged postwar agency functions retroactively, to construct him as a figure that even under the privileged conditions of wartime had no control over his own or other lives.

The Prosthetic Perpetrator At the same time that the war films of West German cinema praise the anti-authoritarian man who cannot or will not stand “stramm,” they highlight the constitutive inadequacies of the alternative, the hypertrophically stiff, soldierly body. The postwar hero’s new posture thus does not present a perfect mirror image of the authoritarian body offered up in these works but rather exists only in relation to him. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find examples of a whole masculinity — at least in any traditional sense — in any of these films. Instead, what we find are essentially good and bad forms of compromise. In numerous instances, the wrong kind of manhood, that is, the one linked to a fascist ideal of hardness, comes to be associated with physical and sexual lack. Throughout this cinema, this sort of “bad man” appears as one who can only exercise his power through accessories of augmentation. Radványi’s Der Arzt von Stalingrad provides a good point of entry for this subject. Positioned against O. E. Hasse’s mild-mannered Böhler and his hotheaded and hotblooded young counterpart, Dr. Sellnow (Walther Reyer), is their Russian nemesis: Kapitän Pjotr Markow, played by Hannes Messemer. In contrast to his prisoners, Markow has suffered an obvious physical wound. While the narrative never makes explicit just what ails him, throughout the film Markow’s stiff left arm remains prominently on display, serving as an obvious reminder of his character’s ideological rigidity. This comes to the fore most prominently in a sequence in which Markow and Sellnow argue over the process for selecting men to return to Germany. An opening series of medium close-ups of camp loudspeakers not only emphasizes the impersonal nature of the camp administration, but also, through the amplification of the anonymous announcer’s voice, suggests the artificial enhancement of Russian power, while at the same time echoing the film’s earlier rendering of Hitler as a radio transmission. This sense of the loudspeaker as an augmentation of male authority carries over

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Fig. 1.3. Fascist authority requires amplification in Der Arzt von Stalingrad (1958). DVD capture.

into the subsequent shot of Markow as, with a loud thump, he hoists his arm onto his desk, his limb serving as a hypertrophic extension of his masculine authority. The film has taken pains throughout to vilify Markow as the narrative’s real authoritarian, evidenced not least in this sequence by the portrait of Stalin displayed prominently behind him, which cannot fail to recall the compulsory portraits of the German dictator of a few years earlier. Here, then, this dead arm takes on a double valence, for while it marks his own injury and thus suggests that Markow’s behavior may be read as a compensatory strategy (according to which he must make up for his lost physical power), this display of his stiff limb also aligns Markow with a particular form of hardened, militarized masculinity — one that, according to the logic of the larger body of 1950s war films from West Germany, must be rejected in favor of a new, revised, and decidedly softer postwar vision of manhood. May’s 08/15 trilogy further presents the image of the perpetrator as suffering from a lack that then results in masculine excess. Sergeant Schulz, whom the film consistently characterizes through unflattering close-ups as a literally and figuratively over-inflated buffoon, regularly suffers assaults on his masculinity when his wife initiates sexual affairs with the better part of the camp population, and more than once other figures

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in the film hint that his cruelty toward his men is a by-product of his own inability to serve at the front. If Schulz’s black boots serve from the film’s outset as the symbolic embodiment of his aggressive posture, a whistle becomes the object of choice for his fellow tormentor, Master-at-arms Platzek (Hans-Christian Blech), an instrument he employs to impose his authority upon defenseless recruits. In a key scene, in which Platzek blows his whistle to force the trainees to perform exercises in deep mud, driving Vierbein to such exhaustion that he collapses and immediately thereafter makes a botched attempt at suicide, the camera offers ever-closer and more grotesque shots of Platzek’s face, honing in on his straining mouth as if to highlight the hard work behind this mask of masculine power. The shots mirror the earlier depictions of Schulz, suggesting a parallelism not only in their behavior but also in its underlying causes. When, in the second film of the trilogy, a new master enters the scene — Captain Witterer (Rolf Kutschera), a trained but not tried officer with dangerously naive ideas about eradicating the enemy — he is presented at once as ideologically rigid and utterly effete. Finding his quarters inadequate, he requests delivery of a sofa, mirror, washbasin, and French soap, and we later witness him perfuming his satin sheets and unabashedly admiring his own reflection. When it comes to waging war, however, Witterer knows no mercy, and he spouts an identifiably Nazi rhetoric of total destruction. Alarmed to learn that the battalion is not waging an active battle with nearby Russian troops, he initiates an assault on the enemy, in this case, against a peasant carrying wood. If Platzek’s prop was the whistle, the captain’s prosthetic here comes in the form of his binoculars. These serve literally to frame the shots of the front line when May inserts numerous point-of-view shots, and the device becomes a form of masking. As in the scene of Platzek’s senseless training-camp antics, these close-ups of the major’s augmented vision define the attack sequence, underscoring his relative distance from the actual violence but also hinting at his need for reinforcement in the exercise of his military powers. Witterer does not approach the battle himself but rather by proxy. Not coincidentally, this same officer flees after sending Vierbein on a mission that will bring him certain death, for the authoritarian types in these films do not exhibit genuine bravery but rather act exclusively in surreptitious ways and seem only capable of exerting force with the aid of technologies of projection and enhancement. This figure of the amplified perpetrator troubles the image of a hardened National Socialist manhood, prominently displaying the cracks in the facade and suggesting that fascism might be read as a form of sexual compensation or even dysfunction. Moreover, it plays into the larger postwar discourse of fascism as a form of sexual degeneracy that Dagmar Herzog has identified, a notion that reinforced calls for a return to morality and the bolstering of the traditional family.21 At the same time, these hardened

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Fig. 1.4. The perpetrator must enhance his power through prosthetic aids in 08/15 (1954). DVD capture.

perpetrators — the male characters in whom all aggressive cruelty and violence is localized in 1950s war films — perform a central function in the construction of a new ideal of postwar masculinity and a new model of soldiering. The new heroes do not lead the narrative of warfare, nor do they lead battles. Armed instead with a softer sensibility, the revised postwar man does not need to compensate or display his prowess but instead hangs back, lets things happen, perhaps suffers for it, but ultimately emerges on the other side as an armchair warrior, succeeding by dint of his very failure to match the steely ideal of fascist masculinity. In contrast to the notion of a “Papa’s cinema” that celebrates the restoration of a normative, patriarchal, and militarized order, these works privilege those wounds that linger — as a sign that the memory of the recent past may not simply be healed over, and as the index of a masculinity that may, through its failure to lead, in the end help Germany carve out a different future.

Notes 1

For a representative sample of Wolf Graf von Baudissin’s many essays on the subject of the new soldier, see his collection Nie wieder Sieg! Programmatische Schriften, 1951–1981 (Munich: Piper, 1982).

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2

Sections of the “Himmeroder Memorandum” may be viewed online. See: “Himmeroder Denkschrift”at the Web site of the German Federal Archive, www.bundesarchiv.de/aktuelles/aus_dem_archiv/galerie/00147/index. html?index=0&id=1&nr=4, accessed 7 Oct. 2008. 3

Erica Carter, How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997); Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford UP, 1995); Elizabeth Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s ´Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001), 21–56; Heinemann, “Gender, Sexuality, and Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past,” Central European History 38.1 (2005): 41–74; Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999); and Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005). 4 Manfred Barthel, Als Opas Kino jung war: Der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1991), 247. 5

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 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 195–222; here 195. 6

Josef Hrycyk, “Gehorsam und Größenwahn: Die Rolle des Militärs in Deutschland zwischen 1971 und 1945 — ein ZEIT-Forum zu Ehren von Karl-Heinz Janßen,” Zeit Online 48 (2000): 22–23, http://www.zeit.de/2000/48/200048_ janssen.xml, accessed 7 Oct. 2008. My emphasis. 7

See J. Lens’s article in Neue Zeit, 4 June 1958 (Stiftung deutsche Kinemathek library, “Kriegsfilm” file); also Werner Jungeblodt, Kriegsfilme — noch und noch, Beiträge zur Begegnung von Kirche und Welt 47 (Rottenburg: Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg, 1960). 8

Carol Cohn, “Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 242. 9

There are variations between the films: Der Stern von Afrika shows German pilots happily engaged in combat, while the second of the 08/15 series, “At the Front,” centers on an effort to retreat from the front line. When combat is shown, however, it tends to emphasize the technological spectacle, and the human costs of war are kept at a discrete remove. 10

Scholars have recognized the model of wounded masculinity in the so-called “rubble films” produced in Germany in the immediate postwar years, but until now there has been a general assumption that it essentially ended with the demise of the genre in the late 1940s. On the rubble films, see Anke Pinkert, Film and Memory in East Germany (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008); Robert R. Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001); Jennifer M. Kapczynski, The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008).

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11

Susan Sontag coined this phrase. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor, 1990), 3. 12

Originally Staudte planned to have Mertens shoot Brückner in the final scene, only to face a blind justice when it came time for sentencing. While this retributive act undoubtedly would have made Mertens’s status as hero more problematic, and Soviet censors nixed it for obvious pragmatic reasons, I would argue that even this violent end would have supported Hans’s eligibility for “new man” status, by shifting attention to the ways in which justice was not being served by traditional channels. 13

For example, Wir Wunderkinder (Aren’t We Wonderful, 1958).

14

For example, Nachts wenn der Teufel kam (The Devil Strikes at Night, 1957) and Strafbatallion 999 (Punishment Battalion 999, 1959). 15

A short while later, Kartuschke utters a very similar line to Ernst, the reluctant leader of the execution squad. After Ernst’s hand is too unsteady to light Kartuschke’s cigarette, the major seizes his lighter, completes the task, and admonishes Ernst with the words: “Sehen Sie, mit ein bisschen Haltung geht alles” (You see, with the right attitude [literally: posture] you can do anything). 16

See the essays by Daniela Berghahn and Sabine Hake in this volume for discussions of melodramatic war narratives in DEFA cinema. On the issue of paternalism in postwar West German discourse, see Robert G. Moeller, “‘The Last Soldiers of the Great War’ and Tales of Family Reunions in the Federal Republic of Germany,” Signs 24.1 (1998): 129–45; and Heide Fehrenbach, “Rehabilitating Fatherland: Race and German Remasculinization,” Signs 24.1 (1998): 107–27; Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005. 17

It is a pose repeated in other war films of the era, such as the moment when the rebellious Felmy first appears on screen in Haie und kleine Fische. 18

Erica Carter, “Men in Cardigans,” 209.

19

All translations are my own.

20

Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus, 1946). Although Meinecke’s is the most prominent example, the notion of fascism as an “Unheil” (calamity) or “Katastrophe” (catastrophe) was extremely widespread in the years following the end of the Second World War. 21

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Herzog, Sex after Fascism, esp. chapters 2 and 3.

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2: German Martyrs: Images of Christianity and Resistance to National Socialism in German Cinema David Clarke

Martyrs for the Nation

T

the representation of Christians as victims of National Socialism in the cinema of the Federal Republic, and particularly the representation of Christian resisters who fell victim to Hitler’s regime. Such representations have not been a consistent feature of the Federal Republic of Germany’s film culture; rather, we can observe clusters of films that examine the predicament of Christians, whether as resisters or as more passive victims, emerging at different points in time with often very different emphases. The discussion below will provide a survey of these representations and locate them within the development of German memory culture, offering for the first time an overview of the shifting filmic representations of Christianity under National Socialism produced in the postwar period until the present day. Aleida Assmann has noted close parallels between the Christian notion of martyrdom and the secularized national commemoration of the fallen. The Christian martyr, following the example of Jesus, dies as proof of the coming kingdom of God; to venerate and imitate the martyr is to express one’s faith in that better future. In the case of the national martyr, her or his death either points toward a victory not yet won or is looked back on as a forbear of the national victory now finally secured. Assmann argues that for Germans immediately after the Second World War the imposition of a “perpetrator memory,” demanded by the outside world, blocked such normal national commemoration, condemning Germans to silence about the past.1 As Robert G. Moeller’s work has amply demonstrated, however, to talk of silence about the past in postwar West Germany, and indeed silence about the suffering of Germans themselves as a consequence of the war, is something of an exaggeration: any expectation that Germans would regard themselves as perpetrators did not stop them mourning the destruction of their cities, their soldiers lost in the war or in captivity, or the flight and expulsion of refugees from former eastern territories.2 Moreover, a closer HIS CHAPTER EXPLORES

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look at the political culture, and also the film culture, of the Federal Republic in its early years would equally appear to call Assmann’s generalization into question. In this period there clearly were attempts to establish in West German collective memory certain figures from the opposition to Hitler’s regime both as victims of National Socialism and as prophets of the new democratic order, attempts that drew heavily on Christian imagery of martyrdom, underpinned by references to the religious faith of those involved. As David Clay Large has noted, public attitudes to resistance were ambivalent at best in the early years of the Federal Republic, with many feeling it had been wrong to resist while the war was still going on.3 Nevertheless, when figures from the resistance were eventually incorporated into the pantheon of the new West German democracy, the symbolism of Christian martyrdom was mobilized. In the case of the plotters of 20 July 1944, the impetus for a significant reassessment of their resistance was the trial in 1952 of the right-wing politician Major Remer for defaming the conspirators, which ushered in an intense period of engagement with their legacy over the following two years.4 As the Cold War became more entrenched, a foregrounding of anti-communist, Christian heroes in the heritage of the Federal Republic was politically useful, and it is noteworthy that this period also saw the commemoration of the White Rose group in terms that stressed the members’ identity as Christians.5 Given the political dominance of Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, the Christian resistance of the July plotters and the White Rose also served a significant legitimizing function for the new government.6 Federal President Theodor Heuss, for example, called upon the symbolism of Christian martyrdom to explain the “sacrifice” of the July plotters in his commemorative speech to mark the tenth anniversary of the coup attempt, at the height of this rehabilitation phase in 1954. Heuss’s Christian imagery, though, serves a national founding myth: Die Scham, in die Hitler uns Deutsche gezwungen hatte, wurde durch ihr Blut vom besudelten deutschen Namen wieder weggewischt. Das Vermächtnis ist noch in Wirksamkeit, die Verpflichtung noch nicht eingelöst.7 [The shame that Hitler had forced upon us Germans was washed away from the besmirched German name by their blood. Their legacy is still with us, but we have not yet lived up to our duty to fulfill it.]

Here Heuss adopts what A. Dirk Moses has described as a strategy of “stigma management” linked directly to Christian traditions of martyrdom and sacrifice.8 He suggests that for those blemished by sin Christianity offers the veneration of the sacrificial victim, in the last instance Christ

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himself, as a path to liberation from that stigma: by identification with and imitation of that sacrificial victim one’s own salvation is achieved.9 In this case, identification with the martyred resisters promises the cleansing of the nation and its consequent healing as a community. West German film culture responded to this renewed interest in the 20 July assassination attempt with two features, both released in 1955: Es geschah am 20. Juli (It Happened on July 20), directed by G. W. Pabst, and Der 20. Juli (The Plot to Assassinate Hitler), directed by Falk Harnack. Pabst’s film focuses on the small group around Stauffenberg and the events on the day of the attempted coup. Harnack’s film, on the other hand, as one might expect from the brother of left-wing resistance leader Arvid Harnack, aims to present as broad an anti-Nazi front as possible and adds further fictionalized characters and plotlines to this end. We see an unnamed Protestant pastor hauled before the Gestapo for preaching against the regime’s policies, for example, as well as the arrest of a union leader (presumably based on Julius Leber) for organizing the distribution of anti-fascist literature. The depiction of the “Wednesday Club,” the resistance group under General Beck with which Stauffenberg was associated, allows competing socialist, Christian, and monarchist voices to express their vision for a future Germany, while at the same time emphasizing their shared support for Stauffenberg’s actions. The importance of Christianity is underlined, however, when, on his way to the airfield, Stauffenberg enters a church and stares at a distinctly ominous crucifix framed by heavy cruciform shadows. A close shot of a somber Stauffenberg then fades into a montage of documentary footage showing the destruction brought about by the war. After this vision Stauffenberg leaves, determined to carry out the assassination of Hitler. This imagery is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, the scene (without dialogue) could be interpreted as sanctioning Stauffenberg’s actions, which offend not only against traditional Christian views on respect for worldly authority, but also against the sixth commandment (“Thou shalt not kill”): principles that underlay the ambivalence of the major Christian churches and the Christian population in general to resistance both during and after the Third Reich.10 In this interpretation, proposed by Detlef Kannapin, the implicit approval by the Christian God is explained in terms of the terrible destruction that will otherwise be caused by the continuing war.11 On the other hand, one could also interpret the scene as Stauffenberg’s response to the threat to his own salvation: despite the warning represented by the imposing cross, his moral qualms are cancelled out by his vision of the consequences of inaction. At the end of the film, an authoritative voiceover attempts to address this ambiguity in relation to the suicide of Stauffenberg’s co-conspirator Henning von Tresckow. Speaking as if to the conspirators, the voice makes the following judgment on behalf of the audience:

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Mit gutem Gewissen kann Tresckow jetzt vor Gottes Richterstuhl verantworten, was er getan hat. Gott richtet nicht nach dem Erfolg. Er weiß, dass Euer Kampf ein Aufstand des Gewissens war. Es ging um die Zerstörung rechtloser Tyrannei und um die Ehre des deutschen Namens. [Tresckow now need not fear to stand before God’s throne to be judged. God does not judge according to success. He knows that your struggle was a resistance of conscience. It aimed to destroy illegal tyranny and to save the honor of the German name.]

This assertion is oddly self-contradictory. By pointing out that God will judge Tresckow and his co-conspirators, the voiceover highlights the fact that there is, at the very least, a case to answer, even if it immediately supplies the arguments that, it assures the audience, God will take into account. The end result concedes the morally problematic nature of their actions, from the Christian point of view, so that the arguments for the plotters retain a distinctly defensive quality. The motif of the visit to a church, a visit Stauffenberg did in fact make before the assassination attempt,12 is an element in Pabst’s competitor film, Es geschah am 20. Juli.13 Less melodramatic than Harnack’s interpretation, Pabst’s version shows a noble Stauffenberg striding into a simple church in a semi-rural setting, before praying and then crossing himself in the shadow of the doorway. The audience cannot see Stauffenberg’s face, but his demeanor is interpreted for them by a comical old caretaker who witnesses this event and relates it to his wife: “Ich werde das Gesicht nie vergessen. Er hatte was mit Gott auszumachen” (I’ll never forget that face. He had to make his peace with God about something). This is again ambiguous: we cannot read Stauffenberg’s face to see his feelings, and he remains silent in this scene. We have no confirmation whether he has received divine sanction, or whether he is continuing with the plot in the knowledge that he is thereby putting himself outside conventional Christian morality and thus endangering his soul, as the shadow that falls upon him might suggest. Strikingly, the opening scene of the film, which also recreates a meeting of the “Wednesday Club,” hints at the possible necessity of going beyond normal Christian morality in the service of the nation. As in Harnack’s film, this scene serves the purpose of airing the different points of view within the group of conspirators, but ends with the camera panning across the group to a close shot of Beck, who delivers straight to camera an authoritative verdict on the moral concerns that are expressed by the others: Entscheidend ist, dass im Namen des deutschen Volkes seit Jahr und Tag Verbrechen auf Verbrechen, Mord auf Mord gehäuft wird. Es ist unsere Pflicht, uns mit allen Mitteln dagegen zu stellen. Von dieser Pflicht kann uns weder Gott noch unser Gewissen befreien.

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Fig. 2.1. “Er hatte was mit Gott auszumachen.” Stauffenberg prays before his assassination attempt in Pabst’s Es geschah am 20. Juli (1955). DVD capture. [The decisive point is that for years crime has been piled upon crime, murder upon murder in the name of the German people. It is our duty to resist this by all means. Neither God nor our conscience can free us from this duty.]

The implication of Beck’s statement here is that if the conspirators were to listen to their conscience and to God’s injunctions, the necessary saving of Germany’s name would become impossible. In this way, as the final voiceover reminds us, they become martyrs for the nation.14 However, the relationship between this national-secular martyrdom and Christian faith is clearly fraught: the film can, in fact, be read as implying that the sacrifice of their souls for the nation is part of that martyrdom. An analysis of these two films and their dialogue with Christianity reveals a desire on the part of the filmmakers to equate martyrdom for the nation with a self-sacrifice sanctioned by Christian faith, an equation that neither of the films successfully balances because of the lingering doubts about the moral justification of the plotters’ actions in Christian terms. Other films of the period that deal with the resistance within military circles, such as Alfred Weidenmann’s Canaris (1954) and Helmut Käutner’s Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, 1955), make no

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reference to Christianity at all in their positive portraits of resistance to Hitler. While Stauffenberg’s personal Catholic faith may explain the need to address this subject in films about his part in the plot, the issue of Stauffenberg’s actually having attempted to murder Hitler would seem to be the moral sticking point, since neither Canaris nor the figure of Harras in Käutner’s film move in this direction. Both are equally guilty of breaking their oath of allegiance to Hitler and, therefore, of rejecting the Pauline tradition of respect for earthly authority. This suggests, perhaps rather surprisingly, that Stauffenberg’s turn to lethal force, in contravention of the sixth commandment, causes these moral difficulties. Given the violence unleashed by Hitler and his generals, this seems in retrospect a peculiar point to inspire such concerns. Nevertheless, in Pabst’s film, for example, we see von Haeften, Stauffenberg’s companion on the day of the assassination attempt, reassuring him that: “Es gibt keinen anderen Ausweg. Damit Millionen leben können, müssen auch Unschuldige sterben” (There is no other way out. For millions to live, some innocents must also die). The “innocents” in question here are members of the NSDAP and German army elite, assembled around Hitler’s conference table. To return to Moses’s notion of “stigma management” and its relationship to martyrdom, these early filmic representations suggest that the July plotters, and Stauffenberg in particular, cannot be easily co-opted for this function in the collective memory of the 1950s. The martyr figure is supposed to offer the community the promise of washing away a mark of shame by providing an example to imitate; yet these figures are doubly marked with shame, first as Germans held responsible for a dictator’s actions by the rest of the world, and second as transgressors against Christian morality. Their morally compromised nature will not permit the easy identification that would allow them to fulfill their role in the management of German national stigma.

From National Martyrs to Christian Victims The years of intensive preoccupation with the plotters of 20 July in the official memory culture of the Federal Republic also reflect a desire on the part of the political establishment to improve the reputation of the German military at a time when the prospect of remilitarization was not met with general enthusiasm by the West German population.15 This unease is reflected, as Moeller points out, in a number of war films in the second half of the 1950s, which were critical of the experience of military life for the average soldier.16 Particularly after conscription began again in 1957, however, we can observe a cluster of films that make reference to Christianity and the experience of soldiers in a different way, presenting

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religion as a cultural constant from which the German nation was only momentarily estranged during the National Socialist period. This equation of Christian morality with German identity had at least the potential to offer a critique of the remilitarization agenda, as in Géza von Radványi’s Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor of Stalingrad, 1958). The Christian symbolism in this film is not omnipresent, but it is nevertheless significant. When we are first introduced to the work of Dr. Fritz Böhler in a Russian POW camp, the camera frames a Russian Orthodox cross on the wall of the what is now the camp’s hospital, before pulling back to show an inhumane Russian military doctor, supported by the camp commandant, sending sick German POWs out to work. Apart from the criticism of a barbaric communism contained in the image, this setting also lends Böhler’s character a saintly aspect, as he defends one man against certain death before the backdrop of a faded religious mural still visible on the wall. As the original press notes for the film stress, it is Böhler’s superhuman selflessness that eventually helps to break down some of the mistrust between the Russians and their German prisoners: Sie lernen, daß fast in jedem, auf welcher Seite er auch steht, etwas steckt, das Achtung verdient. Aber es wird nur sichtbar, wenn es ausgelöscht [sic; i.e., ausgelöst, DC] wird durch die Ausstrahlung eines ungewöhnlichen Menschen.17 [They learn that there is something in everyone, regardless of which side they stand on, which deserves respect. But it only becomes visible when it is triggered by the influence of an exceptional person.]

Böhler thereby achieves a Christ-like status, overcoming hate by setting an example of selfless human compassion. Most startling, however, is the final sequence in which Böhler is shocked on arriving back in the Federal Republic to find troops marching on the streets again: he enters a hallucinatory vision of the Cold War technology of destruction, featuring marching Soviet, American, Chinese, German, and British soldiers, jet fighter planes, and the launching of military rockets. The film ends with a freeze-frame close-up of Böhler’s face, with its frightened, staring eyes, before fading to black, leaving the audience with a sense that his sacrifice has been in vain and that the cycle of violence will inevitably begin again. Radványi’s film is something of an exception, however. In most instances where the subject of Christianity is raised in West German films of the mid- to late 1950s, its centrality to German cultural identity is emphasized, while at the same time it is played down as a possible motive for direct resistance to military or political authority. This is certainly the case for Frank Wisbar’s Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? 1959). The central character in this film, Lieutenant Wisse, is initially presented as a loyal, if not obviously fanatical National

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Socialist. Even though he has been trained at an elite National Socialist military college, this does not stop him falling for a young Russian woman in the opening sequence, for instance. As the war progresses, Wisse experiences the incompetence and cowardice of fanatical Nazi officers, like the appropriately named Major Linkmann (“link” means underhanded or devious). Wisse eventually lives up to his own name, which is the familiar imperative form of the verb “wissen” (to know), by recognizing the vacuity of Nazi ideology and finding his way back to a Christian Germanness. Following an impromptu Christmas service outside Stalingrad, held by Military Chaplain Busch, Wisse turns to the man of God for advice, as his faith in National Socialism is shaken: “Ich bin nicht mehr ganz sicher, Herr Pfarrer. Das alles hier ist so schwer zu verstehen. Man fragt sich nach dem Sinn” (I’m not so sure any more, Chaplain. This here is all so hard to understand. You ask yourself what it all means). The orphan Wisse has been raised as a National Socialist and an atheist. Yet, the chaplain comforts him, he can still find his way back to God among the “hell” of war, if he simply follows his feelings. The idealistic Wisse, cast as a child led astray by a false father, represents the German nation that can still recover its true nature. However, the chaplain does not offer Wisse “eine verstandesmäßige Antwort” (a rational answer) to the chaos of the war. He implies that Christianity is not a basis for political judgments but a means of enduring adverse political circumstances without compromising one’s true German-Christian nature, in other words, that this resilient identity is not a starting point for active resistance. This is emphasized earlier in the film, at the first meeting of the two men, when they share a meal with a Russian family and witness the children crossing themselves in front of an icon of the Virgin Mary. As the chaplain points out, both Soviet Communism and National Socialism have tried to abolish Christianity without success. Here the political is reduced to the transient, whereas Christian faith will always remain: “Sehen Sie, Herr Wisse, alles vergeht, aber das bleibt. Darauf kann man sich verlassen” (You see, Wisse, everything passes, but that remains. You can rely on that). A good deal more critical in its outlook, Falk Harnack’s Unruhige Nacht (The Restless Night, 1958) follows a Protestant chaplain, Brunner, who must prepare a deserter for the firing squad. The firing-squad commander is also a former clergyman, and the film features an anguished conversation between the two men on the morality of their involvement in this brutal process. Brunner points out to his colleague that the time for resistance is past and that their failure, and by implication the church’s failure, to prevent the war will weigh on their conscience when it and the dictatorship end. Moreover, it will be their duty to make sure that war never happens again. Despite the film’s more complex treatment of Christian conscience in wartime, with the central figure torn between his duty to provide comfort to the condemned man and his realization that,

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Fig. 2.2. Military Chaplain Busch organizes a Christmas service for a group of German soldiers at Stalingrad in Frank Wisbar’s Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (1959). DVD capture.

in doing so, he is oiling the wheels of a murderous bureaucracy, it still conveys the same underlying message that National Socialism and the war, now they are in the world, must be regarded as transient and that, ultimately, Christian values will survive them and regain their influence. This is presented as less of an automatic process than in Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? and more as something to be fought for in the future, but the notion that the Christian values of the Germans will outlast National Socialism is still implicit. This notion is equally central to another Wisbar film, his follow-up to Hunde, Fabrik der Offiziere (The Officer Factory, 1960), which was based on best-selling author Hans Helmut Kirst’s novel of the same year. This adaptation is notable for the introduction of the Christian theme that is, for the most part, absent from Kirst’s text. When it mentions Christianity at all, the novel tends to take a much more jaundiced view, associating the church with Germany’s authoritarian traditions.18 In both Kirst’s and Wisbar’s versions of this military academy tale, the three radical National Socialist members of a training company dispose of their officer by sabotaging an exercise with explosives. In Wisbar’s version alone, however, for which the director cowrote the script, their new officer, Lieutenant Krafft,

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is able to persuade another trainee, Böhmke, to give evidence against their ringleader, only for the guilty men to discover a letter to Böhmke from his father in which the National Socialist regime is condemned from a Christian standpoint: “Gottes Reich währet ewiglich, des Führers Reich wird bald in Staub und Asche fallen. Mein teurer Sohn, vertraue Gott mehr als ihm” (God’s kingdom is eternal, the Führer’s empire will soon fall into dust and ashes. My dear son, trust God more than him). This same Christian morality will not allow Böhmke to lie under oath, even when the murderers threaten to expose him and his father. Through a series of intrigues, however, Böhmke is indeed arrested, and Krafft is killed trying to defend him. The film ends with Krafft’s troop, led by his friend Feders, marching around the prison where Böhmke is still being held, visibly marked by his physical mistreatment. Böhmke hears his former comrades singing the soldiers’ song “Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht” (Wild Geese Fly through the Night) to show their solidarity, with its final refrain “was ist aus uns geworden?” (what have we become?) adding a final melancholy note. Yet, as in the films already discussed, this “was ist aus uns geworden?” again implies that Germany has been diverted from her true nature and morality — embodied here in the figure of the honorable Christian — by the forces of fanatical Nazism. Robert Siodmak, who was like Wisbar an émigré filmmaker, equally emphasizes the continuity of Christian morality among the Germans during the National Socialist period in his Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (The Devil Strikes at Night, 1957). This thriller, set in 1944, involves an investigation into the crimes of serial killer Bruno Lüdke by Axel Kersten, a wounded officer who has returned from the front to take up his old job as a detective with the murder squad. He successfully tracks down the mentally handicapped Lüdke and hopes by doing so to overturn a number of miscarriages of justice, including the death sentence of a small-time Nazi party official wrongly accused of strangling his mistress. Although the regime is originally enthusiastic about the case, which provides evidence of the alleged danger of genetic weakness in the population, SS-Gruppenführer Rossdorf, who is overseeing the investigation, soon receives an order from Hitler personally that Lüdke’s existence must be kept secret, since the Nazis now fear that their failure to detect his long campaign of murder will shake public faith in them. In the final confrontation between Kersten, who has risked his own future in an attempt to save the wrongly condemned man, and Rossdorf, the latter underlines the key difference between the two men in terms of their respect for human life: “Glauben. Mann, aus welcher Mottenkiste nehmen Sie eigentlich dieses Wort? Glauben Sie vielleicht an Gott?” (Believe. Where on earth did you get that moth-eaten word? Does that mean, perhaps, that you believe in God?); to which Kersten simply replies, “Ja.” As a consequence of his principled actions, he is sent back to the front and therefore made to suffer for staying true to German-Christian values.

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Fig. 2.3. The final confrontation between Detective Kersten (1.) and SS-Gruppenführer Rossdorf (r.) in Robert Siodmak’s Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957). DVD capture.

In all of these examples we see soldiers, former soldiers, or others closely associated with the military apparatus who demonstrate their allegiance to a set of values that supersedes the principles of those in political power at a given historical moment. In each case that set of values is represented as Christian in origin and as having survived the onslaught of National Socialist indoctrination, whose agents are presented either as fanatics or cynical careerists. Overall these films leave an impression, then, that the military in general, and the ordinary citizens who were conscripted into it in particular, stayed true to a Christian-German culture that remained intact in the National Socialist period and continues to endure even as West Germany remilitarizes to defend itself against another godless force, namely Soviet Communism.

Christianity and the Legacy of Authoritarianism The theme of Christian resistance to National Socialism, whether active, as in the case of the July plotters, or passive, as in the case of the ordinary soldiers portrayed in the late 1950s, is remarkably absent from West Ger-

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man film culture of the following three decades. While it would be reductive to seek out one cause, a number of factors can be mentioned. First, as is well known, the early 1960s saw prominent trials of former Nazi perpetrators both in Germany and in Israel, which focused public attention on German crimes rather than on the suffering of ordinary German combatants and civilians. Second, from the early 1960s the rise of a new antiauthoritarian generation challenged the political status quo of the Federal Republic and its memory politics, culminating in the student revolt of 1968 and the cultural and political struggles of the 1970s; this generation generally regarded the traditional institutions of German society with suspicion. Third, the increasingly materialistic, consumer-oriented society of the Wirtschaftswunder contributed to the kind of secularization common to most Western European countries in the postwar period. Fourth, the scandal surrounding Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy, 1963) called into question the claims of the Catholic Church in particular to have resisted National Socialism.19 These factors help to explain the falling away of the thematic of Christian resistance in the 1960s and 1970s. That said, it is not until the late 1970s and the 1980s that we see explicit criticism of Christianity in the context of the National Socialist regime. In that loose grouping of filmmakers referred to as the New German Cinema, a number attacked institutionalized Christianity as a force of conservative authoritarianism and as an element of continuity between National Socialism and the democracy of the Federal Republic. One particularly striking example of the equation of right-wing ideologies and Christian belief can be found in Theodor Kotulla’s Aus einem deutschen Leben (Death Is My Trade, 1977), a biopic about a figure closely based on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. The film begins with the young Höss (or Hans Lang, as he is called here) being initiated into patriotic faith by a First World War veteran, drawing on Christian imagery to establish a parallel between unquestioning religious obedience and the authoritarian personality of a nationalist persuasion: the veteran makes Lang repeat the mantra “mein Gott heißt Deutschland” (my God is Germany), while a crucifix hangs prominently on the wall behind them. Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1980), on the other hand, places greater emphasis on the continuities between Christianity and authoritarianism in the postwar period: Ulrich, a friend of the protagonist’s husband and the film’s one fanatical National Socialist, is shown after the war enjoying a well-paid administrative post with the Protestant Church. Similar tendencies can be found in more mainstream productions. For example, it is striking that Wolf Vollmar’s four-part TV adaptation of Kirst’s Fabrik der Offiziere, first shown in 1989, removes the pro-Christian plot-line inserted by Wisbar in his film version and reverts to the rather more critical view of the role of religion in German society evident

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in the source text. Joseph Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993), which reworks a number of elements from Wisbar’s Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?, is in a similar vein. Whereas in Wisbar’s film the figure of Chaplain Busch offers an alternative to corrupt Nazi ideology and a return to Germany’s true nature, here we see instead the cynical group of ordinary soldiers who are at the center of the action passing disparaging comments on a sermon they have been ordered to attend, delivered by a chaplain who emphasizes that they are fighting for Christian values against a godless Bolshevism. The hypocrisy of this argument is highlighted for the viewer by the incident that precedes this scene, when an officer attempts to intervene against the brutalization of Russian prisoners by a Nazi fanatic. The commanding officer dismisses his complaint about such abuses on the edge of the crowd listening to this very sermon about Christian values. Although not a negative portrayal of the complicity of Christianity in National Socialism, Michael Verhoeven’s film Die weiße Rose (The White Rose, 1982), which depicts the activities of the resistance group and the execution of its key figures in 1943, is particularly noteworthy in this period in the way it de-emphasizes the religious convictions of these resisters. As Katie Rickard has pointed out, the film shifts the emphasis onto the political aims of the group around the Scholls.20 To achieve this, Verhoeven shows the group’s involvement in wider networks of resistance, including links to left-wing groups through Falk Harnack, and the ideological differences within the group in terms of their political aims and strategies, while at the same time refusing to portray the Scholls as religiously motivated martyrs.21 Christianity is barely mentioned in the film, and when Sophie’s mother says goodbye to her with the words “Gell, Sophie? Jesus” (Remember, Sophie? Jesus), her daughter seems at first surprised at the reference, and then replies in a very matter-of-fact tone, “Ja. Aber du auch” (Yes. But you too), seeming to suggest that turning to the comfort of religion is less important for her than her concern for the well-being of those she is leaving behind. Verhoeven’s attitude toward religion in relation to the National Socialist past moves from such ambivalence to explicit critique in his last film of the 1980s, Das schreckliche Mädchen (The Nasty Girl, 1990) in which the heroine, Sonja Wegmus, finds herself falling out of favor with a devoutly Catholic community that sees its religious identity as a guarantee of its commitment to the cornerstone values of the Federal Republic, freedom and democracy. What is more, they regard their religious faith as a key factor in their alleged resistance to National Socialism. Sonja’s investigations into the history of her town, however, reveal that this same religious faith had previously justified the town’s support for National Socialism, particularly in the case of the regime’s antisocialist and antiSemitic policies. In this way, Verhoeven’s film encapsulates the shift I have examined here from viewing the Christian culture of Germany as a source

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of positive continuity, as was common in the West German films of the 1950s, to a more suspicious view of organized religion as complicit in the nation’s authoritarian traditions.

The Return of the German Martyr The move towards representations of German suffering and of Germans as victims of the Second World War that a number of commentators have identified around the turn of the millennium is accompanied in recent filmic representations by the resurrection of some of the Christian motifs identified above in the film culture of the 1950s.22 However, these are now inflected with a new emphasis on the acknowledgment of German collective responsibility for National Socialism. Although my main focus in this final section will be on images of a Christian martyrdom that retrospectively redeem the national community, I also want to note a secondary tendency to return to the discourse of Christian faith as a source of positive continuity or as a moral framework inherent in the German nation that survives National Socialism. Meanwhile, this motif has undergone significant adjustments between the 1950s and the new millennium. Hardy Martins’s recent TV movie version of Fritz Martin Bauer’s 1955 novel So weit die Füße tragen (As Far As Your Feet Will Carry You, 2001) provides a pertinent example. Among the changes that Martins and his cowriters made to Bauer’s novel, which had already been faithfully and popularly adapted in 1959 for German television, is the representation of the hero Clemens Forell’s epic journey from Siberian internment back to his home in Bavaria as a kind of pilgrimage or penitence. Although in Bauer’s novel and its 1959 TV version the churches in Forell’s hometown assume a symbolic significance as memory of the Heimat he has lost, they are not directly imbued with religious meaning in terms of Forell’s personal faith.23 As in the original text, this new version shows how a Jewish character, Igor, whom Forell meets in a town in central Asia, helps him finally to escape the Soviet Union. In Martins’s film, however, this offer of help is made in a deserted Orthodox church, where Forell kneels and prays aloud for forgiveness. While this may refer to the violence that Forell sometimes had to perpetrate in order to survive the journey home, Igor is impressed to see “ein[en] Deutsch[en], der um Verzeihung bittet” (a German asking for forgiveness). Unlike in Bauer’s novel of the 1950s, there is a recognition of German collective guilt, which mitigates the impression that Forell’s ordeal is completely undeserved. Acknowledging this guilt by returning to Christian faith opens the door to the last stage of Forell’s journey home, where, in another scene inserted by Martins into the original narrative, he is finally reunited with his family in church on Christmas Eve. The film reworks 1950s notions of Christian culture’s

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continuity in Germany, yet rather than attributing to that culture a purely exonerating function in relation to ordinary Germans, as was the case with the 1950s films, the ordinary German now has to accept and atone for guilt before being allowed to return to the fold, both in national and religious terms. Jo Baier’s TV movie Nicht alle waren Mörder (Not Everyone Was a Murderer, 2006), based on the memoirs of actor Michael Degen, goes further in acknowledging the break in Germany’s Christian culture represented by national responsibility for the Second World War and the Holocaust. This film is largely concerned with the fate of a Jewish woman and her son hiding in Berlin in a bid to escape deportation. They are eventually taken in by a train driver called Redlich (whose name means “honest”), who has driven transports to extermination camps and is mentally scarred by what he has seen there. In the main room in Redlich’s house, a crucifix has clearly been removed from one of the walls, leaving a trace on the wallpaper, but only when an unexploded shell kills his son, who is playing outside, does the audience understand that Redlich’s estrangement from Christianity results from a sense of having broken God’s laws. His participation in the Holocaust, he reasons, has brought down God’s punishment on him, but he deserves this: “Ich selber bin schuld. Gott hat mir nicht verziehen” (I’m the guilty one. God hasn’t forgiven me). As a representative of the ordinary German, Redlich is shown suffering because of that break with Christian morality represented by the National Socialist regime. This becomes clearer still in comparison with the Jewish characters, whose sense of connection to their religious culture remains intact: Michael and his mother are eventually saved from maltreatment by the occupying Russian forces when Michael is able to prove their Jewish identity by saying Kaddish for his dead father in front of a RussianJewish officer. The Jewish characters’ unbroken religious identity thereby becomes a metaphor for their innocence, whereas the fractured German relationship to Christianity is the sign of a guilt yet to be overcome. This foregrounding of the German need for atonement is also a significant feature of Eric Till’s TV movie Bonhoeffer — Die letzte Stufe (Bonhoeffer — The Final Step, 2000) and, more recently and much more famously, Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl — The Final Days, 2005), both of which portray martyr figures from the resistance against Hitler as motivated by their Christian faith. Yet these films also enact for a contemporary audience an identification with these martyr figures that is troubled by none of the moral concerns of the earlier films about the July plotters, for example. Bonhoeffer, which had far less impact than Rothemund’s film, is chiefly of interest for the patterns of identification it constructs, which foreshadow those in Sophie Scholl. In Bonhoeffer an important figure of potential audience identification is Knobloch, an SS man charged with

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guarding Dietrich Bonhoeffer during his interrogation by the Gestapo. The congruence between the audience’s point of view and that of Knobloch is emphasized by his role in observing Bonhoeffer. He remains a silent presence during Bonhoeffer’s interrogations and watches him through a spy-hole in his cell door as he prays through a wall to give comfort to a young man in another cell who is to be executed. Knobloch is initially dismissive of Bonhoeffer’s religion but eventually fascinated by a conviction he does not understand. Later Knobloch reaches a point where his admiration is such that he wants to help Bonhoeffer escape and go on the run with him. This charismatic effect is also in evidence later in the film, when Bonhoeffer is thrown together with a disparate group of political prisoners, whose cynicism with regard to religion he is again able to overcome through the strength of his belief. Only one figure, the Gestapo interrogator Roeder, ultimately remains unmoved by Bonhoeffer’s example. The image emerges of a Christian martyrdom that allows for imagining a national community based on the admiration of a protagonist who represents not simply Christianity but a set of values that can be subscribed to by the contemporary viewer without direct recourse to religious faith: for example, the equality of human beings, the need for human solidarity, and the freedom of individual conscience, all of which Bonhoeffer preaches in the course of the film. In this way, a German national community based on liberal, humane, and democratic values is constructed in the past in opposition to the Nazi racial community. Belonging to this new community is not automatic, however: in the case of Knobloch, the Nazi supporter must realize the error of his ways and transfer his allegiance to the martyr figure in what is essentially a secularized narrative of religious conversion. This same strategy is especially evident and inclusive in Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl, which in this respect echoes significant elements of Percy Adlon’s 1982 TV movie Fünf letzte Tage (Five Last Days). As the title suggests, the latter concerns itself only with Sophie Scholl’s last five days in prison before her execution and is characterized, as both Rickard and Daniela Berghahn note, by the Christian imagery that underlines Sophie’s martyr status.24 The film is also striking because the viewer is shown the admiring reactions to Sophie by her fellow prisoners and even her interrogator. Adlon’s film gives a strong sense that the other figures already know what a significant person she is or will be in the future, a fact doubtless conditioned by the screenplay’s reliance on the retrospective accounts of Else Gebel and Robert Mohr, Sophie’s cell-mate and interrogator respectively. Mohr in particular, here named Mahr, is seen respectfully bringing Sophie biscuits and chocolate to share with Else. Two other prisoners then arrive and present Sophie with tributes before waiting modestly for her approval. After a kind of last supper, as Berghahn puts it, the prisoners

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perform their party tricks for Sophie, and then one of them shakes Sophie by the hand and expresses the significance of the Scholls’ actions: “Wir sind machtlos, aber ihr seid Hoffnung” (We are powerless, but you are hope). Here a community of resistance is retrospectively imagined which, as David Levin has argued, excludes any of those ordinary Germans who supported the National Socialist regime, and yet which also encourages identification from the point of view of the audience.25 That this community of resistance can, surprisingly, include the interrogator Mohr is also part of the proposition put forward by Rothemund’s film. Indeed, we see figures from across the political spectrum in Sophie’s thrall and, through her, discovering their common ground. Whereas Adlon’s film leaves little trace of Gebel’s communist identity, letting her instead pray for Sophie alone in her cell in the film’s final scene, Rothemund’s version highlights Else’s politics, although these do not appear complex: “Die Kommunisten halten zusammen. Das hat mich imponiert. Irgendetwas muss man tun” (The communists stick together. That impressed me. You have to do something). Similarly, Mohr’s politics are to an extent de-ideologized. Although a convinced National Socialist, his explanation of his own political position highlights the similarities between himself and Sophie in terms of their values: “Ich kann nicht verstehen, dass Sie mit Ihren Gaben nicht nationalsozialistisch denken und fühlen. Freiheit, Ehre, Wohlstand, sittlich verantwortliches Staatswesen: Das ist unsere Gesinnung” (I cannot believe that you with your talents do not think and feel as a National Socialist. Freedom, honor, prosperity, morally responsible government: those are our values). By confronting Mohr with the horrors of National Socialism, such as the Holocaust and the so-called euthanasia program against the mentally ill and the handicapped, Sophie manages to unsettle her interrogator, but Mohr’s defensive reaction to her challenges does not necessarily condemn him outright. Rather, the film presents him as a man with ideals who has chosen the wrong political system to realize those ideals and who is unwilling to confront that fact. His increasing admiration for Sophie, like that of Else Gebel, as well as his desire to save her, holds out the prospect that a community of values can be reestablished and override the political divisions between him and Else, which also initially separate them from Sophie. This, I would suggest, is the most significant aspect of the film in terms of the function of Sophie’s martyrdom. Although clearly motivated by Christian belief, her values, like those expressed by Bonhoeffer in Till’s film, are also those of the postwar democracy that can claim her as a forbear. The fact that Mohr and to a lesser extent Gebel still ascribe to what — according to the political orthodoxy of the postwar Federal Republic — are both totalitarian ideologies does not mean that they are beyond the pale. Indeed, the film anticipates through their veneration of Sophie their return to the democratic fold.26

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Fig. 2.4. Robert Mohr is shaken by Sophie’s condemnation of National Socialism in Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage (2005). DVD capture.

In conclusion, we can see that since the turn of the millennium the martyrdom of Christian figures under National Socialism can finally be represented as a national martyrdom that points forward to a successful democracy in the Federal Republic. In this guise it appears to offer a successful strategy of “stigma management” for German viewers. The moral qualms about resistance in a Christian context have largely been erased, yet at the same time the Christian conviction of the figures in question has become little more than a shorthand for a set of democratic values to which not just the religious can subscribe. The turn toward the veneration of the Christian martyr figures is also an acknowledgment of a German guilt to be overcome: Germans are no longer shown as holding the correct values automatically by virtue of their Christian heritage but rather must accept their wrong-doing in order to be reintegrated into that heritage. The access of other figures in these films to the redeeming identification with the Christian resisters offers the audience an identification that positions them as the heirs of these German martyrs and at the same time confirms that their legacy has been realized in the contemporary Federal Republic.

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Notes 1 Aleida Assmann and Ute Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit

— Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1999), 47.

2

Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001). 3

David Clay Large, “‘A Beacon in the German Darkness’: The Anti-Nazi Resistance Legacy in West German Politics,” supplement, Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 173–86; here 174. 4

Peter Steinach, “Widerstand im Dritten Reich — die Keimzelle der Nachkriegsdemokratie? Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Widerstand in der historischen politischen Bildungsarbeit, in den Medien und in der öffentlichen Meinung,” in Der 20. Juli 1944: Bewertung und Rezeption des deutschen Widerstands gegen das NS-Regime, ed. Gerd R. Überschär (Cologne: Bund-Verlag, 1994), 79–100; here 90. 5

Large, ‘“A Beacon in the Darkness,’” 178. On the White Rose, see Katie Rickard, “Remembering the ‘Weiße Rose’: Myth, Memory, National Identity” (PhD thesis, U of Bath, 2005), 34–123. 6

Large, “‘A Beacon in the Darkness,’” 180.

7

Theodor Heuss, “Der 20. Juli 1944.” Available at http://www.20-juli-44.de/ pdf/1954_heuss.pdf, accessed 23 Feb. 2009. All translations are my own. 8

A. Dirk Moses, “Stigma and Sacrifice in the Federal Republic of Germany,” History and Memory 19.2 (2007): 139–79; here 155. 9

Moses, “Stigma and Sacrifice,” 156. Moses’s argument posits the Jews as the sacrificial victims in this scenario, but his insights are clearly also applicable to resisters. 10 See Hans Maier, “Das Recht auf Widerstand,” in Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, ed. Peter Steinbach and Johannes Tuchel (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1994), 33–42, and Gerhard Ringshausen, “Der 20. Juli 1944 als Problem des Widerstandes gegen die Obrigkeit: Die Diskussion in der evangelischen und katholischen Kirche nach 1945,” in Überschär, Der 20. Juli, 191–202. 11

Detlef Kannapin, Dialektik der Bilder: Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Film; Ein Ost-West-Vergleich (Berlin: Dietz, 2005), 102.

12

As Peter Hoffmann records, however, this visit was actually made on the evening of 19 July 1944, not on the morning of 20 July. Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905–1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 263. 13

On the competition between the two films, see Kannapin, Dialektik der Bilder, 98–99. 14

Very much in the spirit of Heuss’s reading of the plotters, the voice-over states: “Now we must make sure that their sacrifice was not in vain.” 15 Kurt Sontheimer, Die Adenauer-Ära: Grundlegung der Bundesrepublik (Munich: DTV, 1996), 269. 16

Nevertheless, as Moeller observes, negative representations could always be recouped by politicians as criticisms of the bad old days of the Wehrmacht, from

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which lessons for the new Bundeswehr would be learned. Moeller, “Victims in Uniform: West German Combat Movies from the 1950s,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 43–61; here 46–48. 17

“Pressevornotiz,” in Der Arzt von Stalingrad (Leipzig: Kinowelt DVD, 2006).

18

For example, the two central positive figures in Kirst’s novel, Lieutenant Krafft and Captain Feders, both have an ambivalent relationship to Christianity. In Krafft’s case, his father’s injunctions to be “obedient to the Lord God and to the rulers” are portrayed as a kind of self-denying blindness, whereas Feders is oppressed by his authoritarian father, a Protestant pastor. Hans Helmut Kirst, Fabrik der Offiziere (Munich: Heyne, 1977), 57 and 116–17. 19

For details of the debate surrounding Hochhuth’s play see Jan Berg, Hochhuths “Stellvertreter” und die “Stellvetreter”-Debatte (Kronberg: Skriptor, 1977). Hochhuth’s play was recently adapted for an international coproduction in English directed by Costa-Gavras under the title Amen (2002). This chapter confines itself to a discussion of German-language films produced principally by German production companies with German directors.

20

Rickard, “Remembering the ‘White Rose,’” 178–80.

21

See Michael Verhoeven, “Annäherung,” in Die weiße Rose: Der Widerstand Münchner Studenten gegen Hitler, by Verhoeven and Mario Krebs (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1982), 189–212; here 190 and 198. 22

For an overview of these debates, see the introduction to the present volume. Also Bill Niven, “Introduction: German Victimhood at the Turn of the Millenium,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Niven (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–25; and Helmut Schmitz, “The Return of Wartime Suffering in Contemporary German Memory Culture, Literature and Film,” in A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present, ed. Schmitz (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 1–30. 23

Fritz Martin Bauer, So weit die Füße tragen (Bergisch Gladbach: Ehrenwirth, 2002), 5–7 and 477. The six-part TV serial of the same name was directed by Fritz Umgelter. 24

Rickard, “Remembering the ‘White Rose,’” 202–4. Daniela Berghahn, “Sophie Scholl Biopics: Wandel im öffentlichen Gedächtnis einer weiblichen Ikone des Widerstandes,” in Ikonen, Helden, Außenseiter: Film und Biographie, ed. Manfred Mittermayer, Patric Blaser, Andrea B. Braidt, and Deborah Holmes (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2009), 105–21. 25

David Levin, “Are We Victims Yet? Resistance and Community in The White Rose, Five Last Days and The Nasty Girl,” Germanic Review 73.1 (1998): 86–100; here 93.

26

In this respect, the relationship between Nazi interrogator and Christian victim recalls that portrayed in Volker Schlöndorff’s Der neunte Tag (The Ninth Day, 2004), which also presents both parties as “believers” of different kinds. However, Schlöndorff’s film, discussed in detail in Brad Prager’s chapter in this volume, works against the conciliatory narrative I am describing here in that the priest Abbé Kramer ultimately will not allow his interrogator Gebhart the comfort of such identification.

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3: The Rhetoric of Victim Narratives in West German Films of the 1950s Manuel Köppen

Working through the Past

I

N HIS 1959 LECTURE “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (The Meaning of Working Through the Past) Theodor W. Adorno observed suspiciously: “Panegyrics to Jews that isolate them as a group already give anti-Semitism a running start.” Someone had told him the story of a woman who, “upset after seeing a dramatization of the The Diary of Anne Frank, said: yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.”1 According to Adorno, this kind of empathy is ambivalent precisely because it allows the individual case to become an alibi for forgetting the “terrifying totality.” That was during the Anne Frank boom. In the mid-1950s the Diary of Anne Frank had appeared in a German paperback edition, followed by the sentimentalized stage version and George Steven’s equally facile American film adaptation (The Diary of Anne Frank, 1959) that found an audience of millions in Germany. Pilgrimages were organized to BergenBelsen, a camp that unexpectedly attained the rank of a German national holy site. In 1956 the Federal Republic of Germany tried to intervene through its embassy in France when Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) was to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, yet just one year later the German version, Nacht und Nebel, was showing in seventy theaters in Berlin alone. The death camps had become media events, long before Marvin J. Chomsky and Gerald Green’s four-part television series Holocaust (1978) secured an appropriate name for the event. It was also a time of re-viewing National Socialist history in West German cinema. The concept of “working through the past” (“Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit”) enjoyed great currency, starting in the mid-1950s. Yet, at first “working through” did not mean remembering war crimes, but rather remembering patterns of behavior and values that could be positive points of contact for the present. These discourses intersected and interfered with each other, one concerned with war crimes and the other with behavioral norms in difficult times. This interference would become the

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focus in positioning Holocaust discourse, avant la lettre, in filmic speech about the recent past during the second half of the 1950s. Postwar German cinema had already thematized war crimes in films like Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946), Eugen York’s Morituri (1948), Helmut Käutner’s In jenen Tagen (In Those Days, 1947), or Kurt Maetzig’s Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows, 1947). In these films the persecution of the Jews may have remained a marginal topic, but the way it was treated left a decisive mark on how the persecution was remembered in the 1950s and how simultaneously it was discursively entwined with the question of guilt and proving oneself in difficult times. Both the exculpatory gesture that made everyone a victim of the war (the soldier at the front just as much as the political dissident or the Jew) and the tendency to sentimentalize reappear in the films of the 1950s. However — and this is what differentiates 1950s West German films from those postwar films of the late 1940s — the exculpatory gesture is now enmeshed with guilt, as a discourse of proving oneself, and, so to speak, rhetorically refined. The present consensus describes the politics of memory in 1950s West Germany in terms of its complete repression or dismissal of the incriminating past in the face of the prospects offered by the Wirtschaftswunder.2 When applied to the movie industry, this appraisal needs to be differentiated: while conceding injustice, films aimed at showing the past in the best possible light. Ten years after the end of the Third Reich a wave of films interrogating the National Socialist past hit West German cinemas, investigating the patterns of behavior that led the nation into catastrophe but also those that were worthy of positive remembrance. This wave began with the portrayal of “tragic heroes” of the Nazi period in Canaris (Alfred Weidenmann, 1955) and Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, Helmut Käutner, 1955); it continued with historical features about the final days in the Führerbunker such as Der letzte Akt (Hitler: The Last Ten Days, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1955) and the attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, as well as with war films set on land, on sea, or in the air; and it even included films about the expulsion of Germans from the East and the final defeat in Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (Darkness Fell on Gotenhafen, Frank Wisbar, 1959) or the causes of the war in Fabrik der Offiziere (The Officer Factory, Frank Wisbar, 1960). In short, between 1954 and 1960 a corpus of — at the time — highly respected cinematic works featuring prominent actors was produced with the goal of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming of the past). The overarching narrative in all of these films is the tragic set of circumstances that always enables the protagonists’ “blameless guilt.” It underpins as well films in the tradition of military comedies like Paul May’s 08/15 series, as Jennifer Kapczynski comments in her contribution to this volume. This type of narrative, in which the German is a victim of

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collective fate, features Jewish victims who play a not insignificant role, even if they only appear episodically or in subplots. Yet these sometimes subtle allusions must be differentiated in two respects: first, according to the narrative position of the Jewish victim’s story, and second, according to context. The reference to the Jewish victim functions differently, depending on whether the narrative is centered on resistance, on the events of the war, or on deportation and exile.

Defeat with a Good Conscience: Narratives of Resistance Borchert’s Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside, 1947) and Zuckmayer’s drama Des Teufels General were among the most popular plays on German stages long into the 1950s. The postwar generation saw itself mirrored in them: in Borchert’s play in the lament of the lost generation led astray by the fathers, and in Zuckmayer’s play in the heroism of the nonconformist general. Draußen vor der Tür was filmed in 1948 by Wolfgang Liebeneiner under the title Liebe 47 (Love 1947). He deleted the play’s allusions to the persecution of Jews and in its place expanded the role of Anna Gehrke, whose story of expulsion, flight, and moral endangerment in postwar Germany parallels that of the returning soldier Beckmann, allowing them to come together and enjoy newfound happiness in their sheltered home.3 Six years later, in 1954, Helmut Käutner took the opposite approach and expanded the persecution of the Jews into a subplot of its own. Zuckmayer’s play mentions in passing the fate of a Jewish surgeon named Samuel Bergmann, who escapes the concentration camp and wants to flee but, finding himself in a hopeless situation, commits suicide with his wife. General Harras, “the Devil’s General,” who was supposed to help the couple, receives their farewell letter. This is the impetus for the play’s central guilt-monologue: “Jeder hat seinen Gewissensjuden, oder mehrere, damit er nachts schlafen kann. Aber damit kauft man sich nicht frei. . . . Schuldig und verdammt in alle Ewigkeit. Das Gemeine zulassen ist schlimmer, als es tun” (Everyone has at least one good-conscience-Jew so he can sleep well at night. But that doesn’t get you off the hook. . . . Guilty and damned for all eternity. Allowing cruelty is worse than committing it).4 Already in Zuckmayer’s play, in other words, references to the persecution of Jews highlight the absolute moral integrity of the main character. In Käutner’s film adaptation of the play Jenny and Samuel Bergmann have become the Rosenfelds, a couple whose fate parallels that of all morally upright Germans. Jenny Rosenfeld is introduced in the backstage dressing room of the actress Olivia Geiss, the general’s close friend. Sitting in front of a poster announcing The Merry Widow,5 Jenny laments her

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fate to the actress. Her husband, just released from the Buchenwald concentration camp to a prison hospital, is to be deported to Poland. Olivia confronts Harras with the Rosenfelds’ problem when she insists that he is the only one who can help them. Jenny appears again only much later in the story. During a party in Harras’s apartment, she opens the door to the living room but does not dare enter. Here she is used both as a reminder and as a contrasting figure, recalling the omnipresent threat to Jews and undermining the festive cheerfulness of Harras’s military colleagues. Later, after Harras is released by the Gestapo, the viewer learns through a dialogue between Harras and Olivia that the Rosenfelds found shelter in Harras’s house: “Seitdem trauen sie sich kaum aus dem Zimmer vor Angst” (Since then, they have barely ventured from their room out of fear),” says Olivia. Harras answers: “Angst, überall Angst” (Fear. Fear everywhere).” By this point it should be clear to the audience that the fate of the Rosenfelds is tied to Harras’s fate, especially because Olivia now suggests that Harras should not only help the Rosenfelds leave the country but also stay in the house himself with his new lover Diddo Geiss, Olivia’s niece. But this does not come to pass. The fifth scene dedicated to this storyline comes right before the film’s finale. The Rosenfelds sit side by side, peacefully leaning against each other at a bus station shelter. Suddenly the man’s cane slides from his hands: both are dead. In the reverse shot Harras and Diddo push their way through a crowd, framed in the same position and proportions as the dead couple.6 This subplot has two functions: it emphasizes how state power threatens both the Jewish family and the nonconformist general, and it establishes visual and narrative parallels between the positions of both sets of victims. What happened to the Rosenfelds threatens the protagonist and possibly his lover as well. The reference to the persecution of Jews has shifted its function from the question of guilt (in the play) to the condemnation of an inhuman regime (in the film). Other alterations to the original play are no less significant. After years of debates about soldiers killing their comrades for political or moral reasons, the figure of Oderbruch, who sabotages airplane production, had to be shown more positively. In the film he is promoted to an old “war comrade from 14/18” and cast in an altogether better light. Schmidt-Lausitz, who in Zuckmayer’s version is the cultural director in the Propaganda Ministry, becomes an SS group leader with all the stereotypical trappings of a villain. And finally, Harras’s detention in the Gestapo prison, which is only mentioned in the play, is expanded into a ten-minute sequence. The effect of these changes, like the story of the Rosenfelds, is to show the regime’s absolute supremacy.7 The protagonists of both Des Teufels General and Canaris were based on historical figures, General Ernst Udet, who shot himself in 1941, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was executed for presumed sympathies

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Fig. 3.1. General Harras and Diddo Geiss watch the Rosenfelds in the bus shelter in Des Teufels General (1955). DVD capture.

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with the resistance movement. Because both films intervened in the mid1950s’ discussion of whether resistance to Hitler had been patriotic or treasonous, both protagonists had to be cleansed of any suspicion that they acted immorally. To this end Canaris is portrayed as a helper of the oppressed, who aids a young woman pressured to become a Gestapo informant because her father is in a concentration camp. Her story develops into a subplot like that of the Rosenfelds. It was pure invention to make resistance fighters of either Canaris or Udet, both of whom were fellow travelers of the regime in important administrative roles. In terms of the politics of memory, both films paved the way for the far more touchy matter of commemorating the assassination attempt on Hitler. After the commercial success of both films and the first installment of May’s war trilogy 08/15, stories about the Third Reich enjoyed mass appeal, and many production companies jumped on the bandwagon. Both Canaris and Des Teufels General, produced by Fama-Film and RealFilm respectively, were distributed by Europa-Verleih. In 1955 the second installment of 08/15, produced by Devina-Film, was launched by GloriaVerleih. In the case of Der letzte Akt the Austrian firm Kosmopol invested, while the American firm Columbia took over distribution. Producing a film about the assassination attempt, which notably missed the ten-year anniversary by a year, became an all-out contest. Artur Brauner’s Berlinbased CCC-Film and Munich-based Artisan film fought over the story and the rights.8 This competition, covered extensively in the West German press, resulted in a compromise: Georg W. Pabst’s Es geschah am 20. Juli (It Happened on July 20, 1955, distributed by NF-Verleih) advertised itself as the authentic presentation of the events of 24 hours in a documentary-like staging, while Falk Harnack’s Der 20. Juli (The Plot to Assassinate Hitler, 1955, distributed by Herzog-Film) was meant to provide the back-story as well. To this end the latter introduces the fictional figure of Captain Lindner, Stauffenberg’s former junior officer. At one of the first turning points in the plot Lindner undergoes a conversion on his own road to Damascus after he witnesses mass killings of Jewish civilians in Russia. Morally shaken to the core, he collapses over the steering wheel of his vehicle and shortly thereafter joins the resistance. The arrest of a Jewish doctor at the beginning of the film already anticipates Lindner’s conversion experience. At this point he still considers the arrest to be an isolated aberration that has nothing to do with the war at the front. In other words the film develops a process of enlightenment that constructs so-called “war crimes behind the front” as the motivation for the military resistance to Hitler, rather than the dissatisfaction among the officer class with the catastrophic direction the war was taking as a military campaign. All three films — Canaris, Des Teufels General, and Der 20. Juli — were part of a struggle over memory that was at least obliquely related to the question of German rearmament. In the summer of 1955 the Bundestag

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activated the committee that was to be responsible for the formation of the Bundeswehr and the selection of high-ranking officers. German soldiers had obeyed their oath to the Führer up to the last moment. Even at the beginning of the 1950s, 53 percent of war veterans and at least 30 percent of German society at large were convinced that resistance to Hitler, and especially the assassination attempt on 20 July 1944, was “treason,” a sort of second “Dolchstoß” (stab in the back) after the military defeat in the First World War.9 Thus references to the persecution of Jews were part of the rhetorical strategy of showing resistance as a moral act.

Soldiers’ Fates: Proving Oneself, No Matter What! Even the most unapologetic war films of this epoch include allusions to genocide and the concentration camps. Such references have a different narrative status than in the stories of resistance. The soldier was, after all, himself a victim of circumstances, and therefore his actions needed no justification. But when in doubt, he proved his moral integrity using the regime’s crimes as foil. This was true for both war heroes and naval cadets. Leaders from the past were in demand. There were Canaris and Udet, but also media stars of bygone days: the flying ace Hans-Joachim Marseille or a submarine captain like Günther Prien. Marseille, who crashed in Africa, undefeated after more than 150 successful hits in the air, had a military career that could still be ascribed to youthful hell-raising, as seen in Alfred Weidenmann’s Der Stern von Afrika (The Star of Africa, 1957). The submarine captain Günther Prien, on the other hand, was more of a father figure. Shown as such in Harald Reinl’s U47–Kapitänleutnant Prien (U47–Lt. Commander Prien, 1958), he is the caring head of family as well as the father of his crew — with an astonishing resemblance to the commander figure Günther Rittau had anticipated in his earlier U-Boote Westwärts (U-Boat, Course West! 1941). As a war hero and father figure he must undergo a process of moral and ethical enlightenment. Before Prien even enters the picture, we meet Pastor Kille, a former schoolmate of the naval hero, who acts as the moral authority. He helps people persecuted by the regime and asks Prien for assistance after the latter becomes a star for sinking the battleship “Royal Oak” at Scapa Flow. As a professional soldier, Prien refuses but thereby triggers the dramaturgical turning point. Up to this point the film’s narrative of wartime heroism was accompanied by cheerful marching music, and its aesthetics largely resembled comparable films of the National Socialist era. But now the music becomes darkly tragic during the attacks on enemy ships. Prien’s submarine sinks a ship that has refugees from Germany on board, but they would rather throw themselves back into the water than be rescued by a German submarine. A close-up shows Prien’s thoughtful

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face. A sailor starts to crack up: “Matrose Christiansen bittet fragen zu dürfen, ob das wahr ist mit dem KZ?” (Seaman Christiansen requests permission to inquire if the stories about concentration camps are true?) he shouts up from the lower deck. The process of enlightenment has begun. In a conversation with his first mate, Prien is now of the opinion that “Soldat sein allein genügt nicht” (Just being a soldier isn’t enough). His moral purification complete, he visits Pastor Kille, who has been arrested by the Gestapo in the meantime, and tries to arrange for his release. This sequence has a symbolic frame: it begins with a dissolve that puts Prien’s face in front of the bars of the prison and closes with a dissolve to the sea, in front of which the pastor’s face now appears. Prien is henceforth also threatened by the regime, and Pastor Kille has absolved him of his sins for his final mission, from which he will not return. Prien has been transfigured into a frustrated resistance fighter. The submarine ace, who during the war was the subject of more narcissistic castings than perhaps any other hero, thus has his integrity preserved unscathed.10 The fact that the film at first employs the usual distinction between politics and war allows war to be portrayed as an exciting adventure and masculine proving ground. After the dramatic turn, the critical tones about the war become general appeals to humanity: the pastor pleads for humanity, and the sight of bodies floating in the water makes Prien’s war appear increasingly inhumane. When Prien elects to go on his final mission despite having been assigned to a position as trainer, he is motivated once again by purely humane reasons: his sense of responsibility for his crew. In his tragic defeat his conscience is clear. We see only his cap floating on the water, metonymically linked to the floating bodies of the refugees. Not only is a parallel drawn between Prien’s fate and the fate of the refugees, but his defeat is also stylized as a sacrifice. This is an act of collective catharsis for the audience in the movie theater. Prien’s sacrifice cancels responsibility for the victims of National Socialism. In other films of the time this retroactive justification, which indicts the crimes of the others (that is, of the Nazis) through moralizing allusions, is less clearly developed than here, but in some cases it is still significant. Frank Wisbar’s Haie und kleine Fische (Sharks and Little Fish), which opened in theaters a year earlier in 1957, explores the submarine war from the perspective of naval cadets. The sharks in the title are not meant to represent the commanding officers but rather the “others”: Hitler and the Nazis. The cadets, for their part, must learn to submit to the commanding officers, that is, to trust their “benevolent fathers.” The main protagonist succeeds, for his commander will ultimately sacrifice himself for the cadet, once again signaled by the captain’s cap floating on the water’s surface. A second cadet, recently promoted to lieutenant, chooses a different path. His father, an intellectual critical of the regime (with Jewish grandparents to boot) has been killed in a concentration

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Fig. 3.2. Symbolic framing of Lt. Commander Prien in front of the prison and Pastor Kille with a dissolve to the sea in U 47–Kapitänleutnant Prien (1958). DVD capture.

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camp. Fighting “for the future of Western culture” on a submarine seems impossible to him now, and he shoots himself. This kind of defeatism may seem somewhat morally justified, but it is not the high road to postwar West Germany: trust in the true fathers. A third path, for example, the path of resistance, is out of the question in a film told from the perspective of soldiers, that is, from below. In war films that thematize “war crimes” the accusation always resonates that the Nazis besmirched an otherwise “clean war.” Prien, his hand on his Knight’s Cross, says to Pastor Kille in his prison cell: “Als Soldat habe ich meine Pflicht getan und werde sie auch weiterhin tun, aber nicht dafür, dass man uns ‘Mörder’ ins Gesicht schreien darf” (As a soldier I have done my duty and will continue to do my duty, but not so that they can scream “murderer” in our faces). The defense against the imagined accusation of “collective guilt” haunts the 1950s cinema like a phantom.11 Meanwhile, the Knight’s Cross continues to manifest a commitment to duty that morally ennobles its bearer in retrospect.12

Flight and Expulsion: Who Was a Victim? The theme of the expulsion of Germans from the East was already present in postwar films of the late 1940s, for example, in the last episode of In jenen Tagen or in the story of the woman’s fate in Liebe 47.13 In 1950s West Germany it was taken up by the Heimat film as a story of successful integration after initial problems, as Rachel Palfreyman details in her contribution to this volume. Frank Wisbar’s Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (1960) was the only film of this era to portray the experience of German expellees directly, culminating in a spectacularly executed catastrophe sequence showing the sinking of the ship “Wilhelm Gustloff.” For Wisbar, who also wrote the script, it was a personally meaningful project in that it extended and revised the final film that Wisbar had shot in the Third Reich before emigrating: Petermann ist dagegen (Petermann Is Against It, 1937), an unequivocal propaganda film about the pleasures to be experienced on a state-chartered vacation steamer bound for Norway. Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen begins with similar (but more cultivated pleasures) and accompanies its cast of characters through the Third Reich, returning eventually to the same ship, the “Wilhelm Gustloff,” as it sinks. In between these two events come the war, complicated love stories, and the portrayal of the expulsion of Germans from the East. The reference to the persecution of Jews here is no more than one brief episode, totally unmotivated in the narrative because up to this point neither National Socialism nor “war crimes” have been mentioned. The episode concerns a Jew in a secret compartment. In her suite Frau Kubelsky runs an improvised gentlemen’s club, which is in high demand

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among German naval officers. In the midst of the merriment an SS officer appears with a carpenter who claims to have built a hiding place into the suite. He opens part of the bookshelf and reveals in a compartment behind it an elderly man who is frantically trying to put on his yellow star. It is Frau Kubelsky’s father. She takes her father by the arm and says: Steht uns bei. Ihr habt doch so oft gesagt, ihr seid meine Freunde. Wir haben nichts verbrochen, gar nichts. . . . Ihr seid doch Helden, ihr habt die Brust voller Orden für Tapferkeit. Bitte, bitte lasst uns jetzt nicht allein. [Stand by us. You have said so often that you are my friends. We have done nothing wrong, nothing at all. . . . You are heroes, after all, you have chests full of medals for bravery. Please, please don’t leave us alone now.]

In the interior frame of the shot the victims are isolated; at the same time, the composition of space separates the SS officer from everyone else. A visual triangle is formed: the isolated victims, threatened by the SS officer, and beyond them the spectators in shocked silence. The discourse on guilt can now begin to develop. While father and daughter are led away past the worried faces of the others, Frau Kubelsky says: “Ihr tut mir leid, ihr armen Schweine” (I feel sorry for you, you poor dogs). A female bystander sighs softly and says: “Aber, das geht doch nicht . . . und wir stehen dabei” (But this is wrong . . . and we’re just standing around). One of the officers comes to his senses and responds: “Ja, wir stehen dabei. Helden, hat sie gesagt, ein, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben Helden: Pfui Deibel!” (Yes, we’re just standing around. Heroes, she said, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven heroes: damn it all!). This self-flagellation leads nowhere, only to the horror of the expulsion. The witnesses’ guilt is not purged but in a sense relativized by what is about to happen to the German expellees. The brief episode’s scenic composition and the narrative positioning ensure here once again that the persecution of Jews can be understood as a symbolic anticipation of German suffering. Shortly afterwards, when a French POW is buried after trying to save German women from being raped by Russian soldiers, the minister speaks words of warning: “In ruheloser Erde musst du ruhen, denn wir sind die Gejagten” (You must rest in restless soil, for we are the hunted). There were voices in the press who were uncomfortable with such scenes. The reviewer in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, saw the SS officer as a “Klischeefigur, der Vorgang selbst nicht mehr als ein Gag [mit] keinerlei Konsequenzen” (cliché figure, and the entire scene itself nothing more than a gag [with] absolutely no consequences) for the plot.14 Hilmar Hoffmann was similarly disparaging, viewing the entire scene with Frau Kubelsky as “peinlich” (awkward). First she is introduced

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Fig. 3.3. The isolated victims, threatened by the SS officer, and the reverse shot with bystanders in silence, in Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (1960). DVD capture.

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as a “kupplerische Witwe” (widow-cum-Madam) and black market dealer, only later to be shown as a Jew as well.15 In his view the script’s sentimental, tawdry “Kinodeutsch” (movie-German) introduces a kind of German self-criticism not far removed from the idea of “the enemy within.”16 The scene still appears embarrassing from today’s perspective. Yet its position within the political discourse of the time allowed two things. First, because it references German guilt, it can also stage the guilt of the Russian invaders in the following scenes all the more clearly. Second, it can also rather casually suggest a kinship between German and Jewish victims. The severity of the criticism also evidences how strongly the image of the past was contested. A former émigré like Wisbar, who had, after all, made successful films such as Haie und kleine Fische or the Stalingrad drama Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Stalingrad: Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? 1958), was accused of having experienced Gotenhafen from the distance of Hollywood.17 Similarly, Douglas Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, had been received as a veritable affront in Germany. When the émigré author’s novel appeared in 1954, many critics dismissed outright his ability to speak about the past.18 And now Sirk, another emigrant, came along to show the Germans what their own past looked like. Produced by the American Universal studios, the feature was filmed exclusively in Berlin, with German screen star Liselotte Pulver as the female lead. Furthermore, it explicitly thematized the air war, with the picturesque rubble landscape of Berlin as its backdrop. Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen hints at the horrors of the air war in two brief sequences, but in Sirk’s film these horrors ground and structure the plot. There is a Jewish character, played by Remarque himself, who tries to survive in hiding. The concentrationcamp theme is also present in the character of a music-loving camp commandant. No other German film dealing with the past had undertaken the task of portraying the Heimat of 1944 so comprehensively — from the barracks guard-informant to the party bigwig — showing a wide range of motivations. The scenes at the front are also remarkable for their uncommonly drastic portrayal of death, corpses, and mutilation. But all of this — the entire repertory of signs for the Third Reich — was merely a backdrop for the real plot: a love story. The film was interested neither in the question of guilt nor in seeking root causes. And not only was it in color, but it was also a melodrama, the very genre that had established Sirk’s reputation as a film director in Germany in the late 1930s. To German audiences it must have seemed like a film imported from a past that they had experienced very differently, like a cliché that summarized everything and missed all the nuances. When A Time to Love and a Time to Die was shown at the 1958 Berlin Film Festival, the criticism was devastating. It was compared to vulgar pulp fiction.19 Its painterly colors and visual language were seen

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as antithetical to the horrors of war.20 More than anything else, the film did not contribute to coming to terms with the past.21 And of course, all the critics were certain that their own position as witnesses took priority: “Wir haben es doch miterlebt. Es war ja alles doch ganz anders. So geht es aber wirklich nicht” (We, after all, lived through it. Everything was completely different. This is really unacceptable).22 Sirk’s film, which in no way questioned the West German consensus about the past, was nevertheless felt to be a provocation because it was not interested in Vergangenheitsbewältigung and therefore seemed to evade a lofty historical interpretation. Hollywood wanted to usurp German memory, and in color, too! In contrast, the West German mode of memory was literally black and white: it guaranteed authenticity and allowed the filmmaker to weave documentary footage into the filmic narrative. As a filmic mode, it allowed a distinction on the level of the plot as well: in the division between a heroically suffering people and the evil perpetrators. That Sirk’s film focused on the love story made all of this strangely indistinct, just as it destabilized discourses of guilt and Bewältigung by refracting them through melodrama. The reactions to Sirk’s film may well represent a marginal episode, but they clearly show that the contemporary discourse insisted on clear boundaries, on a definition of “overcoming” the past that went beyond the Allied imposed reeducation of the early postwar years toward a new self-consciousness about taking control of the past. The scene with the Jew hiding in the secret compartment behind the bookcase was irritating because of its moralistic finger pointing, which had already been rendered obsolete by the efforts of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. In every reference to Jewish victims the consensus insisted upon understanding their persecution as a war crime and not — as was the case in the Nuremberg Trials — differentiating between war crimes and crimes against humanity. Only this enabled the two victim positions to merge. The question of guilt was transformed into the question of how human beings in general behave in times of war, and the “others” are always responsible for the crimes. If guilt was thematized at all, then always as the “metaphysical guilt” that Karl Jaspers, in his influential book Die Schuldfrage (The Question of Guilt), had described as the guilt for which one would “only have to answer before God.”23 In the context of this guilt the Jewish victims take on special significance. They function as the last moral authorities on earth. Helping them becomes the litmus test for moral integrity. But sometimes they help Germans as well, as in Fritz Umgelter’s So weit die Füße tragen (As Far As Your Feet Will Carry You, 1959), a six-part television miniseries about the soldier Clemens Forell’s heroic escape from a Russian prison camp, which became a smash hit. When he meets Igor, an Armenian Jew, in Central Asia, Forell’s years of suffering take a turn for the better. Igor helps him to leave the Soviet Union through his contacts with the underground; however, the episode’s symbolic quality is scarcely

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developed. More than anything, the fact that a Jew is willing to help him motivates the German protagonist’s suspicions of being betrayed. In the final shot, his escape successful, Forell looks probingly at a photograph of himself as a young lieutenant. Time has changed him. This is clearer in the literary source from which the story was adapted: Forell is so traumatized that he can hardly be reintegrated into West German society.24 When we review the positions of Jewish and non-Jewish German victims in this overview of 1950s German films about Vergangenheitsbewältigung, some conventional conclusions become questionable: neither German suffering nor the persecution of Jews is suppressed, and the persecution of Jews is discussed openly, but only as a point of comparison and justification for the suffering of non-Jewish Germans.25

Victims Revisited The 1960s represented a caesura. Coming to terms with the past, that is, the German defeat, was no longer the order of the day. New threats suppressed the need to confront the past in such a moral and sentimental way. The Berlin crisis, which had started in 1959, reached its apex in 1961 and was followed almost immediately by the Cuban missile crisis. In addition the Eichmann trial, which put the banality of evil on display, undermined the narrative of how everyone had been more or less a victim of the times. After all, Eichmann also presented himself as a victim of circumstance, a conscientious bureaucrat who followed orders. The time had come to inflect the construction of memory differently. First of all, the “persecution of the Jews,” as it was still always called, gradually attained a singular status in public discourse. Another television miniseries, also directed by Fritz Umgelter, only loosely connected the theme of Jewish persecution with the suffering of German protagonists. Am grünen Strand der Spree (On the Green Beach of the Spree River, 1960) consists of six episodes from the war, marginally connected by the frame story of bar guests who tell of their wartime experiences. In the first episode a former soldier remembers witnessing mass shootings in Poland. For the first time, in other words, a German fiction film staged the murder of the Jews.26 Somewhat later, similar scenes appeared in Egon Monk’s television production Ein Tag: Bericht aus einem deutschen Konzentrationslager (One Day: Report from a German Concentration Camp, 1965) and in the East German Buchenwald drama Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves, 1963; based on the novel by Bruno Apitz). A shift in the politics of memory gradually set in, partially conditioned by the generational shift.27 In periodizing German constructions of memory, it has been suggested that the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung be reserved for the 1960s

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and 1970s, when a new generation countered the image of the German past held dear by those who had experienced the Third Reich as adults and were therefore also responsible for it.28 It is true that the memory consensus conjured during the 1950s was shaken during the 1960s, yet the war generation as represented by film directors all enthusiastically set themselves the task of portraying their recent history, including the old guard of the Third Reich (Liebeneiner), those who had earned their first directorial honors with films extolling the merits of military training (Weidenmann), returning émigrés (Wisbar), and those who had remained in the Third Reich, however involuntarily (Pabst). This, of course, can also accurately be described as Vergangenheitspolitik (a politics of the past), but this politics had the unequivocal intention of not merely remembering the past but also overcoming it through problem-oriented plots. Beyond allusions to metaphysical guilt, the rhetorical convergence of German suffering and Jewish victimhood also belonged to this kind of “overcoming.” It was exactly this empathetic “overcoming” of the past that Adorno so distrusted. If we live today in the phase of the “preservation of the past,” as it has been suggested, a time in which the grandchildren of the war generation increasingly have their say, it is still remarkable that they have discovered or are supposed to discover the suffering of their grandparents, given the fact that the second generation, the ’68ers, continues to determine the discourse. That said, there clearly has been a boom recently in films treating the suffering of the war generation (few of whom are still alive), which in many cases can be viewed as a revival of the 1950s films’ subject matter. There have been remakes. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) draws on exactly the same sources and takes place at exactly the same time period — the final days in the Führerbunker — as Pabst’s 1955 Der letzte Akt. Audiences in 2001 encountered Fritz Umgelter’s escape epic So weit die Füße tragen as a cinematic remake by Hardy Martins. There have also been new interpretations of subject matter treated by the films of the 1950s. Wisbar’s Gotenhafen film was divided equally between the two public televison stations: ARD produced Die Flucht (The March of Millions, Kai Wessel, 2007), and ZDF produced Die Gustloff (Ship of No Return: The Last Voyage of the Gustloff, Joseph Vilsmaier, 2008). Both were shown as two-part mini-series. ZDF had already broadcast Dresden (Roland Suso Richter, 2006), a melodrama about the air war, a thematic focus that had no precedent in the 1950s, provided Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die is excluded as an American production. The privately owned television stations also put their money on the memory boom. On 29 September 2008, 3.5 million viewers tuned in to ProSieben during primetime to marvel at a remake of Bernhard Wicki’s 1959 antiwar film Die Brücke (The Bridge, Wolfgang Panzer).29 These days memory politics really are about preservation. The war generation’s memories are now on the agenda. After the much-debated

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confrontation with the Holocaust during the 1990s, German suffering is supposedly being given its rightful place in public memory discourse. Ignoring production style for the moment, the politics of this discourse have indeed shifted in comparison to the 1950s. Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang no longer distinguishes between the “unblemished” Wehrmacht and criminals in the guise of sinister Nazis, which was self-evident for Pabst’s and every other film in the 1950s. The perpetrator discourse is being markedly de-differentiated. When it comes to the destruction of Dresden or the expulsions from the East, political correctness now allows Germans and Allied soldiers to unite in a community of victims: a narrative that once characterized films about the First World War at the end of the Weimar Republic. The differentiation of the question of guilt within German society, which characterized the 1950s cinema, is internationalized, and a universal wartime suffering, including always culpability, replaces it. German soldiers ambush and shoot POWs in Russia, British pilots bombard defenseless German cities, Russian hordes rape German women. Those persecuted by National Socialism are the only group that proves difficult to integrate into the international community of victims and perpetrators. Normally, the discussion of the German people’s suffering is disconnected from references to the Holocaust. Of course there are also a few exceptions to this rule. In Dresden the best friend of Anna, the protagonist, is married to a Jew, Simon Goldberg, who is forced to distribute deportation orders to other Jews.30 His figure implies a third perspective — the hope that Dresden will be bombarded in order to prevent further deportations, probably meant as an allusion to Victor Klemperer’s diary.31 The film touches only briefly on this perspective and does not play out its implications. The main narrative function of Goldberg’s character is, once again, to uphold Anna’s probity — naturally she helps the poor couple selflessly.32 The narrative repositioning of the Jew-as-helper in the remake of the escape drama So weit die Füße tragen is even more blatant, as David Clarke also notes in his contribution to this volume. In Hardy Martin’s new version of the 1950s adventure, Igor becomes a moral authority, complete with a biography that includes surviving the Holocaust, and, although he does not forgive the crimes of the Germans, he nevertheless sacrifices himself for a German in an inversion of the Christian salvation story. The sacrifice of the Jewish victim allows the finale’s reconciliatory homecoming. Through this alteration of the original story, Igor’s figure becomes a reminder of past crimes, just as his sacrifice helps bring about the newfound happiness of German postwar society and family life. Correspondingly, Forell is no longer the traumatized wreck of the 1950s version. Instead he is reintegrated into the community as a loving family man. Entirely without irony, the heroic sacrifice that the war generation so insistently claimed as its own is displaced by the sacrifice of others.

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Fig. 3.4. Fighting to the end — Albert Mutz and Ernst Scholten in Die Brücke (2008). DVD capture.

The cases above illustrate the dramatic effects that such character constellations allow. After all, the grandchildren’s generation seeks the emotional satisfaction that will interest them in their grandparents’ stories. This is all the more true for films like Die Brücke, which targeted a young audience. Neither in Wicki’s film nor in the novel by Gregor Dorfmeister is there any mention of concentration camps or the persecution of Jews.33 But in Panzer’s remake the camps and Jewish persecution permeate the story. They are the cause of the rivalry between Walter (one of the six boys who want to defend the bridge) and his father, the Gauleiter. The father has already seen to it that his Jewish coworkers were deported, and now he wants to send the boy’s teacher, Fräulein Bauer, to Dachau, because (in the new version) she is involved in a steamy love affair with the sixteen-year-old Walter. The couple’s first sexual encounter takes place right at the beginning of the film, as Walter and his teacher take shelter from an American fighter plane in a small hunting cottage. “Es dauerte einfach zu lange, bis es kracht” (It just took too long for the sparks to fly) in the original version, according to the producer, when discussing this new dramatic calculation.34 And the American GI, who calls for the boys to surrender during the final fight for the bridge, finally gets a name. Now the soldier who inadvertently wounds the boys’ pride (thus becoming their innocent victim) by saying “Wir schießen nicht auf Kinder” (We don’t shoot at kids) is called “Rosenzweig.” The film in no way intends to reintroduce the question of guilt. References to the Holocaust and concentration camps do not serve as a narrative justification for the film’s conspicuous portrayal of German suffering because of the air war. Their goal is merely to complete the repertoire of memory material

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from the Third Reich available to young people. To the same end, a general appears on the bridge like a deus ex machina, pinches the boys’ cheeks like Hitler in his last appearance in the Deutsche Wochenschau newsreel, then orders the boys into defensive formation. The movie’s stated goal of filming the novel even more dramatically and authentically than Bernhard Wicki meant, more than anything, making the film conform to the expectations of today’s youth.35 This explains its actionoriented plot, the explicit sexuality, and the relative independence of the adolescents, who — in complete contrast to the 1950s films — find themselves in a world where there are only evil fathers in positions of authority. It reinforces as well, through a kind of background noise, everything that students are supposed to learn about the Third Reich in school, including the fact that the Holocaust took place and concentration camps really existed. Today the priority seems less to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and the memories of the war generation than to update them. The war generation, which sought to invent its own history, never would have imagined some aspects of this reinvention of the past. — Translated by John Daniel Davis and Marc Silberman

Notes 1

Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2003), 16.

2

See, for example, Aleida Assmann, who indicates that there was neither “in Israel noch in Westdeutschland . . . in den ersten anderthalb Jahrzehnten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ein ausgeprägtes Bedürfnis nach einer allgemeinen Thematisierung der jüngst zurückliegenden Ereignisse des Krieges und der Massenvernichtung” (in Israel nor in West Germany a widespread need for a general confrontation with the recent events of the war and mass extermination). According to her, a need for silence dominated, and both guilt and suffering remained taboo themes. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 98–101. 3

In Borchert’s play Beckmann’s parents kill themselves with gas, thus de-nazifying themselves forever, as Frau Kramer puts it, because Beckmann’s father had been “ein bißchen doll auf die Juden” (a bit crazy about the Jews) and lost his pension after the war. Wolfgang Borchert, Draußen vor der Tür (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1968), scene 5, line 37. 4

Carl Zuckmayer, Des Teufels General (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 98.

5

The poster includes the information “Beginning 17 September 1941,” which clearly indicates the plot’s duration. On 17 November 1941, Ernst Udet, the reallife version of General Harras, shot himself.

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6

This sequence is introduced with a pan above the scene, which shows a Deutsche Arbeitsfront poster advertising wool collection, accompanied by cheerful, non diegetic marching music: “Nicht spenden, opfern” (Don’t donate, sacrifice), reads the sign, which is probably meant as a sarcastic comment on the rhetoric of sacrifice in the Third Reich, prefiguring the Jewish victims.

7

See Peter Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung: Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 2004), 58. 8 See also the discussion of this competition in Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung, 71–78. 9

See Norbert Frei, “Erinnerungskampf,” in 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen (Munich: Beck, 2005), 129–44; here 133.

10

Judging by his bestselling autobiography, Mein Weg nach Scapa Flow (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1940), Prien was a completely committed National Socialist. 11

The idea of collective guilt was in circulation for a few months after the war but was soon jettisoned as unusable by the American occupation authority: instead of being punished, the German would be reeducated. In postwar German society, however, defense against this accusation continued to play a central role. Karl Jaspers argued vehemently against the idea of collective guilt in Die Schuldfrage: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage (Zurich: Artemis, 1946). The fact that this kind of defensiveness was still widespread in the 1950s, at least in West Germany, can probably be explained by the need to deflect any personal responsibility for guilt as soon as it was sensed. 12

For example, the fictional character of Hauptmann Wüst in Pabst’s Der letzte Akt, who is the only one who dares to talk back to Hitler, also wears the Knight’s Cross. This not only demonstrates that he has done his duty but also locates everyone who wears the medal on the right side of the war/politics dichotomy, that is, on the side of those who act responsibly. 13

Rolf Meiers depicts the plight of German refugees arriving in the west in Menschen in Gottes Hand (People in God’s Hands, 1948); see also the East German film Die Brücke (The Bridge, Arthur Pohl, 1949).

14

F.R.J., “Vor der Leinwand notiert,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 Apr. 1960.

15

Indeed, in the film she was announced as a “lustige Witwe” (merry widow).

16

Hilmar Hoffmann, “So stellt ein kleiner Erwin sich den Iwan vor,” in Jahrbuch der Filmkritik II, ed. Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Filmjournalisten (Emsdetten: Lechte, 1961), 69–70; here 69.

17

Hoffmann, “So stellt ein kleiner Erwin sich den Iwan vor,” 70.

18

In fact, Remarque had to rework and shorten his text for the German edition. Obviously the publishing house feared that former German soldiers might feel intimidated by some of the passages referring too explicitly to the question of guilt. For the German edition and its reception see Tilman Westphalen, “Wann wird zum Mord, was man sonst Heldentum nennt? Nachwort,” in Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben, by Erich Maria Remarque (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998), 401–20. 19

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20

Henning Harmssen, “Auf Wiedersehen, Berlin! Ein Bericht über die VIII. Berlinale,” Deutsche Volkszeitung, 19 Jul. 1958. 21

Kurt Fischer “Filmfestspiel-Nachlese,” Berliner Sonntagsblatt, 27 Jul. 1958.

22

H.F., “Die Berlinale ist vorüber.”

23

“Wenn ich mein Leben nicht eingesetzt habe zur Verhinderung der Ermordung anderer, sondern dabeigestanden bin, fühle ich mich auf eine Weise schuldig, die juristisch, politisch und moralisch nicht angemessen begreiflich ist.” Quoted in the new edition: Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage: Von der politischen Haftung Deutschlands (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1987), 18. 24

Josef Martin Bauer, So weit die Füße tragen (1995; repr., Bergisch Gladbach: Ehrenwirth, 2002).

25

For the politics and the rhetorics of victimization regarding the suffering of Germans see Robert G. Moeller, “The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimization in East and West Germany,” in Germans as Victims, ed. Bill Niven (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006), 26–42. 26

Of course, in The Murderers Are Among Us, the first German film produced after the war, the plot mentions atrocities against Russian civilians behind the frontline. There is also a scene that points to the persecution of the Jews, when Brückner, who is responsible for the shooting, has his breakfast while a newspaper on the table announces in its headline “2 Million People Gassed” with the subtitle “Concentration Camp Auschwitz.” Here everyone is equally a vicitm of war crimes: a former prisoner of a concentration camp like Susanne Wallner, the traumatized officer (Dr. Mertens), the Jew who has survived the persecution (Mr. Mondschein), or the unnamed millions who are linked to the keyword “Auschwitz.” The singular status of the Holocaust slowly developed in the fifties, leading to Umgelter’s television film, which is the first German production that foregrounds the mass execution of Jews. 27

The East German state company DEFA produced two other remarkably differentiated filmic encounters with the Second World War: Joachim Kunert’s Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt (The Adventures of Werner Holt, 1965; based on the novel by Dieter Noll) and Konrad Wolf’s Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen, 1968). On the latter, see Sabine Hake’s contribution in this volume. The war theme became viable again for mass audiences in West Germany in the 1970s, and then only in adventure stories, which had nothing in common with the 1950s “problem films.” See, for example, the blockbusters Steiner — Das Eiserne Kreuz (Steiner — Cross of Iron, Sam Peckinpah, 1977) and Steiner — Das Eiserne Kreuz II (Steiner — Cross of Iron II, Andrew McLaglen, 1979). 28

Frei suggests thinking of the period from 1945–49 as the “Phase der politischen Säuberung” (Political Cleansing), the 1950s as the “Phase der Vergangenheitspolitik” (Politics of the Past), and the 1960s and 1970s as the “Phase der Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Overcoming the Past), which is connected to the “Phase der Vergangenheitsbewahrung” (Preserving the Past) that continues into the present. Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir, 26. 29

With a 17.8 percent audience share, ProSieben was ahead in primetime ratings among one of the demographics most important to private stations, youth.

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30

An embarrassing aspect of this film is that Kai Wiesinger, a well-known German actor, is fitted with a hooked nose to give him an “authentic” Jewish look. 31

Klemperer describes in his diary the “mixture of feelings” (Mischstimmung) between proximity of death and of salvation: “die Russen vor Krakau, die angloamerikanischen Bomber über uns, die Gestapo hinter uns” (the Russians just outside Krakau, the Anglo-American bombers above us, the Gestapo behind us). Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher, 1933–1945, vol. 8, entry 18, Jan. 1945 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999), 13. Klemperer succeeded in hiding after the air attack on Dresden and escaping the threat of deportation. 32

For further discussion see Paul Cooke, “Dresden (2006), TeamWorx and Titanic (1997): German Wartime Suffering as Hollywood Disaster Movie,” German Life and Letters 61.2 (2008): 279–94. 33

Manfred Gregor (i.e., Gregor Dorfmeister), Die Brücke (Vienna, Munich, and Basel: Desch, 1958).

34 Quoted in Heiko Schulz, “Antikriegsfilm als TV-Event,” www.tvspielfilm.de/ news (accessed 13 Dec. 2008). 35 According to Marian Redmann, during filming in Latvia in October 2007. Quoted in “Geheim-Dreh: Franka Potente stand für ‘Die Brücke’ in Lettland vor der Kamera!” www.presseportal.de (accessed 22 Feb. 2009).

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II. Projection Screens: Disavowing Loss, Transforming Antifascism, Contesting Memories

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4: Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia in the Sissi Trilogy Erica Carter

O

N 9 JANUARY 1957 INNSBRUCK’S Tiroler Tageszeitung reported a trade dispute that had been brewing for some months over Austrian films in Germany. Under the headline “Sissi as ‘German film’!” the newspaper cited criticism from Austria’s governing party, the Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP), of the common practice among West German distributors of marketing Austrian titles both in the FRG and internationally as German.1 This long-running Austro-German dispute had intensified with the release in December 1955 of the Vienna-based Erma-Film’s Sissi, the first title in a trilogy, directed by Ernst Marischka, which charted the life of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (1837–98). In its first twelve months Sissi garnered West German audiences in excess of twelve million, achieving up to 98 percent market penetration among the south German provincial audiences who were the film’s most enthusiastic fans.2 Sissi’s unprecedented success spurred Austrian efforts to claw back control over national nomenclature from German distributors (Herzog-Film in the case of Sissi I and II, Ufa for the trilogy’s final part). By February 1957, this binational trade dispute had become a full-blown diplomatic row. When the German envoy in Beirut offered to absorb Austrian film productions into his cultural brief and allegedly screened Sissi as one of five Austrian titles shown “under the German flag,” complaints from the Austrian Ambassador Kurt Farbovsky triggered high-level talks between the Austrian Foreign Office and the FRG’s Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction.3 By the end of April the Ministry had given its blessing to a directive from the Austrian film industry’s trade association that its members write into contracts with West German distributors a clause mandating the branding of their titles as Austrian — and the row died down.4 The episode remains telling, however, for the history of German suffering which this volume attempts. The distributors’ “Freudian slip” from Austrian to German nomenclature as well as the Sissi films’ phenomenal

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West German success suggest an enduring attachment among both industry and audience to a cinema culture unconstrained by the boundaries of emergent postwar states and fused instead into the larger cultural territories of the German-speaking lands. In the case of Sissi that territory is the space of German-language film production in Western Europe, and specifically Austria and West Germany after 1945: a territory united in matters of popular film aesthetics and social affect, which later took the form in the trilogy, I suggest below, of an affective drift toward imperial nostalgia and the melancholy of territorial loss. I focus here not on the question of war and suffering as representation, for the narrative of this costume-drama biopic of Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria, later Empress of Austria, gestures at best obliquely to twentieth-century experiences of authoritarian rule and war. My interest rather is in the relation between the films’ melodramatic aesthetic and a victim sensibility that circulated in the films’ reception in West Germany around the shock of a dual spatial loss: the loss of a common Germanic, film-aesthetic space and the political loss of Eastern Europe as imperial territory.

Sissi in Genre and Reception History Sissi was hailed on its release as the title that triggered the rehabilitation among international audiences of German-language film. The trilogy triumphed at European box offices, launched a European Sissi craze long perpetuated by the films’ annual Christmas television screenings, and prompted an (admittedly artistically calamitous) compilation for US audiences, released by Paramount in 1962 as Forever My Love. The trilogy centers on three biographical episodes: Sissi’s romance with the future Kaiser Franz Joseph in part 1, Sissi (1955); her pacification of Hungarian dissidents and her coronation as their “beloved” queen in part 2, Sissi, die junge Kaiserin (Sissi: The Young Empress, 1956); and in part 3, Sissi: Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress, 1957), her consumptive illness, her recuperation in Madeira and Corfu, and a family reunion in Venice. The trilogy was the latest and most successful in a series of stage and screen reworkings of the Sissi legend, including Marischka’s own 1932 Paula Wessely musical, Sissy, Josef von Sternberg’s The King Steps Out (1936), and Jean Cocteau’s L’aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle with Two Heads, 1946). I intimated above that resituating the Sissi trilogy within a study of spectatorship and reception might illuminate the films’ relation to a larger history of post-imperial territorial loss. That hypothesis is supported by a shift in the recent historiography of German fascism toward a reassessment of the German conquest and occupation of “the East” during the Second World War and a resiting of that history within a longer historical narrative

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of colonial and imperial rule.5 Similar moves are made in an Austrian historiography that traces the “Austrian idea” from roots in the Habsburg Empire through Austro-fascism and into the postwar period.6 These histories are timely for a study of wartime memory in film, suggesting a postcolonial and/or post-imperial dimension to postwar representations of territorial expansion, conquest, or settlement. The Sissi trilogy, indeed, presents itself explicitly as a history of empire, one that traces the story of the House of Habsburg in its mid-nineteenth-century glory years and pursues its protagonist through a glittering career as the pacifier of antiimperial rebellion. The films are set in a phase of political retrenchment for the Habsburg Empire. Following the 1848 liberal revolutions, the Austrian Empire returned to absolutist rule under Kaiser Franz Joseph (represented here in supremely benign form by the dashing Karlheinz Böhm). 1848 had left its mark on the empire in reforms that included the introduction of jury trial, improved rights of association, provisions for communal self-government, and mother-tongue education among a multilingual populace.7 By the time Franz Joseph married the woman whom even the most sober of historians term his “fairy-tale princess” (1854), the young Kaiser had, by contrast, overseen a process that reasserted monarchical authority by dismantling the jury system, replacing the new system of ministerial government with absolutist governance, and tightening the state’s grip on public opinion and behavior through newly stringent press laws, a revised criminal procedure, and an “omnipresent” role for a newly created gendarmerie.8 It is hardly surprising that the Sissi trilogy downplays or sanitizes the harsher political realities of Habsburg neo-absolutism. The omnipresent gendarmerie referenced by historians thus becomes in the film the caricatured figure of Oberst Böckl, played for comic relief by the Burgtheater favorite Joseph Meinrad in a characteristic role as bungling underling. Franz Joseph’s demotion of his ministers to a purely advisory role is also obliquely referenced in the servile postures of the nameless ministerial figures who populate his study and are summarily dismissed whenever the over-zealous Sissi (Romy Schneider) claims his attention on matters of domestic urgency — the imminent birth of their first child or the latest squabble with her mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophie (Vilma Degischer).

Sissi and Biedermeier Yet, if suppressed from the film narrative, the Sissi trilogy’s historical narrative of a pacification of liberal forces and a concomitant reassertion of imperial might is expressed in a different register in the films’ visual organization. Two sequences from part 1 serve to illustrate the point. During

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a conversation between Sissi and her beloved father, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria (“Duke Max”), the two enjoy a leisurely stroll up a neighboring mountain. Max underscores the relief from sorrow that rural landscapes afford with a homily that Sissi herself will repeat verbatim in a second mountain scene, her first romantic encounter with Franz Joseph in the mountains around Bad Ischl: Wenn Du einmal im Leben Kummer und Sorgen hast, dann geh’ . . . mit offenen Augen durch den Wald. Und in jedem Baum und in jedem Strauch, in jedem Tier und in jeder Blume wird Dir die Allmacht Gottes zum Bewusstsein kommen und dir Trost und Kraft geben. [Whenever sorrow and trouble enter your life, open your eyes and take a walk like this through the woods. And every tree and every bush, every animal and every flower will remind you of the almighty power of God, and you will find solace and strength.]

The reiteration in these two sequences of a standard topos from sentimental literature — the claim that religiosity and spiritual relief are found through empathy with nature — is echoed in both sequences’ visual organization. Establishing shots briefly frame an empty landscape before two protagonists enter into view: Sissi with Max from lower screen right in the first sequence, Sissi with Franz Joseph in a second passage whose status as a mirror to the film’s earlier intimate father-daughter moment is underscored by a reversal of movement across the shot (Sissi and Max proceed right to left, Sissi and Franz Joseph left to right: see figures 4.1a and 4.2a). The emphasis here on visual symmetry, or mirroring, as an organizing principle of the film’s narration is repeated as the protagonists move into center frame, and the camera pans unobtrusively to meet them (see figures 4.1b and 4.2b). The symmetrical composition of both twoshots now underscores the balance and inner harmony that derive — so says Duke Max — from human communion with nature. Though Duke Max never makes explicit the nature of the “trouble” or “sorrow” that Sissi may seek to escape, it is certainly signaled associatively in the montage. Both mountain sequences are intercut with scenes from the Viennese court showing the travails of an emperor weighed down by affairs of state. A tetchy exchange between Franz Joseph and his mother prefaces Sissi’s woodland walk with Max. Visibly unsettled by the dictatorial Archduchess Sophie’s revelation that she feels it appropriate to select his future wife, Franz Joseph is later further ruffled when the camera cuts back from Sissi and Max to a verbal exchange in his study with an elderly aide. Requested to approve death sentences for eight young Prague dissidents, Franz Joseph risks Sophie’s wrath (foreshadowed by what is for Marischka an uncharacteristically canted shot of her looming portrait) by demanding time for further reflection: “Aber ich kann doch

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Fig. 4.1. Sissi and Duke Max in Possenhofen, in Sissi (1955). DVD capture.

Fig. 4.2. Sissi and Franz Joseph in Bad Ischl, in Sissi (1955). DVD capture.

nicht über das Leben von acht jungen Menschen im Handumdrehen entscheiden” (You cannot expect me to make a snap decision on the lives of eight young people). That the young Emperor will decide in favor of leniency in the rebels’ case is signaled in this exchange not just through dialogue but also through the visual association the montage establishes with the more benevolent Sissi. Particularly significant here is color. The soft blue of Franz Joseph’s otherwise rigidly ornamental military dress echoes the color palette of the mountain landscapes with which this and similar scenes of imperial administration are intercut. Landscapes in Sissi are painted in a panoply of mellow greens, soft browns, and blues that blend unobtrusively with the muted grey of the men’s hunting costumes or the demure blue pastel of Sissi’s dirndl in her walk with Max. Scenes at the Viennese court, by contrast, deploy a luminous kaleidoscope of blacks, blues, golds, and reds that recall and celebrate the visual splendor of a bygone empire. This use of color in Sissi seems at first glance to offer itself as a vehicle of what Arjun Appadurai has termed “nostalgia without memory.” Appadurai’s term describes the pastiche aesthetic that shapes global image

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markets, cloaking popular representations with a historical patina that locates them as objects of attachment for popular memories of an experienced past.9 The semantic indeterminacy of color, its evocation of affective states with no secure historical referent, locates it as a privileged site for this affective mobilization of the technologically manufactured image: a fact recognized, perhaps, by press packs that celebrated the Sissi trilogy’s “Farbenpracht” (rich coloring) in “Natur- und Landschaftsaufnahmen von seltener Schönheit” (nature and landscape shots of a rare beauty), or the visual glamor of “Szenen einer geradezu märchenhaften Prachtentfaltung” (scenes of almost fairy-tale splendor) depicting life at the Vienna court.10 Certainly color functions in Sissi to focalize not memories of empire as lived historical experience (the mid-nineteenth century was not accessible to living memory), but an aesthetic memory rooted in two imperial moments: nineteenth-century Austria and Austro-Hungary and the more recent moment of European film culture dominated by Germany from 1930 until the collapse of the Nazi Reich in 1945. To take the latter first: the Sissi films were shot in Agfacolor, a color process devised in wartime as a competitor for Technicolor and launched for feature film with the Marika Rökk star vehicle Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women Are the Better Diplomats, 1941). Agfa was at this point already established as a key player in the Third Reich drive for German film-industrial dominance. A subsidiary of the munitions giant IG-Farben, Agfa was represented on the board of directors of the Filmkreditbank, the centralized loan company on which film production was dependent after 1933. Agfa’s commitment to the Third Reich political fantasy of a film industry that could displace Hollywood as the hegemonic power in European popular film was underscored when the company signed a cooperation agreement on color processing with Ufa in 1938 and began developing a process to rival Technicolor.11 When Agfacolor was launched for color feature-film production in 1941, the process thus fed Nazi dreams of European film-cultural hegemony. But Agfacolor not only served demands for new technologies that would help secure German film-industrial dominance; it was also known for a muted softness claimed by the process’s champions as more appealing to European sensibilities than the garishly artificial Technicolor. Though the musicals and fantasy features that were Agfacolor’s most prominent early vehicles — they included Münchhausen (1943), Die Frau meiner Träume (The Woman of My Dreams, 1944), Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942) — were arguably less suited to a color process that downplayed these genres’ spectacular qualities, it came into its own after the war with Heimat films and historical dramas that promoted a German-inflected European heritage aesthetic. In Sissi, for instance, the use of Agfacolor works to curtail the film’s realism and to evoke instead the diffuse sentimental excess that is characteristic both of heritage

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melodrama and of that genre’s nostalgic representational mode. Agfacolor’s softness of hue lends to the process a tendency to flatten out the color distinctions that are used in the color film to establish depth and differentiate spatial planes. It favors therefore a static mise-en-scène that privileges color harmony and balance over contrast or perspectival depth. Favorable reviews of the Sissi films thus praised Marischka’s mastery of painterly visual style, lauding among other qualities his “grandiose Farbeninszenierung” (grandiose orchestration of color) in an “album” of magnificent images — “eine wahre Augenweide” (a true feast for the eyes.)12 The broadsheet press, by contrast, recognized in the trilogy’s tableau aesthetic “ein Studienobjekt für . . . Unfilmisches” (an object lesson in the non-filmic), a static deployment of “lebende Bilder mit überdeutlich demonstrierten Gefühlseffekten” (living images with overplayed emotional effects), which included their emphasis on “schöne Traurigkeit” (the beauty of sadness) and “edles Leiden” (noble suffering).13 This “nobility” in suffering, as we shall see later, was most powerfully evoked by the suffering body of Sissi herself. But it is also signaled throughout the trilogy by a use of color that nostalgically references a lost past of Austro-German cinematic dominance. By the mid-1950s Agfacolor’s US rival, Eastman Color, developed after the war as a cost-effective alternative to Technicolor, was on its way to becoming the industry standard in Western cinema. Agfacolor meanwhile acquired associations with the Soviet East after Soviet forces seized large quantities of Agfacolor film stock during the Second World War and used it to develop the Sovcolor process as the postwar Eastern European industry norm. The splendors of the Agfacolor aesthetic were thus tarnished in historical actuality by the uncompetitiveness of the process in Western media markets (the last US Agfacolor film was shot in 1956), and by Cold War associations with the Soviet East. If the Sissi trilogy, by contrast, offers its audience the nostalgic pleasure of an imagined recapture of Agfacolor’s glory days, then a second feature of the films’ visual aesthetic reaches further back into cultural history and cements at the level of image composition their connections to an imperial past. Let us return in this connection to Sissi’s conversation with Duke Max (see fig. 4.1). Among the signal features of this sequence are the balanced composition of its shots; its use of pastoral motifs in the Heimat tradition — folk costume, woodland and mountain landscapes, and peasant habitats; and the centering of iconic figures in the frame’s foreground with the landscape arranged ornamentally around them to highlight their natural affiliation to nature and land. This emphasis on balance and harmony suggests that the stabilization of inner life referenced by Duke Max derives in Sissi from the film’s organization of the visual field, both for the characters on screen and for the spectator. Of particular interest here is the use of the pictorial camera frame. Sabine Hake has identified pictorial mise-en-scène as a recurrent feature

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of German-language popular film.14 In the Sissi trilogy pictorialism finds its specifically Austrian art-historical source in Biedermeier, a movement loosely associated with artists as diverse as the humorous portraitist Carl Spitzweg, Julius Oldach, or Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, a popular Viennese artist who made his name initially in portraiture before embarking on extensive travels through the Austrian Salzkammergut from 1830 on. Waldmüller’s travels, alongside his forays into the Wiener Wald, produced the landscape paintings for which he is now predominantly remembered. Two features of Waldmüller’s landscapes link his Biedermeier aesthetic to the Sissi films. Waldmüller, like Marischka, uses symmetrical framing and centered perspective to draw the eye to a vanishing point in the image’s center. In the Romantic landscapes of Karl Friedrich Schinkel or Caspar David Friedrich, the vanishing point disappears into wide seas and limitless skies, staging in the process an encounter between the spectator and sublime infinity. In Waldmüller, by contrast, the frame’s center is occupied by objects with solid contours: tree-lined pastures, distant mountains, the rocky shores of mountain lakes. This containment of natural phenomena within visible contours lends structure and permanence to the Biedermeier landscape, facilitating a spectatorial experience not of unruly and ambivalent sublimity but of the ornamental, the sentimental, and the decorative. Figure 4.2a shows Marischka mimicking Waldmüller’s use of the bounded object (a distant farmhouse) to fill the space of the vanishing point, locating the landscape as the site of a known “pastness” — here the continuous and recognizable tradition of rural labor. In figure 4.1 wooded hillsides and the contours of distant mountains give similarly palpable shape to the landscape’s vanishing point, supplanting the Romantic encounter with infinity with a contained experience of tangible nature. This organization of the shot involves a spatialization of time, a fixing of history within spatial contours that recalls Svetlana Boym’s account of nostalgia as a desire “to obliterate history [and] to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”15 It also evidences a second feature of Biedermeier shot composition. In Waldmüller pictorial framing suppresses awareness of a history beyond the frame that might disturb the rural idylls of the Salzkammergut or the Wiener Wald. His 1834 Der Dachstein mit Gosausee, for instance, like many of Waldmüller’s Salzkammergut landscapes, shows a scene devoid of human habitation, the crystal blue of the lake artfully mirroring a clear blue sky that in its turn sets off to perfection the snowy peak of the distant Dachstein. Gosau today is a UNESCO world heritage site, and a local museum preserves the rural homesteads that were the traditional centers of a cottage industry supplying wood to regional salt mines. This opening of Gosau and its environs to heritage tourism began with the nineteenth-century Biedermeier vogue; but unlike twenty-first

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century heritage culture, which presents images of the laboring poor as commodity representations for global sale, Biedermeier’s visual world was structured around a myth of untouched nature that depended on the presentation of landscape as a place of repose beyond the flux of industrial modernization and social change. Waldmüller’s 1834 image thus presents Gosau as the site of unsullied nature at rest, erasing traces both of touristic travel and of the early nineteenth-century crisis that shook the region when plummeting salt prices undermined its traditional economic base. The pictorial frame functions here to immobilize time and bracket out or disavow ambivalent histories. A similar use of the frame is evident in Marischka’s blocking out of offscreen space and with it the traces of sociopolitical agon within the flux of historical time. The period of the Sissi trilogy’s release was a time marked, as was Waldmüller’s nineteenth century, by rapid industrial modernization: the penetration of factories and residential developments deep into the rural locations that the films depict. In the Bavarian setting of figure 4.1 (Possenhofen), Marischka’s careful framing screens out both the traces of that incursion of industry and manufacturing into West German rural landscapes and the swelling DP and refugee populations that passed through or settled in Bavaria and the Salzkammergut after 1945.16 Less than 18 km northeast of Bad Ischl, the scene of Sissi and Franz Joseph’s first romantic tryst, lay Ebensee, a labor camp that registered more than 8,000 dead by the end of the war. Ebensee became a DP camp in 1945 and was swiftly identified, like other camps in Bavaria and the Salzkammergut, as a preferred destination for Jewish DPs. Local hostility to these unwelcome strangers is evidenced by oral histories that recount how “delighted” was the response to some Jews’ (illegal) exodus across the mountains from Austria to Italy.17 Publicopinion polls by the American Military Government registered similar hostility to the Jewish DP presence in Bavaria, as well as rising anti-Semitism, particularly in rural areas.18 The Bavarian government responded with a drive throughout the 1950s to “persuade” Jewish DPs to emigrate.19 Less conveniently dispensed with were the predominantly Gentile refugee populations that settled in rural regions during the same period.20 The arrival of refugees and expellees in the immediate aftermath of war had compounded the region’s socioeconomic misery, contributing to housing and food shortages, and intensifying competition for already scarce employment in countryside and town. Regional political parties, in particular the right-wing Christian Social Union (CSU), managed anti-refugee hostilities by promoting integration on grounds of the significant refugee contribution to the region’s economic health, while appeasing “Old Bavaria” by loudly advocating the return of refugees and expellees to their eastern Heimat.21 In CSU rhetoric, to put this another way, the perceived threat of unruly refugee populations was managed symbolically by splitting them,

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on the one hand, into a “safe” group of economic migrants and, on the other, into rogue cultural elements, Silesian and Sudeten Germans seen to bear the alien marks of regions further east.22 The expulsion of those foreign elements to the fantasy space of a past time — the imaginary time of pure ethnic homelands — could then be at least imagined as a future possibility, if not actualized in the Cold War context of the 1950s FRG. Here, then, social policy — initiatives for refugee integration — became the material instrument that managed potential social unrest by symbolically expelling the supposed agents of social strife to a place beyond the borders of the historical present. In Marischka’s films the cognate instrument is the image frame. In figures 4.1 and 4.2 the camera banishes to offscreen space visible evidence both of imperial strife and of contemporary (1950s) social transformation. The film frame can be conceptualized in this instance as a tool of defense against the symbolic traces of historical turmoil and loss: the turmoil of mid-nineteenth-century anti-imperial struggle; the twentieth-century loss of the integrity of rural community with the incursion of new populations; and the loss of the pastoral idyll under the influence of postwar rural industrialization.

Lateral Camera: A Release into History? I have read sequences from Sissi thus far as registering a nostalgic effort to fix historical time within the immobilized space of pictorial landscape. This argument, however, needs further elaboration. Even the sequences I have taken as exemplary of the trilogy’s nostalgic freeze-framing of time show the incursion into the screen space of conflictual histories. The severed tree trunk that dominates the foreground of figure 4.1a and the smaller stumps that interrupt lines of sight from the spectator’s eye to the distant farmhouse in figure 4.2 remind the viewer that the landscape in which Sissi seeks solace is also the site of a modern form of mechanized labor (tree felling by chain saw).23 The trilogy’s postcard aesthetic, lamented by the Frankfurter Allgemeine as placing the films in the same commodified relation to history as “die Seriensammelbildchen der Zigaretten- oder Haferflockenreklame” (the collectable picture series used to advertise porridge oats or cigarettes) connects the Sissi narrative, meanwhile, to a modern tourist culture, relocating it stylistically in that very history of cultural modernization that the film also disavows.24 Though I began by situating the Sissi trilogy generically within costume drama, it is more accurately described as a genre hybrid that subscribes to what Johannes von Moltke terms the “generic . . . forest idyll” of the Heimat film. By incorporating into landscape shots traces of the modern (severed tree stumps, postcard conventions), Sissi shares what von Moltke identifies as a key characteristic of the Heimat genre, its “selective

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embrace of . . . modernization” and its mobilization of the idea of Heimat “to negotiate, rather than simply keep at bay, the modernization of social, economic and political life in Germany.”25 There is, moreover, a further recurrent feature of mise-en-scène that confirms the presence in Sissi and its sequels of an impulse to escape the stasis of Biedermeier and enter the maelstrom of historical time. In Sissi’s walk with Franz Joseph the two spy a deer. Dyed-in-the-wool hunter Franz takes aim to fire. Alarmed at the impending death of a forest creature, Sissi feigns a sneeze, the single hunting horn that was the musical accompaniment to Franz’s sighting of his prey swells to a triumphant chorus of brass and strings, and the deer gallops off. The sequence is an early instance of the occasional moments in the trilogy when the camera abandons its customary stasis, using sweeping pans or tracks to signal liberation from the pictorial frame. In the case of the deer the animal is first literally fixed in Franz Joseph’s sights, its status as visual prey underlined by a sequence of ornamental medium shots (see fig. 4.3a) which, combined with a musical crescendo, heighten the tension of both the kill and the release as the stag breaks cover and escapes (see fig. 4.3b). This transition from constraint within the ornamental frame to pans or tracks that evoke the bliss of lateral mobility is repeated in the various scenes throughout the trilogy when Sissi takes to her horse, riding sidesaddle in search of liberation from the claustrophobic Viennese court. That the empress was in reality a passionate horsewoman is not, of course, the issue here. Important instead is the emotional charge that surrounds horizontal camera movement, its link to liberation from danger (the impending death of the deer) or from social constraint (Sissi’s at the imperial court). Lateral camera, then, is one device that highlights the persecutory elements of the pictorial gaze, situating these films’ protagonists, and above all Sissi, as victims of constraint with whom we can only empathize as they escape the static frame and seek release in untrammeled flight. That Sissi’s victim status is ambivalent, however, is illustrated by one especially protracted sequence of lateral movement in Sissi, die junge Kaiserin. The sequence traces Sissi’s 1867 journey from Vienna to her coronation as Queen of Hungary in the Budapest Matthiaskirche in 1867. In historical actuality the event marked a turning point in the consolidation of Austrian imperial hegemony. Franz Joseph’s neo-absolutist reassertion of monarchical authority during the early “Sissi” period (she was Austrian Empress from the date of her marriage to Franz Joseph in 1854 until her death from stabbing by an Italian anarchist in 1898) had gone hand in hand with the pacification of the external enemies of Austrian centralism, including Hungary. In Die junge Kaiserin this complex history is condensed into a sequence celebrated in the film’s press pack as a “unique climax” to an “overwhelming” film.26 The film cuts here between three locations: an open-air religious ceremony to bless waiting crowds in

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Fig. 4.3. Franz Joseph’s prey takes flight in Sissi (1955). DVD capture.

Budapest, the red-gold interior of Sissi and Franz Joseph’s carriage, and the wide plains of the Hungarian puszta (plains) through which the couple pass en route. The scene’s first cut from decoratively arranged crowds in Budapest to a pan across the puszta seems to promise the same sensory release as earlier moments of horizontal camera. The puszta is figured in a long shot (see figure 4.4) that empties the space around the royal procession, establishing an emphasis on the horizontal line (the horizon, the road, the limitless sky) that is reinforced by the camera’s slow pan in the direction of royal travel. Yet here, as throughout the sequence, visual features that stress decorum and artistic restraint stifle the potential exhilaration of lateral camera. The wide shots of the puszta are cramped by a frame that eschews the technical possibilities of widescreen, retaining the Academy aspect ratio of 1.37:1, the industry standard before the advent of modern widescreen in 1952.27 The panning camera’s studied pace further dampens the mood. Even in one cutaway to a herd of galloping ponies, a vision of furious mobility whose excitement is heightened by a czárdás musical accompaniment, the frontal camera moves only imperceptibly, struggling apparently to contain the scene’s visual chaos within what one contemporary commentator called the “konventionelle . . . Farbpostkarten-Fotografie” (conventional postcard cinematography) for which the cameraman, Bruno Mondi, was well known.28 Even color seems here to privilege stasis over mobility, fullness of meaning over the ambivalence of mobile camera in lateral flight. The clear definition of objects in the puszta scene contrasts sharply with the blurred focus of other scenes of lateral flight, including Sissi’s escaping deer (see figure 4.3b). The puszta’s cloudless sky, meanwhile — which is ubiquitous in the trilogy’s location scenes — paints the space of the action in a solid blue that stifles the sky’s potential for semantic mobility, its status in color film as what Béla Balázs terms “an event, not a static condition.”29

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Fig. 4.4. The coronation procession crosses the puszta, in Sissi, die junge Kaiserin (1956). DVD capture.

Melodrama and Suffering In an illuminating study of psychoanalysis and the “time of life,” Jan Campbell has drawn connections between melodrama and hysteria that are helpful for my analysis here. I have so far suggested that the Sissi films are trapped stylistically within a pastiche aesthetic that recycles representational models from two imperial moments, nineteenth-century Biedermeier and Third Reich film. At the same time Sissi and its sequels seem gripped by a visual paralysis that trammels mobility in the film image, reining in camera movement, muting color, arresting spectatorial attention, and confining it within the stasis of the pictorial frame. Campbell’s work is suggestive here, pointing as it does to a way of reading Marischka’s melodramatic style as a defensive response to the trauma of historical loss. For Campbell the melodramatic mode is identified with hysteria as its attendant psychic state. She draws among other sources on the early Freud to read hysteria not primarily as rooted in an Oedipal narrative but as a split state of being — a “doubling or splitting of consciousness” — in which the hysteric swings between “on the one hand a fantasy world which

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substitutes for . . . real life,” and on the other, “neurotic representations where the flows of time and affect have become cut off from psychic existence and become solidified in consciousness as symptoms.”30 Hysteria is melodramatic by virtue of its extreme dualism (as in melodrama, the hysteric swings between the polarized states of “fantasy and the body . . . masculine and feminine and . . . life and death”); its performative and symbolic excess; its rooting in an original trauma that fixes the subject in a place of suffering; and its compulsive repetition of “symptoms and stories” that surface “as fixed melodramas” in the fantasy of the hysteric.31 In classical accounts of film melodrama the aspects of mise-en-scène I discussed above in relation to the Sissi trilogy — color, camera motion, costume, composition within the frame — are read as registering an otherwise inexpressible affective excess.32 The ability of mise-en-scène to speak the unspeakable situated the genre for many years as the focus of studies that emphasized melodrama’s “subversive” quality: its function in particular, given its preoccupation with “feminine” issues (love, romance, intimacy, bodily pleasure), to articulate an otherwise repressed or subterranean feminine desire. If, however, the stylistic excess of melodrama is stifled, the flux of historical time contained within an aesthetics of sensual restraint (muted color, static image composition, the pictorial frame), then mise-en-scène becomes legible in Campbell’s terms as the hysterical symptom of a trauma that splits both the spectator and the melodramatic subject on screen (in our case Sissi) between a de-realized fantasy world and the repetitive scenarios of a “melodramatic monologue” on a traumatic past.33 Read in this light, the royal procession in Sissi part 2 becomes a pivotal scene for any account of the trilogy’s relation to the double “trauma” of imperial loss: the 1918 collapse of the Wilhelmine and Habsburg empires and the final crushing of Austro-German imperial aspirations with the 1945 defeat of the Nazi Reich. The impact of that double “trauma” is signaled in this sequence first by a splitting-off of the film image into the de-realized and solipsistic (“dissociated,” in Campbell’s terms) fantasy world of the manufactured image. In his research for the scene, Marischka had recourse to contemporary prints that were then meticulously reconstructed by the army of film architects, costume advisors, and prop masters he employed in the making of Sissi 2.34 Shots of the royal couple’s passage across the puszta are thus intercut with stylized arrangements of colorful crowds of Hungarian children and peasants. Sissi’s comment that they are exactly like the images in her picture books back home confirms both that this film moves in the realm of pastiche and the replicated image, and that the image functions for both Sissi and the film spectator as a defensive screen, blocking perceptual access to the material effects of the agonized history of empire that the film depicts.

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The “trauma” of imperial loss is not only referenced in this sequence, however, by a visual stasis that may be read in Campbell’s terms as a symptom of trauma erupting as visual paralysis across the body of the film text. A second hysterical symptom is the compulsive repetition of scenarios rooted in the history of Third Reich film. Marischka’s collaboration with Bruno Mondi is a case in point. A master cinematographer whose long association with Third Reich film included collaborations with Veit Harlan on Die goldene Stadt and Jud Süss (Jew Suss, 1940), Mondi reproduces in the Sissi trilogy key elements of Ufa’s 1930s cramped studio aesthetic: ornamental shot composition, claustrophobically sluggish camera, and avoidance of key features of Hollywood continuity (eyeline match, point-of-view cutting) in favor of a montage of painterly tableaux. Mondi’s repetitive reconstruction of historical simulacra was mirrored in Marischka’s recourse to Third Reich stars, including Romy Schneider’s mother Magda, who played her onscreen mother Ludovika throughout the trilogy, accompanied Romy on numerous promotion tours, and was excoriated in the broadsheet press as a long-term Marischka favorite whose collaboration on Sissi established a perfidious continuity with Third Reich film.35 A final instance of hysterical repetition relates to the Roma extras hired to greet the royal couple in the onscreen Budapest. Marischka’s penchant for verisimilar pastiche of Hungary’s folkloristic mid-nineteenth-century national iconography sent him in search of “gypsies” to greet the royal couple in the run-up to the coronation scene. Since “gypsy camps” (sic) were accessible only in the “real” Hungary behind the “Iron Curtain,” Marischka transported “authentic gypsies” from a “large settlement on the Vienna Prater” to a location close to the Hungarian border (Illmitz on the Neusiedler See). Arranged in decoratively composed groups alongside Hungarian-speaking locals, the visiting Roma, claimed the distributors, added significantly to the “authenticity” of the scene.36 Unmentioned was the uncanny resonance of this episode with a recent and more contentious film-historical event. In 1954, the German distributor Allianz had finally released Leni Riefenstahl’s Tiefland (Lowlands), a characteristically mystical tale of a gypsy dancer who seeks refuge in the mountains from hostile peasants in the lowlands below. Riefenstahl began work on the film in 1942, and allegedly had a group of Roma extras removed from a concentration camp, then summarily returned after the shoot. Not completed at the time of shooting, Riefenstahl’s film was finally released in 1954. The film then triggered what Steven Bach terms a “tempest” in the press: speculation was reawakened about Riefenstahl’s complicity in Nazi terror; a boycott campaign was launched by the Association of Survivors of Concentration Camps; and Riefenstahl raced to counter negative publicity with a hastily organized Austrian tour.37

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The tour itself, as well as the controversy surrounding the use of Roma in Tiefland, preceded Sissi 2 by a mere two years. Publicity material for Sissi 2, however, ignores the cultural-political sensitivity of his use of “gypsy” extras when it re-narrates Marischka’s shoot as a “gypsy invasion of the Prater,” praises in particular the “artistic” use of children in “ragged trousers and torn shirts,” and underlines Marischka’s heroism in procuring this authentic “gypsy” crowd. Subsequent press coverage continues the press pack’s hyperbolic tone, celebrating the film as “Marischka’s most mature work to date, a “confession of faith” that shows the capacity of a royal “heart” to mend the wounds of a “fractured and disunited Hungary.”38

Melodrama and the Suffering Body: Sissi We witness here a reception discourse whose hyperbolic sentimentalism mirrors the melodrama of the film text itself and underlines once again the capacity of melodramatic narration to split off memories of unpleasure — here, the memory of recent revelations of Riefenstahl’s complicity in racial crimes — and recast them as hysterical performances of personal triumph (Marischka’s, as he overcomes the Iron Curtain to procure his own home-grown “gypsy” crowds). But a final melodramatic performance is equally crucial to the narrative of post-imperial suffering that the Sissi trilogy enacts. Sissi’s onscreen coronation in Budapest is the culmination of a romantic sub-narrative between Sissi and a Hungarian nobleman, Count Andrassy. The political settlement that secured Hungarian agreement to a dual monarchy with Austria was negotiated in 1867 with significant input from the liberal-nationalist exile Andrassy, who returned home in 1858 to help negotiate the return to Hungary of autonomous government. The terms of the settlement included a reaffirmation of Austrian imperial authority through the formal coronation of the emperor and empress that Sissi 2 depicts.39 In Die junge Kaiserin Count Andrassy (Walther Reyer) is played as a rebel whose fiery temperament threatens to destabilize delicate negotiations with the Austrian throne. Andrassy’s temper is stilled by a Sissi who intervenes repeatedly on Hungary’s behalf, securing from Franz Joseph an amnesty for the country’s political dissidents and assuring Andrassy of her determination to “give” Hungary equality under Habsburg rule. But Sissi’s patience is stretched when her newborn daughter is removed from her care by a mother-in-law (Archduchess Sophie) determined to force Sissi’s hand in prioritizing imperial affairs over maternal love. The row climaxes when Sissi refuses to attend a royal reception to celebrate the conclusion of the Austro-Hungarian compromise and prepares apparently to flee Schloss Schönbrunn and the state duties that her role as empress demands.

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Yet the episode does not end here. Swayed by a visit from a clearly besotted Andrassy, Sissi appears in full ceremonial regalia at the reception. This is a pivotal move for narrative development both in the remainder of this film and in Sissi part 3. Die junge Kaiserin has hitherto been punctuated by Sissi’s attempts to escape from the imperial court. Her restlessness mirrors that of the historical empress, a tortured figure and frustrated intellect known for her thirst for travel, her love of Heine’s poetry, and her own dabbling in romantic verse. In Sissi 2, admittedly, the historical Elisabeth’s “masculine” intellectual yearnings are recast in the feminine form of the onscreen Sissi’s longing for mother-child symbiosis, represented by her repeated return in the film to the parental home at Possenhofen, by extended scenes of intimacy with her off- and onscreen mother Magda/”Ludovika,” and by her furious defense of the mother-child dyad in her dealings with the Archduchess Sophie. Yet even this more gender-conventional expression of female desire is negated in Sissi 3 when Count Andrassy exhorts Sissi to sacrifice her maternal desires for Hungary’s greater good. When Sissi capitulates and attends the royal reception, she reveals herself as sharing with the Elisabeth of historical myth a conception of imperial power as the product of personal sacrifice. In both figures, moreover, the “trauma” of lost autonomy surfaces melodramatically as bodily symptom. Dubbed by some the “anorexic princess,” the Empress Elisabeth was dogged throughout her married life by both illness and self-inflicted bodily distress. An excellent horsewoman, she also fenced, hiked under extreme conditions, equipped her castles with gymnasia, and fasted, often for days on end. Her obsession with “rigorous fasting cures and Spartan physical training” is often attributed to the same maternal melancholia that afflicted the onscreen Sissi. In part 3 of the film trilogy, Sissi is separated from both her daughter and her beloved Hungary by a consumptive illness that mandates a protracted convalescence on Corfu and Madeira. Elisabeth similarly relinquished her children to the Archduchess Sophie’s care and eventually lost her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, who died, apparently by suicide, in 1889.40 The historical Elisabeth’s penchant for physical self-punishment and her very public maternal grief supply Marischka’s films, moreover, with the raw material for a final melodramatic performance that links Sissi’s bodily suffering to the exercise of imperial might. The trilogy concludes with a sequence in Venice, the scene of a rumbling nationalist rebellion that Franz Joseph seems unable to master, so he calls for succor from his ailing wife. Summoned prematurely from her island retreat, a still fragile Sissi joins husband and daughter in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square. The hostile crowds that await the pair are pacified in an instant, as Sissi’s rapturous welcome from her daughter provokes a rousing cheer across the square and neutralizes the crisis not through political maneuvering but through maternal sentiment on ostentatious display.

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This sentimental denouement illuminates a final aspect of melodramatic hysteria that is not examined in detail by Jan Campbell but that is pervasive in the Sissi films. Both hysteria and melodrama involve solipsistic psychic states. Mired in her own suffering, the hysteric recognizes neither the desire nor indeed the autonomous life of the other, tolerating intimacy only on the condition that the other recognize the primacy of the hysteric’s own victimhood: her suffering, her self-sacrificial “love.” Film melodrama too is framed within what Thomas Elsaesser terms a “dominant representational code” that repeatedly evokes the beauty of the suffering victim: a beauty that not only is gendered repeatedly as feminine but also overwhelms the mise-en-scène with what melodrama’s critics perceive as a suffocating feminine excess.41 In the Sissi trilogy, in particular in the aftermath of a coronation (part 1) that ambivalently marks both Sissi’s imperial triumph and her capitulation to the sacrifice of mother-daughter separation, the young empress is situated as a melodramatic heroine whose self-sacrificial “love” overwhelms imperial subjects bent on insurgency against the Habsburg throne. It is Sissi’s “love” of Hungary, then — displayed in her appearance at the royal reception discussed above — that stills the hands not only of Count Andrassy but also of other rebel nationalists, including the revolutionary Count Batthanyi (Peter Nusser) in an early sequence in part 2. Elsewhere in this volume Sabine Hake writes of the “political affect” that structured the DEFA films of the GDR’s early years. In the Sissi trilogy the politics of affect operates through a melodramatic affective excess that neutralizes the resistance of the imperial other, enfolding and obliterating that resistance within claustrophobic scenarios of an all-embracing sentiment. A final episode from the film’s reception history should illustrate the point. Contemporary press coverage commented regularly on the serendipitous conjunction of Die junge Kaiserin with the Hungarian uprising of 1956. The Hungarian insurgency was finally quelled in November 1956, one month prior to the film’s West German and Austrian release. On Christmas Eve 1956, the Salzburger Nachrichten reported as follows on a screening of Die junge Kaiserin: Zur ersten Aufführung hatte das Mozart-Kino . . . 350 UngarnFlüchtlinge eingeladen. Man musste wirklich miterlebt haben, wie diese ungarischen Studenten und Arbeiter gerade von diesem Film ergriffen wurden, der vor dem Hintergrund historischer Ereignisse ihres Heimatlandes . . . spielt. Die nassen Augen dieser Kinobesucher liessen uns vergessen, was wir in gelehrter Untersuchung kritisch an dem sentimentalen, aber gut gemachten Film aussetzen wollten. Warum eigentlich auch sollte ein Film nicht auf Herz und Gemüt des breiten Publikums abgestellt sein, wenn er so grundsauber und anständig ist wie dieser?42

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[The Mozart-Kino had invited 350 Hungarian refugees to the first screening. One needs to have been there to be able to report how moved these Hungarian students and workers were by a film whose backdrop is provided by historical events from their homeland. . . . The tearful eyes of these cinemagoers made us forget the criticisms that we might have raised as scholarly analysts of this sentimental, if well-made film. For why should a film not be attuned to the heart and mood of the broader public, especially if it is as fundamentally decent and proper as this one?]

In this small episode from reception history the Mozart-Kino restages a form of repressive management of political affect which mirrors that enacted on screen by Sissi as melodramatic victim. Political desire — in the case of the Hungarian refugees, the desire for national political transformation — is hooked up into a scenario of melodramatic identification with Sissi: an identification that dissolves the emotional energy of political rebellion against a state socialist regime into the affect that surrounds Sissi’s experiences of loss (the loss of “her” Hungary), suffering (hers, as self-sacrificial mother), and redemption: hers again, through the family reunion and the coronation that are the films’ — and this article’s — dénouement.

Notes 1

All translations are my own.

2

Estimates from Herzog-Verleih press pack, Sissi, die junge Kaiserin, n.d. Press commentators did, however, note the unreliability of film industry statistics: see the film notice in Die Abendzeitung, 14 Feb. 1957. 3

Tiroler Tageszeitung, 9 Jan. 1957. On the Beirut incident, see Film-Echo, 2 Feb. 1957. 4

“Österreichische Filme sollen nicht mehr als ‘deutsche’ laufen,” Rhein-Neckar Zeitung, 20 Apr. 1957.

5

See Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39.2 (2005): 197–219; Christine Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne: Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben; Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). 6

Edward Timms, “National Memory and the ‘Austrian Idea’ from Metternich to Waldheim,” Modern Language Review 86.4 (Oct. 1991): 898–910. 7

Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, c. 1765–1918: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 160. 8

Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 161.

9

Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester 1993), 324–39.

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Herzog-Verleih press pack, Sissi, die junge Kaiserin, n.d.

11

Klaus Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1992), 260 and 386. 12

Le Figaro, n.d., cit. in Herzog-Sonderinformationen, 5 Apr. 1957.

13

“Sissi: Ein Album rührender Effekte,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 Dec. 1957; “Zum dritten Male: Sissi,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 Dec. 1957.

14

Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2008).

15

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xv.

16

See Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek, “‘Reconstruction’ and Modernization”: West German Social History during the 1950s,” in West Germany under Reconstruction: Politics, Sexuality and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997), 53–72. 17

“DPs beim Übergang über die Krimmler Tauern,” oral history, Bezirksarchiv Pinzgau, quoted in Hanno Loewy, “Der Wald, der Berg, der Schnee und das Meer: Der ‘Exodus’ der DPs durch die Krimmler Tauern 1947,” in Hast du meine Alpen gesehen? Eine jüdische Beziehungsgeschichte, ed. Hanno Loewy and Gerhard Milchram (Hohenems and Vienna: Jüdisches Museum, 2009), 374–85; here 376. 18 Report No. 49 (3 Mar. 1947): “Antisemitism in the American Zone,” cit. in Constantin Goschler, “The Attitude towards Jews in Bavaria after the Second World War,” in Moeller, West Germany under Reconstruction, 231–50; here 232. 19

Goschler, “The Attitude towards Jews in Bavaria,” 246.

20

Rainer Schulze, “Growing Discontent: Relations between Native and Refugee Populations in a Rural District in Western Germany after the Second World War,” in Moeller, West Germany under Reconstruction, 53–72; here 55. 21

Graham Ford, “Constructing a Regional Identity: The Christian Social Union and Bavaria’s Common Heritage, 1949–1962,” Contemporary European History 16.3 (2007): 277–97; here 286. 22

On stereotyping and splitting as a classic strategy in the authoritarian regulation of cultural difference, see Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (London: Polity, 1992), 276–331. 23 The smooth surfaces of the tree stumps in Sissi suggest the use of mechanical chain saws, which had been in general use since the late 1920s. During the Second World War forced labor was mobilized to harvest timber for the war effort, though the stumps’ clean surfaces in these shots suggest that the tree felling here was more recent. 24

“Zum dritten Male,” Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, 21 Dec. 1957.

25

Johannes von Moltke, No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005), 14. 26

Herzog-Verleih press pack, Die junge Kaiserin, n.d. The quotes are from Herzog’s suggestions for press headlines on the film. 27

Widescreen was, however, used in Sissi part 3.

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SISSI THE TERRIBLE 28 29

101

“Sissi — Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin,” Film-Echo, 30 Dec. 1957. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film (London: Dennis Dobson, 1953), 242.

30

Jan Campbell, Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life: Durations of the Unconscious Self (London: Routledge, 2006), 34 and 55–56. 31

Campbell, Psychoanalysis, 112, 27, and 162.

32

The classical statement of this position is Thomas Elsaesser’s “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (1972; repr., London: BFI, 1987), 43–69. 33

Campbell, Psychoanalysis, 19.

34

Herzog press pack, Die junge Kaiserin, n.d.

35

See the film notice in Der Spiegel, 2 Jan. 1957.

36

“Zigeunerinvasion im Prater,” Ufa press pack, Sissi: Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin, n.d. 37

Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (London: Little, Brown, 2007), 244.

38

Reviews, Lahrer Zeitung, 5 Jan. 1957; Hannoversche Zeitung, 22 Dec. 1956.

39

Miklós Molnár, A Concise History of Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 201–8. 40

Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, “The Anorectic Empress: Elisabeth of Austria,” History Today (Apr. 1996): 16. 41 Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996), 249. 42 Luis Grundner, “Sissi in zweiter Auflage,” Salzburger Nachrichten, 24 Dec. 1956.

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5: Political Affects: Antifascism and the Second World War in Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf Sabine Hake

L

OOKING AT THE MANY FILMS and television series on the Third Reich and Second World War produced since German unification, we might easily arrive at two conclusions. First, the Second World War has joined, if not replaced, the Third Reich as the unifying myth of German postwar identity. Second, German unification has created the political conditions necessary for the recognition of Germans as victims rather than only as perpetrators. The resultant preoccupation with German wartime suffering can be found across the entire range of cultural practices, from historical exhibitions, book publishing, and scholarly debates to the audiovisual practices discussed in this volume. However, for reasons that have to do with the asymmetries of unification, the discourse on German wartime suffering has been organized around a dominant Western narrative, especially in the representation of the home front and the possibility of resistance.1 Here the exclusive emphasis on individual experiences has marginalized the collective voices that made antifascism the foundational narrative of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and turned it into a powerful, if increasingly hollow rhetoric in the making of a socialist imaginary and historical legacy. Furthermore, the privileging of suffering and victimization and the focus on trauma, memory, and postmemory has elided political categories, beginning with the analysis of nationalism, militarism, and capitalism that dominated the discourse of antifascism from the late 1940s to the late 1980s and that aligned East German approaches to the Second World War with urgent contemporary concerns about the future of socialism.2 In the following pages I will take a closer look at the antifascist films made by DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the stateowned East German film studio, and consider their contribution to the filmic representation of the Second World War during the 1960s and 1970s. The convergence of the antifascist narrative and the war narrative, I contend, allowed filmmakers to remap the affective landscape of antifascism, reassess its historical status, and reaffirm its meaning for

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the present. Directors Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf played a key role in revisiting the discourse of antifascism from the perspective of the Second World War: Beyer through what are now considered antifascist classics, Fünf Patronenhülsen (Five Cartridges, 1960) and Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves, 1963), and Wolf through two autobiographical war films, Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen, 1968) and Mama, ich lebe (Mama, I Am Alive, 1977). My comparative reading of what might be described as revisionist films, with the term denoting a challenge to established filmic conventions rather than a departure from central Marxist concepts, is structured around a number of key issues and the constitutive tension between affirmation and critique organized through them. These include the role of the war narrative in realigning the antifascist narrative with the hegemonic perspective of the communist party (in Beyer’s case) or the Soviet Army (in Wolf ’s case); the role of masculinity in validating the antifascist leader (in Beyer’s case) or exploring new forms of male subjectivity (in Wolf ’s case); and the role of formal innovation in reaffirming the antifascist myth (in Beyer’s case) or deconstructing it (in Wolf ’s case). In critical assessments of DEFA and its contribution to German film history, one fact appears indisputable: the antifascist film is central to the DEFA legacy.3 The hundred-plus films of this type produced by the state-owned studio between 1946 and 1989, most scholars agree, captured the artistic ambitions, political commitments, and filmic sensibilities of this major socialist cinema in almost ideal form. Together with other cultural practices, they provided the foundational narrative for “der erste sozialistische Staat auf deutschem Boden” (the first socialist state on German soil), to cite the GDR constitution, and established a model of identifications and projections for its citizens. In the antifascist master narrative the Third Reich and Second World War were presented as necessary phases, or crisis moments, in the defeat of capitalism and the triumph of communism, with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust usually treated as complicating factors. From this teleological perspective, the GDR emerged as the Other of fascism and its legacies; in socialism antifascism found its logical culmination, ultimate manifestation, and ongoing affirmation. Sustained by this dialogical (or dialectical) relationship between fascism and antifascism, the antifascist films played a pivotal role in the production of a socialist imaginary, either through the glorification of the communist resistance during the Third Reich or through conversion stories that delivered the victims of false consciousness into the hands of the SED (Socialist Unity Party). Yet the antifascist genre, if it can be called that, was anything but stable or uncontested. After its initial codification and canonization in the 1950s, it experienced a final flourishing in the 1960s when the exemplary stories of resistance were absorbed into the very different affective registers of the war film and

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when modernist experimentation released a previously suppressed sense of melancholia that had haunted the genre from the very beginning.4 In light of these legacies the question remains: Do the interventions by Wolf and Beyer partake in the fundamental revision of basic Marxist concepts denounced by dogmatists as defeatist or do they contribute to a critical revision meant to reaffirm the historical and ideological foundations of the GDR? While historians over the last two decades have provided us with a more nuanced assessment of the role of antifascism in defining official memory and organizing public life in the GDR, film scholars have clung to a rather normative definition of the antifascist film, one that sheds little light on the political affects — solidarity, trust, belief, dedication, commitment, militancy, and so forth — organized by its images and stories.5 Treating it like an established genre, they have focused on basic storylines, stock characters, typical settings, and recurring symbols and motifs, while neglecting its formal transformations from the 1950s to the 1960s. Moreover, individual films have been evaluated primarily in relation to GDR nation building, cultural identity, and official historiography.6 As a result, the antifascist fantasies have been reduced to ideological functions and didactic effects, seemingly uncomplicated in their relationship to East German history and state doctrine and unaffected by the instability of filmic meaning and the decline of classical narrative. More specifically, the focus on normative effects has distracted from the self-reflexive qualities of the late antifascist film — its ability to problematize its ideological foundations and turn such significatory excess into an instrument of formal innovation and critical revision. The same can be said about the genre’s increasingly unstable patterns of identification and heavy reliance on performance and embodiment as alternative sites of subject formation.7 Through its narratives of resistance, antifascism in the GDR organized a series of ideological oppositions (for example, capitalism vs. communism, nationalism vs. internationalism) and produced a distinct social typology and political iconography embodied most compellingly in film, literature, and memory culture by the antifascist hero/father figure. Yet as a political affect, antifascism also organized much more complicated processes of identification and projection. In hypostatizing the Other, the label “antifascist” conferred a habitus of righteousness, purity, and clarity that, below the rhetoric of heroism and strength, revealed a powerful attachment to the position of victimhood and an empathetic identification with suffering and loss: reason enough to take a closer look at antifascism as political affect and consider its hidden history of mourning and melancholia. The antifascist films discussed in this chapter show to what degree revisionist approaches to the antifascist master narrative depend on the

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production of what I call political affects. The notion of political affect, in the context of this essay, owes much to current work in cultural studies on affect as a central category of film theory and political critique.8 Questioning both the rational Cartesian subject in the Enlightenment tradition and the oedipalized subject of psychoanalytic theory, this critical work has allowed scholars, drawing on the work of Deleuze, to pay greater attention to the function of affect, emotion, and feeling in constituting political subjectivities and identities, with the conceptual slippage among these three terms sometimes distracting from the specificity of affect as a heuristic device within poststructuralist thought. In contrast to emotions, which are personal, and feelings, which are social, affects refer to “a prepersonal intensity; they exist outside of consciousness” and represent a moment of “unformed and unstructured potential.”9 This dialogical quality makes affect a useful tool for analyzing film’s central role in forging political identities. Moreover, its abstract quality makes affect and affect theory particularly suited to perform some of the work formerly done by ideology critique, but now in full recognition of that which precedes reason and identity; hence the special relevance of performance, spectatorship, and music in examining the filmic manifestations of political affect. Applied to the films of Beyer and Wolf, the concept of affect allows me to account for the ways in which antifascism was something not only to be believed or felt but also to be expressed and conveyed in aesthetic terms; it allows me to understand how the antifascist films had (or have) an ability to affect and allow audiences to be affected. This helps to move the discussion of the antifascist film beyond the prevailing focus on social (and sexual) stereotypes, narrative structures, and identificatory patterns and draws attention to the aesthetic strategies that constitute antifascism as a desire, fantasy, and habitus. Thus defined as a historically specific political affect, antifascism joins characters and spectators beyond the simple terms of identification and demonstrates the importance of film performance and spectatorship in sustaining ideological commitments in affective terms. The notion of political affect de-psychologizes the analysis of antifascist films and acknowledges their central role in the dissemination of political ideologies; more important, it shifts the locus of analysis from intended meanings to the kind of subject effects that extend the antifascist imaginary into political culture and public life. As the foundational narrative of the GDR, antifascism and its stories of resistance were the focus of normative aesthetic practices and powerful affective economies since the founding of the GDR in 1949 in the spirit of “antifascist democratic transformation.” In official rhetoric and public life this foundational narrative during both the Ulbricht era (1960–71) and the Honecker era (1971–89) gradually deteriorated into

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hollow phrases and empty rituals. Yet in film, literature, and the visual arts, the discourse of antifascism emerged as one of the most important vehicles in the critical reassessment of GDR history and identity. As the most visible symbol of antifascism’s continuing relevance, the Berlin Wall — then known as the “antifaschistischer Schutzwall” (antifascist protective rampart) — was initially welcomed by many intellectuals as an instrument of political stabilization and, consequently, a prerequisite for liberalization in artistic matters. After 1961, writers in particular turned to innovative modernist styles to develop a critical perspective on the legacies of fascism and antifascism and to address the contradictions of everyday life under socialism. However, filmmakers’ hopes were soon shattered by the infamous Eleventh Plenary of 1965 that resulted in the shelving of an entire year’s production of DEFA films. Any critical engagement with antifascism was henceforth marked by a double crisis: the crisis of political legitimization in the aftermath of the Eleventh Plenary and the Prague Spring of 1968, and the crisis of filmic representation brought about by the assault on classical narrative cinema by the international New Waves. The encounter of DEFA directors with New Wave films from France, Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union gave rise to a cool, modernist aesthetic of alienation, characterized by stark blackand-white cinematography, atonal sound tracks, elliptical editing, surrealist dream sequences, symbolically charged mise-en-scènes, and new approaches to screen acting. Viewed with suspicion by the SED leadership, these innovative films often failed to reach their intended audiences, further proof of DEFA’s difficulties in negotiating the conflicting demands of artistic innovation, popular entertainment, and political education. The return to political and aesthetic orthodoxy demanded by the party and audience’s preference for formulaic genre films proved particularly difficult for emerging directors such as Frank Beyer, who believed in the compatibility of socialism and modernism, often seeking inspiration in the work of fellow socialist filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky or Andrzej Wajda, and who in the 1970s addressed issues of subjectivity, memory, and experience in self-reflexive ways not dissimilar to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Just as Georg Lukács’s pronouncements on the nineteenth-century realist novel as the model for critical realism was used in the 1950s formalism debates to dismiss all modernist experimentation as decadent, the canonization of modernism in the West as inherently resistant has distracted from the affirmative functions of formal innovation. Concretely, in the case of DEFA cinema this means that an uncritical reliance on the realism-modernism opposition has allowed us to equate filmic experimentation with political dissent. Just as the ideological effects produced by the antifascist classics in the socialist

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realist mode were never as uncontested as their detractors claimed, the turn to art-cinema traditions never implied automatic opposition to the ideological and institutional structures that relied on antifascism as its founding myth. On the contrary, modernist strategies and techniques often helped to liberate the affective core of antifascism from the ossifications of cinematic illusionism and to redeem the utopia of socialism in aesthetic terms. To what degree such rescue attempts had system-stabilizing effects remains an unresolved question in the critical assessment of GDR film and literature.10 Under these conditions of discursive instability the convergence of antifascist narrative and war narrative resulted in a fundamental realignment in the established binaries of fascist and antifascist and gave rise to the triangulated identificatory patterns that henceforth positioned the Germans, in a version of the Hegelian dialectic, as victims, perpetrators, and victors.11 The war narrative shifted attention from Nazis to Soviets as the main historical agents and brought into sharper relief the role of the Soviets both in the antifascist movement and in ongoing confrontations within the Eastern Bloc. Just as the tanks moving toward Berlin in 1945 prefigured the tanks appearing on the streets of Prague in 1968, the protagonists’ preoccupation with party discipline and their hushed references to Moscow pointed to very contemporary anxieties among the SED leadership and the literary and artistic elites, including filmmakers, who had been so deeply invested in the project of socialism. On the level of narrative this revisionist process involved a series of significant shifts in focus, tone, and mode of address: a shift in historical time from the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich to the last year of the Second World War; a shift in settings from densely populated urban centers to vast, empty landscapes on the Eastern Front; and a shift in protagonists from a cross-section of social classes and generations to the young soldiers who were socialized into Nazi society and who became the first generation to achieve adulthood in the GDR. Women — marginal characters in the antifascist narrative from the start — disappeared almost entirely from the scene, only to make a last-minute reappearance in the psychological dramas discussed by Daniela Berghahn in her contribution to this anthology. Erotic longing and sexual pleasure had never been part of the affective register of antifascism; now its masculine ethos became even more pronounced. The complications of heterosexual love were replaced by painful confrontations between disillusioned fathers and fanatical sons. This oedipal structure dominated the many encounters between Germans and Soviets on the battlefields of the Second World War, but it also surfaced in the confrontation between Germans and Soviets, and communists and Nazis. Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than in the films and careers of Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf.

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The histories of these two men play an important role in their approaches to the Second World War and its significance to the affective economy of antifascism. Beyer (1932–2006), who was socialized into GDR society during the early reconstruction period, studied directing at the Prague Film Academy (FAMU) from 1952 to 1956. Working for the DEFA studio during the last years of his studies, he quickly rose to prominence with the antifascist trilogy of Fünf Patronenhülsen, Nackt unter Wölfen, and the lesser-known Königskinder (Star-crossed Lovers, 1962), hailed as part of a formally innovative socialist cinema. He benefited greatly from the atmosphere of stabilization and liberalization after 1961, until the banning of Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones) in 1966 put a temporary end to his film career.12 The slightly older Wolf (1925–82) grew up in exile in the Soviet Union, was a soldier in the Red Army during the liberation of Berlin in spring 1945, studied directing at the Moscow Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in the early 1950s, and remained indebted to the Soviet Union, in his choice of topics and themes. As president of the Academy of Arts of the GDR after 1965 and head of the Association of Film and Television Workers after 1967, he served as an important mediator between cultural workers and the nomenklatura and always approached filmmaking as part of a larger political project.13 The convergence of the antifascist narrative with the war narrative can only be understood through the filmmakers’ personal investment in the concept of political resistance. Wolf and Beyer, the two most prominent directors of the 1960s, were passionate antifascists who believed in the public responsibility of artists to engage with difficult and controversial subject matter. The inherent difficulties of representing war allowed them to affirm this political commitment, Beyer by celebrating the leading role of the communist party in the antifascist resistance and Wolf by acknowledging the Red Army as a major force in the military defeat of fascism. The coupling of socialism and cinema in their work can be traced back to the quintessential antifascist epic, Kurt Maetzig’s Ernst Thälmann, Führer seiner Klasse (Leader of his Class, 1955), during which Wolf served as Maetzig’s directorial assistant and Beyer as an apprentice on the set. Moreover, the significance of antifascism in sustaining such commitment finds telling expression in Ernst Busch’s rendition of the “Jarama Song” from the Spanish Civil War, which functions as an important intertextual link between their bodies of work during the 1960s: as part of the (extradiegetic) film score at the beginning and end of Fünf Patronenhülsen and then reprised in a profoundly moving scene in Ich war neunzehn, when a concentration camp inmate listens to a recording of the song after his release. At the same time, their different aesthetic solutions to the crisis of antifascism are evident already in their approach to camerawork and, by extension, filmic reality. Inspired by Italian neorealism but also

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referencing the stylized look of the expressionist film, Beyer and his cinematographer Günter Marcinkowsky rely heavily on the expressive possibilities of film — extreme close-ups, chiaroscuro lighting, unusual camera angles, and stage-like sets — to conjure the iconography of antifascism one last time. Meanwhile, taking advantage of his experiences in an army propaganda unit, Wolf’s cinematographer Werner Bergmann in Ich war neunzehn and Mama, ich lebe experiments with a documentary or newsreel aesthetic, a style Wolf had learned to appreciate in an early apprenticeship with Joris Ivens in the Netherlands. Beyer and Wolf stand for two diametrically opposed tendencies within socialist modernism that assumed special significance in relation to the antifascist master narrative. Beyer’s position of aesthetic affirmation and Wolf ’s strategy of aesthetic dissent can be characterized through a series of discursive oppositions: celebration of the antifascist leader versus deconstruction of the myth of (male) agency, affirmation of the omniscient voice of the collective versus acknowledgment of the difficulties of subjective voice, emphatic embodiment of the antifascist habitus versus retreat to a position of critical detachment, preservation of antifascism’s pathos versus development of a documentary ethos, and reliance on political allegory versus exploration of the visible world. Accordingly Beyer’s emphasis on pathos, melodrama, and the sublime in Fünf Patronenhülsen and Nackt unter Wölfen can be described as a defense against the corrosive effects of melancholy, whereas Wolf ’s exploration of the profilmic event in Ich war neunzehn and Mama, ich lebe must be interpreted as a sustained reflection on the consequences of historical trauma and loss. To begin with narrative point of view, Beyer privileges the authoritative position of the communist leader and establishes an omniscient perspective from which to present the dramatic events through the lens of Marxist orthodoxy. However, he can maintain this perspective only by approaching the Second World War from its other, extraterritorial spaces, the Spanish Civil War and the Buchenwald concentration camp. Enlisting old Comintern positions and Popular Front rhetoric, he uses the vast exteriors of the Ebro valley and the confined interiors of the concentration camp to make a passionate argument for political unity that extends from the heated arguments among the communists in the diegesis to the infusion of the entire mise-en-scène with antifascist pathos and what might be called the communist sublime. The main concern in both films is the future of the party as embodied by the old German commissar in Fünf Patronenhülsen and the Polish child in Nackt unter Wölfen. Significantly the unity and survival of the antifascist brigade in Fünf Patronenhülsen can be guaranteed only through a cunning deception by Commissar Wittig: the so-called secret plan for a fascist deployment

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in the Ebro region does not exist. Delivered to its destination despite bitter sacrifices and tragic losses, the message hidden in the five cartridges simply states: “Bleibt zusammen. Dann werdet ihr leben” (Stay together. That way you will live), a revealing comment on the communist party’s ultimate raison d’être. In Nackt unter Wölfen the same question of survival dominates discussions among the communists about the Polish child and his potential threat to their plans of an armed resurrection, a process controlled once again by the antifascist father/leader figure played by Erwin Geschonneck as a stand-in of the party — and for the director. By contrast, Wolf chooses a narrative position quite literally between the lines to express both his love for the Soviet Union and his palpable disillusionment with the GDR. His staging of ambivalence relies heavily on autobiographical perspectives. Ich war neunzehn’s first-person narrator, Gregor Hecker, is a German-born soldier in the Red Army for whom the country of exile has become his new Heimat, a choice acknowledged by the director in his loving depiction of Russian music, language, and food. Hecker’s first words in Ich war neunzehn — “Achtung, Achtung, deutsche Soldaten! . . . Der Krieg ist endgültig verloren . . . Ich bin Deutscher” (German soldiers! The war is finally lost. I am a German) — foreshadow all of his subsequent encounters with Germans (unrepentant officers as well as civilian bystanders) under the conditions of defeat, while also allowing for the possibility of empathy and understanding. Yet these opening lines establish not only the first-person narrative as a bifurcated one but also Wolf’s own strategy as a filmmaker to make the spectator simultaneously look at a defeated Germany through Soviet eyes and witness the effects of these perceptions on a native-born son: an almost paradigmatic reenactment of ambivalence. In Mama, ich lebe four German soldiers desert on the Eastern Front, undergo political reeducation in an antifascist training camp, join the Red Army, and return as German soldiers to spy for the Soviets behind enemy lines. Once again their Germanness puts them in a position of conflict and contradiction. Already the title of Mama, ich lebe, which refers to a note to be delivered to a mother back home, confirms the primary bonds of family and the power of origins. The four deserters inadvertently contribute to the death of a Soviet comrade because they are unable to shoot the Wehrmacht soldiers attacking them; and as if to prove further the futility of their antifascist training, three of the four die on their first military mission. The infusion of the mise-en-scène with political affect brings into sharp relief the directors’ competing aesthetic and political projects. For Beyer the original promise of antifascism is preserved through its instant mythification: the myth of the Spanish Civil War in Fünf Patronenhülsen and the myth of the liberation of Buchenwald by communist inmates in

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Fig. 5.1. “German soldiers! The war is finally lost. I am a German.” From Ich war neunzehn (1968). DVD capture.

Nackt unter Wölfen. The transformation of history into myth, however, requires tightly controlled narrative spaces, carefully composed filmic frames, and highly charged auditory regimes. As characters turn into allegorical figures, the image loses its hold on physical reality; its primary purpose from then on is to deny the possibility of loss and ward off the debilitating effects of melancholia. The resultant tension between the physicality of the actors’ bodies and the sublime body of the communist party profoundly reconfigures the meaning of antifascism and in the end makes it as much an affective position as an ideological project. The transformation of mise-en-scène into allegory is particularly apparent in an elaborate montage sequence in Fünf Patronenhülsen. Motivated in the narrative through a Russian brigadist’s desperate search for water, the sequence reveals the underlying pattern of displacements, condensations, and substitutions in almost exemplary form. Conceived as a reflection on the power of the communist party, his hallucination of water starts a series of superimpositions that equates this precious elixir with the party and elevates communism to the source of all life, as evidenced by the transition from individual water drops and glasses of water to communists marching and singing in a Moscow parade. Further insights into the required alignment of antifascist affect with the communist party can be found in Nackt unter Wölfen, an adaptation of

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the famous novel by Bruno Apitz.14 In the same way that Fünf Patronenhülsen provides a model of party unity in times of struggle, Nackt unter Wölfen offers a testimony to the survival of the communist party, here personified by the small Polish child who arrives in Buchenwald with a new transport of Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz and is hidden by the communist inmates. The Nazi guards are very aware of the child’s existence and his symbolic significance. “Wenn wir das Kind haben, haben wir auch die Partei” (Once we have the child, we have the party, too), they declare and consider various strategies for using this knowledge to their advantage, especially in light of the advancing American troops. In the confining interiors of the camp the antifascist heroes can do little more than argue, debate, persuade, and strategize. Again it is Geschonneck, himself a longtime communist who spent the war years in various concentration camps, who mediates between those who want to get rid of the child because he threatens their underground work and those, like the Armin Müller-Stahl character, for whom the child embodies the utopian promise of socialism. In the end, empathy and fondness triumph over cold reasoning. The child is hidden in another cellblock, and the inmates refuse to divulge his whereabouts even under torture — proof that the party can be both all-powerful and all-caring. Through the miracle of this small living being, presented in one scene as if he were a religious relic, the communists’ love for the party finds its most tender expression. The child brings together German, Russian, French, and Polish inmates in shared memories of families back home and poignant affirmations of their humanity. Yet his presence also forces the members of the cell to practice key aspects of underground work: political analysis and self-critique, complete reliance on others, and willing cooperation within a hierarchy. Most important, the child functions as a distraction from their weapons arsenal and helps them plan their armed insurrection and much vaunted self-liberation. In the final sequence the inmates’ overjoyed shouts of “Kameraden, wir sind frei! Frei! (Comrades, we are free! Free!) and Müller-Stahl’s soothing words to the child: “Jetzt ist alles gut. . . . Du hast uns so viel Kummer gemacht. Hab keine Angst!” (Now everything is okay. . . . You caused us so much worry. Don’t be afraid!) evoke the language of victory but could also be read as apprehensive observations about the postfascist future of the party. For Beyer the possibility of social cohesion and individual agency is predicated on and guaranteed through the survival of the communist party. By contrast, Wolf’s personal love for the Soviet Union informs his filmic approach to the Second World War but also complicates it through his identity as a German and, though this is rarely addressed, as a Jew. Both Ich war neunzehn and Mama, ich lebe avoid the moralistic humanism of the antiwar film in the tradition of Bernhard Wicki’s West German

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Fig. 5.2. Tortured by the Nazis. From Nackt unter Wölfen (1963). DVD capture.

production Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1959) by confronting the horrors of war — and the limits of representation — through an ongoing reflection on the conventions of the genre itself. His documentary ethics and aesthetics provide both a critique of and an alternative to the hegemonic claims of antifascism as classical realist text. The difficult balancing act between the mere recording of the visible world and its enlistment in a sustained reflection on history, memory, and identity is reduplicated in the tension between the conventions of first-person narrative and the withdrawal of personal perspectives from the mise-en-scène. And precisely this vacillation between the “authenticity of autobiography” and “its authenticity-effect,” to cite two different interpretations of Wolf’s filmic style, opens up a discursive space for the staging of political affects — hesitation, doubt, detachment — previously excluded from the antifascist master narrative.15 Not surprisingly, the crisis of antifascism is directly thematized through the problem of language and the difficulty of translation. Choosing a discursive approach, Wolf conjures up a melancholy atmosphere through long silences in the dialogue scenes and minimal use of sound in the documentary sequences. Instead of offering identifiable settings, familiar locations, and logical spatiotemporal transitions, Wolf projects his own sense of dislocation into long traveling shots over wide open landscapes, empty streets, and abandoned dwellings. Sometimes the silence is overcome through music, especially folk songs and political songs that seek to restore the lost connection to history and tradition. Particularly in Mama, ich lebe, the back-and-forth between German and Russian, often without the benefit of subtitles, suggests a complete

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breakdown in communication and a crisis in translatability whose implications extend far beyond these fictional wartime encounters. Even when translations are given, arguments and misunderstandings often follow. For instance, when Gregor Hecker in Ich war neunzehn tells a young German woman about the horrible acts committed by German troops in the Soviet Union, she responds indignantly: “Das glaub’ ich nicht” (I don’t believe it). He translates her answer for a female fellow Soviet soldier as “Sie kann es sich nicht vorstellen” (She can’t imagine it), which prompts the latter to shout (in German): “Verbrannte Erde!” (Scorched earth!) and the former to insist: “Ich hab’ doch nichts gemacht. Ich doch nicht” (I didn’t do anything. Not me). Last but not least, the problem of masculinity plays a key role in staging the crisis of antifascism and reclaiming its critical force through two very different approaches to screen acting and the question of affect and embodiment. Again this process can be reconstructed in almost exemplary ways through a comparison between Beyer, who uses the war narrative to fortify the antifascist master narrative, and Wolf, for whom the war narrative functions as a solvent or catalyst. In Beyer’s case allmale groups led by older leader figures carry out the historical struggle between fascists and antifascists. Traditional masculinity remains their common currency, and their shared strength is based on the rituals of homosocial bonding. A group’s effectiveness is measured by the gestures through which individual members acknowledge hierarchies and make the expected sacrifices for the common goal. Yet with classical narrative withering away, the desire for unity and strength can henceforth only be realized through the regimes of the body in pain. Erwin Geschonneck, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Manfred Krug are the actors most closely identified with this ultra-masculine phase in the performance of antifascism.16 Fünf Patronenhülsen unabashedly celebrates this decidedly male physiognomy of antifascism: faces marked by hunger and thirst, eyes lined by lack of sleep and fear of death, but also animated by the belief in the righteousness of struggle and the inevitability of victory. By exploring the nuances of their faces and capturing the physicality of their bodies, Beyer creates a rupture between social type and screen persona, between metaphorical charge and physical presence, and between ideological investment and aesthetic surplus. In staging this rupture, he relies extensively on the affective qualities of faces in close-up. Composed as part of an elaborate optical screenplay and shot with a deep-focus, twenty-eight millimeter lens, these close-ups serve highly contradictory functions. The camera’s detailed attention to the human face evokes a tradition of filmic realism and mass communication that has a clear socialist genealogy. In particular Béla Balázs’s reflections on the face as the foundation of a new visual language connect Beyer’s apotheosis of international solidarity to a long

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tradition of film as the first democratic mass medium. Accordingly the physiognomies of the six brigadists — a Russian, a German, a Spaniard, a Bulgarian, a Frenchman, and a Pole — are absorbed into the composite face of antifascism and literally become one in their desperate search for water. At the same time the expressive camerawork, lighting, and miseen-scène claim their faces for a distinctly religious tradition. From Mueller-Stahl’s chapped lips and bloodshot eyes to Krug’s scraggly beard and forehead scar, the close-ups repeatedly evoke the iconography of martyrdom, complete with the Christian symbolism first used in Wolfgang Staudte’s Rotation (1949) and its close-up of a similarly marked prisoner of the Nazis. Beyer’s expressive “corporeal semantics”17 culminate in the death scene that deifies Wittig as the quintessential antifascist father/leader figure. The shot/reverse shot pattern moves back and forth between close-ups of the dying commissar, played by Geschonneck, the men of the antifascist brigade, and the point of view from which the spectator is meant to join their unspoken contract. The final superimposition of all faces within one single frame obliterates the difference in the communist body, to cite Julia Hell, between the body’s corporeality and the metaphysical sublime.18 Not only does the visual presentation of Geschonneck play with the notion of the king’s two bodies, one rooted in his singular physical existence, the other in his function as an embodiment of the community (or state), but his enlistment in such allegorical functions also invites more troubling comparisons to another famous character actor similarly engaged in the performance of political authority and state power: Heinrich George. He is Erwin Geschonneck’s uncanny double and the actor most closely tied to fascist fantasies of the autocratic and the populist leader in Jud Süss (1940), Kolberg (1945), and numerous other propaganda films.19 In Wolf ’s case these strong male leads are replaced by weak, conflicted, and indecisive protagonists — and the kind of young men and adolescent boys typically found in the classic antiwar film. Their overwhelming sense of disorientation can be seen in the expressionless faces of first-time actors such as Jaecki Schwarz in Ich war neunzehn and the cast of relative unknowns in Mama, ich lebe. In accordance with Wolf ’s documentary aesthetics his actors appear not to perform at all; many, in fact, are not even actors. Introducing the generation born during the Third Reich and drafted in the last years of the war, these personifications of troubled or unfinished masculinity legitimate a gradual opening toward the representation of Germans as victims. Moreover, the protagonists’ youth makes possible a fundamental questioning of oldfashioned notions of character and personality that still inform Beyer’s expressive aesthetics but give way to the more tentative reenactments of Wolf ’s postfascist subjectivity.

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Fig. 5.3. International Solidarity. From Fünf Patronenhülsen (1960). DVD capture.

Fig. 5.4. The Party’s two bodies. From Fünf Patronenhülsen (1960). DVD capture.

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Yet what takes the place of the ethos of sacrifice and the cult of selfdenial that in the films of Beyer still presume the unity of character, type, and actor in the performance of antifascism? Not wholesale rejection of this founding myth but rather open acknowledgment of the highly personal nature of political commitment and its constitutive elements. In Wolf’s films no established stylistic register seems capable of overcoming the pervasive sense of powerlessness and incomprehension; only the conscious refusal of stylization promises a formal solution to the underlying dilemma. The loss of confidence in the antifascist master narrative is worked out through the recording of everyday moments, the exploration of landscapes in long takes and traveling shots, the use of voiceover and diegetic music as critical commentary, and the inclusion of authentic settings and documentary sequences. But above all, it finds expression in the constraints on affect that haunt the main protagonists. Whether working as an interpreter during the surrender of German troops at Spandau, talking to a cynical landscape designer about German idealism, or (seemingly) interviewing the man in charge of the gas ovens at Sachsenhausen, Gregor Hecker in Ich war neunzehn shows almost no emotional reactions. Only when he loses a comrade does he break down and cry, hiding his face from the camera in the film’s only moment of intense emotionality. Numbed by the tedium of warfare, the sudden eruptions of violence, and the ubiquity of death, the main protagonist performs the problem of unrepresentability to quietly subversive effect — perhaps one of the reasons why the reception of the film was so mixed. The aura of melancholia in Ich war neunzehn suggests an emotional inhibition and prohibition that is openly acknowledged when the Soviet general declares that, “mit Gefühlen kann man keine Politik machen” (You cannot make politics with emotions). In Mama, ich lebe, however, his assertion is indirectly disproved by the Germans’ emotional ties to their Heimat and the Soviets’ reservations about these improbable political converts. Antifascists by circumstance, the Germans repeatedly question the effectiveness of the Soviets’ political reeducation program and remain unconvinced by the blessings of life under socialism. Unlike Gregor Hecker in Ich war neunzehn, whose primary modus operandi is that of quiet observation but who manages to act decisively nonetheless, the four deserters in Mama, ich lebe appear paralyzed by their existence between the lines. They not only fail to overcome the gap separating action and reflection as well as individual and collective, but they also no longer have access to the symbolic registers and affective positions associated with antifascism, a problem shared by Wolf ’s young audiences who questioned the film’s relevance. To quote Larson Powell: “In a sense, the incomprehension of the four antifascists anticipates that of the younger viewers in 1977 who no longer understood the antifascist narrative.”20

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In what ways then do Wolf’s films infuse antifascism with new meaning? They make its discursive crisis the subject of conflicting explanations and ongoing discussions. “Wie soll ich das erklären: Goethe und Auschwitz?” (How do I account for Goethe and Auschwitz?), wonders Vadim in Ich war neunzehn. The German landscape architect, a self-declared representative of inner emigration, explains the irresistibility of the Nazi movement with reference to German history, more specifically to the Kantian categorical imperative that glorified submission to authority as the highest form of duty and, in his view, led to a frenzy of obedience and sadism. Offering a very different explanation to his Soviet liberators, the communist concentration camp inmate takes the official line: “Die Industrie hat ihn [Hitler] bezahlt, die Reichswehr ihn gestützt, die ganze Militärclique, die Macht hat man ihm zugesteckt . . . (Industry paid him, the Reichswehr supported him, all those military cliques, they gave him the power . . . ). Nine years later, in Mama, ich lebe, such answers no longer satisfy the interlocutors in the diegesis and the motion-picture theater. Thus the Soviet officer’s essay question to his new students “Wie ist es zu der deutschen Katastrophe gekommen und was führt aus ihr heraus?” (How did the German catastrophe come about and what will lead out of it?) can not be answered simply by having the Germans exchange their gray Wehrmacht uniforms for the olive uniforms of the Red Army. Aware of this difficulty, another Soviet officer later voices his frustration over the Germans’ lack of commitment. In response to one soldier who refuses to participate in the first military mission, he concludes that, understandably, there are “zwei Sorten Deutsche, Faschisten und Antifaschisten” (two kinds of Germans, fascists and antifascists) but, less comprehensible, there are also “zwei Sorten Antifaschisten, die, welche kämpfen und die, welche Stühle machen” (two kinds of antifascists, those who fight and those who build chairs). Perhaps this casual comment was meant to suggest resigned acceptance of the failure of the antifascist master narrative; but perhaps it also opens up new perspectives on the different politics of everyday life (that is, of building chairs) that at once challenge the antifascist myth and extend its legacies into the present. How does the organization of political affect in the antifascist films of Beyer and Wolf contribute to our debates on German wartime suffering? In what ways can we use the formal deconstruction and critical reconstruction of the genre to shed new light on the complicated relationship between the aesthetics and politics of wartime representations and their changing place within the larger discourses of socialism, antifascism, and national identity? As I have argued, the DEFA antifascist films bring into sharp relief the slippages between political and filmic imagination, and they reveal the difficulties of harnessing aesthetic means to ideological projects. By relying on the power of political affect in its various aesthetic manifestations, including the face in close-up as the site of empathetic

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identification, the antifascist films introduce visual effects and narrative perspectives that in fact undermine the official rhetoric and use the established iconography to explore previously suppressed sentiments and attitudes: about German wartime suffering, divided allegiances to the Soviet Union, and growing doubts about the future of socialism. Yet it is only from the post-Wall perspective that the affective politics of antifascism in the films of Beyer and Wolf come into full view and that we can reconstruct the internal contradictions inscribed in DEFA’s contribution to the filmic representation of German wartime suffering.

Notes 1

For an introduction to the current debate on German wartime suffering and Germans as victims, see Karin Hartewig, ed., Der lange Schatten: Widerspruchsvolle Erinnerungen an den Zweiten Weltkrieg und die Nachkriegszeit aus der Mitte Europas, 1939–1989 (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1993); Ursula Heukenkamp, ed., Schuld und Sühne? Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit (1945–1961) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), especially Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus, “Vergeßt es nie! Schuld sind Sie! Zu Kriegsdeutungen in den audiovisuellen Medien beider deutschen Staaten in den vierziger und fünfziger Jahren,” 742–57; Lothar Kettenacker, ed., Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–45 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003); Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave, 2006); and Helmut Schmitz, ed., A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 2

Whereas contemporary representations of wartime suffering presume a sharp division between the personal and the political within the terms of postideology, the DEFA antifascist films — and their equivalents in the New German cinema, for that matter — aim at a very different understanding of politics and ideology from the perspective of postfascist subjectivity. Accordingly, the DEFA antifascism films produced during the Honecker era (after 1971) privileged the existential questions of guilt, hope, and personal responsibility first explored by Beyer in his Jurek Becker adaptation Jakob der Lügner (Jacob, the Liar, 1974) and in Der Aufenthalt (The Turning Point, 1982) as part of a larger critique of 1950s and 1960s antifascist orthodoxy. The similarities with the West German films of the 1970s are evident in the presentation of the personal as the political and confirmed by a comparison between Ralf Kirsten’s Ich zwinge dich zu leben (I Force You to Live, 1978) and Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother, 1980). However, in contrast to the strong feminist voices in New German Cinema, the belated introduction of female perspectives in Die Verlobte (The Fiancée, 1980) and Die Schauspielerin (The Actress, 1988) became possible in the East only after the demise of any totalizing claims to historical agency associated with antifascism; see the contribution of Daniela Berghahn in this volume. 3

The best surveys of DEFA cinema can be found in Ralf Schenk, ed., Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFA Spielfilme, 1946–1992 (Berlin: Henschel,

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1994); Seán Allan and John Sanford, eds., DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946– 1992 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999); Helmut Pflügl, ed., Der geteilte Himmel I: Höhepunkte des DEFA-Kinos, 1946–1992 (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2001); and Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005). 4

On postwar melancholia, especially in Wolf, see Anke Pinkert, Film and Memory in East Germany (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008). 5

See Konrad Jarausch, “The Failure of East German Antifascism: Some Ironies of History as Politics,” German Studies Review 14.1 (1991): 87–102; Dan Diner, “On the Ideology of Antifascism,” New German Critique 67 (1996): 123–32; and Manfred Agethen, Eckhard Jesse, and Ehrhart Neubert, eds., Der missbrauchte Antifaschismus: DDR-Staatsdoktrin und Lebenslüge der deutschen Linken (Freiburg: Herder, 2002). On GDR memory culture in general, see Martin Sabrow, ed., Geschichte als Herrschaftsdiskurs: Der Umgang mit der Vergangenheit in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), especially Thomas Heimann, “Erinnerung als Wandlung: Kriegsbilder im frühen DDR-Film,” 37–86. 6

For German-language works on the antifascist film, see Detlef Kannapin, Antifaschismus im Film der DDR: DEFA-Spielfilme, 1945 bis 1955/56 (Cologne: Papy-Rossa, 1997), and Anne Barnert, Die Antifaschismusthematik der DEFA: Eine kultur- und filmhistorische Analyse (Marburg: Schüren, 2008). English-language discussions can be found in Barton Byg, “The Anti-Fascist Tradition and GDR Film,” in Proceedings, Purdue University Fifth Annual Conference on Film (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1980), 115–24; Christiane Mückenberger, “The Anti-Fascist Past in DEFA Films,” in Allan and Sanford, DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992, 56–76; and Daniela Berghahn, “Liars and Traitors: Unheroic Resistance in Antifascist DEFA Films,” in Millennial Essays on Film and Other German Studies, ed. Daniela Berghahn and Alan Bance (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), 23–40. For comparative analyses in the German context, see Joachim Schmitt-Sasse, ed., Widergänger: Faschismus und Antifaschismus im Film (Münster: Maks, 1993), and Detlef Kannapin, Dialektik der Bilder: Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Film: Ein Ost-West-Vergleich (Berlin: Dietz, 2005). On the same problematic from a literary perspective, see Simone Barck, AntifaGeschichte(n): Eine literarische Spurensuche in der DDR der 1950er und 1960er Jahre (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), and Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997). 7

In his study on embodiment in DEFA cinema, Stefan Zahlmann examines the heightened significance of the body in working through the contradictions of history, memory, and identity. See his Körper und Konflikt in der filmischen Erinnerungskultur der BRD und DDR (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 2001), and, more specifically, “Die besten Jahre? DDR-Erinnerungskultur in Spielfilmen der DEFA,” in Vom kollektiven Gedächtnis zur Individualisierung der Erinnerung, ed. Clemens Wischermann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 65–88. 8

See Patricia Tiniceto Clough, with Jean Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006), and Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010).

9

Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8.6 (2005): 1 Dec. 2009, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. My definition

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of political affect is indebted to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi. For approaches that engage the work of Deleuze and others, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002), and Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007). 10

On the insulating effect of aesthetic utopias, see Wolfgang Emmerich, “Affirmation-Utopie-Melancholie: Versuch einer Bilanz von vierzig Jahren DDR-Literatur,” German Studies Review 14 (1991): 325–44. On the unwillingness to address the loss of Stalinism, also see Patricia Herminghouse, “Confronting the ‘Blank Spots of History’: GDR Culture and the Legacy of ‘Stalinism,’” German Studies Review 2 (1991): 345–65. 11

I owe this insight to Paul Cooke.

12

On Beyer, see Ralf Schenk, ed., Regie: Frank Beyer (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1993). On the shooting of the film, see Frank Beyer, “Fünf Patronenhülsen: Aus der Werkstatt des Regisseurs,” Filmwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen, supplement to Deutsche Filmkunst 1 (1961): 3. More anecdotal reminiscences about the shooting of his antifascist trilogy (but few insights into his political views) can be found in Frank Beyer, Wenn der Wind sich dreht: Meine Filme, mein Leben (Munich: Econ, 2001), 91–119. On the myth of the Spanish Civil War in the GDR, see Josie McLellan, Antifascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the International Brigades, 1945–1989 (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), and Arnold Kramer, “The Cult of the Spanish Civil War in East Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 39.4 (2004): 531–60. 13

On history and identity in Wolf, see Marc Silberman, “Remembering History: The Filmmaker Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique 49 (1990): 163–91; and Gertrud Koch, “On the Disappearance of the Dead among the Living: The Holocaust and the Confusion of Identities in the Films of Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique 60 (1993): 57–75. On the antifascist film and its affinities with the Gegenwartsfilm, see Barton Byg, “From Anti-Fascism to Gegenwartsfilm: Konrad Wolf,” in Studies in GDR Culture and Society 5 (1985): 115–24. For a historical biography that sheds light on the three subject positions — German, Soviet, and Jewish — that informed Wolf ’s engagement with antifascism, see Wolfgang Jacobsen and Rolf Aurich, Der Sonnensucher Konrad Wolf (Berlin: Aufbau, 2005). 14

On the novel and its film and television adaptations, see Thomas Heimann, Bilder von Buchenwald: Die Visualisierung des Antifaschismus in der DDR (1945– 1990) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 71–104. 15

Marc Silberman, “The Authenticity of Autobiography,” in German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1995), 145–61, and Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel, “Defining DEFA’s Historical Imaginary: The Films of Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique 82 (2001): 3–24; here 19. 16

On DEFA stars and the performance of masculinity, see Claudia Fellmer, “The Communist Who Rarely Plays a Communist: The Case of DEFA Star Erwin Geschonneck,” in Millennial Essays on Film and Other German Studies, ed. Daniela Berghahn and Alan Bance (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), 41–62. On the crisis of masculinity in early DEFA film, also see Anke Pinkert, “Can Melodrama

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Cure? War Trauma and Crisis of Masculinity in Early DEFA Film,” Seminar 44.1 (2008): 118–36. 17

The term is taken from Horst Ruthrof, Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997). 18 Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies, 67. For a discussion of this point in relation to Fünf Patronenhülsen, see Stefan Soldovieri, “German Suffering in Spain: Cold War Visions of the Spanish Civil War in Fünf Patronenhülsen (1960) and Solange du lebst (1955),” Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques 18.1 (2007): 53–69. 19

On the king’s two bodies, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1954). For a reading that applies these ideas to socialist realism, see Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 292–306. 20

Larson Powell, “Mama, ich lebe: Konrad Wolf ’s Intermedial Parable of Antifascism,” Edinburgh German Yearbook 3 (2009): 63–75; here 71. For a more traditional reading that emphasizes the difficulties of memory as a foundation of socialist identity, see Knut Hickethier, “Mama, ich lebe (1977): Erinnerung als Identitätssuche,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 31.29 (1990): 168–82.

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6: Shadowlands: The Memory of the Ostgebiete in Contemporary German Film and Television Tim Bergfelder

I

N THE LITERARY, CINEMATIC, AND TELEVISUAL RETELLINGS of German suffering during the Second World War that have been proliferating over the past years, some narratives recur frequently: the bombing of German cities in Allied air raids, the killing and rape of civilians by invading soldiers in the last days of the war, and the expulsion before and after the end of the war of ethnic Germans from territories east of the rivers Oder and Neisse. This last narrative constitutes as much a traumatic memory as any of the other privileged sites of German wartime suffering; even by conservative estimates the expulsions created approximately fourteen million refugees and resulted in more than 500,000 civilian deaths. Few Germans living through the war and the first postwar years were left unaffected by the impact of this mass migration — in the West, the influx of refugees caused housing problems that persisted for a decade, while the expellees had to reinvent themselves and integrate into a national community many found unfamiliar and often hostile. Despite all these traumatic dimensions, however, there is a notable difference between the remembrance of the expulsions and narratives concerning the Allied bombings insofar as the trauma of the former has become suffused over the years with the “softer” nostalgic or melancholy memory of a lost Heimat. My essay will suggest ways in which specific conceptions of memory, history, and nostalgia are implicated in the curious “rediscovery” of extinct political entities in the contemporary German collective consciousness. After some general observations about the scope of this “revival” and the theoretical implications behind its interpretation I discuss two specific case studies, the television event movie Die Flucht (March of Millions, 2007) and a series of documentaries by East German director Volker Koepp. The territories from which Germans were expelled, and which are contentiously often still referred to as Ostgebiete (Eastern regions), had comprised sizeable established German-speaking communities prior to 1945.

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Some areas had been under Prussian or Habsburg control for centuries, while others had been governed successively by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and Russia. The regions included Pomerania (a section of the Baltic coastline today divided between Germany and Poland); Silesia (an area now covered by the Czech Republic and Poland); and East and West Prussia, comprising the former heartland of the medieval Teutonic Knights and nowadays divided between Poland, Lithuania, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast around the city formerly known as Königsberg. Communities of Baltic Germans were also present further northeast in areas now part of Estonia and Latvia. During the Second World War these territories, which had always consisted of a patchwork of cultural and ethnic identities, witnessed some of the most horrific events of the entire conflict — including the Nazi oppression, persecution, deportation, and murder of non-German locals and especially of Jews (indeed these territories marked one of the darkest spots of the Holocaust), and heavy military combat across the region. Following the advances of the Red Army, unofficial expulsions of Germans had begun in some areas by 1944, while the agreements reached at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 definitively sealed the fate of the continued presence of Germans in these regions. In postwar West Germany the official representation of the expellees and their lost Eastern homelands was coordinated by the Bund der Vetriebenen (BdV or Association of Expellees), which initially encompassed a fairly broad political spectrum, and which had a significant influence on domestic and foreign policy in the Adenauer years.1 Nevertheless, the association’s insistent lobbying for restitution became an irritant in terms of the Federal Republic’s Realpolitik, while in countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia it was considered a threat to national sovereignty. The BdV’s inability to adapt to changing political circumstances and its antiquarian understanding of culture meant its positions were eventually sidelined, especially in the wake of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the 1970s and the ensuing detente with Germany’s eastern neighbors. Moreover, official narrativizations of expulsion histories frequently refused to accept complicity in the Nazi terror and sought exculpation by proposing equivalences between expellees and Holocaust victims. As a result, invocations of the so-called Ostgebiete from the 1960s onwards carried connotations of right-wing revanchism, exemplified by the infamous motto “Schlesien bleibt unser” (Silesia remains ours), chosen as the rallying cry in 1985 for the annual conference of the Silesian expellees. Robert G. Moeller has argued that especially in the early postwar period the expellee was seen as “the representative of a postwar Germany threatened by displacement and instability, but also a characteristic figure of the modern age.”2 However, despite substantial efforts by the BdV and its members and supporters to promote remembrance, the former Eastern

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territories themselves did not penetrate the wider public consciousness very deeply, at least among ordinary West Germans. This was not only because these spaces had become inaccessible behind the Iron Curtain, but also because the memory associated with them had become synonymous with the trauma of war itself, and thus an obstacle to the nation’s eagerness to overcome its past in the first postwar decades. Instead of a straightforward remembrance of cultural heritage, even the most prominent literary chronicles of the Eastern provinces in the Federal Republic tended to be characterized by strategies of distanciation, estrangement, and fragmentation, as in Günter Grass’s Danziger Trilogie (Danzig Trilogy, 1959–63) and Siegfried Lenz’s So zärtlich war Suleyken (So Tender Was Suleyke, 1955) or Heimatmuseum (The Heritage, 1978). In postwar cinema the Ostgebiete were rarely invoked as identifiable locations either — in the cycle of war films that began to emerge from the mid-1950s, the Eastern Front was mostly a generic backdrop for narratives that focused on the suffering of ordinary soldiers and POWs. A rare exception was Frank Wisbar’s Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (Night Fell over Gotenhafen, 1959), which thematized the flight of civilians from East Prussia and the sinking of the refugee ship “Wilhelm Gustloff” by a Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea in 1945. In the Heimatfilm genre, on the other hand, the expellee became a recurring figure, one that needed to be integrated into the Western community in the service of wider socioeconomic progress.3 In the course of such narratives the reference point of the expellees’ displacement, their former homelands, became literally as well as figuratively superimposed by the reality of a new Heimat in the West. The imperative of forming a cohesive postwar community demanded the absorption of the expellees’ cultural background. In the New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s the former Eastern regions resurfaced occasionally as an uncanny return of the repressed. Especially pertinent in this respect is Volker Schlöndorff’s depiction of post-First World War Latvia in the Franco-West German coproduction Der Fangschuss (Coup de Grâce, 1976), its setting opaquely described by the offscreen narrator as “jener verlorene Winkel Osteuropas, dessen russische, lettische und deutsche Ortsnamen heute niemandem etwas sagen” (that lost corner of Eastern Europe whose Russian, Latvian, and German place names no longer mean anything to anybody). Based on Marguerite Yourcenar’s novella, the film’s haunting tale of sexual repression can easily be read as a metaphor for a wider historical repression.4 Its doomed protagonists are a Prussian officer and a brother-sister pair born into the German Protestant aristocracy that dominated Russia’s Baltic provinces of Livonia and Courland during the czarist period. The aim of reconstructing a forgotten history (emphasized by the stark black-and-white cinematography) is given added poignancy by the fact that the family of leading actress and co-screenwriter Margarethe von Trotta originated in

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the same sociocultural milieu as her onscreen counterpart. Schlöndorff later returned to the East with his phantasmagoric portrait of Danzig in Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979), and wartime East Prussia was also the setting for his feature Der Unhold (The Ogre, 1996). To West Germans born after 1945, reunification and the end of the Cold War opened up regions and landscapes that previously had barely registered on their cultural radar. To East Germans, in contrast, the regions formerly known as Pomerania or Silesia were not particularly exotic and were less likely to be perceived as “lost.” Poland and Czechoslovakia had counted among the few short-distance foreign destinations open to GDR citizens after the building of the Berlin Wall. An exception was the Soviet and subsequently Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast, with stringent travel restrictions barring casual visitors from both East and West, even after the Cold War had come to an end. It is thus not surprising that the opening of what used to be the heartland of East Prussia has engendered curiosity. The introduction to a 2007 German travel guide for Kaliningrad encourages potential tourists: “Entdecken Sie das Kaliningrader Gebiet! Im früheren Königsberg begegnen sich Ostpreussen und die Sowjetunion, Europa und das neue Russland (Discover Kaliningrad! In the former Königsberg East Prussia meets the Soviet Union, Europe, and the new Russia).”5 The “rediscovery” in Germany of East Prussia and other former German territories may elicit unease across Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, and Russia. But while the end of the Cold War has raised renewed anxieties, suspicions, and tensions, it has also provided the opportunity for a fresh cultural dialogue between Germany and its eastern neighbors. German filmmakers, as Randall Halle and Alexandra Ludewig documented, have been eager in the new millennium to explore crossborder narratives.6 In many examples of this cinematic trend the focus is on contemporary encounters between Germany and Poland, as is the case in Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe (Grill Point, 2002), Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (Distant Lights, 2002), Henner Winckler’s Klassenfahrt (School Trip, 2002), and Robert Thalheim’s Am Ende kommen Touristen (And Along Come Tourists, 2007), the latter set in present-day Auschwitz. Both Halle and Ludewig have convincingly suggested reading such films as forays into a new transnational German cinema. Ludewig argues that the efforts of directors such as Dresen, Schmid, and Winckler reposition the German Heimatfilm in the sense that “the filmmakers are driven by a desire to transform the genre, endowing it with their re-orientation and paradigm shift from the west to the east, which is neither rapprochement nor a territorial claim, but a rejection of nationally charged spaces” (174). The former Ostgebiete are thus firmly back in the public consciousness in contemporary Germany. In terms of political discourse the demands for

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restitution and the “right to Heimat” of preceding decades have not entirely vanished.7 More surprising has been the mainstream appropriation of the memory about the former Eastern provinces in recent years. This phenomenon is cross-generational and encompasses three different groups: the former expellees whose memory is based on personal experience, a younger generation engaging with their family histories, and those with no personal involvement who respond purely to media representations and thus acquire what Alison Landsberg refers to as “prosthetic memories.”8 Contemporary representations of the Eastern regions cover a wide spectrum of political positions and cultural registers. One of the most respected West German cultural figures to write about the former Ostgebiete was Marion Gräfin Dönhoff (1909–2002), general editor of Die Zeit and the doyenne of liberal-bourgeois journalism in the Federal Republic, who documented her aristocratic East Prussian background in several books.9 Toward the end of her life these had already received considerable domestic acclaim, but it was her journalist great-niece Tatjana Dönhoff who brought her relative’s wartime tribulations to a mass readership with the factual Weit ist der Weg nach Westen (It’s a Long Way to the West, 2005). More recently, the younger Dönhoff has written novelizations of the television hit Die Flucht, to which I shall return later in this essay, and Die Gustloff (Ship of No Return: The Last Voyage of the Gustloff, 2008), Joseph Vilsmaier’s new TV version of the 1945 maritime disaster.10 Also revisiting family histories of expulsion and displacement in recent years have been queer activist and underground filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim (born in 1942), who traced his origins to a childhood adoption in a prison in war-torn Riga in Meine Mütter — Spurensuche in Riga (My Mothers — Searching for Traces in Riga, 2007), or Ute Badura, who returned to the region where her father was born in her acclaimed documentary Schlesiens wilder Westen (Silesia’s Wild West, 2002). Whereas the rhetoric of the BdV in previous decades often invoked a legalistic and collective framework of discussion (the appeal to public international law or Völkerrecht) and to this day conceives of its members in the first instance as victims, the more common trend in the new millennium has been to focus on individual memories. There is a specific emphasis on stories of childhood and on a nostalgic reconstruction of domestic life, expressed through cookbooks, collections of regional Christmas stories, or anthologies of regional jokes and folk wisdom. Before looking at specific case studies in more detail, it is worth reflecting on the academic debate on German war suffering, of which the “rediscovery” of the former Eastern provinces is a part. As other contributors to this volume state, the international discussion was triggered by a number of key texts, including Jörg Friedrich’s controversial account of the Allied bombing campaign of German cities, Der Brand (2002),11 and an essay by W. G. Sebald on the repression of German war suffering in postwar West

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German literature.12 Several scholars challenged the notion of an alleged taboo imposed on German war suffering, suggested by both Friedrich and Sebald, by demonstrating that the topic had always been discussed, particularly at a domestic level.13 Some went further by suggesting that Friedrich et al. could be seen to offer a revisionist take on the question of German war guilt or culpability for the Holocaust. Helmut Schmitz has declared that the discourse about German civilian victims “happens at the expense of, and in competition with, the remembrance of Nazi victims.”14 Aleida Assmann has countered this claim, arguing that “we cannot excise the experience of suffering from family memories because they are not politically correct. . . . It is not a question of either/or.”15 At a more general level the academic debate about German war suffering touches on a conflict between positivist and non- or post-positivist conceptions of history, which include differing views about historical agency, memory, ethics, and politics. One concern is that historical deliberations have seeped into and are discussed by an uninformed public without the authorization of experts, and that official history is being contaminated by the trivializing and falsifying incursions of personal memory. Bill Niven argues that “the explosion of memory of German victimhood in the public realm might represent the triumph of the private over the public, of emotion over enlightenment, and of uncritical empathy over pedagogy.”16 In a similar vein Stefan Berger notes in his critique of Friedrich’s book that “memory, as Charles Maier observed, tends to get in the way of history: ‘no history perhaps without memory, but no history that does not discipline memory.’”17 Alison Landsberg’s previously cited notion of “prosthetic memories” constitutes a counterargument to the assertion that the primary duty of historians is to discipline memory in order to safeguard an absolute truth. Her notion challenges the idea of an “authentic” recollection of history, especially one that can be mapped onto simplistic good/bad binaries. Insisting on the progressive potential of memory, she proposes: “I call these memories prosthetic to underscore their usefulness; because they feel real, they help to condition how an individual thinks about the world, and might be instrumental in generating empathy and articulating an ethical relation to the other.”18 The contestation regarding different approaches to history and memory does not merely constitute a disagreement at an arcane academic level. Debates about German war suffering can directly influence ethical positions and political decisions in the present. I noted the perception among some scholars that the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of German war suffering have come to “compete” with each other. It is worth recalling in this context that the aspirations in Germany toward “never again Auschwitz” (the imperative born out of the guilt over the Holocaust) and “never again war” (the pacifist impulse born out of the

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experience of mainly civilian suffering) were deliberately decoupled in the 1990s, following the constitutional legitimization for Bundeswehr soldiers to participate in foreign “peace-keeping” missions. Maja Zehfuss suggests that the Second World War discourse on memory (and the repression of the suffering of German civilian victims within that narrative) was instrumental in promoting support for the new military paradigm of global interventionism: “If it was possible to fight a good war against the Third Reich . . . with merely insignificant — for Germans are to ignore it — collateral damage, then it may be possible to do so again, perhaps indeed in Iraq.”19 In the wake of conflicts such as the Balkan wars, Afghanistan, and Iraq, some commentators have denounced Germany’s institutional and grassroots pacifism as anachronistic, naive, and irresponsible.20 It is certainly undeniable that the participation of German soldiers since the 1990s in so-called “humanitarian” wars has not only sharpened positions for and against military action in the present but also fundamentally affected German perspectives on their own past. I shall return to this link between present conflicts and past suffering in the concluding part of this essay. If historians are frequently suspicious of memory, then nostalgia seems to be an even less appropriate way of dealing with the past. Pam Cook has suggested, however, that it is possible to conceive of a continuum “with history at one end, nostalgia at the other, and memory as a bridge or transition between them.”21 She argues that “the advantage of this formulation is that it avoids the common hierarchy, in which nostalgia and some ‘inauthentic’ forms of memory are relegated and devalued in order to shore up notions of history ‘proper’” (3–4). Moreover, as Cook points out, demands for the objectivity of history are often in themselves influenced by nostalgia, imagining a time when the authority and unambiguousness of history was unchallenged. She suggests that “while not necessarily progressive in itself, nostalgia can form part of a transition to progress and modernity” (4). It is this forward-looking quality that Svetlana Boym indicates in the title of her book, The Future of Nostalgia. At the heart of her argument is the identification of two tendencies of nostalgia, the restorative and the reflective: “Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos (the return home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.”22 Nostalgia provides, like Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory, a framework to talk about films owing to a number of shared characteristics, not least the investment in processes of fantasy, desire, and identification. As I suggested, nostalgia is a crucial element in contemporary German memory culture. For the remainder of this essay I shall analyze the dynamic between restorative and reflective nostalgic tendencies in the German media landscape with

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regard to the representation of the former Eastern provinces. I will then conclude by explaining how such manifestations can be reconciled within the wider political debates concerning German war suffering that I have discussed above. Among the recent cinematic and televisual narratives about the former Ostgebiete, few compare in terms of publicity or audience reach to the TV movie Die Flucht (2007).23 Directed by Kai Wessel and produced by Nico Hofmann’s company teamWorx for the German public broadcast channels ARD and Arte, the two-part film was marketed as the primetime television “event” of its year. The first part had thirteen million viewers, making it the most successful feature film broadcast on ARD in ten years. For Hofmann the two-part mini-series fitted seamlessly into a portfolio of similarly slick historical disaster epics, fictionalizing significant moments in Germany’s past, including the Allied bombing of Dresden (Dresden, 2006), the Berlin Blockade of 1948/9 (Die Luftbrücke, The Air Lift, 2005), and the 1977 German Autumn in Mogadischu (2008).24 In its attention to period detail, which also informed its marketing, Die Flucht is part of a wider subgenre of German films made since the 1990s that are set during the Third Reich and that Lutz Koepnick has termed “Nazi heritage cinema.”25 The genre’s fetishization of historical authenticity (most prominently in Der Untergang, Downfall, 200426) resonate with Boym’s description of restorative nostalgia’s manifestations in “total reconstructions” of the past (FN, 41). The production team of Die Flucht represents a generation with no personal memory of the former East Prussia or of the expulsions — Wessel and Hofmann were born in West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As Paul Cooke has argued, Hofmann’s production strategies are influenced strongly by Hollywood (the name of his company is an allusion to Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks27). Die Flucht exemplified the teamWorx formula in several respects. Epic in length at three hours, the film also drew attention owing to its unusually high budget for a television production, nine million euros, and its lavish production values, including the use of more than 2,000 extras.28 Leading actress Maria Furtwängler (a great-niece of Nazi-era conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler) had gained national recognition as a detective in the television crime series Tatort (Scene of the Crime). Costar Jean-Yves Berteloot is a prolific French actor who prior to Die Flucht had appeared in the international blockbuster The Da Vinci Code (2006). The rest of the cast consisted of dependable character actors, including New German Cinema veterans Hans Zischler and Angela Winkler. Cooke has suggested with regard to the earlier teamWorx production Dresden that the film can be read as a reworking of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic, and “as with Titanic, the viewer knows from the start what is going to happen.”29 The same applies to Die Flucht,

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although the actual flight from East Prussia that gives the film its title only gets underway about two-thirds into the story. Whereas Dresden had Cameron’s Titanic as an unspoken intertext, the model for Die Flucht is Gone with the Wind (1939). Like David O. Selznick’s epic, Wessel’s film tries to evoke nostalgia for a vanished culture and society (East Prussia versus the “Old South”) that is mired in trauma and controversy (fascism, war, and expulsion in the case of the Ostgebiete versus racism, slavery, and civil war in the case of the Confederate South). Similar to Scarlett O’Hara’s figure in the Hollywood classic, Die Flucht features an initially rebellious daughter who proves herself to be a resourceful defender of her family in a crisis. After having had a child out of wedlock several years earlier, aristocratic Lena returns to East Prussia in 1944 to run the estate of her ailing father. The local landed gentry, living in lavish mansions (cue tourist vistas of heritage buildings and interiors) and profiting from the forced labor of Poles, Lithuanians, and Russians, is portrayed as a doomed social class, stoically anticipating its imminent demise. Free-spirited Lena meanwhile demonstrates her rootedness to the land by riding across the fields (cue idyllic landscape pans), only half-heartedly responding to the romantic advances of an insipid admirer from a neighboring estate. Lena’s Rhett Butler turns out to be handsome French prisoner-of-war and farm hand François. Lena’s sense of honor brings her into conflict with the local Nazis, who kill several laborers after they try to flee — only François manages to escape. Eventually the Nazis are gone, and the Red Army approaches. Unlike the Nazis, the Russians remain a faceless presence in the film, despite some graphic scenes depicting the rape of German women. Fleeing certain death, Lena leads a trek of women and children to the strains of a suitably dramatic musical score across wintry plains and frozen lagoons, where Soviet planes shoot at them. The survivors arrive in sunny Bavaria, where Lena and François are reunited. The original broadcast of Die Flucht was accompanied by a high level of press attention, with articles in all the major newspapers. Yet despite all this hype, it is noteworthy that few German reviewers engaged explicitly with the film on its own terms. For a narrative such as Die Flucht to work, it must elicit sympathy and identification with its main protagonist. However, when critics discussed the actual plot instead of the wider historical context, they largely dismissed it as an inconsequential soap opera. They ridiculed both the choice of actress Furtwängler and the conception of her character.30 The main criticism was less that the film approached its subject in a historically inappropriate manner than that it told its story in a lowbrow form. Hofmann and Wessel’s reliance on Hollywood conventions (in terms of plot, music, cinematography, and editing) was experienced as jarring. In terms of its depiction of the wider historical context it is on first sight difficult to identify anything especially controversial in Die Flucht.

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Fig. 6.1. Gone with the Wind in East Prussia. From Die Flucht (2007). DVD capture.

Fig. 6.2. Heading west. From Die Flucht (2007). DVD capture.

Nowhere does the film suggest even indirectly territorial restitution or revanchism. As Cooke already argued with regard to its predecessor Dresden, the teamWorx take on the Ostgebiete is remarkably didactic in representing all sides of the conflict. Harking back to some of the characteristics of what Eric Rentschler referred to as the 1990s “cinema of consensus,” Die Flucht seems to be primarily interested in achieving resolution and reconciliation.31 Of course, some might see this equivalence as the film’s central problem, as an attempt to please everybody at best and at worst as an attempt to exculpate the perpetrators. Die Flucht conforms

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to what Randall Halle has described as the “universalizing” tendency of recent German historical films about the Nazi period, a tendency that can be identified too in the pronouncements by personnel involved in these productions.32 Director Kai Wessel has explained his intentions in the following way: Flucht und die spätere Vertreibung sind keine exklusiv deutschen Themen. Sie sind europäisch, interkontinental, global. Und wenn wir als Deutsche darüber berichten, dann vielleicht deshalb, weil wir es waren, die diese beispiellose Flucht und Vertreibungsgeschichte ausgelöst haben. . . . [Unser Ziel war zu] berichten, um nicht zu vergessen. Berichten, um darüber zu reden.33 [Forced migration and expulsion are not specifically German themes. They are European, intercontinental, global. And when we as Germans talk about these issues, it may be because we initiated this unprecedented history of expulsions. . . . [Our aim was to] report, lest we forget. Report, so that we can talk about it.]

Wessel certainly did not have to wait long for the ensuing debate. Marek Cichocki, a foreign policy advisor to the Polish president, commented on a German television talk show that the film “focuses on individuals, but blots out the bigger picture. It’s disturbing that so much emphasis is on individual (suffering), not the broader history.”34 Meanwhile, across Internet notice boards and forums, the film functioned as a trigger to air personal memories and to enter into wider debates about the uses of history. One might be tempted to see Die Flucht as part of what Halle understands to be “post-ideological” films (including Der Untergang), which “represent . . . a past that we reject in our present, a past we can enjoy as good spectacle because it has lost its impact in our present.”35 Wessel’s film could also be seen to represent an instance of restorative nostalgia, attempting in Boym’s words a “transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” through the means of cinematic production values and representational techniques. But it is important to stress in this context that this restorative attempt ultimately failed at the level of reception to cohere into a meaningful collective consensus. The diverse response in Germany to Die Flucht, ranging from the consumption of generic pleasures, via the ridicule of the same generic elements, to a debate of the historical background of its story at a transnational level, demonstrates how the actual narrative of the film became displaced in the public domain not by an officially sanctioned history but by a myriad of politically correct as well as incorrect memories. This unruly eruption of individual agency may disturb historians and politicians, but the merit of Die Flucht lies less in its formulaic textual form and (supposedly) intended meaning than precisely in the public debate it engendered.

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There are, on the other hand, cinematic examples where a productive engagement with questions of nostalgia and memory emanates to a much greater extent from the texts themselves. Among the most systematic chroniclers of the Ostgebiete over the past decades has been the documentarist Volker Koepp, born in 1944 in the formerly German city of Szczecin (Stettin), and one of the few veteran East German filmmakers who has made a successful transition to the post-unification period. Perhaps best known for his Wittstock cycle of films, which depicted the life of a group of factory workers over several decades, Koepp’s interest in Eastern European landscapes and regions predates unification. However, some of his post-1990 films, especially those about and shot in the former East Prussia, are entirely dependent on the changed political climate, since it would have been impossible to make them previously. While there are many potential avenues to engage with Koepp’s work, in this essay I intend to discuss how his films about the Eastern regions are structured by reflective nostalgia. This extends in the first instance to the nostalgic memories of individuals the films document, secondly to the filmmaker’s own nostalgic position vis-à-vis his material, and ultimately to the nostalgic position the films invite their viewers to occupy. Koepp’s films have largely avoided the discordant reception of films such as Die Flucht or some of the other key texts of the recent war suffering debate. This may in part be due to the fact that they are aimed at a more specialized audience, even among those with an interest in documentaries. Nevertheless, they have found an appreciative audience at national and international festivals as well as a place in late-night programming on television. Koepp offers a very different perspective on the former Ostgebiete from that of Wessel’s generic spectacle. His films are Heimat texts in the sense that while they do not cohere into a national narrative, their individual testimonies tend to document a wider sense of cultural memory. He simultaneously records specific localities and the people that make these locations their home. Koepp’s approach eschews a framework that explicitly features or fixes man-made borders. It focuses instead on geographical markers, which are simultaneously local and transnational — rivers such as the Gilge, in the eponymous film of 1998, the Masurian lakes in northeastern Poland in Schattenland (Shadowlands, 2005), the Curonian sand dunes and the river Neman (Memel) traversing Lithuania and Russia in Kalte Heimat (Cold Heimat, 1995), Kurische Nehrung (The Curonian Spit, 2001), and Holunderblüte (Elderflowers, 2007); or defunct regional and transnational designations such as Sarmatia (Grüße aus Sarmatien für den Dichter Johannes Bobrowski [Greetings from Sarmatia for the Poet Johannes Bobrowski], 1972), Bukovina (in Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann, 1999, and Dieses Jahr in Czernowitz [This Year in Czernowitz], 2004), or Pomerania (Pommerland, 2005).

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As exercises in nostalgia, Koepp’s films document the history of these regions, and he mourns the passing of local languages and dialects or cultural traditions. Many of his protagonists are the last witnesses of a culture that is about to disappear forever, whether these are the elderly Germanspeaking Jews in Czernowitz in Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann, or the few Germans who have remained in the Baltic regions of Lithuania, Poland, or Russia after 1945 and who tell their stories in Kalte Heimat and Kurische Nehrung. But the disappearance of specific cultural forms is registered with a quiet form of melancholia that bears little resemblance to the portentous tone of Die Flucht. The eccentricity of these characters in relation to expected national norms estranges the viewer from those norms themselves. Koepp picks up the idiosyncrasies of their language, films them preparing food, follows their daily routines, and marks moments of inactivity, tiredness, and boredom. For Boym, reflective nostalgia is “concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude.” (FN, 49). Koepp articulates this through long takes, pauses, silences, embarrassments, and evasions, as well as through natural sound. In this sense Koepp’s films are only partially concerned with oral history — in fact in some of his films the most poignant scenes are those where the dialogue fails, is interrupted, or comes to an end. Similarly his images of landscape panoramas initially impress with their crisp, picture-postcard perfection. But as these images outlast the timeframe the viewer expects them to persist on the screen, they test one’s conception of time and duration and allow an engagement with the depicted space that transcends the purely pictorial. The sheer length of some of his films (Kalte Heimat alone clocks in at over three hours) conforms to Boym’s definition of reflective nostalgia as taking a “sensual delight in the texture of time” (FN, 49). The divergent uses of nostalgia in a film such as Die Flucht and Koepp’s documentary work relates to Boym’s differentiation between restorative nostalgia that “spatializes time” and reflective nostalgia that “temporalizes space” (FN, 49). Unlike the narrow cultural identity promoted in the postwar period by expellee associations, Koepp’s films celebrate these regions’ past and present multiculturalism, while accepting that neither then or now was this multiculturalism without its problems, frictions, and mutual suspicions. Koepp does not simply document the legacies of German migration and expulsion but also tells the story of those who took their place. His films are concerned with cultural change itself rather than with affirming or rejecting particular narratives of the past. Koepp’s approach can be seen to conform to what Robert Stam (drawing on Bakhtin) has called “chronotopic multiplicity”:36 his landscapes function as palimpsests on which successive as well as parallel cultures inscribe themselves, leaving behind fragments, shards, or ruins, which interact with other memories,

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Fig. 6.3. Historical versus individual time. From Kurische Nehrung (2001). DVD capture.

Fig. 6.4. Disappearing cultures. From Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann (1999). DVD capture.

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histories, traditions, and experiences. In this respect Koepp’s films also resonate with the notion of “double occupancy” that Thomas Elsaesser has used to identify a fundamental characteristic of European identity and the latter’s cinematic representation.37 An example of Koepp’s visual approach and use of oral testimony can be demonstrated by looking at some sequences from Kalte Heimat. Before the opening credits, the film begins with the camera filming a man driving a horse-drawn carriage on an empty country road in a bleak, late autumnal landscape. The man looks over his shoulder directly into the camera, saying not a single word and revealing no readable expression on his face. Eventually he turns away, and a car overtakes the carriage and disappears in the distance. As the noise of the car recedes, the nondiegetic credit music, a haunting accordion theme, commences gradually. This scene is followed by a number of fragmented shots of empty beaches and the sea, accompanied by the sounds of a hailstorm. Soon afterward we are being introduced to an elderly couple in their eighties, living in a ramshackle hut near the seashore. The man initially is reluctant to let the film team into the house (asking in Russian: “what do you want?” “why do they want to film us?”), while the woman is more welcoming and tells the crew that her husband is afraid of the secret police. Once inside the house, the camera records the memories of the wife, Bluma Timofejewna, while occasionally including shots of the non-responsive husband. The woman’s story is told in a meandering form that only gradually (and even then not fully) reveals the couple’s multiple identities, their relation to the location where they live, and the history of the place more generally. We learn that neither of the two comes from the region; they were resettled here after the expulsion of the Germans. Bluma is Jewish and originally from Ukraine, while her husband was born in Poland in an area subsequently annexed to Belarus. Both were outsiders and persecuted — he was jailed and tortured under Stalin (which explains his earlier anxiety), she says that she was always the only Jew wherever she worked. Bluma frequently digresses from her narrative; she slips into German at one point, declaring “Ich bin eine Lehrerin” (I am a teacher), and into Polish at another. But she becomes most animated and nostalgic when she remembers the Russian singer Alexander Vertinsky, and two pieces of music, a Polish tango and a Russian Gypsy romance, which she sings in front of the camera. Accompanying a beautiful shot of light reflections on the water of the nearby Curonian lagoon, Bluma is heard in voiceover saying that she is not keen to go to Israel, because she knows the people better here. This statement is followed by a rather more tentative question when she asks Koepp: “Do you know what it’s like in Israel?” By recording experiences such as Bluma’s, Koepp’s films envisage the recycling of trans-historical memory as a precondition of contemporary pan-European cosmopolitanism. Interestingly, among the communities

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in Koepp’s films in which being an outsider is the norm, the most striking outsiders are often those German expellees who return after decades, who look for material manifestations of their nostalgic longing, and who expect reality to conform to their nostalgic fantasies of their lost home. This, as Boym has acknowledged, always results in failure and disappointment, for “nostalgia is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed” (FN, xiii). In conclusion, I return to the question of how texts such Die Flucht and Koepp’s films contribute to the recent memory culture of German suffering during the Second World War. As argued above, some commentators (especially, but not exclusively, in Britain and the United States) perceive the return to the memories of air raids and mass expulsions as undermining the established consensus of viewing Germany as a perpetrator nation, replacing it with a narrative that reifies Germans as victims. Thus the memory of German civilian suffering becomes potentially “dangerous,” as it is seen to support right-wing, revanchist, and revisionist positions in the present.38 Even without analyzing the respective memories in detail, the suggestion that Germany in the new millennium might pose a “danger” seems unnecessarily hyperbolic, and tells us more about external perceptions of Germany’s democratic stability and less about the actual political meaning behind the public circulation of certain memories. Once again, Zehfuss’s interventions in this debate prove productive. She proposes that an argument positing a mutual incompatibility between the terms victim and perpetrator and constructing an automatic link between particular memories and political positions is not only fallacious but in fact unwittingly undermines its own intentions: A framing which opposes and clearly distinguishes victims and perpetrators plays into the hands of those who would like to construe all Germans as victims . . . the framing that is meant to counter rightwing versions of the past in fact supports the possibility of them. . . . Most problematically, it turns the struggle with the far Right into one about the accuracy of memories rather than about their political positions.39

Zehfuss rejects as illusory the notion that the promotion of a “correct” memory might simultaneously promote or lead to a “correct” political conviction. Her analysis also points to the most crucial conundrum in the current debate: what has triggered the prolific collective return to memories of civilian war suffering since the mid-1990s, fifty years after the events that are being “remembered”? As previously noted, Zehfuss sees a correlation between the reemergence of the memory of suffering in the Second World War and

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present global political concerns, proposing that “at least some of the recent interest in these events stems not from a new wish to excuse the Nazi regime and ordinary Germans’ involvement in it, but rather from what is experienced as a ‘return’ of war” (68). This acknowledgment is not to deny that exculpatory or revanchist motivations may persist in Germany, but that they do not need to have an exclusive (or even dominant) hold on the debate. Some scholars decry the instrumentalization of memory these processes imply. Andreas Huyssen, for example, has been particularly scathing about the “facile and selfserving ways in which the German suffering during the air war” was “amalgamated to an otherwise legitimate political critique of the Bush government” by German anti-war activists prior to and during the early stages of the Iraq campaign.40 Yet debates on memory are always already instrumentalized. Thus, however awkwardly peace campaigners may have invoked the memory of civilian casualties during the Second World War, Huyssen’s attack elides the question whom or what his own critique serves, other than as a legitimization, or justification, of a belligerent “New World Order.” With regard to the instrumentalization of the memory of the former Ostgebiete I have looked at in this essay, I concur with Zehfuss’s assessment that it articulates (in the case of Koepp’s films) or merely facilitates (as in the case of Die Flucht) a response to the present. In this context audiovisual texts can function, as discussed above, as “prosthetic memories.” As Zehfuss rightly notes with respect to literary texts about the war, the aim is less to identify a supposedly inherent message or to demand an “accurate” or comprehensive representation of history (whatever that might be), but rather to understand how fictional narratives “disturb the official memory of war and other certainties” (20). Fifteen years after the German government’s attempt to “normalize” national attitudes towards military conflict, I am reassured rather than worried that contemporary German engagements with the topic of civilian war suffering still register or trigger a profound unease, not only about the Second World War, but also about war itself, and especially vis-à-vis recent conflicts. However, I contend that such texts, and those about the Eastern regions in particular, articulate more than just a collective attitude toward and remembrance of war. They also express a complementary and perhaps utopian desire to step out of the past, perhaps even forget or — as Ludewig and Halle argue — imagine and adopt new identities across borders and beyond the national. Through reflective nostalgia the memory of the Eastern regions not only can be reclaimed in association with the trauma of expulsion but also can serve as a model for a more open and fluid conception of European identity.

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Notes 1

In East Germany the expellees were referred to as Umsiedler (resettlers), and although policies in the late 1940s and early 1950s regulated the logistics of their integration, they did not form representative associations as in West Germany.

2

Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001), 55. 3

See Johannes von Moltke, No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005), 135–45. See also Moeller, War Stories, 123–70; and Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995), 148–68. 4

Timothy Corrigan, “Types of History: Schlöndorff’s Coup de Grâce,” in New German Film: The Displaced Image (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994), 54–73; here 60. 5

Marco Polo Reiseführer Kaliningrader Gebiet: Königsberg/Kurische Nehrung (Stuttgart: Mair-Dumont, 2007), 7. All translations are my own. 6

Randall Halle, “Views from the German-Polish Border: The Exploration of Inter-national Space in Halbe Treppe and Lichter,” German Quarterly 80.1 (2007): 77–96; Alexandra Ludewig, “A German ‘Heimat’ Further East and in the Baltic Region? Contemporary German Film as Provocation,” Journal of European Studies 36.2 (2006): 157–79. 7

In recent years the BdV has repeatedly hit the headlines lobbying for a controversial center for memorializing the history of expulsions. See Jan Friedmann, “Beharrlich und provokant,” Der Spiegel, 19 Nov. 2007, 60–61. 8

Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture,” in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), 144–61. 9

For example, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Kindheit in Ostpreußen (Berlin: Siedler, 1988). This book dominated German bestseller lists for more than a year. 10

The Gustloff incident also forms the basis for Günter Grass’s novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk, 2002) and features in Polish author Stefan Chwin’s novel Death in Danzig (1995).

11 Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Munich: Propyläen, 2002). 12

Winfried G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001).

13

See Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnal, “Opa war kein Nazi”: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002). 14

Helmut Schmitz, “The Birth of the Collective from the Spirit of Empathy: From the ‘Historians’ Dispute to German Suffering,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 93–108; here 108.

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15

Aleida Assmann, “On the (In)compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory,” German Life and Letters 59.2 (2006): 187–200; here 196 and 198. 16

Bill Niven, “Introduction: German Victimhood at the Turn of the Millennium,” in Niven, Germans as Victims, 1–25; here 20. 17

Stefan Berger, “On Taboos, Traumas and other Myths: Why the Debate about German Victims of the Second World War Is Not a Historians’ Controversy,” in Niven, Germans as Victims, 210–24; here 219. 18

Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory,” 149–50.

19

Maja Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 252. 20

See Andreas Huyssen, “Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad,” in Niven, Germans as Victims, 181–93. 21

Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004), 3. 22 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation FN and the page number. 23

The film’s working title, Flucht und Vertreibung (Flight and Expulsion), recalls an earlier three-part TV documentary, directed by Eva Berthold and Jost von Morr in 1981, one of the most controversial media engagements with the topic in West Germany prior to unification. See Werner Paul, “Wo waren im Jahre 1945 die Delphine?” Der Spiegel, 16 Feb. 1981, 65–69. 24

Paul Cooke, “Dresden (2006), TeamWorx and Titanic (1997): German Wartime Suffering as Hollywood Disaster Movie,” German Life and Letters 61.2 (2008): 279–94. 25

Lutz Koepnick, “Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s,” New German Critique 87 (2002): 47–82. 26

See Paul Cooke, “Der Untergang (2004): Victims, Perpetrators, and the Continuing Fascination of Fascism,” German Monitor 67 (2007): 247–62. 27

See Cooke, “Dresden,” 282.

28

kbu/epd, “Die Flucht — Emotionaler Zweiteiler sorgt für Debatten,” Stern, 4 Mar. 2007.

29

Cooke, “Dresden,” 287.

30

See, for example, Kerstin Decker, “Frau Gräfin, die Russen sind da,” Der Tagesspiegel, 2 Mar. 2007; Cosima Lutz, “Wie die Flucht aus Schlesien wirklich war,” Die Welt, 5 Mar. 2007.

31

Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (New York: Routledge, 2000), 260–77. 32

Randall Halle, German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2008), 89–128. 33

Kai Wessel, “Über Die Flucht,” http://www.daserste.de/dieflucht/allround_d yn~uid,3x5quzd5rylh1j18~cm.asp (accessed 8 Mar. 2009).

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34

Anon, “Debate Ensues after WWII Drama Shows Germans As Victims,” Deutsche Welle (5 Mar. 2007), http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/ 0,2144,2374468,00.html (accessed 8 Mar. 2009). 35

Halle, German Film after Germany, 127.

36

Robert Stam, “Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage,” paper presented at the conference on Hybrid Cultures and Transnational Identities, University of California, Los Angeles, 7–8 Mar. 1997. 37

See Thomas Elsaesser, “Double Occupancy and Small Adjustments: Space, Place and Policy in the New European Cinema since the 1990s,” in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2005), 108–30. 38

“How dangerous is it?’ is the question posed on the back cover of Niven, Germans as Victims. 39

Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory, 232.

40

Andreas Huyssen, “Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad,” in Niven,

Germans as Victims, 183.

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III. Display Screens: Generational Traumas, Untimely Passions, Open Wounds

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7: Links and Chains: Trauma between the Generations in the Heimat Mode Rachel Palfreyman

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HE POPULAR HEIMAT FILMS OF THE 1950S, characterized by formulaic happy endings, beautiful peaceful landscapes, romance, sing-along moments, and comedic confusion, range from lightly pastoral treatments to downright kitsch. They appear to stand as an emblem of popular escape and so to fit neatly into the twin narratives that have been applied retrospectively to the postwar period — German suffering as taboo, and repression of guilt.1 Scholarship on the recent explosion in the cultural representation of German wartime suffering has, however, acknowledged that discussion of the traumatic experiences of German soldiers and civilians in the Second World War was in fact widespread in the 1950s. As Robert G. Moeller comments, “In the first decade or so after the war, the past most Germans sought to master was one of the traumatic impact of war and defeat on Germans.” Soldiers were regarded as the “victims of Hitler’s war.”2 The broader civilian population, and expellees in particular, were also judged to have been victims of the war. The very emphasis on German suffering in the 1950s did indeed accompany an unwillingness or inability to acknowledge and engage with guilt and shame, but at the same time there was a tendency to emphasize that Germans were somehow duped by ideological fanatics, a criminal group at the very top who bore responsibility for Nazi crimes.3 Some critics have suggested that Heimat films in the 1950s did not engage with either suffering or shame but simply soothed and cheered a West German population which, looking resolutely to the future, had eyes only for material security.4 And yet, even as the viewing public looked forward, 1950s film production was heavily reliant on remaking films of the 1930s and 1940s. From the perspective of the 1960s, such continuities with a tainted tradition compounded the other sins of omission and commission. The 1960s critique of the concept of Heimat notwithstanding, recent research has uncovered the extent to which widespread desires and anxieties were implicated in West German Heimat films from the 1950s.5 Building on this reappraisal of their capacity to engage with pressing social questions, I argue that both perpetration and a traumatic generational

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rupture — a significant aspect of wartime suffering — are frequently evident in 1950s Heimat films, some of which show a surprising refusal to contrive neat resolutions. I will look briefly at the way the Heimat genre, with its focus on identity, maternal nurturing, and psychological rootedness, lends itself to such a treatment of trauma, before discussing some notable instances of generational conflict. Heimat films construe complex historical legacies in familial terms and examine their impact on successive generations as well as on the relationship between the generations. In these films the treatment of such conflict ranges from spurious resolutions to the presentation of terrible wrongs that cannot be put right. The focus on how traumatic shadows of the past can be transferred to younger generations reemerges in contemporary film in ways suggesting that generational divisions rooted in the Second World War can beget further traumas in peacetime, or indeed that the effects of wartime trauma can persist and survive through subsequent generations to blight the lives of those who were born long after 1945. Thus, following my discussion of 1950s films, I examine how established patterns of generational conflict originating in the war have been both rejected and repeated in post-unification cinema, where filmmakers continue to rediscover the Heimat mode. Recent scholarship on the construction of memory discourses in Germany has focused on the question of generations and how generational patterns influence dominant discourses on historical and political issues. Both Jan Assmann’s model of communicative memory shifting to cultural memory and Jörn Rüsen and Friedrich Jaeger’s focus on characteristic responses of different generations to National Socialism are relevant in the exploration of generational constructions in film.6 In Assmann’s model communicative memory becomes cultural memory as the generation of those who experienced an event at first hand passes away. Rüsen and Jaeger are more specific in identifying individual generations with particular perspectives on the legacy of the Second World War. Their division of the generations of 1945 (silence and negation), 1968 (critical moral distance from the 1945 generation, compounded by identification with the victims of National Socialism), and 1989 (historicizing acceptance of, as well as deeper and broader engagement with, National Socialism) implies a psychological family structure where children are harsh moral critics of their parents, but grandchildren apparently combine an acceptance of the historical situation with a forgiving attitude to their grandparents (EK, 415–18). While such a generational analysis is potentially problematic in what it elides (Karl Jaspers, for example, a key postwar critic of exculpatory discourse, fits neither the period nor the generational group for this model), it is nevertheless suggestive for readings of films that also depend on family structures. From the 1960s on a complex generational bind became apparent. First, the 1960s witnessed a rupture when the generation socialized in West Germany began to express a strong sense of betrayal, which was

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compounded by patchy denazification and the perceived failure of an older generation to acknowledge guilt for the war and the Holocaust. Since then this generational rupture has been repeated through successive decades, as subsequent political and historical phenomena are construed in terms of conflict between the generations, with the emphasis typically on a guilty older generation. A key example would be the representation of West German terrorism in film, which is often linked obliquely or even directly to guilt over the Holocaust and the suffering of innocents in and after the war resulting from the actions of older generations. Second, while in these films older generations are figured as culpable and have an oppressive impact on the innocent young, filmmakers by contrast are eager to connect with previous cinematic generations, either by locating themselves within a cinematic tradition or by making explicit their disavowal and rejection of such traditions. The language of debate about Germany’s cinematic identity has been couched in terms of family relationships: Papas Kino, Opas Kino (daddy’s cinema, grandpa’s cinema);7 in addition there are striking examples of critical and apparently iconoclastic filmmakers who consciously seek usable German traditions: Fassbinder’s and Sirk’s melodramas, Herzog’s engagement with Weimar cinema. Perhaps the most persistent and significant attempt at such contextualization are the myriad efforts to modify, subvert, or participate in the Heimat genre. Accordingly, guilt (or “guilt”) that overshadows subsequent generations is a significant motif in a recent Heimat film like Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot (Grave Decisions, Marcus H. Rosenmüller, 2006) or in two films that nod toward the Heimat genre, Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, Sönke Wortmann, 2003) and Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, Hans Weingartner, 2004). Here the apparently straightforward narrative construction of an innocent younger generation coping with the burden of a guilty older generation becomes more complicated. Generational ruptures develop into a series of transactions where both suffering and culpability can be transferred between the generations, with both older and younger generations trapped in cycles of repetition. My focus on the question of guilt and the suffering this causes for the responsible older generation and their children leaves aside the wartime suffering of physical injury or bereavement, but the experience of guilt, or sometimes the sense of guilt where none really exists, brings its own suffering and thus is relevant here. Guilt and the transfer of responsibility across generations synthesize — though problematically — the position of perpetrator and victim. This excludes the original victims of National Socialist crimes and mirrors some of the dubious maneuvers of German memory discourse, especially since the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute) of the 1980s. Ernst Nolte, for example, suggests that fears of becoming a victim of the Soviet Union drove Hitler in his perpetration; guilt is thus shunted eastward as Germany is figured in a state of potential

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victimhood.8 Reflections on perpetration and guilt also call to mind key concerns of the New German Cinema, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s exploration of the power of the apparently weak victim.9 Such problematic syntheses are probed and to some degree satirized in Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot, which deploys comic absurdity to explore intergenerational guilt, and in Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, which suggests that guilt and perpetration can shift back and forth between two generations. The use of generational patterns to represent history is a powerful but questionable maneuver, reductive at the very least and potentially ideologically driven.10 By subordinating historical development to a biological teleology, it lends itself to interpretations of inevitability grounded in biological necessity.11 The suggestion that certain political positions are held generationally is also problematic. Rüsen and Jaeger are explicit about not seeing their 45–68–89 model as prescriptive or fixing individuals in particular groups (EK, 416). Any implication that political perspectives can be ascribed to homogeneous and discrete groups on the basis of birth date in relation to a specific historical moment needs to be treated with caution at the very least. Nevertheless, as Rüsen and Jaeger comment, the intergenerational impact of National Socialism means that it might be profitable to look at approaches that coalesce around certain historical moments (EK, 416). The use of family constellations to represent historical and political conflicts, especially but not only through the prism of the Heimat genre, is an enduring tendency in the postwar German cinema, and one that encompasses both popular and art cinema. In that sense the sharp division of the post-1960s art cinema and the entertainment cinema of the postwar period is not always neatly sustainable, since wildly different treatments of social problems nevertheless have common aspects. Patriarchal and authoritarian family structures, which function in critical Heimat films and the New German Cinema from the late 1960s to explore societal mechanisms of power and control, are symptomatic of an interest in working with popular genres such as Heimat and melodrama as a means of accessing narrative forms that can critically engage an audience. Indeed, the post-unification cinema pays little attention to such putative demarcations of traditional and critical Heimat discourse, and continues to draw on popular and critical Heimat discourse to explore a persistent generational trauma originating from wartime suffering and the unease relating to German guilt and perpetration.

The 1950s: Suffering Perpetrators and Shadows of Guilt Despite the widespread critique of the Heimat concept in the 1960s and 1970s, both concept and genre have proved consistently fruitful for

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exploring German identity, in part because the tendency in Heimat discourse to negotiate between different layers of identity, from familial to local to national, has meant that even where the idea of nation is difficult, it has been possible to engage with the intersection of history and identity in complicated, albeit sometimes problematic, ways.12 A highly disputed arena is the debate over the Heimatvertriebenen (expellees) and the “lost lands” of the East, which depends on the term Heimat to interrogate the intersection of historical and psychological loss and to articulate questions of identity. As Tim Bergfelder shows in his contribution to this volume, such discourses vary in political stance from revanchism to reconciliation but have in common a complicated engagement simultaneously with the political and the personal, with family and locality, and ultimately with nation. In addition, from the inception of the Heimat discourse there is evidence of critical potential beyond simple nostalgia. For example, Heimat was a focus for early environmental campaigning in the Wilhelmine period,13 and it was crucial to Fleisser’s and von Horváth’s critical analysis of systems of exclusion and control in the 1920s, a critical turn echoed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when writers and filmmakers presented a revisionist reading of Heimat to explore and correct the perceived failure to deal with the Third Reich.14 The tendency, then, to regard 1950s Heimat films as trivial and escapist neglects crucial aspects of the Heimat concept, not only its ability to negotiate between the personal, political or historical, and identity, but also in this case to represent wartime suffering in its traumatic effects on family relationships. As the following will reveal, key anxieties are present, sometimes in buried or encoded form, so that the notion of “pure” escapism becomes hard to justify. Some after-effects of the war, such as guilt and perpetration, the integration of refugees and expellees, the high numbers of illegitimate babies born, and rape, are not so much repressed or absent as resolved in a restorative mood in keeping with Adenauer’s West Germany, the postwar economic miracle, and an idealized social harmony. Fifteen years after the end of the war and casting a sharp, criminal shadow over an innocent prodigal son, Wenn die Heide blüht (When the Heath Blossoms, Hans Deppe, 1960) has Rolf returning after ten years in the United States only to find that he is the presumed murderer of his brother Klaus, who was killed the night Rolf left. When the real killer, the gamekeeper Harkort, is revealed, Rolf is reconciled with his father and able to marry Harkort’s daughter, all this clearing the way for him to settle for good in the rural Heimat. The pain caused to an intergenerational relationship by apparent guilt is thus assuaged and patrilinear harmony is restored; moreover, the true perpetrator is not guilty in the strict legal sense. As it turns out, he killed Klaus in self-defense, so not only is the perpetrator not properly guilty but the victim is not properly innocent

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either. In short, the popularity of some 1950s Heimat films may be attributable to their successful narrative strategies of easing guilty consciences in the postwar era by blurring the boundaries between perpetrators and victims, by suggesting that some crimes are not really culpable, or by modeling historical conflict as a family misunderstanding. Where the faults of a male older generation are variously shown to be youthful indiscretions, simple mistakes, or crimes committed under mitigating circumstances, the pattern echoes broader 1950s attitudes to German perpetration.15 In addition, the suggestion that issues of perpetration and culpability can be resolved, as it were, within “the family,” suggests that no account is taken of the actual victims of National Socialism; their forgiveness is not sought, and reconciliation across such divides is not dramatized in these exclusively domestic structures. Nonetheless, emotions are mobilized by raising the issues, and the questions need to be resolved. Some Heimat films present the trauma of wartime and postwar experience as a lack that can be symbolically healed through the very flexibility of the concept of Heimat. For example, Hubert, the eponymous gamekeeper in Der Förster vom Silberwald (The Gamekeeper of the Silver Forest, Alfons Stummer, 1954) is a refugee from the East, but though he alludes to the loss of his former home, he is at a deeper level thoroughly integrated into his new home, and is even entrusted with the care of the local environment. Hubert, the expellee, is set against an arrogant urban rival, Max. The Heimat girl, Liesl, finally rejects both Max and her bohemian city life to return to her Heimat roots and marry Hubert. Though on the narrative surface both men lack Heimat, the film privileges the notion of Heimat as a set of values over and above a native affiliation, so that Hubert can overcome his dislocation, whereas Max never can. Such easy solutions to the problems faced by refugees and host populations suggest that a deep emotional understanding of Heimat values alone will suffice to bring about integrated communities.16 Indeed, in staging social problems through the exploration of family constellations, Heimat films in the 1950s frequently touch upon problems between the generations. Illegitimacy, one of the social problems of the war and postwar years, is a romantic plot twist in Die Fischerin vom Bodensee (The Fisher Girl of Lake Constance, Harald Reinl, 1956), but also indicates a deeper and broader historical relevance and a metaphorical function where the “sins of the father” threaten the future of a younger generation. The film’s central love relationship between Maria, the poor fisher girl, and Hans, the heir to the neighboring modern fishery, is beset with obstacles, not least of which is the possibility that the illegitimate Maria, who does not know who her father was, and whose mother is dead, might in fact be Hans’s half-sister. Finally, however, this complication is resolved so that, with the true father identified, the young pair can marry. In addition, the new-found father is both wealthy and delighted

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to have discovered his daughter. Thus the romantic resolution also heals the social division that causes friction between the poor Maria and the rich and entrepreneurial Hans, as well as providing symbolic forgiveness and reintegration of the paternal generation. Many 1950s Heimat films exhibit a cheerful faith in the power of postwar prosperity to solve wartime problems. A material approach to addressing the traumas of the war and postwar period is a key point of contention in the 1960s reckoning with the older generation, where a myopic focus on material success and the economic miracle of Adenauer’s Germany is reckoned to be part and parcel of a refusal to engage with German perpetration and responsibility at any deeper level. The resolution of the illegitimacy plot in Die Fischerin vom Bodensee thus ensures the end of the actual and potential suffering that the dead mother’s “guilt” or “sin” visited upon the daughter. The “missing” mother, another common trope of 1950s Heimat films, is neither particularly blamed, nor especially redeemed. The father’s “sins” and the potential for his redemption are the clearer focus here, where eminently forgivable youthful indiscretions can be put right later in life. A smaller number of films approach generational conflict with a darker attitude and a melodramatic flourish. These films often allude to the nineteenth-century literary Heimat tradition and displace the conflict into a historical setting. Und ewig singen die Wälder (Duel with Death, Paul May, 1959) stages an antagonism between a powerful timber farmer, Dag, and a decadent and declining aristocratic family, the von Galls, that leads to the death of Dag’s favorite son Thore. Dag enjoys a form of revenge when Elisabeth von Gall burns to death in a dubious accident, but his grim satisfaction leaves him an isolated and bitter figure. Hope for the future is embodied in Dag’s less favored son, also called Dag; the latter’s marriage to Adelheid, who is from a decent, if impoverished, branch of the von Gall family, offers the hope of healing the feud in the next generation: their baby son is named Thore. The elder Dag, now increasingly alienated even from his family, struggles out in bitter winter weather to see the new baby, only to die after having witnessed the nativity scene in Dag and Adelheid’s humble mountain cabin. The next generation together with the “reborn” Thore symbolizes hope for the future through a Christian motif of renewal, but the older Dag can only be partially redeemed before he must be removed. As Fehrenbach puts it in her reflections on 1950s Heimat films, some older recalcitrants have “to pass into the past to liberate the present.”17 The 1956 film Der Meineidbauer (The Farmer’s Perjury, Rudolf Jugert), based on Ludwig Anzengruber’s 1871 play, has at its heart a serious injustice that can never be redressed. Following the death of her common-law husband, Paula is denied her rightful inheritance when her husband’s half-brother Matthias hides his will. She is forced to return to her impoverished gypsy village, an event that faintly echoes Nazi crimes.

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The two villains of the piece, Matthias and a legal clerk who knows about the true will, might be seen as representing sins of commission and omission. Matthias destroys the will and violently defends his position; finally, believing himself to have killed his son in an argument over the farm, he falls to his death from a mountain path. Viewers nevertheless know that Matthias had plausible reasons for his behavior — Paula initially treated him as a kind of servant on the death of her spouse, and Matthias claimed that he wanted the farm to support his son. Without redeeming features, however, is the clerk who remained silent about the will, while attempting to blackmail Matthias. Here is a hint of the failures in moral courage that allowed wrongs in the Third Reich to pass unchallenged. That the clerk’s name is Demuth (meaning humility or meekness) is ironically underscored later when someone remembers his name as “irgendwas mit Mut” (something to do with courage). The film hovers between punishment and forgiveness of the guilty and between reconciliation and recrimination, eventually settling for a measure of both. Demuth confesses on his deathbed to a priest who urges him to make amends. This is too late to save Paula’s wayward son, Jakob, who, damaged by his impoverished environment, has become a drug smuggler and is killed by the police. But before she even hears about Matthias’s death, Paula decides to show forgiveness and renounce her claim to the farm — her happiness and security will be assured by marriage to a kindly police officer. Her daughter and Matthias’s son will also marry, the younger generation reconciling the conflicted families. So the film counsels magnanimity and ends with a glorious sunrise, a new dawn for the survivors at least. Nevertheless, though the blame is spread a little, sins and the resulting suffering are not wiped away — nothing will bring back the dead. By no means unique in its darker mood, Der Meineidbauer is nevertheless quite different from the majority of 1950s Heimat films. Its lurid color palette stands in contrast to the genre’s characteristic prettiness. Deeper tones dominate; chaste romance has become the racier sexuality of a smoldering Paula and menacing Matthias. The melodrama of the shady criminal milieu, the shootout, and the dead boy all point to a darker variant of the genre in which the theme of how sins of older generations are visited on the younger is dealt with more directly. The rhetorical focus on reconciliation is not as coy or contrived as in some of the other 1950s films; and in any case the final resolution cannot undo the more visceral and strident representation of character and location. There is thus considerable variation in the degree to which the Heimat mode refers to war’s disfiguring and traumatic effects. Generational tension and dysfunctional families can be read as a reflection on the strain placed on family life in the postwar situation and as an expression of the desire for stability and happiness in the domestic sphere at least. Often the shadows of the past are banished through restoration of an idealized

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social harmony. An iconography of automobiles, fashionable dresses, and comforting, “timeless” landscapes fed desires for a settled prosperity. Such visual objects of desire were punctuated by carefully choreographed festivals, songs, and dance, so that the aesthetic pleasures of the 1950s films enabled a shift from a constructed “timeless” past to an idealized present, which in turn imagines a prosperous and serene future. Culpability and responsibility are displaced into domestic spheres that allow forgiveness, mitigation, and reconciliation. The intergenerational focus also restricts issues of culpability to “the family,” that is, forgiveness is precisely not sought from those who might symbolize Jewish victims. On the other hand, in some darker films the symbolic transfer of guilt, punishment, and suffering between generations is so pervasive as to suggest that what became an emblematic struggle during and after the 1960s — the conflict between the Tätergeneration, the perpetrator generation, and the Nachgeborenen, those born after the event — is already prefigured in 1950s Heimat films.

Post-unification: Generic Clashes and Generational Ironies Though filmmakers in Germany and Austria have not forsaken the Heimat genre, we might expect the theme of the guilty older generation to be recast in post-unification films, given the intervening developments in discursive approaches to German guilt and suffering.18 It is all the more striking, then, to encounter this theme in numerous recent Heimat and Heimat-inspired films. With varying degrees of critical distance they both reject and repeat familial models of guilt transfer between the generations. Indeed, with the passing of time generational transfer of guilt and suffering has not weakened, as one might suppose with memories and relevance fading, but rather it has been displaced to encompass postwar traumatic phenomena, such as West German terrorism. An unresolved violence ripples through subsequent generations as the response to the political trauma of the war and the stubborn persistence of an authoritarianism that is perceived to have precipitated the perpetration of such unimaginable violence. Thus in a number of post-unification films both the reception of the popular and critical Heimat mode and generational constellations pertaining to subsequent but related trauma feed into a renewed exploration of the legacies of guilt passed down through the generations. Das Wunder von Bern connects a family narrative about a returning prisoner of war who struggles to reintegrate into family life with the story of the unexpected 1954 West German World Cup victory, via the character of Matthias, the returnee’s young son and devoted fan of the wayward but inspirational winger Helmut Rahn. Though not squarely

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in the Heimat mode, it shares with the genre a myth-making nostalgia, the reconstruction of family, and efforts to build identity.19 The film’s focus on the importance of men learning to be good fathers is entirely in keeping with Heimat films of the 1950s. Richard’s struggle to build a relationship with Matthias mirrors the paternal relationship between legendary coach and manager Sepp Herberger and Rahn. As Richard learns how to gain Matthias’s trust and Herberger wrestles with the problem of his wayward favorite, even the subplot of the young journalist, Ackermann, and his chic wife emphasizes family life as it culminates in the young man learning of his wife’s pregnancy. The celebration of impending fatherhood is part of the national sporting victory, spatially and visually embedded in the celebrations for the victorious team. The couple is surrounded by crowds of fans waiting for the team’s train, but the news that he will become a father easily trumps Ackermann’s career triumph in reporting on the World Cup, and he throws away his press pass to take his wife away from the crush. The film deploys a version of the familiar 1950s Heimat device, where characters from towns or cities vacation in a rural idyll, something that prompts self-discovery and romantic resolution. Here the West German squad’s Swiss training camp functions as a kind of Heimat refuge from the still badly scarred West German city of Essen. The sparkling intensity of color and brightness in sequences of the training camp and hotel suggests a deliberate evocation of a 1950s Heimat aesthetic, as do sequences of the West German team and Matthias and Richard traveling to Switzerland through spectacular scenery. To experience the healing power of rural Heimat for real and symbolic broken families (and by implication nations too), the characters have to cross the border, albeit to arrive in a landscape familiar from earlier German Heimat films. After the victory and the restoration of family harmony, however, images of Germany are transformed from dark streets and piles of rubble to scenes of communal celebration and idyllic rural landscape, as if Heimat returns with the victorious team. The final shot captures them journeying home by train through a rural landscape into a glowing sunset, a reprise of 1950s Heimat iconography. The train is greeted by a few folk standing in golden fields of wheat and waving as the garlanded train passes by. A title proclaims that this was the year the economic miracle began. A horse-drawn cart and two people on bicycles complete the idyllic picture, which strongly evokes the intense and slightly lurid colors of the 1950s Heimat film, as well as its tendency to integrate tradition with modernity in irresistible, if contrived, ways. The value of the Heimat mode has often lain in fostering and fusing psychological and political identity while at the same time skirting or eliding problematic aspects of nation. Alternatively the Heimat mode can effect a negotiation between national identity and other layers and levels of identity. As Celia Applegate comments, in the Third Reich Heimat was

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Fig. 7.1. In keeping with the 1950s Heimat tradition, a rural idyll enables familial reconciliation and national redemption in Das Wunder von Bern (2003). DVD capture.

used to pay lip service to the idea of regional identity, while it was actually conflated with nation; the local and particular were all the while brought into line with the Reich.20 Postwar films revived notions of Heimat that offered a more fluid and flexible reading of local and provincial identity, negotiating between the region and the new (West) German state, while bypassing the difficult issue of a divided nation. The tendency in Das Wunder von Bern to conflate Heimat, family, and nation suggests a reprise of one of the more problematic variants of the genre in post-unification Germany. The plight of the returnees, which was elided or masked in the 1950s films, is shown with unabashed directness, though this does not necessarily imply critical reflection. The fact that the critical elder son goes to East Germany consigns critical discourse about support for Nazism to a margin of communism, which viewers already know is a false promise.21 Das Wunder von Bern emphasizes that the problems the family face as a result of Richard’s experiences as a POW are “nobody’s fault” — this point is voiced by Richard’s wife, Christa, who stresses instead the need to work together to improve things. The point about avoiding blame is repeated in mythical mode in the football plot, when Sepp Herberger encounters a Swiss wise woman in the shape of the hotel cleaner. Figured as an oracle sent to help him on his quest, she (the film implies) is the inspiration for one of Herberger’s famous football aphorisms: “Der Ball ist rund und das Spiel dauert neunzig Minuten” (The ball is round and a game lasts ninety minutes). Her pronouncements on punishment echo Christa’s sentiments on a grander scale: she derides what she describes as a German addiction to punishment.

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This clearly has a wider resonance than Herberger’s management of his “favorite son” Rahn. The eventual victory is not just a tonic but a turning point for the whole nation, magically coinciding with West Germany’s economic miracle. And it is all made possible by Herberger’s insight that he needs to understand and not punish, a development mirrored by Richard, who has also learned that he needs to break a damaging cycle of punishment. In a synergy of conciliatory emotion, the new understanding between Matthias and his father provides the final talismanic impetus to a German victory, which without irony promises a healing between the generations that stretches beyond the family via the symbolism of the national team to the nation itself. More closely connected to the Heimat mode, yet lacking the earnest sentimentality of Das Wunder von Bern, Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot adroitly mixes generic conventions to interweave the plumb Heimat family narrative with the surreal and with comic horror. The film presents a grotesque take on guilt and punishment transmitted between the generations, playing with the absurd notion that a child bears guilt for the parental generation’s misfortunes. Sebastian, the young protagonist, is told by his older brother that he is “responsible” for the death of his mother, who died in childbirth and not in a car accident, as he had been previously told. Sebastian’s touching if confused sense of guilt, responsibility, and sin lead him to fear that his catalogue of transgressions will damn him to an extended spell in purgatory and thus prevent him from being reunited with his mother. And so he undertakes various efforts at Wiedergutmachung (reparation) — a term used in the film. These include a home-made defibrillator to resuscitate a dead rabbit,22 the experimental drowning of their pet cat, a search for a new wife for his father, and the planned murder of the designated new wife’s existing husband. Biblical references to guilt, judgment, and death underpin a comic critique of the relations between generations. The absurd notion that Sebastian is responsible for his mother’s death is balanced by references to the biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac. Death is explained by a Greek chorus of Stammtisch regulars as the need for older generations to make way for the young, which is then demonstrated in a scene where the dead crowd into the bar with the living. Judgment becomes a comic Volksstück (folk play) performance woven into Sebastian’s dreams from the theater rehearsals taking place in his father’s bar. The play’s grotesque courtroom scene becomes a surreal Judgment Day where Sebastian is confronted with his sins and repeatedly faces the threat of purgatory. The mash-up of Catholicism and other supernatural contexts in Sebastian’s attempt to understand his family situation and the loss of his mother looks back to films that mix Heimat with gothic horror. The scene of Sebastian digging down into his mother’s grave and her hand suddenly emerging to draw him down into the earth recalls scenes at the end of

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Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab (Rape on the Moor, Hans König, 1952) when Dorothee, having been raped by an unwanted suitor, leads her attacker onto the moor where they both sink into the mud before being rescued. Dorothee’s ordeal is foreshadowed by a historical parallel with a local woman raped by an invading Swedish soldier during the Thirty Years War; she too leads him off the safe paths and has haunted the moor ever since. The rapes of both Wilhelmina and Dorothee allude to the rape of German women by soldiers in the Second World War; but as Johannes von Moltke argues, Dorothee is figured both as German victim and undead symbol of German guilt.23 Wer früher stirbt also features a tale of Moorleichen (bog bodies), which Sebastian tells his friends. The tale tells of a woman’s haunted song as she is burned at the stake, and of how, as she sings, her executioners become undead corpses to rise again from the moor at full moon. The tale is later reenacted unwittingly by Veronika, the potential new wife, at a tryst with Sebastian’s father, Lorenz. When she falls into the water, her screams resemble the song of Sebastian’s mythical woman; Lorenz falls in trying to pull her out, and the resultant thrashing about in the water evokes the undead moor corpses for the watching children — again in a conflation of victim and guilty murderer. Indeed, the film is full of images of the dead or undead, from a vampire encountered by Sebastian on a train, to the crowd of dead drinkers in the bar, to dreams of Sebastian’s mother bursting out from the grave and then conflated with the spirit of the woman in Sebastian’s ghost story. In its representation of Sebastian’s persistently false understanding of his guilt, this film looks back to the Gothic Heimat tradition of Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab and Nachtschatten (Night Shade, Niklaus Schilling, 1972), and in doing so connects its comic tale with a series of filmic representations of a haunted and undead past where sin, guilt, and the resulting suffering ripple through future generations. However, Rosenmüller’s technique of complicating the Heimat family tale with surreal grotesquerie playfully undoes the knots of generational guilt, while emphatically not rejecting the Heimat family structure as a narrative model. The farcical coincidences and childish misunderstandings briefly threaten a tragic outcome (the false, imagined guilt might in a sense become real), but finally the shadows of generational guilt and suffering are banished. Wer früher stirbt reflects on earlier constellations of generational transfer and deploys irony, grotesque hyperbole, and a comic critique of Catholic notions of sin and judgment to render absurd the notion of a younger generation inheriting parental guilt. Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei is one of a number of post-unification films about West German terrorism, or, more broadly in the supposedly post-ideological era, the emergence of violent struggle from political protest. As such, its concerns might appear quite far from the suffering of the Second World War and restricted to the problematic encounter between

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Fig. 7.2. Dorothee, undead symbol of guilt and victimhood, is pulled from the moor at the last minute in Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab (1952). DVD capture.

Fig. 7.3. Sebastian’s “undead” mother reaches out from her grave to pull him down in Wer früher stirbt, ist länger tot (2006). DVD capture.

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the now co-opted protest generation of the 1960s and post-unification anti-globalization protestors. Yet in locating itself as a terrorism film and staging conflict as a dispute between generations, the film engages with an enduring pattern of interpretation common to a striking number of New German Cinema and post-unification films that deal with West German terrorism, from Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, Alexander Kluge, et al., 1978) to Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters, Margarethe von Trotta, 1981), and from Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979) to Black Box BRD (Black Box FRG, Andres Veiel, 2001) and Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, Christian Petzold, 2001). In these films left-wing violence is a consequence of the unresolved violence of the Second World War. Terrorism is accounted for as a tenacious cycle of generational tension emerging from the issue of guilt about the war, which becomes an unrelenting intergenerational trail of suffering.24 In the case of Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, an ambiguous conflation of victimhood and perpetration, guilt and suffering is centered on the debt owed by young anti-globalization protestor Jule to the bourgeois Hardenberg. Guilt and debt are expressed by the same word in German, “Schuld” (guilt, in the singular) and “Schulden” (debt, in the plural). Jule’s perpetual state of indebtedness sees her figured as a suffering victim in the eyes of her fellow protestors, Jan and Peter. However, the reason for her years of penance is not quite commensurate with her apparent status in the film as oppressed victim. Driving while uninsured, Jule totaled Hardenberg’s top-of-the-range Mercedes: certainly the punishment does not fit the crime, nor is the situation quite worthy of the moral outrage that leads Jan to compare Jule’s debt to the unrelieved debt of developing countries. Such ironic hints at a problematic comparison of suffering undermine the initial sense that the younger characters are burdened by suffering and morally irreproachable, while the older bourgeoisie is culpable. Indeed, no rigid division of victim and perpetrator is maintained; the generations exchange moral positions throughout the film, unable to sustain a viable separation or clear identity. Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei alludes to the Heimat genre in an important section of the film set in a true Heimat locale, a remote mountain cabin with traditional, folksy interior where the young protesters hold captive the bourgeois victim of their “anti-burglary” protest against capitalism. The journey into rural Austria propels the film away from the urban generic mix of its opening and closing movements, which veer between a slacker love triangle and an anti-capitalist heist movie, and into the calming surroundings of a Heimat film, where the kinship of the mountain refuge propels the two generations into a rigorous self-examination and a curious appraisal of the other. Book-ended by scenes of police in full combat gear at the beginning and end of the film, the Heimat intermezzo

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functions as a kind of dream sequence, where the conflict of the two groups can be examined away from the pressures of urban society. As in 1950s Heimat films, a healing mechanism is triggered when urban characters repair to the rural Heimat, and generational tensions are tackled as part of the reconciliation of conflicted families and couples. Shots of the spectacular Austrian surroundings and of characters gazing at the Heimat landscape are excessive and over-determined in the narrative. They punctuate moments of crisis and a shift towards reconciliation just as scenes earlier in the film of Jan and Jule watching the urban environment from rooftops and balconies create a melancholy city symphony. It is as if the characters are spirited away from conflicts of generation and class to an imaginary realm where they are involuntarily reconstituted as a warring family that needs to reexamine its notions of fault, guilt, and debt. Heimat is thus ironically invoked as an opportunity to stage a much-needed encounter between two generations that are both in different ways subject to enduring chains of guilt and debt. In its knowing allusion to 1950s Heimat films, Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei plays with notions of reconciliation between the generations, against the pull of its other generic tradition, the terrorism film. Away from class and generational divisions (which therefore emerge as an effect of urban life), the two parties come perilously close to an accommodation that sees them develop mutual respect and care. The many scenes of cozy domesticity give the sequence more the mood of a holiday with in-laws than of a kidnapping, as a kind of Stockholm/reverse Stockholm syndrome develops. In fact, when the captive Hardenberg is allowed to call his housecleaner and wife from the village pay phone, he goes beyond mere cooperation to throw himself into the role of Jan’s long-suffering father. For the benefit of witnesses he confidently jumps into the front seat of the van after completing the calls, as befits any pater familias, rather than getting into the back with his minder, as befits the victim of a kidnapping. For their part, Jan, Peter, and Jule come to trust their captive to a surprising degree. They listen attentively to Hardenberg’s tales of the late 1960s and scrounge money off him like recalcitrant teenagers to buy wine and dope (which both generations then share). Hardenberg’s actions are ambiguous and could be motivated by a more calculated desire to win his captors’ trust and then to play them off against each other by disingenuously revealing (with comments about “free love”) Jan and Jule’s relationship to Peter. Nevertheless he does seem to enjoy aspects of the experience. His fatherly concern for Jule is reasonably convincing, and he could in any event almost certainly have escaped shortly before they abandon the whole enterprise. The possibility of generational reconciliation in the rural Heimat, however contrived or spurious, acknowledges the genre conventions, even as it is sandwiched between sections of the film that belong to a

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Fig. 7.4. An escape into the rural Heimat allows an encounter between conflicted generations in Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (2004). DVD capture.

different tradition, one in which a politicized younger generation attacks a guilty older generation and the guilty older generation fights back. The section in the Heimat is initiated by a crisis that propels the younger characters into a guilt all their own. The inversion of the pattern whereby the young suffer through the guilt of the parental generation causes a rather playful if oblique series of reversals. Rather than depicting a smooth or even rocky road to reconciliation, the film shows guilt and perpetration ironically transferred back and forth before the parties settle back — apparently, though the ending is ambiguous — into a comfortable set of roles. Here, instead of lives being wrecked by the guilty other generation, each generation needs the other, and needs the other to be guilty in order to maintain their preferred lifestyle. Or at other moments in the film’s economy of reciprocal exchange, each generation defines itself as having a distinct identity by its own particular sense of guilt, whether false or real. The use of family narratives to allude to political history like the tension between the generations over war guilt and resultant suffering can predispose outcomes toward reconciliation. This includes the need for forgiveness, even when terrible wrongs cannot be reversed or put right, and frequently emphasizes the blighted lives of innocent children, teenagers, or young adults because of the actions of older people, more often than not their relatives. In the films I have discussed, the suffering of such innocent figures at the hands of their families, as in Der Meineidbauer, is foregrounded, but so too is the need for them to understand and forgive the sins if they are themselves to avoid the further suffering of a fractured and stunted identity. Blood connections imply forgiveness in spite of the

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wrongs done; it is in everybody’s interests, not least those of the suffering innocent. One might add that keeping it “in the family” as a generational narrative tends to construct younger generations (of Germans) as victims of a sort and exclude Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In some cases the presentation of an older generation that bears a burden of perpetration and inflicts various traumas onto the younger generation becomes a way of turning a discourse of guilt and perpetration into a discourse of suffering and victimhood. Attitudes to the guilty older generation run the full gamut. At one extreme they must die if the younger generation is to achieve happiness. Or there is a drive for reconciliation and forgiveness, and then they must die. At the other extreme, scenarios of spurious reconciliation result from both sides reaching a workable accommodation. Post-unification films encompass a variety of approaches: Das Wunder von Bern goes even further than the films of the 1950s in displacing the issue of culpability and responsibility. Everyone ends up free of guilt, though this maneuver has a miraculous or mythical quality. Other post-unification films, such as Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot and Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei, deflect actual guilt or a false sense of guilt comically or ironically between generations. It is as if the double preoccupation with, or double occupation of, the position of both victim and perpetrator results in the ready transfer of guilt and punishment between generations. It also intensifies the capacity for perpetration to be construed as suffering. In some of the more recent terrorism films, such as Die innere Sicherheit, this state of affairs leads to a catastrophic bind where the generations can hardly coexist, let alone be reconciled. However, Wer früher stirbt and Die fetten Jahre both play with notions of bringing families back together in the Heimat mode by combining the generic traditions of Heimat with other potentially jarring genres. And while the former presents a sense of guilt as a grotesque delusion, something that is touching in a child but would be indulgent and stupid in an adult, the latter shows two postwar generations unable to free themselves of guilt but at the same time relying on it as a source of generational and class identity; they try reconciliation and ultimately prefer rupture. Filmmakers return to the protean Heimat mode again and again in part at least because of its usefulness in articulating questions of identity. Where family narratives dominate, historical development tends to be construed in terms of generations and generational rupture, but like the proverbial chicken and egg, it is not clear which comes first. In turn, the notion of guilt visited upon the innocent young is a perennial preoccupation, the focus on suffering entailed by guilt maintaining a peculiar double focus on both perpetrator and victim. These films articulate questions of culpability, though the burden of perpetration and responsibility can be all too easily transformed into a discourse of suffering that encompasses an older generation of perpetrators, and is readily passed down

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the generational line to amplify German suffering rather than interrogate broader responsibility. In the later films I have discussed, however, guilt and punishment oscillate between the generations in a way that can be read as a knowing comment on the filmic history of representing such generational guilt and an ironic critique of the tendency to rely on guilt, contrition, suffering, and punishment as a source for German postwar identity.

Notes I am grateful to my colleagues Elizabeth Boa, Franziska Meyer, and Karl Wilds for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 See for example Winfried G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001); Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002); Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002); and Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1967). 2

Robert G. Moeller, “Victims in Uniform: 1950s Combat Movies,” in Germans as Victims, ed. Niven (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 43–61; here 43–44. 3

Ruth Wittlinger, “Taboo or Tradition? The ‘Germans as Victims’ Theme,” in Niven, Germans as Victims, 62–75; here 64. 4

Jürgen Trimborn, Der deutsche Heimatfilm der fünfziger Jahre: Motive, Symbole und Handlungsmuster (Cologne: Teiresias, 1998); Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindlichkeit (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1970). 5

See for example Johannes von Moltke, No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005); Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat — A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture, 1890–1990 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); and Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995), 148–68.

6

Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1997); Jörn Rüsen and Friedrich Jaeger, “Erinnerungskultur,” in Deutschland-Trendbuch: Fakten und Orientierungen, ed. Karl-Rudolf Korte and Werner Weidenfeld (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2001), 397–428. Further references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation EK and the page number. 7

Thomas Hoffmann and Ines Steiner, “Die sechziger Jahre: Zwischen Jagdszenen und Jägerporno,” in Der deutsche Heimatflim: Bildwelten und Weltbilder: Bilder, Texte, Analysen zu 70 Jahren deutsche Heimatgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Kaschuba (Tübingen Verein für Volkskunde, 1989), 116–18. 8

See Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will: Eine Rede die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden kann,” in Rudolf Augstein et al., “Historikerstreit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987), 39–47; Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 118–29.

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9

Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius, trans. Martin Chalmers (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 161–63.

10

Anne Fuchs, “The Tinderbox of Memory: Generation and Masculinity in Väterliteratur by Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, Ulla Hahn, and Dagmar Leopold,” in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film and Discourse since 1990, ed. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote (Rochester: NY, Camden House, 2006), 41–65; here 42–44.

11

Aleida Assmann, Generationsidentitäten und Vorurteilsstrukturen in der neuen deutschen Erinnerungsliteratur (Vienna: Picus, 2006), 18–22. 12

Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 11–15. 13

William Rollins, “Heimat, Modernity and Nation in the Early Heimatschutz Movement,” in Heimat, Nation and Fatherland: The German Sense of Belonging, ed. Jost Hermand and James Steakley (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 87–112. 14

Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, 74–85; Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time (New York: Redgrave, 1984), 103–28.

15

Robert G. Moeller, “The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimisation in East and West Germany,” in Niven, Germans as Victims, 26–42; here 32. 16

For a discussion of the realities of life as an expellee in West Germany, see Rainer Schulze, “Growing Discontent: Relations between Native and Refugee Populations in a Rural District in Western Germany after the Second World War,” in West Germany under Reconstruction: Politics, Society and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1997), 53–72. 17

Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany, 158.

18

See Bill Niven, Germans as Victims; Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006); and Fuchs et al., German Memory Contests. 19

See, for example, Paul Cooke, “The Continually Suffering Nation? Cinematic Representations of German Victimhood,” in Niven, Germans as Victims, 76–92; here 91–92. 20

Applegate, A Nation of Provincials, 18.

21

See Matthias Uecker, “Fractured Families — United Countries? Family, Nostalgia and Nation-Building in Das Wunder von Bern and Goodbye Lenin!” New Cinemas 5.3 (2007): 189–200; here 196–97. 22

By comparison, the rabbit-eating episode in Das Wunder von Bern melodramatically symbolizes the pathos of Richard’s failure to understand Matthias, the family’s hardship, and Matthias’s isolation and loneliness. In Wer früher stirbt, the exploded rabbit is eaten by the family, with Sebastian’s older brother calmly explaining that eating the rabbit will allow it to live on in them. 23

Moltke, No Place like Home, 111.

24

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 (London: Continuum, 2006), 11–42.

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8: Resistance of the Heart: Female Suffering and Victimhood in DEFA’s Antifascist Films Daniela Berghahn

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NATHAN STOLTZFUS coined the phrase “resistance of the heart,” making reference to the successful protest of the women of the Rosentrasse in Berlin’s Jewish quarter in 1943, whose intervention may have saved their interned Jewish husbands from deportation, and more than twenty years before the West German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta paid tribute to these courageous women in her film Die Frauen von der Rosentraße (The Women of Rosenstrasse, 2003), East German cinema emotionalized the representation of resistance by focusing on women in two antifascist films of the 1980s: Die Verlobte (The Fiancée, Günter Reisch 1980) and Die Schauspielerin (The Actress, Siegfried Kühn 1988).1 These two films belong to the small number of antifascist films with female protagonists produced by DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft), as the GDR’s state-owned production company was called. Antifascism through a female prism results, as I shall argue, in a perspective that emphasizes the emotional motivations for joining the resistance rather than the ideological ones. In this respect, Reisch and Kühn’s films signal a new departure for DEFA’s antifascist genre, which I shall consider in the broader context of the critical reappraisal of the GDR’s foundational narrative of antifascism during the 1980s. Framing DEFA’s antifascist genre in terms of gender, this chapter explores how these two films construct and deconstruct gender stereotypes, including the intersection of race and gender in the image of the feminized Jew. How do the films’ protagonists Hella Lindau and Maria Rheine compare to women in earlier antifascist films? What do these antifascist heroines, if we may refer to them in such terms, have in common with the socialist women featuring prominently in DEFA’s Gegenwartsfilme (films about contemporary society), another significant genre of East German film production? And finally, to what extent do these two East German films about female resistance, suffering, and victimhood anticipate the discourse on wartime suffering that has dominated German cinema since unification?

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DEFA’s Antifascist Films In East Germany’s nationalized film industry, antifascism was a perennial theme. From its very first feature film, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, Wolfgang Staudte, 1946), until 1992, when DEFA ceased to exist, around one hundred antifascist feature films were produced. This represents roughly 13 percent of DEFA’s entire feature-film production, with organized communist resistance being by far the most common thematic angle taken. This is unsurprising, of course, given the foundational narrative of the German Democratic Republic as a state founded by antifascist resistance fighters, which, in turn, served to legitimize the Party state. But the antifascist genre also includes films that examine the political and economic causes that led to the rise of fascism and the Second World War, war films, and a comparatively small number of films about Jews during the Third Reich. In the early 1990s, DEFA’s antifascist tradition came to an abrupt end, when the memory contest on the silver screen became dominated by representations of the Third Reich that reflected the West German normalization debate rather than a critical reappraisal of the East German anti-fascist discourse.2 DEFA’s antifascist genre was closely aligned to the GDR’s official historiography and reflected changes in the Party’s political agenda and strategic priorities. Frank Beyer’s Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves, 1963), based on Bruno Apitz’s best-selling novel (1958) of the same title, is a canonical text. The film provides a fictionalized account of the GDR’s antifascist myth of origin, which centers on the alleged self-liberation from fascism, and the Buchenwald Oath, sworn by a group of political prisoners (but by no means all communists), in which they committed themselves to the “annihilation of Nazism at its very roots,” and the creation of a world of peace and freedom.3 Since Nackt unter Wölfen details on the one hand the plight of the political prisoners while on the other hand celebrating the victory of communist resistance, the film’s narrative encapsulates the paradoxical notion that the GDR’s founders and leaders were both the victims of and victors over fascism. In particular during times of conflict and crisis, the production of antifascist films was prioritized by the DEFA studio management, since antifascism was harnessed to create a sense of consensus among East Germany’s disillusioned citizens. In his memoirs, Wenn der Wind sich dreht: Mein Leben, meine Filme (When the Wind Turns: My Life, My Films), Frank Beyer suggests that the incarceration and suffering of the GDR’s founders and leaders prevented the kind of radical de-Stalinization that occurred in other Eastern bloc countries during the post-Stalinist thaw and that paved the way for an artistic renaissance and the East European New Waves:

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Weil es Antifaschisten waren, die den Sozialismus stalinistischer Prägung bei uns eingeführt haben. Man hätte Antifaschisten bekämpfen müssen, um den Stalinismus zu bekämpfen. Das wollten viele nicht. Es gibt einen großen Respekt im Lande vor denjenigen, die viele Jahre ihres Lebens in der Emigration oder in Gefängnissen und Lagern verbringen mußten.4 [Because it was anti-fascists who had introduced a Stalinist type of socialism in our country. In order to fight Stalinism, one would have had to fight antifascists. Many people were not prepared to do so. Those who had to spend several years of their lives in emigration, in prisons, or in camps are held in high esteem in our country.]

Although the conflation of antifascism and Stalinism legitimized the Party state well into the 1980s, a critical reappraisal of antifascism gradually emerged in the 1970s. In the words of Heiner Müller, the attempt was made “die deutsche Geschichte bis auf die Knochen freizulegen, um zu verhindern, daß die Schuld und Unterdrückung des Verbrechens überlebt” (to strip history to its very bones in order to prevent the survival of guilt and the suppression of crime) and to reveal the ordinariness of fascism. Heiner Müller provocatively remarked in 1975: “Heute ist der gewöhnliche Faschismus interessant. Wir leben mit Leuten, für die er das Normale war, wenn nicht die Norm. Unschuld ein Glücksfall” (Today we are interested in everyday fascism. There are people among us for whom it was normal, if not the norm. Innocence was a happy coincidence).5 DEFA’s antifascist films of the late 1970s and 1980s set out to challenge state-prescribed antifascism by breaking taboos and approaching an old theme from new vantage points. Orthodox accounts of the antifascist myth were losing currency as the focus gradually shifted from actiondriven narratives about heroic male resistance to detailed introspective portraits of conflict-ridden, wavering, and passive protagonists.6 Narratives of resistance, hitherto depicted as a collective effort, increasingly centered on isolated or lonely individuals. Women, generally of marginal significance in DEFA’s antifascist films, took center stage, at least in a small number of films. Established gender dichotomies became more fluid in what had, until the 1980s, been an overtly masculine discourse (see Sabine Hake’s comments on masculinity in the antifascist genre in her contribution to this volume). Women had not been completely absent in antifascist narratives of previous decades, but in accordance with the genre’s gender bias they were depicted as the helpmates of their heroic husbands or lovers rather than as autonomous agents in their own right. The chief function of women in the films’ narrative economy was to heighten the trope of self-sacrifice around which the antifascist genre is structured. Whereas men tend to sacrifice their lives, women merely sacrifice their personal happiness.

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There are hardly any couples that survive together. Generally the male partner, as the agent of resistance, dies, leaving his lover, fiancée, or wife behind to mourn his loss. Slatan Dudow’s Stärker als die Nacht (Stronger than the Night, 1954) is a typical example. The film eulogizes the heroism of male communist resistance, in particular that of the larger-than-life antifascist fighter Hans Löning, while his wife’s chief function is to provide moral support and to preserve his memory. At the end of Stärker als die Nacht Gerda Löning reads out her husband’s farewell letter, in which he urges her to remember their life together and their common goals, to a group of fellow communists. Yet her voice falters, and she hands over the letter to her young son, who continues to read it out loud. Gerda is shown literally to pass on the legacy of antifascism to the next generation. She assumes the role of mediator between the GDR’s heroic antifascist past and the bright future of socialism for which Hans Löning and thousands like him sacrificed their lives. Gerda, as wife and mother, ensures that the memory of resistance survives. By the end of the film Hans’s sacrificial death has already become a legend, as fellow communists in prison quote from his farewell letter and tell each other with great admiration about his heroic death. Stärker als die Nacht concludes with a montage sequence, accompanied by the funeral march “Immortal Victims,” which cuts from images of nationally owned factories to East Berlin’s Humboldt University, from vast expanses of cornfields swaying in the wind to the young Hans and Gerda by the sea. This montage equates the socialist way with nature’s way, thus tracing and legitimizing East Germany’s trajectory from antifascism to socialism. Though made only a few years later, Konrad Wolf’s Lissy (1957) presents a far less conventional portrait, assuming a female subject position and granting the title heroine a degree of psychological depth atypical for a film of the 1950s.7 It was Konrad Wolf’s intention to explore, “wie der deutsche Faschismus es fertigbrachte, in die Seele und den Verstand von Millionen und aber Millionen Deutschen Eingang zu finden” (how German fascism succeeded in penetrating the soul and mind of millions and millions of Germans).8 Focused on Lissy and her petit bourgeois husband Freddy Fromeyer, Wolf’s film examines how mass unemployment and the recession during the Weimar Republic made the Germans susceptible to Nazi propaganda. Lissy initially enjoys a life of luxury at the side of her husband who, upon losing his job, joins the Nazi Storm Troopers and quickly rises in their ranks. Yet she eventually realizes that the Nazis are murderers and responsible for the death of her brother. This realization transforms her love of Freddy into contempt and impels her to leave Freddy. She returns to her proletarian roots and joins the antifascist resistance. In line with prevailing gender stereotypes, Lissy’s decision is motivated by an intense emotional experience (the assassination of her brother), albeit one that induces her political reflections. As she turns her

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back on the Nazis and purposefully walks down a straight, tree-lined avenue towards the camera, the offscreen voiceover commentary reaffirms the protagonist’s decision: Ja, ein jeder muß sich entscheiden. Und Lissy wußte jetzt, man kann einsam sein und doch nicht verlassen. Sie wußte jetzt, es gibt einen Weg, eine schweren und mühsamen Weg, aber einen ehrlichen Weg. Jeder geht ihn für sich allein, und doch geht ihn keiner allein. [Yes, each of us has to make up his mind. And Lissy had come to realize that one could be lonely without being abandoned. She knew of a path, a difficult and laborious path, but it was an honest path. Everyone takes this path alone, and yet nobody follows this path alone.]

In Frank Beyer’s Königskinder (Star-crossed Lovers, 1962) we encounter a heroine who makes her lover’s political mission her own. When Michael, Magdalena’s sweetheart of long ago, is arrested, she joins a resistance group, escapes to Moscow, and from there sets off on an exploratory mission, which takes her back to her fascist Heimat. The film’s final scene shows Magdalena and Michael being almost reunited on an airfield in Russia. After more than fifteen years apart Michael recognizes Magdalena boarding an airplane that will take her back to Germany, but she is oblivious of his presence and takes off. As the film’s title song, the German Volkslied “Es waren zwei Königskinder” (Once upon a time there were two royal children) suggests,9 these star-crossed lovers are never to meet again, yet they are united through the antifascist cause, which is regarded as ultimately more important than romantic ideals.

Die Verlobte: Antifascism as a Tale of Star-crossed Lovers Against this background I wish to consider Die Verlobte. Set between 1934 and 1944, the film tells the story of Hella Lindau, who is betrayed by a traitor from within the ranks of the communist resistance group for which she and her fiancé Hermann Reimers work. On an errand she runs for Hermann, she is arrested by the Gestapo. During the trial (which is not dramatized in the film) she refuses to betray her fiancé and is sentenced to ten years in prison. The film is first and foremost a psychological investigation of how Hella retains her dignity and hope in a women’s prison among murderers, prostitutes, and corrupt guards and suggests that this is achieved not primarily because of her political convictions but because of her love for her fiancé and the pledge they made to each other immediately before her arrest: “Du bist mein Mann, ich bin deine Frau, was auch

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Fig. 8.1. Hella and Hermann’s personal pledge in Die Verlobte (1988). DVD capture.

kommt” (You are my husband, I am your wife, whatever may happen.), whereupon Hermannn replies: “Du bist meine Frau, ich bin dein Mann” (You are my wife, I am your husband), sealing their promise with a chaste kiss on each other’s entwined hands. Telling the story from the point of view of a female protagonist, Die Verlobte introduces a new agenda to the antifascist discourse by emotionalizing and depoliticizing the antifascist narrative. Hella’s most intense moments of grief are those when she is denied visits from her fiancé and, when shortly before her own release, Hermann is arrested and sentenced to death. The experience of separation and the eventual loss of Hermann trigger a momentary loss of self-control and hysterical outbursts of crying in Hella. The film’s chief premise revolves around the contrast between Hella’s unwavering loyalty to her fiancé and the betrayal in the political sphere, namely the Hitler-Stalin pact, a political event that was generally glossed over in the GDR’s official historiography. When Hella finds out about this agreement, she is shocked by what she perceives to be an act of treason and she questions her belief in communist solidarity.10 In this way Die Verlobte challenges the tenets of the state-endorsed memory of communist solidarity and idealizes instead the moral integrity of Hermann and Hella’s personal pledge.

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Reisch’s historical film corresponds with a trend, manifested in DEFA’s Gegenwartsfilme from the 1970s onward, that featured female protagonists.11 While East German woman’s films of the 1950s and early 1960s are underpinned by the firm belief in the socialist utopia, in which the common good and individual happiness are in perfect harmony, those of the 1970s and 1980s no longer extol the virtues of collectivism. DEFA’s most famous screen heroines, including Paula in the Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, Heiner Carow, 1973) and Sunny in Solo Sunny (Konrad Wolf, 1980), embody what Marc Silberman aptly calls “the emancipatory power of desire ( . . . that) undermines society’s rules.”12 These disillusioned heroines disassociate themselves from the ethos of collectivism and either withdraw into a private niche of romantic love or seek fulfillment through asserting their individuality. Die Verlobte pursues an agenda similar to that of the socialist woman’s film during that period. Female subjectivity goes hand in hand with a focus on personal relationships and a critique of the ideological principles of socialism and antifascism. In fact, according to Regine Kühn, one of DEFA’s most successful women scriptwriters, the representation of women’s lives and female subjectivity provided filmmakers with a certain amount of ideological latitude and made it possible to breach taboos that might have been censored in male-centered films.13 Despite conflating Hella’s commitment to Hermann with her commitment to the antifascist cause, Die Verlobte unmistakably prioritizes the personal over the political. Even its reception did not attempt to ascribe a political pathos to this antifascist love story. In the popular East German magazine Filmspiegel, Die Verlobte was advertised as “Die Geschichte einer großen Liebe” (the story of a great love), while the headline of a film review in Neues Deutschland reads: “Stark geblieben durch Liebe und unerschütterliches Vertrauen” (Empowered by love and unshakeable trust).14 Arguably DEFA’s most apolitical antifascist film, Die Verlobte was what East German audiences, oversaturated with narratives of heroic resistance, wanted: the film attracted over one million viewers, which is a remarkable box-office figure for the 1980s. While part of the film’s success was due to the popularity of Jutta Wachowiak in the role of Hella Lindau, the focus on enduring love doubtless contributed to its popular appeal. As scriptwriter Günter Rücker explained in a Q & A session with the audience and with Eva Lippold, on whose autobiographical novel Haus der schweren Tore (House of the Heavy Gates, 1971) the film is based, “Wir haben versucht zu erzählen, wie gefühlt wurde, und wir haben versucht, dieses Gefühl über die Zeit nahezubringen” (We tried to capture the emotional experience and we wanted to convey what it meant to live in those days).15 The feminization of the antifascist narrative was certainly a novelty in the 1980s; nevertheless, Die Verlobte perpetuates rather outdated gender

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Fig. 8.2. The star-crossed lovers are briefly reunited in prison before Hella is released and Hermann is sentenced to death in Die Verlobte (1988). DVD capture.

roles, reminiscent of Stärker als die Nacht. Like Gerda, the loyal wife and comrade of Hans Löning, Hella is first and foremost her fiancé’s helpmate rather than an active resistance fighter in her own right. She gets caught acting as a messenger for Hermann. She sacrifices her own freedom and goes to prison for ten years so that Hermann can be free. In other words, she chooses the passive role of biding her time in prison, thereby enabling her fiancé to pursue actively the goals of the resistance. However, in contrast to Stärker als die Nacht, Die Verlobte focuses on Hella, who is rendered politically inactive in prison, providing little insight into the resistance activities of Hermann and his cell. In this sense Die Verlobte disavows the political pathos that governed the antifascist narratives of the 1950s and 1960s and replaces it with the emotional pathos of individual grief and suffering. Furthermore, in contrast to Lissy, who is expected to assume a role in the collective effort of the antifascist resistance, Hella is depicted as an isolated figure after Hermann’s death. On the day of her release from prison she puts on the necklace and applies the lipstick Hermann gave her on the day of their engagement. The next shot shows her crying and forlorn on the large staircase in the prison, pressing a large bundle of letters from her fiancé against her chest. Revisiting the site where she was for just

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a few moments reunited with Hermann in prison, she sings a few lines of the Volkslied “Wohl heute noch und morgen”: Der Liebste ist gekommen Und rückt durch’s Tor herein Da schneit es rote Rosen Da schneit es rote Rosen Und regnet kühlen Wein.16 [The beloved has arrived And proceeds through the gate Then it snows red roses Then it snows red roses And rains cool wine.]

The lyrics reflect Hella’s romantic yearning and thereby once more underscore the priority of her personal pledge to Hermann over her political commitment to antifascism. What is more, the lyrics also point toward a morbid longing on Hella’s part: the young girl in the song waits for her lover and eventually dies, or even kills herself. The roses snowing upon her are the roses falling off the wreath her lover, who finally returns, lays on her grave. The subtly expressed death wish alluded to in Hella’s song stands in stark contrast to the future-directed determination expressed at the end of Stärker als die Nacht and Lissy. While Konrad Wolf’s film ends with a bird’s-eye view of the bustling street life of Berlin, where the title heroine will find her place in the resistance, Die Verlobte concludes with a static shot of a lonely Hella, mourning the loss of her fiancé.

Die Schauspielerin: Reassessing Stereotypes of Gender and Race Die Schauspielerin (1988) is one of a relatively small number of films about the persecution of the Jews in DEFA’s antifascist genre. Where the annihilation of the Jews is addressed, it is usually instrumentalized to support the Marxist interpretation of fascism, which “considered anti-Semitism . . . a peripheral phenomenon, one caused by manipulation from above in order to provide a scapegoat for anti-capitalist sentiment, thus displacing the energies of class struggle.”17 It would automatically be resolved through the overthrow of the capitalist order. In the GDR’s official memory, those who were persecuted because of their active political resistance were commemorated, while those who were persecuted on account of their race or religion tended to be forgotten, because their fate was less suited to support the antifascist master narrative. Hence, in the GDR’s hierarchy of victims of fascism, Jews were accorded only the twelfth position.18

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The production and release dates of films dealing with Jewish themes and the Holocaust were frequently determined by tactical political considerations.19 In 1988, the GDR commemorated the anniversary of Kristallnacht for the first time, with many public ceremonies, concerts, and publications devoted to Jewish history and culture.20 The release of Die Schauspielerin, alongside Jewish-themed documentaries such as Die Nacht als die Synagogen brannten (The Night When the Synagogues Were Burning) and Erinnern heißt leben (Remembering Means Living, both by Rosa Berger-Fiedler, 1988) has to be seen in a cultural-political context in which it seemed wise to play the Jewish card for a number of reasons. According to a film review of Die Schauspielerin in the West German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the GDR, which had hitherto denied sharing responsibility for German fascism and the Holocaust with the FRG, was trying hard to develop a closer relationship with the Jews, since Erich Honecker was hoping to receive an invitation to the United States and realized that the Jewish influence on politics there was stronger than at home, where the membership of the Jewish community was down to just three hundred in the late 1980s.21 But Die Schauspielerin is more than just an interesting example of an opportunistic change of the GDR’s politics of memory. Siegfried Kühn’s film marks a significant departure from gender and racial stereotypes of earlier antifascist films. It exemplifies what Judith Butler has referred to as the interarticulation of gender and race, simultaneously invoking and inverting clichéd images of femininity and the feminized Jew. One of the most persistent stereotypes of the male Jew — and not just in DEFA films — is that of the weak and passive Jew, who is reliant upon a strong Christian/Gentile for her protection. As Judith E. Doneson argues in her discussion of the feminization of the Jew in Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), this constellation is structured around a gender binarism, whereby the Jew is typically depicted as “the meek female dependent upon the strong male” and thus essentially feminized.22 The image of the effeminate male Jew has a long history. One of its most influential exponents was the Jew-turned-Christian Otto Weininger, who pursued the homology of male Jew as woman in his infamous study Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903).23 In Weininger’s study the male gender represents exclusively positive character traits, agency, control, and potential for genius, whereas the female pole functions as the negative antipode. Misogynist and anti-Semitist thinking converge as “the eternal Jew” is conflated with “the eternal feminine” in the attempt “to articulate the male Jew’s ‘racial’ difference from his Aryan counterpart through and as ‘sexual difference.’”24 Die Schauspielerin is pivotal in relation to the exploration of female victimhood, because it critically reassesses these persistent racial and gender stereotypes. The film’s opening scene shows the actress Maria in

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her backstage dressing room, preparing for a performance of Schiller’s Maria Stuart (Mary Stuart). As she looks at herself in the mirror, she programmatically states, “Das Weib ist nicht schwach” (Woman is not weak), thus establishing the deconstruction of gender stereotypes as the film’s chief agenda. The film, based on a screenplay by Regine Kühn, tells the story of Maria Rheine and Mark Löwenthal, both actors at a small theater in 1930s Berlin. They fall in love with each other. When the Nazis come to power, Mark loses his job, whereas Maria is offered the part of Johanna in Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (Maid of Orleans) at a large theater in Munich and is celebrated by the Nazis as the “ideal German woman.” Meanwhile Mark has found work at the Jewish Theater in Berlin.25 After the Nuremberg Race Laws come into effect in 1935, it becomes impossible for Mark and Maria to continue their relationship in public. Maria realizes that she has to make a choice — and chooses love over her career and fame. In order to be reunited with Mark in Berlin, she feigns suicide and assumes the Jewish identity of Manja Löwenthal. Performing Jewish identity is an act of defiance and a form of self-imposed victimhood, which will result, as the film’s final scene in Berlin’s Jewish Theater implies, in her death. Before considering the film in detail, I wish to locate it in the context of earlier DEFA films about the Holocaust, notably Kurt Maetzig’s Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows, 1947), Konrad Wolf’s Professor Mamlock (1961), and Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, 1975) in order to establish how Die Schauspielerin negotiates the stereotype of the feminized Jew projected in DEFA’s antifascist genre. Especially a comparison with the thematically similar film Ehe im Schatten reveals how dramatically Kühn’s film challenges the notion of passive Jewish victimhood. The popular melodrama Ehe im Schatten is about a married acting couple, the Jewess Elisabeth and her Gentile husband Hans Wieland. When the Nazis come to power, Elisabeth is excluded from the theater and confined to the couple’s apartment, where she spends her days waiting for her successful actor-husband to come home and share his experiences of life outside. After the couple attends a film premiere together and thereby makes a tacitly tolerated interracial marriage a public provocation, Hans is faced with the decision to either divorce Elisabeth or be banned from acting, like his wife. The couple commit suicide. Elisabeth is depicted as passive and politically naive, even childlike in relation to her husband, who frequently addresses her as “Kind” (child) or even “Kindchen” (little child). Consistent with the film’s gender stereotyping, Hans is in control and assumes almost paternal authority over his Jewish wife. He is the one to determine when and how to end Elisabeth’s and his own life, pouring the fatal poison into a pot of freshly brewed coffee. Elisabeth’s agency is limited to secretly watching her husband and

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to implicitly giving her consent, when drinking the poisoned cup. The portrayal of Elisabeth is in keeping with East German discourses on Jewish victimhood insofar as the film critiques her disinterest in politics and her misconception that the German humanist tradition might prevent the Nazi’s genocide of the Jews. In fact, it was Kurt Maetzig’s explicit intention to show that Elisabeth and, indeed, the German-Jewish bourgeoisie at large, were “nicht nur Opfer, sie haben auch mitverschuldet, Opfer zu werden” (not just victims, they were complicit in their own victimization) through their indolence and passiveness.26 Konrad Wolf’s Professor Mamlock makes this indictment of the Jewish bourgeoisie even more explicit by contrasting the fate of the assimilated Jewish surgeon, Professor Mamlock, who fails to recognize the early signs of the Nazis’ policy regarding Jews and who stays clear of any political involvement, with that of his son Rolf, a communist resistance fighter. Wolf fervently reaffirms the official political pathos of antifascist resistance by concluding the film with the admonishing commentary: “Es gibt kein größeres Verbrechen — nicht kämpfen zu wollen, — wo man kämpfen muß!” (There is no greater crime — than not wanting to fight — when fight one must!). The film attributes Mamlock’s suicide to his failure to join the resistance. As Gertrud Koch notes in her discussion of Konrad Wolf’s Jewish-themed films: “The German Jews are condemned to their own death — as part of the bourgeois class, they bear part of the blame for it.”27 Framing Professor Mamlock in terms of the race-gender-paradigm outlined above, the old professor occupies the feminine pole, being associated with a lack of agency, notably political agency. His son Rolf, by contrast, represents the masculine pole: through his involvement with the communist resistance he transcends not only passive Jewish victimhood but also his bourgeois class background. Similar gender dichotomies inform Jakob der Lügner, DEFA’s most famous Holocaust film and the first film to link the representation of Jews with the theme of resistance, albeit a peculiarly unheroic type of resistance.28 Set in a Polish ghetto, the film centers on Jakob Heym, who finds himself in the Gestapo office one night and overhears news on the radio that the Russians are making rapid advances. When he shares the good news with other Jews in the ghetto, nobody believes that he had been held captive and then released by the Gestapo. He therefore pretends to own a radio (an offense punishable by death) and supplies his companions with regular “news” about the advancing Red Army and the imminent liberation of the ghetto, thereby inspiring them with hope and the strength to survive. Frank Beyer’s film reappraises the stereotype of the passive Jew inasmuch as Jakob exhibits a certain degree of agency. Nevertheless, in most respects the portrayal of Jakob conforms to the image of the feminized male Jew: in his role as caretaker of the orphan girl Lina he exhibits maternal qualities, while his endeavor to save lives in the ghetto

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is motivated by a nurturing instinct rather than male heroic aspirations. In fact, Jakob der Lügner was intended as a critique of heroic antifascist narratives: Jakob is a hero against his own will. He unwittingly stumbles into the role of harbinger of good news and reluctantly continues in this role in order to prevent further suicides in the ghetto, fully conscious of the risks he takes and frightened of them. Ultimately his efforts fail. The film ends with the deportation of the entire ghetto. Nobody can be saved. Perhaps DEFA’s antifascist heroes are as ineffective as Jakob, for they too were unable to change the course of history — and yet DEFA’s antifascist narratives make us forget this minor detail by glorifying these heroic martyrs and proclaiming them victorious in spite of their death and defeat. Maria in Die Schauspielerin has much in common with the male martyrs of DEFA’s canonical antifascist films, since she too actively chooses to risk and ultimately sacrifice her life when, out of love for Mark, she rejects the racial ideology of the Nazis by assuming a Jewish identity. To fully appreciate the revalorization that Maria’s identity change has in relation to gender and racial stereotyping, it is necessary to consider briefly the difference between the concepts of “victim” and “sacrifice.” As Aleida Assmann points out, where the English language has two words, the German language has only one, “Opfer.” While “victim” (lat. victima) denotes the passive, defenseless object of violence, “sacrifice” (lat. sacrificium) refers to the self-determined commitment to a religious or patriotic cause and involves risking one’s life or choosing death. Thus the term “sacrifice” typically refers to the death of a martyr and, indeed, Jesus Christ. “Sacrifice” connotes agency, whereas “victim” does not, and yet, Aleida Assmann contends, the religious martyr transforms passive victimhood and political oppression into active intervention and religious superiority: “Durch die selbstbestimmte Umdeutung des Todes in eine religiöse Botschaft wird die politische Macht der verfolgenden Staatsgewalt überboten.” (By the self-conscious transformation of death into a religious message, the political power of the persecuting regime is vanquished.)29 In this sense Maria’s decision to assume the identity of those persecuted by the Nazis constitutes simultaneously an act of sacrifice and resistance. However, what allows me to claim that Maria, through performing Jewish identity, transforms passive Jewish victimhood into active resistance? She performs Jewishness, but she is still a Gentile after all — or is she?30 To begin with, the roles Maria plays on stage, in particular, that of Schiller’s Johanna and Shaw’s Saint Joan, underscore her status as martyr. Almost a quarter of the film is devoted to showing Maria on stage performing the role of Joan of Arc, who is not only the most iconic female martyr in Western culture but also renowned for her androgyny.31 Moreover, the film emphasizes that for Maria life is theater and theater is life. For her there is no clear demarcation between those two spheres. The significance of performing is also indicated in the film’s title, Die Schauspielerin, which

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differs from its literary source, Hedda Zinner’s Arrangement mit dem Tod (Arrangement with Death, 1985). Through her nuanced performance style Corinna Harfouch, who plays Maria, distinguishes between the “role of her life” as the Jewish Manja Löwenthal, and her role on stage as Schiller’s Jungfrau. From the window of her luxurious, light-flooded Munich apartment Maria observes a group of girls in League of German Girls’ uniforms, singing and reciting a poem and using body language and oratory reminiscent of Hitler’s public speeches. Maria’s eyes are fixed on this seemingly idyllic scene, then she closes the window and continues to observe the girls in silence. She studies their abrupt and symmetrical arm and hand movements before proceeding to the mirror to rehearse her role, imitating the fascist performance style she has just studied. Her subsequent performance on stage garners her standing ovations, but Maria is bemused and puzzled about this applause, suddenly realizing that she has become complicit with the fascists through her overtly fascist performance style. Her preparations for her role of Manja Löwenthal are more methodical and thorough: she literally erases her identity as Maria Rheine, burning photos of her previous self, procuring a forged passport, and enlisting the help of a friend to stage her own suicide. Pretending to research her next part in a play, she pays a visit to a Jewish childhood friend. The Jewish grandfather, who seems to sense that Maria is preparing herself for much more than a theatrical role, alerts her to the futility of her endeavor: “Jude wird man nicht, Jude ist man” (It is impossible to become a Jew, one is born a Jew), he asserts, only to revise his dogmatic views on Jewish identity the very next minute: “Sich wandeln, heißt sich erneuern” (To change oneself is to renew oneself). The renewed or rather reborn Maria/ Manja changes her blond hair to black and swaps her light-colored, flamboyant attire for black, inconspicuous clothes. She transforms herself from a figure of light into a figure of darkness. And soon her mood is also shrouded in darkness. Isolated from the world and cooped up in Mark’s dark and claustrophobic Berlin apartment, while he plays at the Jewish Theater, Manja cannot bear her clandestine existence any longer and does precisely what thousands of Jews did both in reality and in films about the Third Reich: she tries to commit suicide but is rescued by Mark, who comes home before Manja is able to hang herself.32 The contrast between Maria’s performance on stage and her performance in Mark’s flat indicates that she has become one with her new role as Manja Löwenthal. Her performance of Jewishness is ultimately a performative act through which she makes her role of Manja her new self. In fact, the film questions essentializing notions of race and gender, instead making a case for the social constructedness of identity. According to Judith Butler, identity categories such as gender — as well as race — are not preexisting essences that merely find their expression

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in performative acts. On the contrary, Butler contends, gender identities are effectively constituted through “sustained social performance.”33 Over time gender identities are discursively constituted through performative acts that congeal into “the appearance of a substance,” which is then mistaken for material reality or a real or true identity.34 Though primarily concerned with gender, Butler reminds us that sex, gender, and race cannot be theorized separately and that all three identity categories, albeit in different ways, are not ontological but instead discursively constructed categories. Ann Pellegrini, among others, has extended the concept of performative identity to the interarticulation of gender and race, focusing in particular on the feminization of Jewish stereotypes. What makes these considerations relevant in relation to Die Schauspielerin is that through the aesthetics of performance and performativity, the film deconstructs dichotomies such as Aryan/Jewish, masculine/feminine, and active/passive. Manja’s Jewishness is no less real or authentic than Mark’s. The film dramatizes this idea by means of color coding and costume: black and darkness are initially linked to Mark and Jewishness, whereas the color white and light are associated with Maria, the embodiment of the ideal Aryan woman. Her Munich apartment is entirely white and so are her opulent clothes — her white feather boa and the grayishwhite foxtail she discarded into the river, along with a red scarf (the color of the Nazi flags) when simulating her suicide. Through establishing the dichotomy between black and white — alongside that of gender — Die Schauspielerin first invokes, but subsequently inverts, another common representational strategy for imagining the Jew as Other. Where “colour coding was [used as] the privileged mechanism for ‘fixing’ Jewish difference, the colour was as likely to be ‘yellow’ as black.”35 However, the Jew has also been represented as “mulatto” and “half-breed,” a racial classification that reflects the Jew’s putative racial impurity and that complicates the Jew/Gentile, black/white opposition. Ann Pellegrini, therefore, proposes to “borrow Daniel Boyarin’s term — ‘off-white’ [as . . . ] a kind of third term” to capture the Jew’s difference.36 However, consistent with Siegfried Kühn’s agenda to destabilize boundaries of gender and race, Mark and Maria/Manja change colors, as it were. Early on in the film they wander about the streets of Berlin and witness signs of rapidly intensifying anti-Semitism. Both are wearing identical clothes: cream-colored trench coats and Borsalino hats, an androgynous outfit that underscores the fluidity of their gender and racial identities. When Maria returns to Berlin as Mark’s Jewish wife Manja, she is almost invariably dressed in black, even wearing a black hat and dark black sunglasses, whereas Mark still wears the lightcolored trench coat or a white costume and a white mask when rehearsing a new role on stage. If, then, black and darkness stand for Jewishness,37 whereas white and light are linked to the “Aryan race,” Mark and Maria

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Fig. 8.3. Maria’s and Mark’s identical off-white, androgynous outfits underscore the fluidity of gender and racial identities in Die Schauspielerin (1988). DVD capture.

Fig. 8.4. Manja Löwenthal all in black in Die Schauspielerin (1988). DVD capture.

appear to have exchanged their racial identities. Put differently, if — as Richard Dyer demonstrates in his exploration of Whiteness in Western culture — white represents the hypostatized norm and is therefore normalized and rendered invisible, whereas black (or rather non-white) represents the deviation from this norm, Mark’s putative difference as the Jewish Other is rendered invisible through his association with the color

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white.38 By playing with the cultural signification of dark/black versus light/white, Die Schauspielerin subverts the dichotomies on which the racial hierarchies of the National Socialist regime were based. Precisely in this disavowal of racial difference we can locate Maria/ Manja’s resistance: she chooses to give up her identity as the ideal German woman in order to assume the identity of those regarded as racially inferior and persecuted by the Nazi regime. In doing so, she defies the Nazi ideology of the master race versus the Jewish race, unmasking its arbitrariness and absurdity. At the same time her courage and determination prove the stereotype of woman as the weaker sex wrong. Not only is her resistance active: it is also heroic (in contrast to that of Jakob Heym), inasmuch as Maria readily embraces the deadly consequences of her decision. The film’s final scene with its suggestive intertextuality anticipates her annihilation in the furnaces of a concentration camp. Manja is shown auditioning for the role of Shaw’s Saint Joan (rather than Schiller’s Jungfrau) since in 1937, following a performance of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, the Jewish Theater in Berlin was no longer permitted to stage German plays.39 Dressed completely in black and engulfed or even obliterated by the darkness of the stage, Manja recites one of Saint Joan’s monologues, ending with the ominous prophesy of her sacrificial death: Ich will wagen und wagen und wagen, bis in den Tod . . . Ich will jetzt zu den geringen Menschen hinausgehen und mich von der Liebe in ihren Augen von dem Haß in den Eurigen trösten lassen. Ihr werdet froh sein, mich brennen zu sehen. Aber wenn ich in das Feuer gehe, werde ich durch die Flammen hindurch auf immer und ewig in das Herz meines Volkes einziehen — und so sei Gott mit mir! [I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die. I will go out to the common people, and let the love in their eyes comfort me for the hate in yours. You will be glad to see me burn; but if I go through the fire I shall go through it to the heart of my people for ever and ever. And so, God be with me!]40

Conclusion How, then, do Die Verlobte and Die Schauspielerin anticipate discourses of suffering and victimhood in contemporary German cinema? A significant number of recent German films about the Nazi period feature female protagonists. Prominent examples include Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999), a lesbian love story about the Jewess Felice and her friend Lily, who, like Maria, is also depicted as the “ideal German woman”; Die Frauen von der Rosenstraße, about Lena, a Gentile married to a Jew, who

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saves her husband’s life and that of a young Jewish girl through her courageous resistance and compassionate love; Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl — The Final Days, Marc Rothemund, 2005), a tribute to Germany’s most famous female resistance fighter who was executed at the age of twenty-one;41 and Anonyma — Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, Max Färberböck, 2008), a historical melodrama that translates the suffering of thousands of German women who were raped by Red Army soldiers into a love story between a young and beautiful German woman and a handsome and noble Soviet officer. In fact, as is suggested by the impressive audience figures for Dresden (Roland Suso Richter, 2006) and Die Flucht (March of Millions, Kai Wessel, 2007),42 two recent television dramas that also treat love affairs between German women and “the enemy,” the conflation of narratives of German victimhood with female suffering and love across the enemy line is proving to be a new and popular formula for German historical imaginaries. Hand in hand with the focus on female subjectivity in these films goes a privatization and a depoliticization of history. This holds true for DEFA’s woman-centered antifascist films as well as for the contemporary historical imaginaries listed above. However, the ideological agendas of the East German and the post-unification films are different. In Die Verlobte and Die Schauspielerin female subjectivity is employed to reappraise critically the state-endorsed antifascist myth of resistance, which had been remembered in DEFA’s antifascist canon with its glorification of male heroism and communist collectivism. By engaging with a specifically female form of resistance, Reisch and Kühn’s films mark a new departure during the 1980s. These films suggest that the self-sacrifice of Hella and Maria is no less heroic or admirable, despite being primarily motivated by heterosexual love and feelings of personal solidarity rather than political credos. Die Verlobte and Die Schauspielerin prioritize emotions over ideology, and yet they eschew the emotional intensity and the visual excess associated with melodrama. The growing number of female-resistance narratives in post-unification cinema has to be seen in the context of the German normalization discourse. According to Aleida Assmann, contemporary popular memory is dominated by a mode of empathetic identification with those who experienced the National Socialist regime as perpetrators, bystanders, or victims.43 Prompted by a generational shift and the reappropriation of history from a new vantage point, the Nazi period is no longer predominantly remembered as a time of evil, shame, and guilt but is gradually being reimagined as a time of suffering and victimhood. Film critic Georg Seeßlen refers to films like Dresden as “national feel-good movies,” because they invite German audiences to reclaim a positive national identity.44 The ingredients of these national feel-good movies are action, in the shape of war and its concomitant disasters, and romance, in the

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shape of a love against all odds. In these historical melodramas German women take center stage, because through their self-sacrifice, suffering, and goodness they are better suited than men to rehabilitate the unified German nation. The good German woman embodies humanity in inhumane times. Her solidarity with the victims of the Nazi regime is based on love. She represents eternal values and virtues that allow her to transcend shifting ideological agendas. That is, perhaps, why an increasing number of filmmakers see the timeless and universal appeal of resistance of the heart as well suited to overcome the ideological divide of East and West German interpretations of fascism and their negotiation on the silver screen.

Notes 1

See Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York and London: Norton, 1996). 2

See Daniela Berghahn, “Post-1990 Screen Memories: How East and West German Cinema Remembers the Third Reich and the Holocaust,” German Life and Letters 59.2 (2006): 294–308. 3

Cited in Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 65. 4

Frank Beyer, Wenn der Wind sich dreht: Meine Filme, mein Leben (Munich: List, 2002), 421–22. All translations are my own.

5

Heiner Müller, cited in Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1996), 318–19. 6

For example, Ulrich Weiß’s film Dein unbekannter Bruder (Your Unknown Brother, 1982) debunks orthodox accounts of heroic communist resistance, tracing its protagonist’s internal conflicts and paralyzing fear.

7

Lissy, alongside the two films discussed in this chapter and Sonjas Rapport (Sonya’s Report, Bernhard Stephan, 1982), about the famous Soviet spy Ruth Werner, are among the few antifascist films that are told from a woman’s point of view. 8

Konrad Wolf, cited in Madina Spoden, “Lissy (1957): Gedanken beim neuerlichen Sehen,” Beiträge zur Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft 31.39 (1990): 29. 9

For the lyrics see http://www.volksliederarchiv.de/text261.html

10

It is noteworthy that Hella has been deceived by a female comrade from within her own communist resistance group and that communism is doubly connoted with treason: on the level of international and interpersonal relations. 11

Except for its name the East German “woman’s film” has nothing in common with what is normally referred to as the woman’s film in the context of Hollywood. It does not subscribe to a melodramatic modality; instead, its aesthetic strategies are firmly grounded in realism. For an extensive discussion of DEFA’s Gegenwartsfilme about women, see Andrea Rinke, Images of Women in East Ger-

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man Cinema, 1972–1982: Socialist Models, Private Dreamers and Rebels (Lewiston, NY and Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen, 2006); and Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005), 175–211. 12 Marc Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1995), 174. 13

Regine Kühn, cited in Christel Gräf, “Waren Ostfrauen wirklich anders? Zur Darstellung von Frauen im DEFA-Gegenwartsfilm,” in Der geteilte Himmel: Höhepunkte des DEFA-Kinos, 1946–1992, vol. 2., ed. Raimund Fritz (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2001), 108. 14

Anon. “Die Geschichte einer großen Liebe,” Filmspiegel 14 (1980): 3–7; Horst Knietzsch, “Stark geblieben durch Liebe und unerschütterliches Vertrauen,” Neues Deutschland, 3 Sept. 1980; Horst Knietzsch, “Das Volk soll von dieser Liebe wissen, sie soll aufbewahrt sein für alle Zeiten,” Neues Deutschland, 27 Aug. 1980. 15 Eva Lippold and Günther Rücker, “Zeit erzählen: Die Verlobte im Dialog mit dem Publikum,” Sonntag, 19 October 1980, 3. 16

For the lyrics see http://ingeb.org/Lieder/wohlheut.html and http://www. scribd.com/doc/6538328/WohlHeuteNochUndMorgen. 17

Thomas C. Fox, Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), 10.

18

Thomas Jung, “Jenseits der Erinnerungspolitik: Oder der schwierige Umgang mit dem Holocaust in der DDR,” in Kulturelle Repräsentationen des Holocaust in Deutschland und den Vereinigten Staaten, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn, Jürgen Fohrmann, and Helmut J. Schneider (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 167–91. 19

For instance, in the wake of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 it was opportune to make Jewish-themed films to maximize their propaganda value. Frank Beyer’s above-mentioned Nackt unter Wölfen, released in 1963, is such a film: it links communist resistance to the emotionally charged theme of hiding and saving the life of a Polish-Jewish child. For a detailed discussion of the film’s checkered production history and the controversies surrounding the Polish-Jewish child, see Fox, Stated Memory, 113; Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall, 87–88; and especially Bill Niven, The Buchenwald Child: Truth, Fiction and Propaganda (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2007). 20

For a detailed account, see Jung “Jenseits der Erinnerungspolitik,” 190.

21

Monika Zimmermann, “Die Schauspielerin und die Politik der DDR,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 Oct. 1988; see Fox, Stated Memory, for a detailed account of the GDR’s shifting political agenda regarding Jews.

22

Judith E. Doneson, “The Image Lingers: The Feminization of the Jew in Schindler’s List,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997), 140–52; here 140. 23

Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, trans. Ladislaus Löb (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005). 24

Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997), 18.

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25

The Jewish Theater in Berlin was part of the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Germany. For the Nazis the Culture League of German Jews functioned as a useful alibi, its existence intended to prove that the Jews were not mistreated. 26

Ellen Blauert, ed., Die Mörder sind unter uns, Ehe im Schatten, Die Buntkarierten, Rotation: Vier Filmerzählungen nach den bekannten DEFA-Filmen (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1969), 143–44. 27

Gertrud Koch, “On the Disappearance of the Dead among the Living: The Holocaust and the Confusion of Identities in the Films of Konrad Wolf,” New German Critique 60 (1993): 57–75; here 68. 28

Notwithstanding its thematic focus on Jewish victimhood, Jakob der Lügner was promoted as an antifascist film, marking the thirtieth anniversary of Germany’s liberation from fascism.

29

Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 73. 30

Seán Allan’s contribution to this volume also engages with anti-essentialist notions of Jewish identity and suggests that in Dani Levy’s films Jewish identity is performed through “an ethical commitment to a particular set of cultural values and practices.” 31

See Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983). 32

This scene too remains ambiguous as to whether Maria/Manja really plans to hang herself or whether she is just acting, since she says in relation to her failed suicide attempt “Ist ‘ne tolle Rolle, nicht?” (That’s a great part, isn’t it?). 33

Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions and Performative Subversions,” in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sarah Salih with Judith Butler (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 90–118; here 114. 34

Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions,” 115.

35

Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 20–21.

36

Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 21.

37

This semantic link is further reinforced in the scene in which Maria visits her Jewish childhood friend, and the grandmother narrates a story about the angel of night enveloping the world in darkness. 38 Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); for a discussion of the alleged racial purity of the Aryan/Caucasian race, see 20–22; for the skin color of Jews, see 11–12 and 53–54. 39

Volker Dahm, “Kulturelles und geistiges Leben,” in Die Juden in Deutschland, 1933–1945: Leben unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Munich: Beck 1996), 75–222; here 115. 40

The last line in Bernard Shaw’s play reads: “I shall go through it to their hearts for ever and ever.” Saint Joan (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1946), 139. By having Manja recite “in das Herz meines Volkes” instead, the final monologue underscores her voluntary affiliation with the Jewish people, who have become “my people.”

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41

For a discussion of these films see Stuart Taberner, “Philo-Semitism in Recent German Film: Aimée und Jaguar, Rosenstraße and Das Wunder von Bern,” German Life and Letters 58.3 (2005), 357–72; Daniela Berghahn, “Sophie Scholl Biopics: Wandel im öffentlichen Gedächtnis einer weiblichen Ikone des Widerstandes,” in Ikonen, Helden, Aussenseiter: Film und Biographie, ed. Manfred Mittermayer, Patric Blaser, Andrea Braidt, and Deborah Holmes (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2009), 105–21; Paul Cooke, “Dresden (2006), TeamWorx and Titanic (1997): German Wartime Suffering as Hollywood Disaster Movie,” German Life and Letters 61.2 (2008): 279–94. 42

According to the films’ production company, teamWorx, the viewing figures for Dresden and Die Flucht were between 12 and 13.5 million. 43

Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit, 192.

44

Georg Seeßlen, “Neue Heimat, alte Helden,” epd Film, Apr. 2008, http:// www.filmzentrale.com/essays/neueheimatgs.htm (accessed 10 Oct. 2009).

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9: Suffering and Sympathy in Volker Schlöndorff’s Der neunte Tag and Dennis Gansel’s NaPolA Brad Prager

W

HETHER WITTINGLY OR UNWITTINGLY, films that depict history play a part in constructing national narratives. Films typically referred to as “heritage films” or “costume dramas” generally rely on presumptions about their audience and therefore about the audience’s collective or national past. The memories created by such films — memories that frequently come to stand in place of experience for audience members who were not witnesses, and even for some who were — tend to overwhelm eyewitness accounts. Most viewers, particularly ones born after 1944, recall events such as D-Day through the lens of war films like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) rather than through accounts based on contemporaneous encounters with newspapers or on eye-witness testimony. Apart from the question of whether memory can ever be unmediated, the question of whether historical narratives may be constructed for a population through cinematic representation is a settled score. This type of history writing through cinema is generally accomplished by way of identification: we are meant to experience the past though film protagonists’ eyes as though we ourselves had been there. The success or failure of heritage films, historical films, or costume dramas is generally predicated on their capacity to inspire an affective connection to the past, yet this generally depends on who is doing the connecting and with whom. Presumptions made along these lines become problematic when one considers the range of different possible forms of connection and identification. Writing specifically about the uses and abuses of Second World War memory — memories of both the war and the Holocaust — Marianna Torgovnick posits the necessity of seeking out an appropriate “middle distance” or “a feeling of spatial, temporal, or emotional connection” with victims of the Second World War.1 She writes a good deal about film in her study, not only because film is a popular medium that reaches many people simultaneously, but also because the very structure of film seems to command strong feelings of identification.

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She describes the middle distance as a standpoint from which the reader or viewer is “not immediately or genealogically connected but connected nonetheless through a pervasive feeling of identification based on a feeling of belonging akin to that of a citizenship” (82). However, she also admonishes us to parse our identifications situation by situation (69) and enjoins us to inquire into who identifies, whether the empathetic “we” in question changes over time, and whether the formation of the “we” can ever accomplish more than simply papering over national wounds. It is noteworthy that Torgovnick associates identification with the suffering of others as a feeling “akin to that of citizenship.” The films under discussion in her work, including Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day (1962), are understood to participate in constructing US identity. However, discourses of world citizenship, or the assertion that regardless of national boundaries we each have the capacity to identify with the suffering subjects depicted on the screen, compete with our inclination to engage in identification from our position as citizens of particular nations. The “we” in the narrative present is typically contrasted with a “we” from the past and then exonerated. The impulse to say that today’s viewers, whether they are British, German, or American, know better, or at least that such viewers may know better now than those who lived at an earlier time, is part of the self-serving, marketable, and comforting notion that the nation has improved. For this reason historical dramas seem unique, though they are hardly unique to any one nation. Of the many films treating the uncomfortable race history of the United States, the television event Roots (1977) was paradigmatic. The NBC miniseries Holocaust (1978), which followed Roots and was patterned on its success, presents a complex case: not only did it participate in the construction of a historical narrative for the nation in which it was produced, but the miniseries managed to cross national boundaries and set the stage for a German discussion about the nation’s past.2 While films do not themselves shape nations, they play a part in determining the direction of national discourse. To borrow from Benedict Anderson: if the nation is a persistent though imaginary form (even in a transnational age), then cinema can be said to work in the service of that imaginative construction.3 Costume dramas of the type in question tend to presuppose their national audience and also bring with them the legitimacy of literary heritage — either because they are adaptations of literature, as is often the case, or because they present themselves as intellectually legitimate through an invocation of literary traditions.4 Though the definition of heritage film is flexible — there were already historical films in the earliest days of cinema — one can describe the generic field. The term is one of convenience, but, more important, it may be historical itself. Andrew Higson notes that something changes for the British costume drama during the 1980s and 1990s — he mentions in particular 1981, when the

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genre was given a “kick-start” by Brideshead Revisited (1981) and Chariots of Fire (1981).5 If this period started, however, it might also one day draw to an end. Lutz Koepnick has taken note of a German trend that overlaps with but is not identical to the British one, and he cites specifically films from the 1990s, including Comedian Harmonists (1997), Gloomy Sunday — Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod (Gloomy Sunday — a Song of Love and Death, 1999), and Aimée & Jaguar (1999).6 There is much to say about the differences between heritage films in Britain, the United States, and Germany. Each comes from a different national cinema tradition, and each national variant has its own generic tendencies. Evidence of this can perhaps be seen in the way a German film such as Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) has departed from the characteristic signatures of the British heritage film. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory would probably not have made a film of this sort. Rather than engaging in nostalgia — at least not deliberately — Der Untergang aimed to show audiences that the image of Hitler could be redeployed, toyed with, and perhaps even worked-through. This broad variation from the standard form only serves to underscore that the so-called “German heritage film” may be viewed as historical. If we take this to be the case, then what can be said to emerge out of the form’s remains? Volker Schlöndorff’s Der neunte Tag (The Ninth Day) and Dennis Gansel’s NaPolA (Before the Fall) appeared in the same year as Der Untergang and likewise represent refigurations of the traditional patterns of heritage cinema. Although these German films present images conforming to what Higson describes as “heritage space” or “a space for the display of heritage properties rather than for the enactment of dramas,”7 and although they are weighted with period-appropriate mises-en-scène, including radio broadcasts and music, these two examples — both of which depict 1942 — address the German past of perpetration differently from the wave of 1990s German heritage films. Most evident is that both films are explorations of wartime suffering, yet both opt not to take Jewish victimhood as their subject. Rather than criticizing these German films for effacing Germany’s Jewish victims, one might aver that their effort to find new ways of triangulating relations of sympathy corresponds to a laudable urge. They adapt and transform the ethics of witnessing as a consequence of their acknowledgment that displays of affect such as generosity, romantic attraction, or pity toward Jewish victims (as in Gloomy Sunday and Aimée & Jaguar) have run their course: they have reached some manner of generic dead end and fail to challenge or provoke. New images must therefore be sought and found. Along these lines, and with reference to the television miniseries Holocaust, Schlöndorff, who was born in 1939, explained to the newspaper Die Welt that he belongs to the generation that had Adorno’s criticism of poetry and art after Auschwitz on their minds. Schlöndorff

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notes that he was fifteen or sixteen when he first saw images from the camps and there were taboos against showing them, but they are by now so overused that they no longer even shock his twelve-year-old daughter. He concludes: “Deshalb müssen wir neue Bilder erfinden: damit sie wieder weh tun” (For this reason we have to find new images — so that they hurt again).8 Schlöndorff ’s formulation is suggestive: film, he asserts, should inflict wounds rather than paper over them. However, can we really expect popular cinema to deny its most convenient and marketable mechanisms? Can heritage film, owing to its origins in the miniseries, its indebtedness to conventions of melodrama, and its need for marketability, be expected to avoid becoming what Koepnick describes as a “theme park” of the past?9 Although the protagonists of both Der neunte Tag and NaPolA endure hardships, they are defined primarily by how they share in the suffering of other victims. In both cases the suffering is embedded in a Christian iconographic tradition such that non-Jewish protagonists take on the suffering of others as though they were Christian martyrs.10 Can such a formula pose challenges to affirmative filmmaking or address a history of atrocity and injustice despite the potential elision of Judaism? While Carol Zemel has rightly been concerned that installing Christological frames around Holocaust stories may lead to Jewish narratives being “reverentially” sealed “into another’s sacralized space,”11 one might simultaneously see these German films as engaged in a struggle to find alternative means for German publics to identify not with victims but as victims. For better or worse, these films aim to depict suffering so that audiences do not say they knew better than the perpetrators but instead are made to confront wartime atrocities by way of sympathy with the victimized bodies on screen, ones presented as proximate to their own. Because of the specific issues involved, and because the Second World War is the subject of Koepnick’s argument, the present inquiry is restricted to films that depict this war. The issue for Koepnick — and the key question for Torgovnick as well — is how the war’s image is used to construct national narratives, and how such films anticipate audience response based on shared acquaintanceship with victimization. Presumed responses are generally cued to how suffering is staged and whether we can understand — whether we sympathize or empathize with — the suffering. The cinematic presumption of a “we” — whether of a “we” who suffered, of a “we” who were victimized, or of a “we” who now know better — is central to Koepnick’s argument insofar as he views the heritage genre in terms of its ability or inability to represent difference. It is therefore of particular significance how such films triangulate: how they connect perpetrators or bystanders with victims, on the one hand, and with the implied or intended (national) audience, on the other.

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One facet of this connection is frequently bound to a form of Semitophilia, such as one finds in Comedian Harmonists and Aimée & Jaguar. German audiences are meant to identify with German protagonists, who are empathizing with Jewish ones, and intimate bonds predicated on experiences of pain and oppression become literalized through close friendships and romance.12 Exploring distinctions between empathy and sympathy, Alison Landsberg posits that sympathy (Mitleid), from sympatheia (to suffer together), may be predicated on an essential mode of identification — the assertion that one’s feelings and those of the “real” victim are identical — and that this sentiment may be contrasted with empathy (Einfühlung), which means that one suffers alongside another, and which starts from a position of difference, thus opening up a transferential space.13 There are indeed different modes of relating; one may be connected to identification and another to the acknowledgment of difference. Der neunte Tag and NaPolA are certainly open to critique insofar as neither film renders memory self-consciously prosthetic, nor does either offer explicit critical engagement with issues of identity. The key question, however, is whether these films succeed in making identification uncomfortable, and whether this discomfort — rooted in a relationship to violence — can combine with the form of the heritage film so that wartime images might wound again. Loosely based on Jean Bernard’s memoir, Schlöndorff’s Der neunte Tag tells a mostly fictional story about a priest held prisoner in Dachau concentration camp.14 The protagonist of Schlöndorff’s film is named Henri Kremer, and many details of the story are conjecture, even though they are inspired by real events. Bernard, a Catholic known for resisting the German occupation of Luxembourg, survived Dachau and wrote his memoir, which resembles a diary, shortly thereafter. The memoir centers on the eighteen months during which he was interred. Starting at the end of 1940 the Nazis had relocated a number of dissident priests from Germany and from occupied countries to Dachau’s so-called Pfarrerblock (priests’ detention). Inspired by an incident dealt with only briefly in the memoir, Schlöndorff concerns himself with the priest’s torment over the course of nine days during the winter of 1942, when he was temporarily released and ordered to convince his superior, the Archbishop of Luxembourg, to sign an oath of fidelity to the Nazis. In the film Kremer is told that if he runs away his family will be deported or killed. Because so little is said about it in the memoir, almost all the details of the nine days are fabricated. In some respects the film broke taboos. Der Untergang, which was released shortly before Der neunte Tag, and which featured Schlöndorff’s lead actor, Ulrich Matthes, in the role of Goebbels, was seen as transgressive owing to its willingness to show Hitler up-close, personal, and played by a German-speaking actor instead of an English one (such as Anthony Hopkins or Alec Guinness). Der neunte Tag was marketed likewise under

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the umbrella of transgression. Many cited it as a rare instance of a German feature film depicting a concentration camp. There are notable exceptions (such as the East German film Nackt unter Wölfen [1963]), yet in the opinions of both journalists and the film’s director, Der neunte Tag broke new ground.15 Speaking to a Protestant publication, Schlöndorff claimed it is cowardly to say that one cannot represent the Holocaust, adding, “Man kann dieses Thema nicht nur Steven Spielberg und den Amerikanern überlassen. Es ist eine Herausforderung, der man sich stellen muss” (One can’t simply leave this to Spielberg and the Americans. It’s a challenge you have to meet).16 Der neunte Tag can in this way be seen as a Holocaust film that relies not only on Holocaust imagery but also on the conscious appropriation of motifs taken from the writings of Primo Levi, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz. Schlöndorff’s story of a nonJewish victim — of a Catholic priest who is tormented and who witnesses the torments of others — draws from the history of Christian iconography as well. To what extent does this synthetic film, a German heritage Holocaust film about a Catholic who was persecuted for religious reasons, reframe approaches to the representation of atrocity and challenge standard modes of identification? The scene of deportation with which Schlöndorff’s film begins resembles those found in numerous feature films about the Holocaust, ones in which masses of victims are depicted in the process of detraining. In its very first moments, Kremer, who is depicted among the mass of bearded deportees, is beaten for responding religiously to a guard — when he hears the phrase, “Gelobt sei Jesus Christus!” (Praised be Jesus Christ!), he responds reflexively, “In Ewigkeit Amen” (In eternity, Amen), and is struck. By beginning with a train, the film picks up where Comedian Harmonists, a more conventional heritage film, left off.17 In this film, which ends in the mid-1930s, the Jewish members of the eponymous singing group board a train to Vienna and continue on to form a new ensemble in exile. Although they were forced to emigrate, their fate did not include the camps. In Der neunte Tag the iconography, the image of the train, is inscribed in terms of its long-standing association with Holocaust imagery. Schlöndorff’s film appears to be willing to depict what has been heretofore avoided on German screens; it means to go where mostly non-German films from Kapo (1959) through Sophie’s Choice (1982) and The Grey Zone (2001) have gone. During the subsequent eleven minutes of the film, those that take place in Dachau, Schlöndorff intercuts black screens with the action, and these interruptions both express the disorientation generally associated with deportation and allude to atrocities that will remain unrepresented. Additionally, many of these initial sequences, though they are not the only ones in the film to do so, employ a process known as step-printing, whereby frames are incorporated more than once in the footage to slow image movement when the film is projected back

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at normal speed.18 The manipulation is meant to reflect the structure of memory — the way memories present themselves as either prolonged or compressed in the imagination. In recalling deportation and attempting to allude to the problems associated with depicting traumatic wartime memories, Schlöndorff relies on a universally recognizable iconography of Holocaust cinema.19 Attempting to communicate from the position of the Holocaust witness, Schlöndorff sutures the viewer to Kremer’s gaze. The suturing through a traditional use of shot and reverse-shot is particularly pronounced in an early sequence in Dachau, during which Kremer watches a fellow prisoner crucified by the guards. The composition draws on traditional Christological images, yet Schlöndorff incorporates a window frame to remind us that we are seeing things from the perspective of a helpless onlooker. Kremer can bear witness but not intervene; he sees through the window but is prevented from taking action. The glass permits him to witness, but prevents him from providing aid and comfort. This window is not a reminder that we are trespassing into private space, but is instead a means of underscoring that the scene of brutality takes place near to but not upon the protagonist’s own body. We are sutured to Kremer, who has himself been physically victimized — we see him repeatedly struck by the brutal guards — and who is also victimized in proximity to those others whom Primo Levi, himself a survivor, would refer to as the “true victims,” the ones who died in the camps, who cannot speak for themselves.20 The division points to the fact that Kremer wants to speak for and act on behalf of the victims, yet he cannot. The pain is shared in that he strongly identifies with his fellow priests, yet the victim’s pain is exclusively the victim’s own. Kremer’s desire to bear their pain for them — to suffer on their behalf — is underscored at a later point in the film, when, during his temporary release, he attempts to explain what he has seen to the Archbishop of Luxembourg. He finds himself stating that the burden of the camp victims is no metaphor and adds the force of literalness to his observation, exclaiming: “Meine Brüder tragen in Dachau das Kreuz! Das ist keine Metapher. Sie tragen das Kreuz!” (My brothers in Dachau are bearing the cross. This is no metaphor. They bear the cross!). This scene of crucifixion is one among many Christological images in the film. Der neunte Tag functions as a Catholic analogue to the similarly successful Protestant-oriented film Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005), which dwells long on the implication that its eponymous protagonist’s spirit is bound for heaven (see Clarke’s commentary on this film in this volume). Despite the fact that Schlöndorff’s film is religiously minded, it is not intended to exonerate the church from charges of complicity. The film alludes directly and indirectly to the church’s problematic position — that Pius XII remained neutral for too long. Its Christianity, however, is forcefully underscored through its

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Fig. 9.1. The deportation. From Der neunte Tag (2004). DVD capture.

Fig. 9.2. Henri Kremer watches a fellow prisoner crucified by guards in Der neunte Tag (2004). Sequence is left to right, top to bottom. DVD capture.

imagery, which repeatedly depicts Kremer as a Christ figure. At times Christ is clearly evoked, as when Kremer’s sister Marie washes his scabbed and swollen feet. Not only is Christ called to mind, but so too is Judas. Kremer is in a situation where he feels he must choose between becoming a martyr in the name of his Christian ideals or becoming their betrayer. The film’s iconography echoes his inner conflict. Following its opening sequences, the film steers away from Dachau. Much of the subsequent narrative centers on an even-tempered theological

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debate, one recalling the discourse of Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy, 1963), which directly accused Pius XII of having taken no action to prevent the Holocaust. Many significant exchanges in the film thus take place not in the camps but in the relatively calm setting of the Villa Pauly, Gestapo headquarters in Luxembourg from 1940 to 1944. Gebhardt, the SS-officer who has arranged for Kremer’s furlough, claims to have theological interests of his own — he was once close to having become a priest himself — and in this way they are presented as two sides of a coin, a point Schlöndorff often underscores by placing one character in the foreground and the other in the background. They appear as one another’s shadowy double. It turns out that Gebhardt is also under pressure: he fears he will be sent to an undesirable post at the Eastern Front if Kremer fails to cooperate. The parallel between the figures — both are caught in difficult positions and can thus sympathize with one another — treads the path warned against by Primo Levi in his reflections on the concept of the “grey zone.” Referring to Liliana Cavani’s film Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), though without naming it, Levi observes that “the mimesis, this identification or imitation, or exchange of roles between oppressor and victim, has provoked much discussion. True and invented, disturbing and banal, acute and stupid things have been said: it is not virgin terrain; on the contrary it is a badly ploughed field, trampled and torn up” (48). As concerns parallels of this sort, Levi adds the cautionary remark that to confuse the murderers with their victims is “a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth” (49). If Kremer is seen as a stand-in for the victims of the camps, then introducing Gebhardt as his double risks leveling important differences between perpetrators and victims. The consequence would not be to deny that all humans have evil within them, which is surely true, but rather to note that one runs the risk of eliding key issues where culpability is concerned. Levi did not want viewers of Cavani’s film and others like it to forgive on the basis of moral relativism without having understood that in his writing he was depicting a moral universe where everyday rules did not apply. Along these lines Gebhardt, the amateur theologian and Nazi, introduces the idea that Jesus and Judas can be regarded as twins who need each other. However, the two are not intended to stand for Kremer and Gebhardt but rather for the twin aspects of the stark choice with which Kremer is faced: martyrdom or a betrayal of historical proportions. Through his academic logic Gebhardt hopes to help Kremer rationalize the abandonment of his values. Gebhardt explores Judas’s role and appeals to Kremer’s own desire to become a man of action, to behave ethically, saying: “Judas war ein Tatmensch. Er wollte etwas bewirken. Er sah in Jesus seinen weltlichen Führer. Aber Gott gab ihm einen anderen Auftrag. . . . Ohne Judas keine Kreuzigung. Ohne Kreuzigung keine Erfüllung des göttlichen

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Willens” (Judas was a man of action. He wanted to have an effect. He saw in Jesus his earthly leader, but God gave him another task. . . . Without Judas, no crucifixion. Without the crucifixion, no fulfillment of the divine plan). Within the film’s logic the form of action proposed by Gebhardt contradicts the response called for by Kremer’s experience of witnessing. At Dachau he was witness to real rather than abstract suffering; what has been seen cannot be unseen, nor can it be rationalized. It is neither a metaphor, nor can it be made the topic of rhetorical and academic argument. The action Kremer takes is thus to resist, based on his personal proximity to and identification with the sufferings of others. While Der neunte Tag is in this way concerned with New Testament discussions, Primo Levi’s writings are later introduced into the film as a different sort of source text. On the fifth day of Kremer’s temporary release we hear the body of a letter he has written to his mother describing his experience of thirst in the camp. The story appears to us in pieces, step-printed and over-exposed, perhaps to suggest that its structure is similar to that of traumatic memory and that Kremer would have difficulty narrating it all at once. As Schlöndorff acknowledges on the DVD commentary, the story is lifted from Primo Levi’s writings. In the chapter “Shame” Levi tells a story about his discovery of a drainpipe that was leaking a small amount of water and how he chose to share this meager treasure with one person, though not with others. He writes about the overwhelming guilt he felt toward another prisoner, considers the shame he feels about having been compelled to act selfishly in such circumstances, the fact that conditions in the camp called for such behavior, and the difficulty of living with the decisions afterward — it was nearly impossible even to speak of such things after the fact. Similarly, in the film, which in this moment becomes an adaptation of Levi’s memoir as much as it is an adaptation of Bernard’s, Kremer finds a trickle of water and chooses not to share it with Professor Nansen, a theology professor from Olso. Kremer is overwhelmed with guilt when Nansen subsequently throws himself into the electrified fence. He concludes his confessional letter: “Jeden Schritt, den ich gehe, gehe ich auf seiner Asche” (Every step I take is upon his ashes). Though the film borrows from Levi, it eventually circles back to its Christian themes: Kremer grasps the importance of martyrdom and learns that he must become a victim himself so that others may draw an example from his victimization. Through the bishop’s secretary Kremer comes to understand that Gebhardt has also witnessed the death camps. He is told in confidence that Gebhardt was in a camp in the East, “zu Demonstrationszwecken” (for purposes of demonstration). The secretary adds: “Als ich ihn gefragt habe, was er da gemacht habe, antwortete er: ‘Nichts. Aber ich habe gesehen’” (When I asked him what he did there, he answered: “Nothing. But I saw”). The knowledge that Gebhardt may have actually

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witnessed suffering (“I saw”) inspires Kremer to action — not from fear, but in accord with his conscience. He has faith in the principle that witnessing yields sympathy and that what is true for him will be true for Gebhardt as well: the sight of suffering cannot be denied. He gives Gebhardt a blank sheet instead of the letter he has been demanding and follows up by asking him the question that could serve as the film’s epigraph: “Was kann ein Täter von seinem Opfer wollen? Nach der Tat. . . . Was haben Sie in diesen Lagern im Osten gesehen?” (What can a perpetrator want from his victim after the crime? . . . What did you see in those camps in the East?). His question can be understood both in Christian terms of forgiveness — Kremer knows that Gebhardt seeks to confess and be absolved21 — but also with respect to the power of witnessing in relation to identification. It functions as an allegory for the very terms by which the film means to convince: the dead make an ethical demand on the living, and when suffering and acts of violence are witnessed, they cannot be rationalized away. At the film’s conclusion, on the ninth day, Kremer returns to the camp. He shares with the other priests, his fellow prisoners, a sausage he has smuggled in. The scene is plainly meant to recall The Last Supper. We learn from the subsequent epigraph that the real figure, Bernard, survived Dachau. (He died in 1994 at the age of 87.22) On the one hand this is a Holocaust story, which is unusual enough for German cinema, yet it also appropriates a Jewish author’s narrative in order to legitimate itself. One may not wish to rigorously reject the film’s language of suture and identification based purely on identity politics — to ask merely: “Where are the Jews?” Aside from Levi’s quiet influence, they are indeed hardly to be seen. It may, however, be worthwhile to ask whether this film’s depictions are challenging and potentially more honest than the sanitized ones typical of heritage films, ones that depict harmonious relationships between Germans and Jews and that generally end on a note of reconciliation. Schlöndorff’s film, taken on its own Christian, martyrological terms, means to resensitize its audience to brutal pain as a pathway back to understanding. Perhaps German cinema, tired of the constraints of the heritage genre, cast about for different depictions of suffering whereby ethics — predicated on the personal proximity to a physical violence that had been heretofore only alluded to — could again find their way into the equation. Appearing in the same year as Der neunte Tag and Der Untergang, NaPolA deals with a boy educated and indoctrinated at a National Political Boys Academy, called a nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt or a “NaPolA,” in 1942. The film presents the sympathetic portrait of a young man who dissented from the party’s teachings at his ideological boys’ academy. He learns to reject the Nazis through sympathizing with victims of their abuse. As the compassionate portrait of a young man who dissented, one could argue that the film is geared toward letting German

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viewers off the hook: it exonerates German audiences by portraying a young German man of conscience, who, like the “we” watching the film, knows better than his ideological peers. Matters are, however, more complicated. Although NaPolA is drawn to its own depiction of fascism and also constructs its victims with an eye to Christian motifs, the film, like Der neunte Tag, uses physical violence to provoke sensations of sympathy for the suffering victims and then mobilizes those sensations as a basis for its martyrological ethics. Gansel’s film was criticized for being fascinated with its fascist subject.23 Fascism indeed appears fascinating in this film: Party uniforms are fetishized, and the castle in which the school is found is without a doubt fairy-tale like. The film’s protagonist, Friedrich Weimer, is offered a fellowship to attend the elite NaPolA school in Allenstein (now Olsztyn, in Poland) because of his blonde hair and his skills as a boxer. He is the son of a laborer from Berlin, one who appears to be either a leftist or simply in disagreement with the Nazi party. We are told that this is Berlin-Wedding in 1942, which is no coincidence, since it was the stronghold of the labor movement, also known as “Red Wedding” from the era of the Weimar Republic up through the war. Friedrich sees this as an opportunity to get away from shoveling coal, and he leaves home to attend the Nazi boarding school in spite of his family’s protestations. Both formally and metaphorically he moves from the darkness of his Wedding boxing club into the bright open spaces of the countryside institution. The boxing coach and recruiter who trains Friedrich exudes a warm paternalism meant to contrast sharply with the image of the disciplining father. The coach provides him with positive reinforcement, which only increases his resistance to the authoritarian behavior he encounters at home, where his father tells him in no uncertain terms that he will not be allowed to attend the NaPolA. When Friedrich arrives there, however, he experiences pleasure in his new identity, mainly in wearing the uniform, and he admires the person he is becoming, all of which is underscored by the many shots of him assessing himself in the mirror. In transition sequences we see him learning medieval German poetry, Nazi-inflected biology, and even Nazi mathematics. The film will of course later reveal all of this confidence-building self-esteem as illusory and unmask the institution’s civility as brutality — all except for his relationship with Albrecht Stein, the regional Gauleiter’s son, who has a misunderstood, poetic soul. Their close friendship, with its homoerotic elements, deliberately evokes the Romantic literary tradition. Friedrich’s experiences in the boxing ring are central to the film’s triangulation of suffering and the way the viewer witnesses how violence itself may be witnessed. A properly trained boxer, Friedrich learns, has no sympathy for his opponent. Boxing becomes a metaphor for his ideological indoctrination and for his abilities as a soldier: he is told that he must

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act mercilessly if he is to fight and that he must forget every humane instinct. When he boxes, trainers and other students cheer for him in bloodthirsty tones. On the verge of his first big victory at the NaPolA, the film cuts quickly from one face to another while the students yell: “Mach ihn fertig!” (Finish him off!). Friedrich’s bloodlust is awakened — looking directly into the eyes of his opponent, he makes a choice in favor of mercilessness. In this first major match at the NaPolA, blood flows from his own mouth, and the crowd encourages him through to the fight’s conclusion. Albrecht, however, watching from the sidelines, is visibly disappointed that his friend had not realized that there was in fact another kind of victory that could have been achieved, one that could have come from saying no to violence. His friend’s reaction to Friedrich’s victory is to remind him that sympathy (specifically Mitleid) would have been the better way. While Friedrich learns about victory, he also sees the lack of sympathy made manifest at the school. The character shown the least mercy is Siegfried Gladen, the NaPolA’s resident bed-wetter. After one incident Siegfried is made to hold his wet mattress over his head in the courtyard, and Friedrich is informed: “Kein Mitleid. . . . Nur so kann er’s lernen” (No pity. . . . That’s the only way he’ll learn). However, when one of the students drops a hand grenade during a training exercise, it is Siegfried, the bed wetter, who throws himself upon it. In the ensuing exchange of gazes, Gansel’s film underscores a mode of ethical relationship. The faces of suffering “victims” — whether they belong to Albrecht, the poetic soul, Siegfried, the object of ridicule, or Friedrich’s opponent in the boxing ring — are all meant to demand that Friedrich do something, that he act to prevent further suffering. Here, as in Der neunte Tag, the question is whether witnessing violence will turn the perpetrator (der Täter) into an ethical person of action (ein Tatmensch). One cannot see such faces, these films suggest, without being compelled to act. Something appears to be communicated through the relation with a suffering neighbor, and the relationship comes to light during the face-to-face encounter. The martyrological injunction — according to the logic of the film — is not “save me,” but rather “do as I do.” Friedrich does not at first recognize what he sees in Siegfried and greets his expression with horror. Siegfried can only return his gaze. Friedrich sees his sacrifice, his willingness to martyr himself, an act that prefigures Albrecht’s later martyrdom and that creates new knowledge in Friedrich. Subsequently, at a birthday party for the Gauleiter, Albrecht’s father, it becomes clear that Friedrich’s accomplishments as a boxer are prized above Albrecht’s sensitivity of soul. Albrecht first tries to read a poem to his father and is humiliatingly interrupted. Drunken officers then lead the two young men down to a basement boxing ring, and the film is suddenly bathed in red light as Friedrich and Albrecht are forced to fight each

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Fig. 9.3. Siegfried throws himself on a grenade as Friedrich watches in NaPolA (2004). DVD capture.

other. Viewers familiar with Holocaust cinema might here think of the American made film Triumph of the Spirit (1989), about a Greek Jew forced to box in order to stay alive in the camps, rather than Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), to which NaPolA has been more frequently compared. The red light, whether it is spillage from the red flags associated with the Nazi party and hanging everywhere in the castle at Allenstein, whether it is meant to recall the blood that comes from the fight, or whether it is simply intended to call to mind an image of hell, contrasts sharply with the bloodless whites and cool blues associated with the literal and metaphoric winter that pervades the remainder of the film. Friedrich’s next awakening comes as the young soldiers-to-be hunt escaped Russian prisoners in the snow. They are informed that a transport

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has caught fire and that a dozen Russians have fled into the woods and are likely armed. Because the students know the local woods, they are sent after them. They have been told that they are chasing enemy soldiers but later realize they have been made to shoot and kill youngsters who, significantly enough, resemble themselves. Looking at the dying Russians seems, especially for the poetic Albrecht, like looking into a mirror. He wants badly to be “seen” and understood as a sympathetic soul, and the inability of the others at the NaPolA to “see” him reflects a general inability to sympathize. Albrecht tries to bind the wounds of a Russian who can only utter the word “spasiba.” He tries to provide reassurance, but he cannot save him. Albrecht feels guilty for the role he has played, for not having done enough to save the Russian, and for his father’s part in ordering this crime. His guilt leads him to imagine that he is being admonished — an admonishment that takes place in Friedrich’s gaze. The wintry landscape takes center stage in the film’s final act. In one of the last sequences Albrecht commits suicide beneath the surface of an icy pond. The student recruits have been brought outside for a morning exercise: they are to swim in freezing water, into one ice hole and out the next. The scene is bathed in cool blues, which underscores the coldness and lack of sympathy in all corners of this wintry world. Friedrich completes the task, but when it is Albrecht’s turn he drowns. The film leaves little ambiguity that this has been a suicide, the goal of which seems to have been to communicate the merits of non-violent dissent to Friedrich, who tries to save him. The camera lingers on both their faces; we watch Albrecht watch Friedrich and Friedrich watch Albrecht, as the latter descends into the watery depths. Where a glass pane stood between Kremer and his fellow priest who was being crucified in Der neunte Tag, the film here removes the surface between the boys. From both sides of the ice they appear to see one another, and although the ice is opaque, and Albrecht descends into darkness, the editing conjoins their gazes. Critic Dieter Kuhlbrot accuses the film of aestheticizing Albrecht’s suicide. He argues that Gansel makes an art project (Kunstgewerbe) of the scene, and points out that the director films through the pond’s surface in a painterly composition. Kuhlbrot adds facetiously: “Schön anzusehen ist es, wie [Albrecht] sein Leben aushaucht, aber ein wenig traurig” (It is beautiful to watch how Albrecht breathes his last breath, but it’s a little sad too).24 Though he is deriding the film, the observation is provocative. As Albrecht dies, he can no longer return Friedrich’s gaze. We are left identifying with Friedrich, asking how one responds to the martyr’s ethical call. With what responsibility did the dying Albrecht leave Friedrich, and what behavior — what action — will show that he has internalized the demand? The lesson Friedrich has taken from Albrecht expresses itself in his unwillingness to win the film’s final boxing match at a big tournament

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Fig. 9.4. Friedrich struggles to save Albrecht from descending into watery depths in NaPolA (2004). Sequence is left to right, top to bottom. DVD capture.

against a boxer from a rival NaPolA, one who appeared earlier, in the first minutes of the film. Friedrich deliberately lets down his guard in the ring and allows himself to be subjected to a beating for which he is thrown out of school, as Albrecht had been before him. He begins the fight well, but upon realizing that he is playing a part in victimizing others, he surrenders. As in Der neunte Tag, the protagonist chooses to be physically victimized rather than make a morally compromised choice. This is not to compare the violence of the camps to the pressures of the boys’ academy, but rather to draw a parallel: in the face of witnessing violence Friedrich, like Schlöndorff’s protagonist, would rather become the victim so that others learn to see brutality. He does not die alongside other victims — Friedrich is only forced to leave the school — but the film makes the point that witnessing bloodshed changes one’s relation to it. Both films express the belief that bearing witness to martyrdom can compel an act of self-sacrifice; they show faith that those who saw and truly understood violence, in the East and elsewhere, could not rationalize what they had seen. These films’ portraits of sympathy and suffering do not bespeak an engagement with the concept of cultural difference. In both cases only the

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suffering of the victim who is like the self, the proximate body, matters. In this regard Der neunte Tag and NaPolA are open not only to the criticism that they exonerate today’s Germans for knowing better than their forebears but also that they turn away from the heart of the matter, which is how one identifies with the suffering of persons unlike oneself — someone who is not a family member, a fellow priest, or the teenage heartbreaker at boarding school. But to what extent is it possible for today’s Germans, those who were not perpetrators and who had nothing to do with the sufferings of Primo Levi and others, to understand them? In light of such questions, it may be preferable for German heritage films to veer away from empathetic relations of pity, condescension, and paternalism in relation to their Jewish figures. Although one finds direct and indirect references to Primo Levi’s chapters, “The Grey Zone” and “Shame,” in Der neunte Tag, these may be less important for coming to terms with the film and with NaPolA than Levi’s later chapter entitled “Letters from Germans.” In this chapter he writes about his own introduction to the German translation of Survival in Auschwitz. He explains how he found himself uncomfortable with having his experiences as a victim represented to Germans and in the German language. The introduction contains a challenge, one that recalls the question key to Der neunte Tag (“Was kann ein Täter von seinem Opfer wollen? Nach der Tat. . . .”). Levi writes: I cannot say I understand the Germans: now, something one cannot understand constitutes a painful void, a puncture, a permanent stimulus that insists on being satisfied. I hope that this book will have some echo in Germany . . . because the nature of this echo will perhaps make it possible for me to better understand the Germans, placate this stimulus. (143)

After his work was published, Levi reluctantly engaged in dialogue with several of his German readers, but he always entered the dialogue with trepidation. He was willing to learn from his interlocutors, but he kept them at a distance. Levi always felt misunderstood by “H.L.,” a student from Bavaria. He describes her idea of him as one caught “between documentary seriousness” and “childish fantasy.” She tells him that she would like to sew a suit for him, “like those donned by the heroes of legend, a suit that will protect you from all the world’s dangers.” Of her sentiment — of the apparent generosity and pity directed toward him — Levi writes: “I could not recognize myself in this image” (157). He then receives from her a pair of gold cuff links, which irritates him, though he does not have the heart to return them. His considerations of the problems that attend communication of this kind evoke a persistent issue pertaining to representation. Who are meant to recognize themselves in these films’ images, and to what extent is it worthwhile to work within rather

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than against the limitations? Only after one acknowledges the constraints of the medium — that is, that directors like Schlöndorff and Gansel may be working in a genre that tends toward nationalism and that is unlikely to surrender its claim on marketability as well as its reliance on certain tropes of identification — can one begin to explore the scope of these films’ provocations.

Notes 1

Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), xv–xvi. Further references to this work are given in the text using the page numbers alone. 2

On the reception of the Holocaust television miniseries in Germany, see Jeffrey Herf, “The ‘Holocaust’ Reception in West Germany: Right, Center and Left,” New German Critique 19 (1980): 30–52, and Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama,” New German Critique 19 (1980): 117–36. 3

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991; repr., London and New York: Verso, 1996).

4

Andrew Higson writes that many of the films he explores are adaptations and that literary source material is “an important selling point.” Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), esp. 16–20. 5

Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 15. Higson asks whether heritage cinema should be labeled a genre. Inquiring into the characteristics of “a range of ‘British’ films produced in the 1980s and 1990s,” he concludes somewhat tepidly that the label is merely serviceable; he only “need[ed] to be able to give those films a name” (10). 6

Lutz Koepnick, “Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and Holocaust in the 1990s,” New German Critique 87 (2002): 47–82. Koepnick makes a similar point in “Amerika gibt’s überhaupt nicht: Notes on the German Heritage Film,” in German Pop Culture: How American Is It? ed. Agnes C. Mueller (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004), 191–208. Additionally, Adam Muller expands the field of such films to account for a nostalgic urge that would include even Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). Muller, “Notes toward a Theory of Nostalgia: Childhood and the Evocation of the Past in Two European ‘Heritage’ Films,” New Literary History 37.4 (2006): 739–60. 7

Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema, 39.

8

Peter Zander, “Wir müssen Bilder erfinden, die weh tun,” interview with Volker Schlöndorff, Die Welt, 8 Nov. 2004. Also published as “Bilder müssen weh tun,” Berliner Morgenpost, 9 Nov. 2004. 9

Koepnick, “Reframing the Past,” 78.

10

David Clarke views this as part of a long tradition in postwar German cinema. See his contribution in this volume.

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11

Carol Zemel, “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003), 201–19; here 217. 12

In many of these films, as Koepnick points out, the Jews become lovers, or the ones worth risking one’s life for. In such films romantic love is a means of eliding differences. He writes that films such as Comedian Harmonists, Viehjud Levi (1998), Aimée & Jaguar, and Gloomy Sunday, “recall modern German history as one of contested identities, as a space of competing initiatives embedded in the nation’s larger narrative.” He concludes that in this way, they “forgo the possibility of reconsidering dominant concepts of ethnic belonging. Often depicting romantic love as the model for understanding historical dynamics, they provide a new image of German-Jewish consensus detached from any traumatic memory of the Shoah” (Koepnick, “Reframing the Past,” 58–59). 13

Alison Landsberg, “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy,” New German Critique 71 (1997): 63–86; here 82. 14

See Jean Bernard, Pfarrerblock 25487: Dachau, 1941–42 (1945; repr., Luxemburg: Sankt-Paulus-Druckerei A.G., 1987). 15

See Christiane Peitz, “Ende des Bildertabus,” Tagesspiegel, 7 Aug. 2004, and Fritz Göttler, “Das Bild des Judas,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11 Nov. 2004. Göttler notes: “Bilder aus dem Lager, aus der Tabuzone der Darstellbarkeit — Schlöndorff weiß um die Probleme, die Filmemacher von Lanzmann bis Spielberg peinigten” (Images from the camp, from the taboo zone of representability — Schlöndorff knows about the problems that afflicted filmmakers from Lanzmann to Spielberg). 16

Christian Buss, “Volker Schlöndorff: ‘Das Thema Holocaust darf man nicht Spielberg allein überlassen,’” interview with Volker Schlöndorff, chrismon: Das evangelische Magazin, Aug. 2004. 17

On the final shot of The Comedian Harmonists, see Lutz Koepnick, “‘Honor Your German Masters’: History, Memory, and National Identity in Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1997),” in Light Motives: German Popular Cinema in Perspective, ed. Randall Halle and Margaret McCarthy (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003), 349–75; here 363. 18 On this process see Franz Günther Weyrich in Filmbegleitheft: Der neunte Tag; Ein Film von Volker Schlöndorff (Munich: Bernhard Wicki Gedächtnis Fonds e.V., 2004), esp. 35–36. 19

Karsten Visarius, refers to Shoah as a reference point for the iconography of trains and deportations. See his “What Can the Criminal Want after the Crime? Volker Schlöndorff’s Ninth Day,” New German Critique 102 (2007): 87–100, esp. 89–90. 20

I am referring to Levi’s self-reflective observation in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1988) that “we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses” (83). Further references to this work are given in the text using the page numbers alone.

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21

In this respect it is, however, consistent with the foreword to Bernard’s memoir (Pfarrerblock 25487). Bernard writes (10): “Aber verzeihen müssen wir. Und zwar bewußt verzeihen, Aug’ in Auge mit dem ganzen Horror des Geschehenen. Nicht nur, weil sich auf Haß nichts aufbauen läßt: kein neues Europa und keine neue Welt. Sondern vor allem Dem zu Gebot und zulieb, vor Dem wir selbst, Opfer und Henker, nur rechtlos armselige Schuldner sind” (But we must forgive. And consciously forgive, facing the whole horror of what happened. Not only because nothing can be built on hate: no new Europe and no new world. But rather especially in respect of and for the sake of Him before whom we ourselves, victims and executioners, are mere miserable debtors without rights). 22

Dieter Kuhlbrot, Deutsches Filmwunder: Nazis immer besser (Hamburg: Konkret, 2006), 142–43, points out that Bernard, the real Kremer, was not a martyr, as he would appear to be in the film. Kuhlbrot chides Der neunte Tag for its poor relation to the truth, noting that the bishops in question were always obligated to swear fidelity to the Reich, that the real Bernard was permanently released some weeks after his return to Dachau, and that two years later he edited the Luxemburger Wort, which is not the impression one would have from the film. 23

Hans Günther Pflaum wrote that Gansel had made an “Internatsfilm” (a traditional boys’ school film) with history as a backdrop, and that his main character’s farewell to his Nazi boys’ school had “den irritierenden Beigeschmack einer Vertreibung aus dem Paradies” (the irritating aftertaste of a banishment from paradise); “Härtetest der Geschichte,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 Jan. 2005. The Frankfurter Rundschau, however, redeemed Gansel’s fascination with the order of fascism by concluding that he had adopted Leni Riefenstahl’s style in order to challenge his audience; Michael Kohler, “Riefenstahl als Lackmustest: Dennis Gansels Film Napola,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 13 Jan. 2005: FR: PLUS Kultur, 28. 24

Kuhlbrot, Nazis immer besser, 176–77.

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IV. Split Screens: Ambiguous Authorities, Decentered Emotions, Performed Identities

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10: Eberhard Fechner’s History of Suffering: TV Talk, Temporal Distance, Spatial Displacement John E. Davidson

T

two general aims: to reintroduce Eberhard Fechner as an important filmmaker and oral historian from the era that roughly corresponds to the New German Cinema and to think about the problem of “identification” in new ways. Guido Knopp claims that depictions of the suffering inflicted and experienced by Germans in the middle of the twentieth century have led to a standoff between the two extremes of “Trauerarbeit” (work of mourning) and “Identitätsfindung” (search for identity) that mark the history of television practice and theory in the Federal Republic.1 Rather than a decisionist choice between more “aestheticist” or more “realistic” material, these poles offer the critic a productive tension. Having elsewhere discussed this tension in feature films from the 1990s,2 I consider it here in relation to television, history, and cultural memory. After briefly staking out the claims of Saul Friedländer and Michael Geisler as representatives of the two positions needing negotiation, as well as Robert Rosenstone’s elaboration of historians’ concerns about history and movies, I develop a medium-specific approach to television that allows us to better understand the possibilities of different generic approaches to the past. Understanding the role of the “oral” within the pre-digital televisual medium in the FRG will open up an approach to the way “history” is constructed in Der Prozess — Eine Darstellung des Majdanek-Verfahrens in Düsseldorf (The Trial — A Presentation of the Majdanek Proceedings in Dusseldorf, 1984). In this three-part film made specifically for television, Fechner offers a particularly apt and critical entrance into enactments of cultural memory construed through a discourse about suffering rather than a depiction of it. This entrance, I will argue, is enabled by shifting the pursuit of historical suffering away from attempts to transform an internal subjective state into a temporal and spatial constellation marked by the insoluble tensions between “there and then” and “here and now” inherent in television aesthetics. HIS ESSAY HAS

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Work on Mourning and Identification Before turning to television studies to help map out those tensions, I note that ideas of temporal distance and spatial displacement have often arisen in debates on the appropriate representation of German history. Saul Friedländer might well be adduced as a voice representing the “Trauerarbeit” side of the scheme. His extended essay, Reflections of Nazism,3 along with his other work on the period, takes to task various texts dealing with Germany’s crimes because, on the one hand, realistic narrative cannot hope to deal with this topic and, on the other, aestheticization (almost) always runs afoul of the “moral imperative.”4 With perhaps one exception neither the New German Cinema’s features nor its documentaries brought forth a “confrontation” with the past that was a “success.”5 But, to his great credit as a historian, Friedländer recognizes the potential of aesthetic texts, and he notes that some works (such as Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah) have a kind of “relative ‘adequacy’” in representing the Holocaust. They are marked by “an allusive or distanced realism” in which “reality is there, in its starkness, but perceived through a filter” constituted by temporal distance and spatial displacement from the actual historical events.6 Here Friedländer shares the belief held firmly by many in the intellectual community outside his discipline that art is indispensable to giving form to the shapes of memory, as well as a healthy suspicion of whether factual history alone is adequate to this end. My concern in this essay is the question of such allusive and distanced realism in works made for and viewed on television, clearly a medium that did as much to shape cultural memory in the late twentieth century as any other.7 Though Friedländer states a preference for “almost any honest eyewitness account of the Holocaust” over fictional forms,8 it is somewhat surprising that the documentaries of the New German Cinema period fare no better in his judgment, since in his account the only real “success[es]” are too narrow or come from abroad.9 Eberhard Fechner’s body of work seems to pose the need to explore and complicate this claim, in part because he recognizes that “eyewitness testimony” is among the most slippery of evidentiary models both in jurisprudence and in documentary. This is fine, because “Der Künstler soll nicht richten, sondern nur leidenschaftsloser Zeuge sein!” (The artist should not pass judgment, but rather be only a dispassionate witness).10 Precisely because Fechner disavows the grand gesture of verdicts in the culminating moments of his films, the eyewitness accounts he presents of suffering caused by and experienced by Germans function as “equivalent” moments in new relationships between victims and perpetrators, offered as evidence for the viewer to evaluate. While this was perhaps not the kind of success Friedländer sought, Fechner’s techniques made him one of the few documentary directors from West Germany who received significant attention. His works evoked a broad journalistic response upon

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release, and his death in 1992 occasioned a number of well-considered pieces looking back at his accomplishments.11 A self-described pioneer of “oral history,” Fechner worked almost exclusively for television, and the subject upon which he chose to train his lens and microphone most often was the history of the Third Reich as told by different figures who had experienced it in — or as — the formative years of their lives. For example, Klassenfoto — Erinnerungen deutscher Bürger (Class Photo — Memories of German Citizens, 1971) traces the fate of a petty bourgeois Gymnasium class from Berlin-Wedding graduating in 1933. Comedian Harmonists — Sechs Lebensläufe (Comedian Harmonists — Six Life Stories, 1976) allows the surviving members of one of the world’s most successful singing groups to tell of the group’s rise, their forced division under the Nazis’ racial policies, and the aftermath. By juxtaposing historical material with different individual memories of that past, Fechner creates an image of the personal, artistic, and political stakes in that history. La Paloma (1989, produced 1978) uses similar techniques to catalogue the story of a merchant ship that saw action in the imperial period, the First World War, the Nazi era, and beyond through the memories of seamen who worked her. Anton Kaes compared Der Prozess, Fechner’s monumental documentation of the Majdanek trial, to Lanzmann’s undertaking in Shoah.12 This assessment could well apply to most of his work, which Fechner himself saw as one large project rather than discrete undertakings. But the methods he employed, while arising, according to his own account, from intense engagement with the material itself, are markedly different from Lanzmann’s more elegiac filmic presentation or, for that matter, more recent television documentaries on space and memory by documentarists like Volker Koepp.13 Fechner’s approach to television in his work from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s offers avenues for a critical coming to terms with the past within the aesthetic range of that medium, not because it reduces itself to the delivery of information or invites a pseudo-cinematic identification, but because it deploys a reflexive aesthetic of distanced realism by interrogating the sequencing and repetition vital to the medium itself. This is not to be confused with Michael Geisler’s claim that the famed success of the original television event in Germany, Gerald Green and Marvin J. Chomsky’s Holocaust (1978), should be attributed to its deployment of television’s aesthetic properties and reception practices.14 Geisler argues that this melodramatic narrative viewed in separate installments over 470 minutes is embedded in “everyday life (especially just before 1933) and [affords access to] the psychology of the perpetrators,” because television narrative is “inextricably intertwined with its mode of reception” (234). Contrary to the claim of total closure in television narrative arising from theory influenced by the Frankfurt School, Geisler holds that television is actually “singularly unconducive

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to passive reception” (233). Unlike cinema, which is experienced in a state separated from “‘paramount reality’ . . . television watching intersects with that reality construct” (234).15 In some ways anticipating more current ideas about “prosthetic memory,”16 he claims that television’s call to “identification” and “personal experience” implicitly aids information processing and learning in viewers. At one level this seems intuitively clear; nonetheless, it is legitimate to ask whether the mode of television viewing in late 1970s West Germany really conformed to the model of the fully commercialized situation in the United States, at a time when the FRG’s television industry was still at a pre-commercialized stage.17 That neither the activity nor the passivity of the audience can be assumed is suggested by both the context of limited state offerings on at most three channels (in many places only two) and the marketing of Holocaust as a cultural event outside the ordinary (to which Geisler himself draws attention, 232). While Holocaust was made by and for American television, its broadcast and reception in the FRG entirely changed the programming and viewing framework.18 West German television production and exhibition in 1979 was a “public broadcasting” platform which, until the mid-1980s, valued high culture, considered education and edification as prime goals, and did not allow advertising to intrude into individual programs. Simply put, in Germany Holocaust appeared against the background of consistent and limited television consumption, a very different situation from that in the United States.19 It is productive to consider the mild contradictions within television studies itself regarding, on the one hand, the physical placement of and temporal/spatial conceptualizations arising from “the box” in everyday life and, on the other, its influence on notions of identification and belief generated during distracted reception. While television programming may tend to be conducive to active reception because it is interlaced with everyday life, at the same time this interlacing calls up assumptions of immediacy, intimacy, proximity, and authority that lessen viewers’ tendency to question the medium actively. The staging of many shows takes place in a conceptual continuity with the domestic living room (morning talk shows) or in opposition to it (news broadcasts), which is essential to perceptions of intimacy, proximity, and veracity, that is, of fostering “realism” despite any temporal and spatial discontinuities inherent in the viewing.20 The repetition of patterns in the mise-en-scène, much like the gesture to generic patterns in credit sequences and musical scores, serve as “anamnetic devices” that help the viewer remember the form and mode of “the real” that is to come.21 Just as the ritual nature of generic reception may do as much to defuse as to incorporate new knowledge, the pre-remembered nature of the television medium tends to exacerbate rather than mitigate this problem. Since “television produces reality rather than reflects it,”22 and the

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entire drive of the medium is for viewers to understand their experience of the medium’s artifice as experience of the real,23 a critical stirring of memory through identification and personal experience would need to push against that drive.

Watching — Television — History Although both Geisler and Friedländer posit the importance of going beyond straightforward documentary narrative for coming to terms with the past, they differ in the approaches they prefer: one insisting upon identification, the other fearing it. To escape this quandary, we might start with a notion of identification based on differences between art forms and media other than the one proffered by the Frankfurt School and the media criticism it has inspired, stressing, rather than the content of programming, the intrinsic properties of the medium itself (which includes the fact of programming). If “television’s defining aesthetic and social project,” especially in regard to non-fiction programming, is indeed “realism” in the sense stemming from nineteenth-century aesthetics,24 then perhaps consideration of visual narrative and realism offers an entry into understanding how Fechner’s seemingly straightforward films open up potentially radical interactions. The seminal theoretician of cinematic realism, André Bazin, differentiates between theater and cinema on the basis of the way realistic identification can take place, which centers on the notion of “presence.” The mutual awareness on the part of performers and audience in the theater prevents identification, because for the audience to make a figure in an imaginary world out of the actor/character requires an act of conscious abstraction. Cinema, on the other hand, by removing the immediate presence of the actor, removes the mental opposition that such conscious abstraction requires, allowing for a fuller psychological identification.25 For Bazin cinema posits a universe, rather than the theater’s locus dramaticus, and the viewer is a hidden participant in that world: “Alone, hidden in a dark room, we watch through half-open blinds a spectacle that is unaware of our presence” (422). He immediately goes on to qualify that the resulting identification, which the viewer experiences as a most personal, individualized moment, is the point when the individual can be lost, when the viewer acts as part of the mass. One of Bazin’s answers to this dilemma is, of course, to privilege a non-conventional realism in which the visual field of the mise-en-scène helps develop a full and complex sense of character, as seen in the presentation of the inhospitable landscape of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) or the monumental, overwhelming architecture of Rome in De Sica’s Umberto D (1952).26 In terms of Bazin’s notion of “presence,” television is not an even more mass

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medium than film, but one positioned in between theater and film. The situation of reception on the small screen may be less passive than in cinema, but rather than generating greater viewer activity, perhaps it is best to think of television as a medium where a mutually acknowledged “presence in absence” shifts the identification from character or even speaker to the medium, to the whole enterprise of making history visible, immediate, and present.27 Bignell and Orlebar have theorized this in terms of both identification and disavowal: “The pleasure of seeing images on TV brings with it an awareness of absence, that ‘I’ am separate from what I see, and am not ‘you, he, she.’”28. The construct of identification in regard to the medium, then, takes place for the viewer externally. Television’s overall dramaturgy is situated in the middle as well. Bazin finds that a dramaturgy of the individual human being inheres in the theater because it is a dramatic location — experienced as the here and now — centered on human language as a psychological vehicle. On the other hand, a dramaturgy of space in time inheres in cinema because it creates a universe — a there and then experienced as here and now through the ideological identifications of realism — that incorporates the human being, who can become but is not central to it. For Bazin, the duration of the take allows the unfolding of the dramaturgy of space. Fechner’s work makes use of television’s “in-between” nature by playing out its contradictions regarding language, time, and space. First, language is central to this — in the primary instance — visual medium. In addition to its intrinsic affinity for the documentary and the informative,29 his television operates as a medium along the logic of oral rhetoric later described by Fiske and Hartley: “The television message is validated by its context, by the opposition of elements (often visual/verbal), and not by the deductive requirements of the syllogism.” The kind of alphabetic consistency that shaped the nineteenth-century novel is “alien to television culture.”30 Yet at the same time this consistency is the origin of the sense of realism that television always aims for in the 1970s and 1980s. Fechner’s oral history constructs itself through an opposition of talk rather than through a progression of argument. Television time refers not to the duration that Bazin’s cinema employs so much as to the sequencing, serialization, and repetition of shots and shows punctuated by interruption and decontextualization. While much of this is relative to programming contexts, Kathleen Higgins has theorized a link between “TV temporality” and the influence of the box both in terms of creating a template for real experience and of underscoring its claim to be a disseminator of the real.31 Non-fiction shows, in particular, employ time in a manner that reinforces the “authority of television,” even though there is a temporal distance inherent in the experience of its real. As there is no Bazinian duration in pre-digital television, it enacts no thoroughgoing dramaturgy of space

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through the visual: “We gain absolutely no experience of space from television, but can only infer spatial experiences by interpreting the images in the light of our experience.”32 Jørgel Stigel’s important work on television has summarized these spatial and temporal relations within the medium as a constant tension between the “here and now” and the “there and then.”33 This arena of temporal distance and spatial displacement is where we find Fechner’s televisual oral history. The crucial question for this essay then becomes, how can historical space be constructed and occupied in television? Many works, whether contemporary features or television productions from Holocaust to teamWorx’s “event television” and beyond, take that space to be immediately present when recreated realistically, a stage upon which a conventional dramaturgy of emotional identification can be mounted, complete with vibrant color, conventional editing, cue-giving sound track, and “redundancy” in the mise-en-scène.34 Documentaries that simply provide facts and revisit historical sites often run afoul of a similar assumption: that describing or filming the “real” place does the trick. Both approaches fail to recognize that thinking the past requires two things: difference from the present and a witness. Neither television documentaries of fact and figure nor representations of “heritage space” as “theme parks” provide us with these two positions. Nonetheless, television can combine language from the theater and images of space and time from film in an external construct that, like cultural memory itself, incorporates individual experience without springing directly from or being reduced to it. Fechner’s strategies exploit television’s contradictory status in order to both optimize the medium and undercut the stultifying authority that the medium generates and regenerates for itself through false promises of temporal immediacy, topical facticity, and equivalence in all that it shows. By occupying the medium’s ambiguities without providing the ideological resolutions of either straightforward documentary or dramatic realism, Fechner affords us a privileged and yet uncertain vantage point. He turns television into a collective space through witness testimony, setting up the possibility of difference within TV’s participation in cultural memory. Der Prozess illustrates the way this medium-specific aesthetic arises from the historical material itself.

“I Am the Cut” Much of the critical discussion about Fechner centers on distinctions between the medium of film and that of television, for which he worked almost exclusively. Indeed, one particularly good discussion of his method speaks of his eye for the “telegenic” rather than the photogenic.35 Fechner might well have welcomed my notion that the media specificity of televi-

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sion resides between theater and film. He writes: “Gründsetzlich gibt es wohl nur Theater und Film. Beides kann man auch für das Fernsehen machen mit medienspezifischen Unterschieden und Besonderheiten” (Fundamentally there are only theater and film. One can adapt both to television with media-specific differences and particularities). These differences and particularities for television lie primarily in its “dokumentarisch-informativ” (documentary-informative) nature.36 Above all, the potentially broad audience attracted by its promise of real information interested him, and his engagement with the form works through the illusion of immediacy to create a reception situation of temporal distance and spatial displacement. Fechner himself often commented on three aspects of his filmmaking that, in my opinion, shed light on its subtle complexity. First, he requires spatial and temporal distance from his objects in order to work, but that relation neither objectifies nor totalizes the past, because the lens to the past is always firmly anchored in an aesthetic generated from the present. Fechner says he needs . . . Distanz und Abstand zu einer Zeit, um nicht nur eine Seite sehen zu müssen . . . [ich bin] doch Künstler, [aber] das Formale, die Kunst und die Ästhetik eines Films sind bei mir immer Zufallsprodukte, die sich allein und ausschliesslich aus der Sache selbst ergeben. . . . In keinem Fall ist die Ästhetik Ausgangspunkt eines meiner Filme gewesen.37 [. . . distance and separation from a period, in order to not see only one side . . . [I am] an artist, [but] the formal aspects, the art and the aesthetic of a film are always chance products for me, which result exclusively from the subject itself. . . . In none of my films was the aesthetic the point of departure.]

Implicit in this first point is Fechner’s second concern: he is aware of documentary’s potential — especially if it seems “merely” objective in its presentation — to manipulate its audience. The moment he shows experts, people who speak a group’s knowledge, their observations are immediately called into question through its proximity to personal experience. And this raises the third aspect, that his films rely on “normal” individuals telling their stories to document historical realities: not only does “the description of an ‘average’ fate during the last war or the postwar years . . . interest [me] more than presenting the career of a man like Adolf Hitler; it also says more about the times then, it is richer in insights and more accessible to every viewer.”38 These three precepts correspond proleptically to Jan Assmann’s description of “figures of memory”: temporal/spatial localities, group interpretive schemes, and expressions of individual experience.39

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Though aesthetics are never the point of departure for his films, Fechner’s sober arrangement of (often quite subjective) personal accounts is punctuated by noticeable authorial intrusions, if not highly reflexive ones. “Ich bin der Schnitt” (I am the cut), he averred again and again, speaking of the manner in which his talking heads enact a “Wechselreden” — an alternating of statements, screen positions, and shot constructions that engage the same topic — but do not come into conventional dialogue. Although generally useful, Rasmus Dahl’s distinction between documentaries of low and high intervention does not hold for Fechner.40 Here the frequent interventions of the director do not shift the emphasis away from “simple showing” to highlight textual structures; rather, they contextualize “simple showing” (or better in this instance, simple telling) to allow repetition, redundancy, and serialization that complicate the seemingly transparent truth of any personal statement.41 Thus he refuses the standard tropes of converting historical material to filmic representations, whether they present “history as document” or “history as drama,” as Robert Rosenstone terms it.42 For example, cutting and mounting the material does not alter what has been said, although it often changes the context in which it is heard. Alteration of fact is left to the Germans who speak, who claim no knowledge, downplay the suffering of others in the past, and, further, claim the status of suffering victims in the present. The discussion of Der Prozess below points out how compression, condensation, alteration, and metaphor arise from the material he works with rather than being placed upon it. The subjects of Fechner’s work are real people in the world known to his initial audience as contemporary, and hence his films carve out a space by their “presence” now and their memories of “back then” that envelopes the viewer in a tapestry of spaces and times open to but not limited by the analytical: what we see is the external process of cultural memory enacted. Der Prozess is the film that Fechner, and most who wrote about him, considered the most momentous project of his career. In roughly 270 minutes it documents the trial of the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity at the extermination camp in Lublin/Majdanek, the longest juridical undertaking in German history.43 The film opens with three cards: one announcing the title, the second a descriptive subheading along with the director’s name, and the third introducing “I. Teil — Anklage” (Part 1 — The Accusation). Next come two historical locations devoid of people: the first a traveling aerial shot of the camp from the 1940s, followed by a higher angle shot that pans left; fade to black, then fade into the second location, a courtroom in contemporary Düsseldorf, where the camera continues the pan to the left and then stops. These slow pans are accompanied by a dry listing of facts in voiceover: “Von Herbst 1941 bis zum 23. Juli 1944 existierte in Lublin/Majdanek ein Konzentrationslager, in der mindestens 250,000 Menschen ermordert worden sind”

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(From autumn 1941 to 23 July 1944 there was a concentration camp in Lublin/Majdanek where at least 250,000 people were murdered). After a brief black screen, the narrator continues over images of a courtroom: “Vom 26. November 1975 bis zum 30. Juni 1981 wurde in Düsseldorf ein Prozess gegen fünfzehn ehemalige Mitgleider der mehr als 1,500 SSBewacher des Lagers geführt. Man klagte sie an, an dem hunderttausendfachen Mord beteiligt gewesen zu sein. Es war der längste Prozess in der deutschen Justizgeschichte” (From 26 November 1975 to 30 June 1981 a trial was held in Düsseldorf of fifteen former SS guards out of the original 1500. They were charged with the mass murder of prisoners. It was the longest trial in German legal history). This opening sets out the two temporal and spatial poles between and around which what will come unfolds, but it also indicates that “factual” information — be it visual or historical-quantitative — only serves as a point of departure.44 These location shots repeat at the outset of part 2, “Beweisaufnahme” (Evidence) and part 3, “Urteile” (Verdicts), serving as anamnetic devices to remind the viewer of parallel medium-generic and historical tensions between “there and then” and “here and now.” The film’s opening immediately implies that the people who carry this history and occupy these sites are missing. The physical confines of these historical stages need to be understood not as a limit but as a gateway into the social relationships that make them possible and in turn are fostered by them. Fechner repopulates these spaces without placing people in them, beginning after the relatively mild verdict has come down. The first speaker is a juror, who talks about the documentary film as a means to keep “it” from happening again. Of course, the viewer initially thinks that this refers to the horrors perpetrated in the camps, especially when the juror hopes that the film will help prevent “what happened here from ever happening again.” But when he then specifically mentions “so ‘n Prozess” (this kind of trial) and “so ‘n beschissenen Urteil” (this kind of crap verdict) as things to be avoided, an ambiguity arises that immediately unseats the viewer as a sovereign observer of things that have already been accorded a pre-processed value. On the one hand, this and the next few speakers undercut the generic suspense of the conventional trial film (fictional or documentary) and, on the other, they open up the possibility that the trial itself is here the “process” in question in the “accusation.” This is reinforced by the camera movement associated with the first two speakers, the only noticeable movement in this part of the film. Fechner opens tight on the juror and then slowly dollies back to a short distance as he finishes speaking; the next shot opens at roughly that same distance from the presiding judge and then dollies in to end in tight close-up. The scrutiny of the verdict shifts immediately to a scrutiny of the people and institutions driving the process. Thus the poles of the Majdanek camp and the Düsseldorf court, which initially seemed visually and conceptually so

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Fig. 10.1. Documentary aerial footage of Lublin-Majdanek tracking left to right in the first minutes of Der Prozess (1984). DVD capture.

Fig. 10.2. The second documented time and place: the Düsseldorf courtroom panning right to left in Der Prozess (1984). Sequence is left to right, top to bottom. DVD capture.

distant from each other, have collapsed or established a proximity that flattens out temporal and spatial distance between them, and yet they create a distance now for the viewer from the contemporary scene. For roughly the next twelve minutes Fechner introduces the inhabitants of this space. With each of these people speaking even a few lines, the viewer has the sense that the courtroom’s empty space evoked in the opening is quickly becoming crowded by the increasing input and images of individuals. While the labels seem to orient us, they fail to contain the sentiments uttered or to apply consistently (some “observers” seem protrial, some anti, and some oddly disengaged). This difficulty is mirrored in the visual presentation as well. Sometimes “opposing” positions seem

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Fig. 10.3. The first talking heads, a juror (above) and the presiding judge (below) in Der Prozess (1984). DVD capture.

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to be depicted in the screen direction, facing-off, as it were, from screen right and left; at other times, however, incompatible figures parallel each other so that no “side” seems safe as a means of making assumptions about the mindset of a speaker. Fechner’s refusal of the “authority” to cue viewers visually goes further, simultaneously acquiescing to and undermining television’s self-construction as a vehicle of the truth. These medium-close shots both invoke and deny the standard realistic “redundancies” of televisual mise-en-scène. Many of the interview sites are clearly recognizable as offices or parlors “belonging” to the figure talking. A couple of settings serve to characterize the speakers — the utilitarian scholarly messiness of the bookshelves behind the “Polish Observer” (not identified as Simon Wiesenthal) to the more orderly backdrop of the “Consulting Historian” or the rigid decor behind the “Presiding Judge” — but generally nothing is imparted by the miseen-scène beyond the type of relation to the proceedings a speaker has, public or private. These places return when the people return, deploying the medium’s strategies of reinforcing “reality” but at the same time refusing to play to the false experience of space that, as Ballantyne maintains, is a significant aspect of television’s structuring of identification.45 The absence of spatial exploration and determination here adds a temporal difference as well, for these contemporary witnesses do not seem to belong to a recognizable time either. The uneven frequency and duration of recurring shots of these witnesses in the “here and now” is determined by the oral contribution to the topic that they make. Only one documentary image from the age of Majdanek — there and then — appears in the sequence: a photo of a little girl. It is inserted as a woman, who is no longer young, asks what the children had to do with all of this and “why did they do it” to them? Once again, a seemingly direct piece of information is conveyed here, but that transparency clouds quickly through the montage. The woman’s voice continues to speak as the photo is displayed, a sound bridge associating the older woman and the girl, and Fechner strengthens this association by returning to the same woman immediately afterward. But at the same time it is an interruption, its lack of specificity leaving the viewer unsure: was that her child? Was it her as a child? Is that picture just an example of the children about whom this woman speaks in general? This kind of information is not pinpointed, and the resulting decontextualization opens space for a different relation to earlier references to children by the “female observer” who is indignant that this trial is exposing “our children” to all the abominations of human imagination, whether “those things happened or not.” The placement of these two women who speak of children in exactly the same screen position and posture in the shot composition again reinforces the theme that both unites and separates them. In this sense the image of the child, whoever she was, bears witness to an absence that no statistical information

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Fig. 10.4. The “Trial-Observer” (top) is incensed that children in Düsseldorf are being exposed to the things being said by people like the “Ex-Prisoner” (third and last frames) in Der Prozess (1984). DVD capture.

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can present, without the child herself becoming a statistic. This image is neither an artistic condensation nor a metaphor: rather, it is a piece of televisual information equal to all others working against the abstraction adduced later when Simon Wiesenthal quotes Eichmann as saying “one million dead is a statistic.” Although information or facts do not tell the whole story, there are some recurring numbers that indicate telling ratios: 250,000 murdered in Majdanek, and 25,000 documents in the materials on the defendants; 1,500 overseeing the camp, and fifteen charged. History and the passage of time have supplied these compressions: Fechner has not created them. The reason for the compression derives from the questions posed at the end of part 1 by the final witness: why has it taken so long, and how could so many be investigated and so few convicted? The answers are ambiguous once again, experienced and disavowed, because what has both furthered and retarded the search for justice is a process run by small bureaucrats engaged in compiling masses of information. Another connection between the “there and then” and the “here and now” inheres in the mania for amassing, collecting, cataloguing, and clarifying that both drove the Nazi machinery and, ironically, impedes its prosecution. That same structure inheres in German television. Ambiguity for its own sake is not the point in Der Prozess; rather, ambiguity becomes a means to create a space that (to use the contemporary term) precludes the comfort zone that the viewer “already in the know” might desire. Fechner even makes his witnesses earn the right to act as the representatives of others — as figures of condensation in Rosenstone’s term. Only near the end of part 2 do the witnesses speak as the historical “we” without the interruption of the perpetrators giving voice to their own suffering. In essence, the people and the stories they tell have become the “redundancy” that makes this history real: the unique, the ones that fail to fit the generic pattern established by the historical aesthetic, have been the perpetrators, those denying their crimes. The medium demands that they fall away once their “irreality” has been established through sequencing, serialization, and repetition, punctuated by interruption and decontextualization, leaving room for interplay like that of figure 10.5. At this point, for nearly ten minutes, individual voices speaking in the first person plural are accompanied by historical images, then followed by a shot of the single speaker addressing someone in the room. Again, like the opening shots of the camp and the courtroom, this montage simultaneously unites the speaker (and listener) with the documentary images and separates them. The easy identification of the viewer with the figure of condensation here offers no ritualized way out of the temporal and spatial tensions that inhere in the survivors’ witnessing. Fechner’s method further avoids the authorial creation of metaphor, the final and perhaps most crucial pitfall of the historical film’s traditional

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Fig. 10.5. The distanced realism of the survivor’s “we” in part II: “You can’t imagine it.” From Der Prozess (1984). DVD capture.

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“realism.” The reports of gigantic cabbages, fertilized with human remains, are followed by shots of photos of a field that could contain such cabbages, but no individual image or trope stands in for anything else here. Fechner allows signs in Der Prozess to move toward metaphors, which then are snatched back from us by the historical itself. For example, perhaps the best known “sign” of the Holocaust is the tattooed camp number on the prisoner’s arm: though always indicative of a unique, individual history, camp numbers serve as a metaphor for the dehumanizing rationalization of Nazi death machinery. These numbers play no role here, because in Lublin/Majdanek small tin badges were used instead. When we are introduced to such a small metal disc as an artifact in the film, its rationalizing advantage is clear: it could be used for multiple inmates. One witness tells us that he was the sixth or seventh person to be attached to the tin badge that he carried. The badge becomes not a metaphor for unspeakable dehumanization but the site of historical compression, not through metaphor but through the rules of the past being made radically different and witnessed at the same time, much the way the 250,000 victims at Majdanek became 25,000 documents. Though he works with ambiguities and uncertainties, there is no danger that Fechner could be accused of a relativistic clouding of responsibility in his Majdanek film. Indeed, pace most of the voices that called this the culmination of his techniques, Der Prozess is the least apt of all his non-fiction works dealing with the early twentieth century to showcase his approach. Because of the temporal distance and spatial displacement in this television history, the moral imperatives seem abundantly and rightfully clear, whereas La Paloma, Klassenfoto, and even Comedian Harmonists are less unerring in uncovering “truth” through sequencing and repetition. But in those films, too, Fechner pursues individual expressions of history through an aesthetic that arises from the material itself, ultimately resulting in works that neither minimize nor totalize the past. Shown to arise from the medium whose intrinsic properties most resemble “cultural memory,” television history is made difficult by Fechner’s refusal of false proximity and immediacy, which enact a ritualized obliteration of the past. I have argued that Fechner’s films abjure the devices of secret authority used both by the historian and the historical film: compression, condensation, metaphor, and alteration. Of course, it would be nonsense to claim that he avoids them altogether. In Der Prozess he compresses into 270 minutes a trial that started far too late, lasted far too long, and produced unfathomable quantities of evidence. He condenses through the statements of a few the expression of suffering of millions. Using a seemingly straightforward mode of presentation, he makes the notion of evidence and witnessing into a metaphor for the hidden inadequacies of the rule of law. Most important, he seeks to alter history by injecting these

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voices and images back into the cultural memory of the medium for two reasons that we may adduce from the last minutes of part 3: because the people of Düsseldorf did not follow the trial, and because many who did follow it claim that they knew nothing of this history. But how could that be, one might ask, as the trial started in 1975 and ended in 1981, and the television event of Holocaust took place squarely between there and then and here and now? Did that television show not open the floodgates of memory through emotional identification? Fechner seems to suggest that to turn history into a collective space through testimony of witnesses requires more than a distracted embedding of the televised into “real life.” In doing so, he sets up the possibility of a difference within television’s participation in cultural memory.

Notes 1

Guido Knopp, “Geschichte im Fernsehen: Perspektiven der Praxis,” in Geschichte im Fernsehen: Ein Handbuch, ed. Guido Knopp and Siegfried Quandt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 1–9; here 9. 2

John E. Davidson, “A Story of Faces and Intimate Spaces: The Form of History in Max Färberböck’s Aimée und Jaguar,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 19.4 (2002): 323–41. 3

Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

4

Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 55. 5

Writing in the context of the Bitburg debacle, Friedländer felt that the feature films of the New German Cinema had “avoided any major confrontation with the Nazi past,” with only four exclusions: Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel (1979), Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981), Syberberg’s Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (1978), and Lilienthal’s David (1979). Of the four, the historian posits that only David might “be a real exception” to this trend (Friedländer, Memory, History, 7). 6

Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 17. 7

The term “shapes of memory” refers to the subtitle of Geoffrey H. Hartman’s Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). Elsewhere I have investigated this problem in regard specifically to Hartman’s notion of the “colors of memory” (10), which are stolen by anti-memory. See John Davidson, “Shades of Grey: Coming to Terms in German Film since the Wende,” in German Cinema since Unification, ed. David Clarke (London: Continuum, 2006), 43–77. 8

Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism, 99.

9

Friedländer, Memory, History, 7 and 20.

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10

This sentiment stands as the epigram for Fechner’s official Web site, http:// www.eberhardfechner.de/ (accessed 23 Mar. 2009). 11

See, for example, Klaus Kreimeier, “Filmische Erzählungen: Zum Tod von Eberhard Fechner,” FrankfurterRundschau, 10 Aug. 1992; Peter Lilienthal, “Eine Flaschenpost, die der Suche nach dem anderen galt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10 Aug. 1992; and Hans Bachmüller, “Der Künstler als Chronist,” Freitag, 14 Aug. 1992. 12 Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), 187. 13

On Koepp’s aesthetic, see Tim Bergfelder’s contribution in this volume. Wulf Kansteiner offers a useful compendium of much Holocaust programming set within the institutional vicissitudes of German television. Reliant to a great extent on quantitative and thematic rather than aesthetic considerations, in In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio UP, 2007), he sees Guido Knopp’s work in the 1990s as a high point, in part for having “carved out a prime-time niche in an increasingly competitive broadcasting environment.” The period from 1963 until the introduction of commercial broadcasting in the mid-1980s is understood as one that “systematically avoided raising some of the most painful questions about German culpability and postwar responsibilities” (112), which makes the exception of Fechner’s documentaries all the more important. Unfortunately, Fechner only rates a mention in two footnotes, for one literary adaptation that he did not make (Giordano’s Die Bertinis) and one that he did (Kempowski’s Tadellöser und Wolff). 14

Michael E. Geisler, “The Disposal of Memory: Fascism and the Holocaust on West German Television,” in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, ed. Bruce A. Murray and Christopher J. Wickham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992), 220–60. 15 “Paramount reality” is drawn from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construct of Reality (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967), 25. 16

Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 2004). 17

See chapter 10 in Knut Hickethier and Peter Hoff, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998). 18 Sometimes this contextual shift between Holocaust’s production and West German reception has been noted but misunderstood, leaving it to be remembered as a “German” show in television studies because of its fabled impact in that country. See, for example, the comments on the “German television docu-drama, Holocaust” by Ann Wales in her essay “Television as History: History as Television” in Television and Criticism, ed. Solange Davin and Rhona Jackson (Bristol, UK, and Chicago: Intellect, 2008), 49–60; here 55. 19

Richard Collins, “The ‘Ises’ and ‘Oughts’: Public Service Broadcasting in Europe,” in The Television Studies Reader, ed. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 33–51. See also Hickethier and Hoff, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens, 326.

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20

Andrew Ballantyne, “Architectonics of ‘The Box’: Television’s Spatiality,” in Television: Aesthetic Reflections, ed. Ruth Lorand (New York: Lang, 2002), 127– 38; here 131. 21

John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (London: Methuen, 1978), 168. 22

John Fiske, Television Culture, 5th printing (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 21. 23

John Caughie, “Progressive Television and Documentary Drama,” Screen 21.3 (1980): 340–45.

24

Jonathan Bignell and Jeremay Orlebar, The Television Handbook (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 96. 25

André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 6th ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005), 418–28; here 420. 26

The example of neorealism is particularly important in this context, as it allows for complex, multiple-audience identification over the duration of a film, even with figures who are not heroic or even positive, and in some cases not even central. This dialectic of the concrete and the abstract in certain types of cinema generates its positive potential. The question of embedding stories of historical culpability in “everyday life” was certainly posed in neorealism, but it was a far cry from the canned “realism” of the “white telephone films,” and it seems a far cry from the desire for the realistic illusion (Bazin’s term) adduced as an argument in favor of Holocaust and other more recent “heritage films.” 27

See Siegfried Quandt on the “Zwang, [Geschichte] in Bildern konkret und bei aller Begrenzung vollständig zeigen zu müssen” (the compulsion to show history concretely and completely in pictures, despite all limitations). “Geschichte im Fernsehen: Perspektiven der Wissenschaft,” in Knopp and Quandt, Geschichte im Fernsehen, 10–20; here 13. 28

Bignell and Orlebar, The Television Handbook, 97.

29

Eberhard Fechner, “Das Fernsehspiel — Dichtung und Wahrheit,” in Eberhard Fechner: Die Filme, gesammelte Aufsätze und Materialien, ed. Josef Nagel and Klaus Kirschner (1977; repr., Erlangen: Beiträge zur Medientheorie und Praxis, 1984), 126–40. 30

Fiske and Hartley, Reading Television, 117; see also 158–59.

31

Kathleen M. Higgins, “Television, Realism, and the Distortion of Time,” in Television: Aesthetic Reflections (New York: Lang, 2002), 107–26. 32

Ballantyne, “Architectronics of ‘The Box,’” 137–38.

33

Jørgen Stigel, “Aesthetics of the Moment in Television: Actualisations in Time and Space,” in The Aesthetics of Television, ed. Gunhild Agger and Jens F. Jensen (Aalborg, Denmark: Aalborg UP, 2001), 25–52. 34

On “redundancy” as the principle of television realism, see Bignell and Orlebar, The Television Handbook. On recent German “event television” productions, see the contributions in this volume by Johannes von Moltke and Manuel Köppen.

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35

Joachim Schöberl, “Spiegelung als Gestaltungsprinzip: Zu Eberhard Fechners Film Nachrede auf Klara Heydebreck,” Rundfunk und Fernsehen 27.1 (1979): 116–35. 36

Eberhard Fechner, “Das Fernsehspiel,” 128.

37

“Eberhard Fechner über seine Arbeit,” in Regie Informationen FFA (Nov. 1977): 7. 38

Eberhard Fechner, “The Experience of History,” in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler (1984; repr., New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 142–44; here 143. 39

Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19. 40

Rasmus Dahl, “Distinctions in Documentary Television,” in The Aesthetics of Television, ed. Gunhild Agger and Jens F. Jensen (Aalborg: Aalborg UP, 2001), 173–92. 41

See the short description in Jacobsen, Kaes, and Prinzler’s Geschichte des deutschen Films (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 452. Fechner’s approach to the Nazi era is similar to Bertolt Brecht’s in Furcht und Elend im Dritten Reich, and even resembles the Lehrstück form, although it is not so impersonal. The viewer participates in repeated consideration of the same material or situation from different perspectives based on snippets of speech, documents, and images that over time and in relationship to other pieces of information generate both exceptionally rich characterizations of the individuals featured and a strong sense of the structural components of the historical era under consideration as manifested in lived experience. In this sense the title of Der Prozess seems less an evocation of the Kafkaesque trial than of Peter Weiss’s documentary-theater depiction of the Auschwitz trial in Die Ermittlung (The Investigation). 42

Robert Rosenstone, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age,” in The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, ed. Marcia Landy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001), 50–66. 43

For a discussion of this trial, which credits Fechner with its first “öffentlichkeitswirksame kritische Aufarbeitung” (publicly effective critical presentation), see the section on “Politisch-justizielle Versäumnisse” in Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz, Lexikon der “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in Deutschland: Debattenund Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), 208–10. 44

As if to highlight this, the next fade out and in reveals three newspapers shown one after the other in a single take, from the beginning, the middle, and end of the trial. Aside from the headings, nothing can be gleaned from them, except that the last one is a German-language Jewish paper. 45

Ballantyne, “Architectonics of ‘The Box,’” 131.

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11: The Politics of Feeling: Alexander Kluge on War, Film, and Emotion Johannes von Moltke

A

N ENTRY IN Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia bears the title “Out of the Firing Line.”1 From the tenuous safety of the position described by that title, Adorno reflects on the ongoing war in the fall of 1944: its industrial nature, its human consequences, its reification in the newsreel. What ties these concerns together, though, are questions about the stakes for experience and representation “after Doomsday,” as Adorno puts it. Noting that the Great War had already destroyed the very possibility of experience because of the incongruity of human bodies and the energy of machines, he locates one of the central motifs of critical theory — the “withering of experience” (Erfahrung) — in the two world wars.2 The Second World War accordingly “is as totally divorced from experience as is the functioning of a machine from the movements of the body.” This radical breakdown of experience, in turn, poses obstacles to representation and memory: “Just as the war lacks continuity, history, the ‘epic’ element, but seems rather to start anew from the beginning in each phase, so it will leave behind no permanent, unconsciously preserved image in the memory.” The representation of war, if not the war itself, has been obliterated, Adorno argues, by information, propaganda, commentary, and the newsreel. The war and the Holocaust “quite literally will soon be past thinking on,” and this bodes ill for the future of representation itself. Since there can be no memory (nor any healing oblivion) of the disjointed, traumatic events that make up the fractured totality of war, there will be no adequate representation. There is clearly a line that connects these “reflections on a damaged life” to W. G. Sebald’s arguments concerning the German failure, if not inability, to represent the air war. Like Adorno’s entry of 1944, Sebald’s 1997 lectures are concerned with the disjuncture between experience, memory, trauma, and (literary) representation. To be sure, Sebald’s arguments are subsumed under a larger repression hypothesis, which Andreas Huyssen has rightly characterized as perhaps the least persuasive of his interventions.3 He couches his analysis in moral terms of failure and the Germans’ refusal to look at the horrors of war, as opposed to Adorno’s

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more principled, philosophical claims about the withering of experience and the impossibility of representation. And yet both critics highlight the incommensurability of the Second World War with what Sebald calls the Sensorium of the survivors.4 In this respect the claims by various critics that Sebald overlooked specific contributions to the literature of the air war do not invalidate the underlying diagnosis, which he shares with Adorno: that is, the shock of experience had suspended, if not disabled, the capacity for memory and thereby undermined the very possibility of representation that Sebald elsewhere demands of German literature.5 For both these authors war poses a challenge to representation as a collective reality, which — as Fredric Jameson notes — “exceed[s] representation fully as much as conceptualization and yet which ceaselessly tempt[s] and exasperate[s] narrative ambitions, conventional and experimental alike.”6 Echoing Adorno’s notion that modern wars can have no “epic” quality, Jameson emphasizes the difficulty of anchoring the concrete multiplicity of war and its institutions in any singular narrative perspective, whether from below or from above (we will return to this Klugean distinction below). Hence, according to Jameson, we encounter the multiplicity of generic modes in Simplicissimus, Grimmelshausen’s account of the Thirty Years War, and the montage technique in the work of Alexander Kluge, from whose Schlachtbeschreibung (The Battle) Jameson takes a self-serving statement by Goebbels on war as representation: “Stalingrad ist wie ein Gemälde, das man aus der Nähe nicht ansehen kann, sondern von dem man abtreten muß, um es voll würdigen zu können” (Stalingrad is like a painting that cannot be viewed up close, but from which one must step back in order to do it full justice).7 And yet, as Jameson reminds us, none of these principled reflections have thrown up any real obstacles to the incessant cultural production of war stories, whether in literature, on television, or in the cinemas. Nor are such representations limited to an experimental, modernist aesthetics of montage, as even a casual glance at Hollywood’s output of thoroughly conventional war films shows. Here I am less interested in “classic” examples of the genre; rather, I am struck by those proliferating productions in contemporary popular culture that hybridize the war story with other generic concerns — whether those be suspense, as in the war thriller à la Valkyrie (Bryan Singer, 2008) or Zwartboek (Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, 2006); or romance, as in the ubiquitous war melodramas produced for German television in recent years. A notice that appeared in Variety on 6 March 2006 usefully highlights several key features of what has come to be known as “historical event-television.”8 Somewhat tastelessly headlined “Dresden heats up,” the brief article summarizes the plot in the journal’s characteristic telegraph style: “Love story follows a German nurse and a Royal Air Force pilot hiding in her Dresden hospital after he was shot down just before the 1945 Allied bombing of the city that killed 35,000.”

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Identifying the “multipart event-film” as a new trend with taboo-breaking implications, the review highlights the way in which Dresden literally romances history to “touch a nerve” in Germany, as it shifts the parameters for the representation of the Second World War. Along with cinema blockbusters such as Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2002) or Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Dresden and similar forms of “historical event-television” — many of them produced by Nico Hofmann’s “teamWorx” production company — would appear to aim for an exhaustive audiovisual treatment of fascism, war, and its aftermath, in which Germans appear primarily as victims.9 While none of these films appear to tackle in any direct way the questions of representation raised by Adorno, Sebald, Kluge, or Jameson, they all collude to lend the Second World War what Jameson elsewhere has described as a “quasi-material ‘feeling tone,’” which in the texts of popular culture “floats above the narrative but is only intermittently realized by it.”10 The romances, in particular, are melodramas about war and its aftermath, suffused with suffering, longing, and regret. They are designed — like all melodrama — to elicit the spectator’s empathetic response and feelings of admiration for the innocent, suffering victims. If war, and the Second World War in particular, poses a representational challenge, it has also come to serve — especially in the audiovisual media — as a seemingly inexhaustible repository of historical affect or what Martin Walser calls “Geschichtsgefühl” (feeling for history).11 We may be inclined to map this apparent split between war as an untotalizable totality, on the one hand, and as a ubiquitous, totally generic, emotionally charged plot, on the other, onto the distinction between high, modernist forms of representation and popular media. The former would include those texts, images, and films that address the failure of representation as part of their own aesthetic structure; the latter would be those reified aesthetics that apparently bypass the problem altogether by replacing the unrepresentable reality of war with nothing but a “feeling tone.” But to thus define the two approaches against each other would be to miss the dialectics of high and popular culture — the ways in which one is not thinkable without the other and in which the undialectical opposition between the two takes on a meaning of its own.12 Contributing to an earlier wave of historical representation, Rainer Werner Fassbinder clearly grasped this dialectic. Through the camp aesthetics of a film like Lili Marleen (1980), he grappled both with the unrepresentability of war (by overstaging it in quasi-operatic explosions accompanied by Hanna Schygulla’s rendition of the title song) and with its manifest emotional power, by treating war as first and foremost “a situation and [a] nourishing soil for an emotion.”13 I propose that, even more than Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge has most consistently explored the relationship between war, representation, and

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emotion ever since his debut as a writer in the early 1960s and in countless films and television programs since then. One of the signatories of the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, which paved the way for the New German Cinema, Kluge retains a forceful presence in German culture even today. A “multi-medial conceptual artist of extraordinary imaginative range,”14 he has received virtually all of the Federal Republic’s major literary prizes, and the broad recognition of his cinematic output ranges from Silver and Golden Lions at Venice to multiple Federal film prizes, including the German equivalent of a lifetime achievement award in 2009.15 Nor has the 76-year-old Kluge shown any tendency to rest on his laurels: in November 2009 the venerable Suhrkamp publishing house released the first title in its newly established DVD “filmedition”: Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike (News from Ideological Antiquity). This assembles on three disks Kluge’s collaborative, nine-hour-long engagement with Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealized project of filming Marx’s Capital.16 It would be misleading to unify Kluge’s sprawling work under any single concept, but many of his writings, films, and television programs do crystallize around a limited set of salient concerns. Among these the concern with German history is perhaps the most obvious, from his 1966 film debut with Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl) through many of the interviews on “Zehn vor elf,” “Primetime,” and “News and Stories” — programming produced by Kluge’s own dtcp production company for late-night private television. As Thomas Elsaesser puts it, “in the end, one abiding concern remains clearly discernible in everything [Kluge] does: the why and wherefore of his nation, his country, and its history.”17 Although Kluge is fond of occasionally (and ironically) projecting that history backward to some lost origins in the Ice Age (as in a sequence of Die Patriotin [The Patriot, 1977]), his focus is resolutely on the history of the twentieth century, with National Socialism and the Second World War as its epicenter. Indeed, one might argue that in Kluge’s oeuvre this center is constituted principally by two texts that he first published in 1964 and 1977 respectively: his montage novel about Stalingrad, Schlachtbeschreibung: Der organisatorische Aufbau eines Unglücks (The Battle) and his autobiographically inflected collection of vignettes entitled Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945 (The Air Attack on Halberstadt). Both of these texts have remained central to his recent work: in the form of revised and updated versions and as narrative quarries that he mines for short vignettes or voiceover dialogs in his films. These two texts earned him Sebald’s praise as the most intelligent and enlightened of Germany’s postwar writers.18 If war remains a touchstone for Kluge in this sense, there has also emerged, particularly in recent years, a master trope, an “architectonic principle,” which Kluge employs for characterizing the century: the trope

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of feeling, with its attendant registers of emotions, psychological dispositions, and affect.19 This salience of feelings, as well as their historical dimension, is signaled by the title Kluge chose for a recent edition of his collected works: Chronik der Gefühle (chronicle of feelings). But it is also evident in the rhetorical strategies Kluge employs in his stories and films: one thinks of the soft-spoken, quasi-confidential voiceovers, the sentimental Schlager (popular songs) that underlie his montages, or the tropes of failed communication through which Kluge highlights the incommensurability of subjective emotions in his stories. Feelings, Kluge posits, are “die wahren Einwohner der menschlichen Lebensläufe” (the true inhabitants of human life stories).20 In this regard the filmmaker Tom Tykwer rightly describes Kluge’s work as that of an emotional and cultural archaeologist, a multi-talented auteur tirelessly digging, like the protagonist of Die Patriotin, for the submerged traces of recalcitrant feelings in a history gone awry.21 It is no accident that Kluge returns over and over in his work to the music and dramaturgy — the melo-drama — of opera, whose fifth act he playfully critiques for invariably harnessing the energy and social potential of feelings to tragic endings, as in the film entitled Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Emotions, 1981).22 To be sure, there have been other, related, terms through which Kluge has sought to organize his thinking and his cultural productions, notably the notions of Erfahrung (experience) and Eigensinn (obstinacy), which form the object of his two most important collaborations with the sociologist and philosopher Oskar Negt. Like the notion of Gefühl (feeling, emotion), these concepts serve to bring into view the “subjective factor” of history that, according to Kluge, can find genuine expression only in the kinds of counter-public spheres he has theorized and aims to foster through his cultural work. But for our purposes, the more recent turn to feeling as the preferred synthetic term for that work has the distinct advantage of allowing us to trace the continuities and the radical disjunctures between Kluge’s recovery of feelings in history and the current pervasive emotional turn in Germany’s media landscape. Kluge clearly shares with the latter an abiding interest in, if not an obsession with, the affective experience of war and its representations. Like the TV film Dresden, Kluge’s Die Patriotin and Die Macht der Gefühle generate a “feeling tone” about the Second World War. But Die Macht der Gefühle also forces us to rethink the power of emotion as conceptualized by teamWorx. Through his promiscuous borrowings from both high culture (opera, philosophy) and popular traditions (early cinema, newsreels, popular songs, the circus), Kluge explicitly confronts the dialectics of history and emotion in which he participates. The key emotions here and the central terms of this dialectic are melodramatic. They involve questions of empathy and sympathy, along with the attendant feelings of pity and admiration for unjustly suffering heroines.

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Feeling for the Victim in Historical Event-Television Again, Dresden provides an excellent example. The emotional address of this teamWorx production and others like it depends centrally on what we commonly think of as identification, or what recent film theory has described as the “structure of sympathy” or engagement undergirding most narrative, fictional films.23 This structure attaches to the salience of characters with whom spectators become aligned, whose view of the unfolding events they often share, but whom they also learn to judge and evaluate morally. This is not the place to rehearse the way in which Dresden orchestrates such a structure of engagement, but by way of an example, we might consider a climactic moment in a film full of climaxes and dashed hopes. The protagonist Anna is wandering through Dresden as British planes above continue to unload their bombs. Together with her estranged fiancé, she has just stumbled across her dying father, his legs torn off by a bomb blast. Now she encounters Robert, the British fighter pilot whose gunshot wound she had secretly treated as a nurse at the hospital and with whom she is in love. In other words, the film carefully reestablishes the central love triangle amid the chaos of 13 February 1945, deliberately layering the historical scenario with the fictional conceit. The ostensible goal of this dramaturgical device, which draws the viewer into the tension of the moment, is heightened through stylistic devices. As the firestorm breaks loose in earnest, the soundtrack and editing focalize the spectator’s attention by aligning it with Anna’s: emulating her perception of muted voices and shouts drowned out by the blast, the soundtrack temporarily mutes the dialog; meanwhile, eyeline matches alternate close-ups of Anna’s face with point-of-view shots registering iconographic images of the Dresden inferno — burning bodies jumping from windows, burning prosthetics, burning baby carriages, burning corpses. This brief scene illustrates the way in which Dresden — and the format of historical event-television more generally — structures viewers’ sympathy. Placing fictional characters and their emotional conflicts at the heart of historical scenarios, this format seeks to align viewers visually and emotionally with individual perspectives on human suffering and to heighten their affective engagement by raising the stakes within the diegesis. Over and over these individual perspectives are gendered as female, as in the case of Dresden’s Anna, caught between two lovers amid falling bombs. Her speechlessness, her horrified gaze, her impaired hearing, and her inability to process the traumatic images all derive not only from the staged historical situation but also from the fictional character’s traumatic loss of her father and her conflicting feelings for the two male romantic leads. Between the good-looking Allied aggressor (“das ist er!” [that’s him, that is, that’s his doing], shouts her fiancé, pointing to the planes from which the bombs are falling) and the strapping Nazi (“das sind wir!”

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Fig. 11.1. Eliciting empathy in Dresden (2006). DVD capture.

[that’s us, that is, our fault] she retorts), Anna becomes an “avatar of innocent feeling,” as Vinzenz Hediger calls it, a composite figure who filters history, fiction, and discourses about victimization and guilt and who offers them up to the viewer for empathetic engagement.24 Viewers are invited to experience history affectively by virtue of their alignment with a suffering heroine at the heart of a historical fictional narrative. As Linda Williams points out, this construction generates the specific “moral legibility” not only of the plot but also of the social and historical constellations that it represents.25 This particular representation as well as the “historical event-television” it exemplifies is significant because it prompts audiences to reread the moral distinction between perpetrators and victims by allowing the distinction itself to blur. Operating in the mode of melodrama, “historical event-television” borrows heavily from a cinematic tradition that characteristically “manage[s] to present all characters convincingly as victims,” thus contributing a significant affective dimension to the revisionist impulses many commentators have discerned in postWall German culture.26

Layered Affect If it were not for the fact that Kluge is so consistently concerned with the very kind of conflagration that drives Dresden — that is, with the traumatic violence of bombing and burning cities, with the paralysis of feeling, and with the power of emotions — one might be inclined to dismiss any comparison out of hand. In terms of their narrative and aesthetic strategies Kluge’s films relate to Dresden as Schönberg relates to

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jazz in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. The seemingly irreconcilable differences between the two begin at the level of narration and unity of action and extend to the conception of character and virtually every aspect of film style. In his recent Geschichten vom Kino (Cinema Stories), for example, Kluge describes the very notion of Handlung — that is, the narrative glue that holds together the disparate elements of film — as a “Machination des Teufels” (machination of the devil), an ideological conceit that disavows film’s ability to focus on elementary phenomena such as “Regen, . . . Farben, Grauwerte, Momente” (rain, . . . colors, shades of gray, moments).27 Like the miniatures that fill his books, Kluge’s own films, by contrast, foreground precisely such ephemeral elements, strung together in complex audiovisual montages that evince only the most fleeting hints of narrative unity, if any. But just as for Adorno Schönberg and jazz ultimately represent “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up,” so does Kluge’s work ultimately beg to be related back to the popular deployment of narrative emotions in historical event-television, which Kluge historicizes through his ubiquitous references to popular media such as the circus, popular music, and silent cinema, and to the opera as the “powerhouse of feelings” in the nineteenth century.28 This relationship is highly mediated, as becomes obvious if we look at a quintessential moment in Kluge’s early film, Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed, 1967). Here, elephants have taken the place of human characters as focalizing agents — functioning as very different avatars of innocent feeling. The scene in question allegorizes historical victimization and solicits the viewer’s — and the listener’s — empathy for the suffering animals. However, as a close look will reveal, the dramaturgy of the circus act that underpins the organization of this sequence (and of the overall film) allows Kluge to multiply the affective investments, ultimately dispersing rather than heightening the viewer’s empathetic response. As in a number of other instances to be discussed below, the overriding question of war and destruction enters through the motif of fire, one of the “elementary phenomena” of Kluge’s visual poetics, and one with deep historical and affective resonances. The scene broaches those resonances circuitously, beginning with the pachyderms’ cry for help in a Chicago Elephant House when a fire breaks out. As we watch a group of circus elephants, the voiceover recounts the director’s dismissive remarks as well as the elephants’ desperation at the encroaching flames. After a few inserted shots from Eisenstein’s film October (1928), cut to a spirited tango tune from an old, scratchy record, the elephants explain the “essence of human freedom” with the help of Hegel and then swear “we forget nothing.” This association of the animals with memory marks the sequence as an intervention into contemporary memory politics that is to be taken quite literally. In a film from 1968 that

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Fig. 11.2. The Fire in the Chicago Elephant House, from Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (1967). DVD capture.

Kluge himself links both to Adorno’s final work, Aesthetic Theory, and to the student protests of 1968 during which shooting took place,29 the insistence on memory is linked to accusations of forgetting and repression leveled at the parent generation after the Auschwitz trials of the early 1960s.30 In this respect, the fire in the Elephant House might appear, first, as a distant evocation of the Holocaust; but Kluge soon layers another reference onto the fire motif by cutting to a shot of a city at night and two still images of burning buildings in a landscape apparently hit by bombs. We return briefly to the film’s diegetic world (to the degree that there is one), as Kluge shows a fire crew running towards a circus tent and then cuts inside to an elephant act. After the voiceover repeats the animals’ solemn commitment to “forget nothing,” a complex sound montage layers different aural snippets, as if to materialize the palimpsest of elephantine historical memory. To the tune of a Christmas carol, a group sings about the imminent demise of the “Hitler-state,” noting the good fortune of anyone who has survived it unharmed; the elephants note that they will not forget the director’s failure to act on the fire alarm; and different voices — Kluge’s own among them — begin discussing what to do with fascists who burn and those who do not burn: pack them in boxes and throw them into the sea.

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Notably the montage ends with the call to do the same with “unsere Erinnerung und die Schmerzen und das Feuer” (our memories and the pain and the fire). At this point the subject of these assertions, the firstperson plural who speaks, is as difficult to locate as it has been to isolate the textual layers spoken by the individual voices: who is the victimized “we” and what are “our” painful memories? Who considers and then dismisses the emotional reaction of “Rache, Rache, Rache” (revenge) in favor of the repressive submersion of all memories and feelings in boxes under the sea?31 How does the radically antifascist subject position, from which the voiceovers ponder how to treat burning and non-burning fascists, relate to the emotional pain that is remembered and then repressed? This proliferation — the Verwirrung der Gefühle (confusion of emotions), as Kluge will later call it — is significant in that it dissociates feelings from clearly demarcated subject positions: while victimization plays into Kluge’s montage as prominently as it does into TV’s melodramatic histories, empathy here becomes a matter not of feeling with individualized characters but of inhabiting a rather more diffuse, but no less affectively charged sense of emotional disorientation.

Verwirrung der Gefühle: Decentered Emotions Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel leaves behind the motif of fire and war in favor of its overriding concern with the status of art and the impossibility of representation after Auschwitz, which it articulates through the protagonist’s dream of a “reform circus.” Kluge will return, however, to the layered emotional impact of war throughout his work, whether in Die Patriotin, the omnibus project Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace, 1982), or in one of his final films before his move to television: with Die Macht der Gefühle, he explicitly reflects on the cinema as a Gefühlsmaschine, an emotion machine. Arguing that during the twentieth century cinema inherited opera’s nineteenth-century role as a “powerhouse of the emotions,” he assembles a string of scenarios and montage sequences around the power — as well as the powerlessness — of feelings in history. Given his claim in an accompanying publication that war constitutes “die schärfste Herausforderung für das Gefühl” (the sharpest challenge to feeling),32 it is hardly surprising that, along with the media of opera and film themselves, the Second World War and the bombing of German cities become a flashpoint for this exploration. Again Kluge approaches the issue circuitously and through the motif of fire. A section introduced by the intertitle “Verwirrung der Gefühle” constructs a link between the “confusion of languages” that resulted from the destruction of Babylon and the emotional confusion generated

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by aerial bombing. After a brief montage has introduced the motif of war through a few shots of bomber formations, a soldier’s grave, and a woman leaving on a refugee trek, the film cuts to a series of closeups that show a fire being lit in a cast-iron oven — again, an ambivalent image with resonances of the iron doors of Auschwitz ovens rather than burning cities. But once the fire is lit and we see a crackling blaze inside the oven, Kluge cuts first to burning buildings and the sound of blaring sirens, and then to a fictional firefighter making a report over the phone as he surveys the damage through binoculars. Though Kluge uses color stock to film this staged sequence, the counter-shot of what the firefighter ostensibly sees through his binoculars is offered in grainy black and white: almost indecipherable images of smoldering corpses in medium close-up that show (according to the script) “was mit Menschen geschieht, die in den Feuersturm geraten” (what happens to people who get caught in the firestorm).33 The heterogeneous material that Kluge assembles here as elsewhere in his films exposes discontinuities and fosters disorientation even where it draws on editing devices associated with narrative continuity, such as the eyeline match suggested by the firefighter’s gaze through the binoculars. Here we have the equivalent of Anna’s point-of-view shots in Dresden, but Kluge treats the same structure in a completely different way. The smoldering bodies that we see (presumably the kind of found footage Kluge is fond of using in his mix of fact and fiction) fail to line up aesthetically with the staged image of the firefighter shot in color and presumably by Kluge’s team. Moreover, the editing refuses any clear historicization; indeed, it does not even generate a coherent diegetic temporality, but rather develops in an associational space that places different historical moments in suspension within an undifferentiated diegetic present, the Jetztzeit (immediate present) of the film itself. This temporality might be described as one of memory rather than history, but it is not subjective memory — the firefighter never achieves psychological complexity or even the salience of character on which Smith’s “structure of sympathy” depends — so much as a multiperspectival montage that brings together the competing subjective positions characteristic of the war experience. A calamity such as Stalingrad, writes Kluge of his other obsession, “hat den Vorteil, daß es unmöglich mit zwei Augen zu sehen ist” (has the advantage that it is impossible to see with two eyes).34 In his aesthetic strategies he draws the consequence of this impossibility and radically decenters our perspectives on war. This is the object of the staged interview that concludes the segment on the “confusion of the emotions.” After the short sequence with the firefighter, a brief transitional shot shows a woman crossing a courtyard in a city as the voiceover claims “man kann nicht einmal mehr kapitulieren” (you cannot even capitulate any longer). To readers of Kluge’s work this will be a familiar phrase denoting the powerlessness of bombing victims

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Fig. 11.3. Confusion of feelings in Die Macht der Gefühle (1983). DVD capture.

who are reduced to devising a “strategy from below” against the military apparatus above. In the context of the film, however, the meaning of this phrase emerges only by association with the staged exchange that follows between a middle-aged woman, identified as the reporter “Frau Pichota” in the script, and “Mr. Anderson,” an Allied (presumably British) brigadier general. As the latter explains in a detached manner how best to dismantle and burn down a small city through aerial bombing, Frau Pichota grows increasingly incredulous. She takes the position of the inhabitants below, asking about an alleged attempt to avert the attack by flying a handmade white flag from the church steeple. Mr. Anderson replies that this is nonsense, as nobody would have been able to notify the bombers at this point; he dismisses Frau Pichota’s story as unfounded and irrelevant. There is a direct link here between the staged investigation of the competing strategies “from above” and “from below,” on the one hand, and the cross-cutting between the Royal Air Force cockpits above and the inferno below in Dresden, on the other; but where the latter constructs continuity and links between these perspectives (not least by the conceit of the British bomber pilot who is shot down at the beginning of the film and falls in love with Anna in the Dresden inferno), Kluge emphasizes the disconnect through Mr. Anderson’s dismissive characterization of the inhabitants’ strategy from below as “Larifari” (nonsense).

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The conversation ends, notably, with the question of Mitgefühl, or empathy: the two interlocutors representing the two opposing strategies for dealing with the air war can only agree on one thing, that empathy would achieve nothing. After Frau Pichota accuses Mr. Andersen of being cynical, he counters: “Was nützt es Ihnen, wenn ich Ihnen jetzt mein Mitgefühl ausdrücke?” (What good will it do you if I express my empathy now?). Frau Pichota concedes: “Gar nichts” (Nothing at all). For if he were to express it in the interview situation, manifestly at great historical remove from the war itself, such feeling would come at the wrong point, too late. On this question of empathy, then, the film does open up a temporal horizon that permits, indeed demands, differentiation. Had empathy played a role at an earlier historical moment, long before the woman tried to raise the white flag on the church tower, it could have been a feeling with the power to affect historical change. But if it is already too late in 1945, the year of the attack on Halberstadt that provides the narrative material for the interview, then it is even less useful decades later as a device in Kluge’s film. The latter consequently critiques the uses of empathy even as it vindicates the emotion itself. Omer Bartov has criticized Kluge for the vagueness of his empathetic project, its representation of Jewishness and the Holocaust as absence, and its conflation of the latter with German victimization — a move by now familiar from popular, revisionist fare such as Dresden as much as from Kluge’s experimental work.35 And yet, even at the risk of underscoring that conflation, we should note the decisive refutation of misplaced sympathy in favor of timely feelings that Kluge implies in this sequence and that he makes explicit in a forceful moral claim in his acceptance speech for the Fontane Prize in 1979. Here he notes, presumably in connection with the recent broadcast of the miniseries Holocaust,36 that the moral devastation in German families, rehearsed decades after the genocide, is “im wesentlichen unbrauchbar” (essentially useless). More important perhaps, this delayed and mediated reaction indicates for Kluge a fundamental misconception of the political as an essentially bureaucratic activity performed by others rather than as an “Intensitätsgrad unserer eigenen Gefühle” (degree of intensity of our own feelings).37 Rather than trying to encourage retrospective empathy, then, Kluge aims to foster through his work and in Die Macht der Gefühle in particular this concept of the political — and of the public sphere — as itself an emotional investment.

Public Feeling The point of my argument is not that Kluge makes essay films (he does), whereas companies like teamWorx make historical event-television (they do); nor is it that, in dealing with the Second World War, Kluge thwarts

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feelings whereas Dresden invites them. I have been suggesting that both of these approaches to the air war foreground the power of emotions despite the aesthetic gulf that ostensibly separates them. The distinction lies, then, not in the centrality of feelings but in the way the dialectics of high and low, of history and emotion are put into play. Kluge’s work pinpoints the stakes for addressing both, the vagaries of representation and the centrality of emotion, in dealing with the Second World War. For Kluge, too, aligns his viewers emotionally, and his modernist techniques by no means preclude the sentimental.38 He too uses fictional characters as entry points into historical scenarios, inserts love stories into histories, Geschichten (stories) into Geschichte (history), or invites us to linger on close-ups of his protagonists’ faces in ways that conventionally solicit empathy.39 By refusing to define these protagonists as fictional characters, however, or sometimes simply through the montage, Kluge’s mini-stories and montage sequences block the spectator’s access to the emotional object, as if to return the invested emotional energy to the viewer herself. Consequently, when Kluge turns to the category of feeling — as he does throughout his oeuvre — he is operating on a plane dialectically opposed to the melodramatic strategies deployed by historical event-television, which is to say, he critiques the conventional structure of sympathy governing the latter, while at the same time highlighting the humanist appeal to empathy that inhabits even the schematic and reified aesthetics in the teamWorx mold. What emerges from this juxtaposition, then, is not so much an either/or of modernist and popular, experimental and conventional approaches to the Second World War but a recognition of the ineluctably public, political function of feelings. Even where teamWorx would appear to privatize and reify the emotions, and empathy in particular, and even where Kluge, according to a facile view of Brechtian distanciation, would appear to undercut emotional investments, we are forced to recognize the centrality of feeling in the very concept of a public sphere, let alone of a nation and its history. Historical event-television individualizes feelings within the diegesis, where characters acquire psychological depth through emotional turmoil. As central elements in mega “TV events,” in turn, these characters’ feelings become the conduits for a mass-mediated culture of empathy that asks viewers to align their emotions (and their putative grasp of historical events) with those of the suffering characters, the avatars of innocent feeling. Kluge puts all these elements into play as well; however, he urges us to understand feelings, not as the private traits of segregated individuals, filtered through fictional characters, nor as a collective, national, emotional ethos imposed from above. Rather, feelings for Kluge are autonomous participants in the public sphere, elements of a counter-public sphere (Gegenöffentlichkeit) that mounts resistance to their incorporation through the narrative formats of mass media even as

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it recognizes the centrality of the latter as “powerhouses of feelings” in maintaining their energy. Kluge articulates this claim in various ways, but it is perhaps most tangible in his tendency — somewhat irritating at first — to personify feelings. Watching a film such as Die Macht der Gefühle and reading through the accompanying materials published in a book by the same title, one is struck by this personification of feeling as a recurring literary device. We find Kluge describing feelings, for example, as “naïve Zivilisten” (naive civilians) whom he would like to arm so that they might learn to combat the tragic endings of operatic narratives. For all feelings, he asserts, “glauben an einen glücklichen Ausgang” (believe in a happy ending). Though the culture industry (among other historical processes) has enslaved and blinded feelings, turning them against themselves like so many “proletarians” (Kluge’s term) with false consciousness, the emotions “können unterscheiden . . . [und] könnten Analytiker sein” (know how to distinguish and could act as analysts). Feelings, Kluge claims, can and should learn “für die Aufklärung brauchbar zu sein” (to become useful for enlightenment).40 And cinema is the space where that can happen: “Das Kino ist der beste Ort für selbstbewusste Gefühle, die etwas auf sich halten” (the cinema is the best place for self-confident feelings that have a high opinion of themselves).41 If this sounds too much like a literary conceit and too little like a viable theoretical basis for analysis, we should perhaps remind ourselves how a number of these tropes recur with slightly different emphasis and ramifications in recent work on cinema and affect, and on the social place of emotions more broadly speaking. Here, as in Kluge, emotion and cognition go hand in hand. His claim that “Denken ist das Unterscheidungsvermögen der Gefühle” (thinking is the capacity of feelings to differentiate)42 is but an idiosyncratic turn on Martha Nussbaum’s description of the intelligence of emotions as “upheavals of thought,” or on the now well-established cognitive function of the emotions.43 Moreover, the agential role of the emotions is likewise broadly recognized. Cognitive approaches do consider the emotions, if not as personified characters, at least as active participants in cognition and in cinematic spectatorship in particular. As Noël Carroll puts it, for example, “the emotions gestalt or organize perception,” they “manage attention over time.” In a particularly suggestive phrase that Kluge would doubtless appreciate, Carroll likens the emotions to “searchlights” that “foreground relevant details in what might be called a special phenomenological glow.”44 The distinction between the cognitivist, analytical perspective of someone like Carroll and Kluge’s more literary standpoint is not in the agency of emotion, then, but in the attribution of critical energy to the emotions. Film has the power to harness that critical energy — as Hollywood tends to — or to unleash it, as Kluge intends to.45 Cognitive

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theory charts the ways in which fiction films “emotionally predigest” events for viewers, cueing them to construe these events in specific ways, based on the specific concerns (generally for particular characters) elicited by the narration and “emotionally organizing scenes and sequences for us.”46 By and large this is where Kluge intervenes with his films, which — as anyone familiar with his work will attest — often refuse to “organize scenes and sequences for us” in any emotionally legible way. The goal of his (rather Brechtian) emotional poetics, consequently, is to liberate the emotions, and to “make them useful for enlightenment” by situating them within the public sphere. Cinematic spectatorship — and now, increasingly, televisual spectatorship — has been for Kluge a constituent element of that public sphere from the start. If one reviews the mounting pile of DVDs issued under the teamWorx label, their generic, formulaic character is difficult to overlook. For all its claims to historical specificity, the plots and the stylistic means of historical event-television appear all but interchangeable. Whether the subject is aerial bombing, the postwar airlift, or the 1953 worker’s strike in East Berlin, these films use the same music, the same actors, the same colors, the same digital effects. More important, they use the same dramaturgical devices centered on female protagonists as avatars of innocent feeling and on romance as the emotional filter for historical scenarios. As Anton Kaes already pointed out with respect to an earlier wave of historical representation on German screens, these films generate “an eternal cycle, an endless loop” in which images refer, not so much to historical events, but to other images.47 The same might be said of Kluge’s films. Here too everything seems interchangeable, an endlessly recombinant realm of images, obsessions, mini-stories, recycled from book to film and anthologized anew in another book version. Admittedly there is a shrewd marketing mentality at work here, but more important, this endless repeatability — indeed, the claim for the need to continue repeating these stories — is exactly his point. Historical event-television recycles generic formulae along with the promise of novelty: for the first time! The most realistic representation ever! A broken taboo! Kluge’s work, by contrast, reminds us of the need for far more patient and dialectical forms of persistence, for the continuous return to the same material, reedited into new montages that foster the Verwirrung der Gefühle: given the sheer affective force of war, on the one hand, and the “suspicion that war is ultimately unrepresentable,” on the other,48 Kluge confronts head-on the need to account for war in terms of (a history of) Gefühle and their power. But he does so in a way that makes the impossibility of representation part of his montage aesthetic. In Die Macht der Gefühle a brief scene shows the Frankfurt opera house, identified by an intertitle as a “Kraftwerk der Gefühle (power plant of the emotions). But as the voiceover notes, “irgendetwas in der Anfangsphase des Projekts ging schief” (something went wrong in the early stage of the project),

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Fig. 11.4. Wiring the emotions in Die Macht der Gefühle (1983). DVD capture.

and today “die Verkabelung ist in einem katastrophalen Zustand” (the cables are in a catastrophic state). Cut to Hannelore Hoger, wrench in hand, working at the bottom of a pit on a construction site, putting her ear to various holes and bits of plumbing, and insisting “man muss für die veralteten Röhren etwas tun” (something has to be done for the outdated pipes) that run underground. Coursing through a subterranean network along human history and erupting in that history’s catastrophic moments, the emotions and their energy have become misdirected on their way to and from the opera and the cinema, which, in Kluge, function as hubs for the distribution and representation of the emotions. One is tempted to see in this evocative image of broken pipes and crossed wires a poetic principle for Kluge’s montage aesthetics: in his writings and in his films alike Kluge tackles the unrepresentability of war by formally short-circuiting, or confusing, the power of emotions, thereby unearthing that power and making it available for inspection.

Notes 1

Theodor W. Adorno, “Out of the Firing-Line,” in Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 53–56. All citations in this paragraph are taken from p. 54.

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2

In this aphorism Adorno borrows heavily from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the withering of experience and narration in his “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” originally published in 1936. Here, in the context of a reflection on the atrophy of storytelling, Benjamin similarly muses: “Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What poured out in the flood of war books ten years later was anything but experience that can be shared orally. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been more thoroughly belied than . . . bodily experience [was belied] by mechanical warfare.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Selected Writings 3, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jenning (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2002), 143–66; here 144. On the notion of Experience in Benjamin and Adorno, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005), 312–60. 3

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003), 147. 4

This is the term in the German original, translated as “sensory experience” in Winfried G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003), 5. 5

Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 24.

6

Fredric Jameson, “War and Representation,” PMLA 124.5 (Oct. 2009): 1532– 47; here 1547. 7

Alexander Kluge, “Schlachtbeschreibung,” Chronik der Gefühle 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 562.

8

See Tobias Ebbrecht, “History, Public Memory, and Media Event: Codes and Conventions of Historical Event-Television in Germany,” Media History 13.2/3 (Dec. 2007): 221–34. 9

For an excellent look at teamWorx and its melodramatization of German history, see Paul Cooke, “Dresden, TeamWorx, and Titanic: German Wartime Suffering as Hollywood Disaster Movie,” German Life and Letters 61.2 (Apr. 2008): 279–94. 10

Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 133.

11 Martin Walser, “Über ein Geschichtsgefühl,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (10 May 2002). See Johannes von Moltke, “Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion,” New German Critique 102 (Fall 2007): 17–43. 12

Jameson, “Reification and Utopia.”

13

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Imitation of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk,” in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, ed. Michael Töteberg and Leo Lensing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 77–89; here 86. 14 Leslie A. Adelson, “Experiment Mars: Contemporary German Literature, Imaginative Ethnoscapes, and the New Futurism,” in Über Gegenwartsliteratur: Interpretationen und Interventionen, ed. Marc Rectanus (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009), 23–49; here 24.

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15

A partial list includes Silver Lion (Venice) in 1966; Golden Lion (Venice), 1968 and 1982 (life achievement); Fontane Prize 1979; Kleist Prize 1985; Lessing Prize 1990; Schiller Prize 2001; Georg-Büchner Prize 2003; Life Achievement Award (Ehrenpreis) of the German Film Academy 2008; Adorno Prize 2009. 16

Prior to this, all of Kluge’s feature film work had been released on DVD by the Edition Filmmuseum, which has recently also released Kluge’s collected films for television. For a brief appraisal of the former collection, see Johannes von Moltke, “Kluge Total,” Germanic Review 83.1 (Winter 2008): 60–68. 17 Thomas Elsaesser, “Marathon Man,” Film Comment 44.3 (May-Jun. 2008): 52–64; here 58. 18

Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 67.

19

Amir Eshel, “The Past Recaptured? Günter Grass’s Mein Jahrhundert and Alexander Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle,” Gegenwartsliteratur 1 (2002): 63–86; here 76. 20

Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle, 7. See also Heinz B. Heller “Alexander Kluges Die Macht der Gefühle — wieder gesehen,” in Mit allen Sinnen: Gefühl und Empfindung im Kino, ed. Susanne Marschall and Fabienne Liptay (Marburg: Schüren 2006), 32–44; here 32. 21

Tom Tykwer, “Der Testpilot der Kinematographie,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 Apr. 2008. 22

Cf. Gertrud Koch, “Alexander Kluge’s Phantom of the Opera,” New German Critique 49 (Winter 1990): 79–88.

23 See Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (New York: Oxford UP, 1995). For a slight variation on Smith’s model, one that favors the term “engagement” over “sympathy,” see Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: U of California P, 2009), 106–9. 24

Vinzenz Hediger, lecture at conference “Audiovisuelle Emotionen,” Hamburg, 2005. 25

Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002). 26

Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1987), 43–69; here 64. For overviews on the revisionist discourses on victimhood, see, among others, Lothar Kettenacker, ed. Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg 1940–45 (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2003) and Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 27

Alexander Kluge, Geschichten vom Kino (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 163. Significantly, however, the list also includes “Liebesgeschichten” (love stories). 28

Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, 18 Mar. 1936, in Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1971), 122–25; here 123. On Kluge’s

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citation practices and his relationship to early cinema, see Eric Rentschler, “A Cinema of Citation,” ArtForum 47.1 (September 2008): 416–25; and Miriam Hansen, “Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema,” October 46 (Fall 1988): 179–98. 29 Alexander Kluge, Neonröhren des Himmels: Filmalbum. Beibuch zu Sämtliche Kinofilme (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2007), 20. 30

The wordplay on Schein in the voiceover, which equivocates between the glow (Schein) of the fire and the director’s claim that this is mere appearance (Schein), opens the door to a further meaning of the word, aesthetic semblance (Schein), a central category of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie, which links the “Krise des Scheins” to historical trauma and the impossibility of art after Auschwitz. 31

One answer might be Theodor W. Adorno. In the entry from Minima Moralia quoted above, Adorno explicitly raises the question of revenge, and one is tempted to see his reflection as a source for Kluge’s collage aesthetics: “As long as blow is followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated. One need only think of revenge for the murdered. If as many of the others are killed, horror will be institutionalized and the pre-capitalist pattern of vendettas, confined from time immemorial to remote mountainous regions, will be re-introduced in extended form, with whole nations as the subjectless subjects. If, however, the dead are not avenged and mercy is exercised, fascism will despite everything get away with its victory scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere.” A bit further on, Adorno offers a further dialectical reversal of the issue that would appear germane to Kluge’s treatment by suggesting that “perhaps the fault lies in the question [that is, revenge or not] and not only in me” (Adorno, Minima Moralia, 55–56). 32 Alexander Kluge, Die Macht der Gefühle (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1984), 6. 33

Kluge, Die Macht der Gefühle, 94.

34

Kluge, “Schlachtbeschreibung,” 513; see also Alexander Kluge, “Krieg,” in Die Welt der Encyclopédie, ed. Annette Selg and Rainer Wieland (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2001), 211–16; here 212. 35

Omer Bartov, “‘Seit die Juden weg sind . . . ‘: Germany, History, and Representations of Absence,” in A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies, ed. Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos (Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 1997), 209–26; Bartov, “War, Memory and Repression: Alexander Kluge and the Politics of Representation in Postwar Germany,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 23 (1994): 413–32. 36

On the role of identification and empathy in that context, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama,” New German Critique 19 (1980): 117–36. 37

Alexander Kluge, Theodor Fontane, Anna Wilde, Heinrich von Kleist (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1987), 16.

38

Omer Bartov makes a similar point, albeit in support of a different argument, in “War, Memory, and Repression,” 418.

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39

See Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), 239–56. 40

See Kluge, Die Macht der Gefühle, 185–86.

41

Kluge, acceptance speech at the 2008 German Film Prize, available at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-ADL49L89s (accessed 19 Jan. 2009). 42

Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Maßverhältnisse des Politischen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992).

43

Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001).

44

Noël Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Plantinga and Smith, Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, 21–47; here 29. 45

See Kluge, Geschichten vom Kino, 53.

46

Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” 29. Cf. also Plantinga, Moving Viewers.

47

Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of German History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), 196. 48

Jameson, “War and Representation,” 1533.

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12: Post-unification German-Jewish Relations and the Discourse of Victimhood in Dani Levy’s Films Seán Allan

I

Die Welt published on 20 January 2007 — just one week after the release of Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler) — the film’s director Dani Levy emphatically threw down the gauntlet to his detractors: “Lachen ist ein Politikum,” he wrote. “Das lachende Kino ist Ausdruck einer Haltung . . . Über Hitler zu lachen klärt unser Verhältnis zu ihm” (Laughter is a political act. Laughter in the cinema expresses an attitude . . . and laughing at Hitler clarifies our relationship to him).1 Levy’s statement serves as a welcome reminder of comedy’s potential to launch a radical critique of the prevailing political and social structures in the post-unification era. However, the wave of comedies that emerged after 1989 was not always viewed in such favorable terms. Eric Rentschler spoke for many when he depicted the comic turn of post-unification cinema as just one symptom of the decline in German filmmaking from a cinema of “oppositional voices and critical energies” to a “cinema of consensus.”2 But while many of the more anodyne genre comedies of the early 1990s might be seen as deliberate attempts to avoid political controversy, the emergence of a new generation of directors — many of them associated with the Berlin production company X-Filme Creative Pool — demonstrated that irreverent and often “politically incorrect” comedy could be deployed as a powerful, though controversial, means of addressing issues relating to the German past generally and to the discourse of victimhood in particular. At the same time, the positive reception in the Federal Republic of such foreign imports as Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), Radu Mihaileanu’s Train de vie (Train of Life, 1998), and Peter Kassovitz’s reworked adaptation of Jurek Becker’s novel Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, 1999) pointed to a major shift in attitudes towards the role of humor and irony in portraying Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. Accordingly, to dismiss post-unification comedy in Germany as part of a normalizing agenda that leads to nothing more than a “cinema of consensus” is to underplay its critical thrust. N A LETTER TO

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In this essay I focus on the work of the Swiss filmmaker Dani Levy, a self-identified Jew whose recent explorations of German-Jewish relations have played a key role in reconceptualizing contemporary notions of victimhood. Although it might be argued that his work centers not on “German” but “Jewish” victimhood (as problematic as such a dichotomy is), Levy’s fascination with an aesthetics of performance and performativity coupled with his interest in the politics of identity has resulted in a series of films in which not only categories of national identity but the concept of victimhood itself are exposed as inherently problematic. Although Levy is best known for his comedies Alles auf Zucker! (Go for Zucker, 2004) and the (much less successful) Hitler-farce, Mein Führer (2007), it was in his psychological thriller Meschugge (The Giraffe, 1998) that he first turned his attention to the relationship between identity and performance. Set in a global community that embraces both New York and Berlin in the 1990s, Levy’s intricate thriller is crucially informed by the impact of the Second World War and Germany’s Nazi past on contemporary German-Jewish relations. Lena Katz, a young German set-designer now based in New York, has grown up in the belief that her “Jewish” grandfather was interned in Sachsenhausen and that she herself is Jewish. However, following a chance encounter with David Fish, a New York Jew with whom she falls in love, she discovers that her grandfather was an infamous Nazi war criminal who was responsible for the supervision of the gas chambers in Treblinka, but who escaped justice at the end of the war by tattooing a concentration camp number on his arm and assuming a fake Jewish identity. Meschugge is a film that invites the spectator to reflect on the multifacetted relationship between identity and concepts of victimhood in the contemporary era. I use the more abstract notion of victimhood rather than victim, because Meschugge is not about war victims in any narrowly defined sense of the term; rather it is a film that explores the attitudes of what Aleida Assmann has termed the “third generation.”3 For the members of this “confessional generation” — represented in the film by the likes of Lena Katz and David Fish — identity is not grounded in the wartime experiences of the “experiential generation” but entails a more complex and distant relationship to the concept of victimhood. In her study Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit (The Long Shadow of the Past) Assmann acknowledges that the term “Opfertrauma” (traumatic victimhood) is most obviously bound up with the Holocaust. Nonetheless she also suggests ways in which the term might be applied in what she refers to as the “posttraumatisches Zeitalter” (post-traumatic era) to capture those situations in which the individual is faced with the total destruction of the world he or she knew prior to the traumatic event by forces that are fundamentally inexplicable.4 As we shall see, this concept of traumatic victimhood crucially informs the way we view the film’s

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main female character, Lena Katz. At the same time the film also raises important questions about the problem of moral legibility in a world in which identity can no longer be taken for granted as something fixed and unchanging, but — at least in Meschugge — turns out to be intimately bound up with notions of performance. While at one level this notion of performative identity is embodied in the abhorrent masquerade played out by Lena’s Nazi grandfather, it also operates at another level insofar as Lena is forced to recognize that her own identity as a third-generation “Jewish” victim has itself been an elaborate charade, albeit one in which she has been an unwitting performer. Lena’s “Jewish” identity impacts profoundly on almost every aspect of her life. Believing herself to be the descendant of a Jewish family persecuted in the Second World War, she has made a conscious decision to live not in Germany but in the United States. After a group of German neoNazis set fire to the family’s chocolate factory in Hanover, she returns to her grandfather’s home in a gesture of solidarity; and in stark contrast to both her mother and grandfather — both of whom take a more pragmatic attitude towards the arson attack — she most vigorously identifies with the discourse of victimhood when she tacitly accuses the German police of latent anti-Semitism: “Es brennt ja nicht die Deutsche Bank,” she tells the chief of police, “es brennt eine jüdische Fabrik” (It’s not the Deutsche Bank that’s on fire, it’s a Jewish factory). At the same time the subsequent sequence, in which we see Lena sitting astride a tree in the family garden while talking to her doting grandfather, not only conjures up images of a loving childhood but also underlines the importance to her of the biological ties that bind the two of them. Lena’s explicit self-identification of her “Jewish” identity even extends to her dress and appearance. Subconsciously aware perhaps that to many outside observers her physiognomy may not conform closely enough to conventional Jewish stereotypes, she seeks to remove all possible doubt by wearing a Star of David pendant (an attention to detail that leaves a lasting impression on her Jewish lover when they first meet). While Lena seeks to ground her sense of “Jewish” identity in a blend of genetics and ethnicity backed up by an emphatic identification with a well-established discourse of victimhood, her commitment to a particular set of ethical values forms an equally important part of who she is. Like her male counterpart, David Fish, who distances himself from the orthodox lifestyle of his sister and who struggles to come to terms with the expectations of the other members of his extended Jewish family, Lena too cultivates a deliberately unconventional lifestyle. In part this is the result of her refusal to allow her sharp sense of ethical autonomy to be compromised by the expectations of conventional society. When she returns to her work in New York and takes part in a fashion shoot that she has designed — a shoot in which glamorous models are filmed against the

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backdrop of an artificially-created inferno — she quickly abandons the project, now suddenly aware of the contradictions inherent in condemning the brutality of the real arson attack on her grandfather’s factory while aestheticizing such violent images for trivial, commercial purposes. Similarly the sheer hopelessness of her relationship with her chaotic, mixedrace photographer-boyfriend — a well-intentioned man, though one who has no grasp of the dynamics of the German-Jewish past — says rather more about her capacity to show solidarity with those on the margins of society than it does about her choice in men per se. And it is her willingness to come to the assistance of an unknown elderly victim such as Ruth Goldberg, an act that she regards as “selbstverständlich” (just a matter of course), that makes so deep an impression on Ruth’s son David Fish. For as his reply — “nichts ist selbstverständlich” (nothing is just a matter of course) — underscores, her commitment to a set of ethical values that he too shares is anything but ordinary, and precisely this commitment sustains her moral legibility as a character, even when her genetic and ethnic identity as a Jew is so traumatically called into question. Following the meeting with David’s attorney, Charles Kaminski (an active member of the Jewish Defense League), Lena is forced to recognize that neither she nor her mother is quite what they seem. For Lena, the trauma of this loss of identity is so acute that she breaks into Kaminski’s office and tries to destroy the evidence, an act that, with no little irony, echoes her mother’s ill-fated attempt to silence Ruth Goldberg by offering her money to keep quiet about the past. Lena’s initial reaction as she tries to rescue her “Jewish” identity by resorting to force is perhaps understandable as an individual’s impulsive reaction in a moment of personal crisis. To some extent it mirrors the behavior of her lover David when, despite being a liberal Jew in terms of his outlook and beliefs, he retreats momentarily into what he regards as the safe haven of an orthodox lifestyle and sides with the other members of his family in refusing to allow an autopsy to be performed on his mother’s body. However, David’s behavior reflects not a new-found commitment to the more orthodox beliefs of his sister but is prompted by a fear of what the autopsy will reveal and to what point in the past the truth might lead him. Ultimately the moral integrity of both Lena and David is such that neither is able to sustain such acts of mauvaise foi indefinitely. Lena rescues Charles Kaminski (the man who will ultimately expose the fraud of her “Jewish” identity) from the fire that she starts in his office, and David’s faith in Lena is so strong that he not only rejects the pseudo-solace of religious dogma but also refuses to play his allotted role in Kaminski’s elaborate plan to use Lena as a means of entrapping her Nazi grandfather. Through his presentation of this love affair, Levy reminds the viewer of the complex character of identity in the contemporary era, while at the same time hinting at ways in which the conventional categories of

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perpetrator and victim can no longer be taken for granted. At the same time the film points to a more general problem that lies at the heart of any concerted effort to reduce identity to a question of genetics and ethnicity. One way of ignoring the complexity of an increasingly multicultural society is to seek refuge instead in such allegedly “infallible” markers as a means of fixing identity once and for all. But as the futile efforts of the older generation (Lena’s mother and grandfather) highlight, to adopt such an approach is to remain locked within the traumas of the past in a way that makes individual moral development impossible. Not only are such deterministic models increasingly difficult to sustain in an age of increasing globalization, but they are also inherently self-contradictory insofar as they leave no room for individual autonomy and reduce “moral legibility” to a simplistic, one-dimensional exercise. As David comes to recognize, the fact that Lena is the granddaughter of a Nazi and that her “Jewishness” is an illusion does not of itself necessitate a revision of her status as a moral agent. In broaching this dilemma, Levy puts forward a new, anti-essentialist concept of identity as “performance.” Accordingly he urges us to see Lena’s identity not in terms of genetics and ethnicity but rather in terms of an ethical commitment to a particular set of cultural values and practices. This enactment of ethical values stands in sharp relief to her grandfather’s “performance” of “Jewishness,” while the film’s portrayal of Lena’s traumatic loss of identity serves to disrupt our understanding of the victim-perpetrator discourse. At the start of the film Lena explicitly portrays herself and her family as the victims of German anti-Semitic tendencies rooted in the Nazi past; but by the end of the film she herself is portrayed as a German “victim,” betrayed by the Nazi grandfather she adored.

Fig. 12.1. Ultimately Lena ends up a German victim betrayed by the Nazi grandfather she adored. From Meschugge (1998). DVD capture.

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Dani Levy was one of the founding members of X-Filme Creative Pool, and in his highly successful comedy of 2004, Alles auf Zucker!, he not only extends the performative concept of identity that lies at the heart of Meschugge but also seeks to embed this concept of identity within the type of comic framework that was rapidly becoming the hallmark of the production company. From the mid-1990s onward the success of XFilme’s comedies in particular was closely bound up with the political fallout after the Wende and with the refusal of a new generation of writers and filmmakers to see citizens from the former GDR as victims of the political process both before and after 1989. Two of the best-known films about the demise of the GDR — Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten (The Architects, 1990) and Margarethe von Trotta’s Das Versprechen (The Promise, 1995) — were criticized for their melodramatic format, which portrayed East Germans as victims of the communist party’s state apparatus and as reduced to almost passive roles with no real narrative agency. Both Kahane, a DEFA-trained director born in 1949, and von Trotta, a key representative of the New German Cinema born in 1942, might be described as members of two fading generations of German filmmaking. And it was only a matter of time before their conventional take on GDR victimhood came to be challenged by a new generation of filmmakers and scriptwriters such as Leander Haußmann, Thomas Brussig, Wolfgang Becker, and Dani Levy himself. Leander Haußmann’s comedy Sonnenallee (Sun Alley, 1999) is, as Paul Cooke has argued, a film in which the performative aspect of identity is relentlessly foregrounded in order to critique conventional notions of Ostalgie.5 But it is also a film in which the young East German protagonists’ rejection of victimhood is exemplified in the way Mischa and his friend Mario self-consciously cast themselves in the role of victims when they chase a busload of western tourists down the street screaming “Hunger, Hunger!” The use of irony to undermine conventional concepts of victimhood and reverse the victim’s position from that of object to subject lies at the heart of many of the post-unification comedies. It is symptomatic of a shift in attitudes characteristic of this new generation of filmmakers and cinema-goers in which to be Other is no longer to be cast in the role of the victim but rather to adopt a position from which the contradictions and absurdities of conventional social structures might be exposed. It is not my intention to argue for a straightforward identification of GDR and Jewish victimhood. Nonetheless, much of the criticism directed at Sonnenallee — in particular its alleged lack of respect for those East Germans who lost their lives trying to cross the Berlin Wall — has something in common with the type of criticism so often leveled at films that use humor to portray the Holocaust. Implicit in such criticism is the view that the use of humor entails a lack of respect for the victim and is thus an inappropriate form for dealing with events of such tragic magnitude.6

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However, such critics often ignore the extent to which irony is deployed as a means of responding to the impossibility of representing that which can never be adequately represented using realist genres. Indeed, the contrasting styles of ironic comedy and redemptive emotional pathos that characterize the relationship between Sonnenallee and Das Versprechen also describe the relationship between Alles auf Zucker! and another wellknown film by Margarethe von Trotta, Rosenstraße (2003). Once again, von Trotta’s exploration of Jewish Otherness is infused with an atmosphere of pathos that locates the Jewish Other in the role of the passive victim, an object to be rescued by individual acts of German self-sacrifice.7 By contrast, using irony and self-deprecating humor in Alles auf Zucker! Levy succeeds in going beyond such stereotypical representations, and in doing so embraces postwar Jewish identity in all its complexity. In a 2004 interview Levy explained that when he was making Alles auf Zucker! his aim was to prevent the erasure of Jewish identity and stop the typecasting of Jews as victims.8 The distinctive blend of farce, irony, and self-deprecating humor that underpins the self-conscious “performance” of a range of easily recognizable stereotypes invites the viewer to situate Alles auf Zucker! within a rich tradition of German-Jewish comedy associated with writers such as Ephraim Kishon and André Kaminski, as well as filmmakers such as Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Levy’s revival of these forms of Jewish comedy within a post-1945 German context call to mind Lubitsch’s observation of 1916 that “Der jüdische Humor . . . spielt überall eine so große Rolle, daß es lächerlich wäre, wollte man ihn im Kino entbehren” (Jewish humor plays such an important role everywhere that to dispense with it in the cinema would be laughable).9 Once

Fig. 12.2. Jaecki and his wife Marlene embark on their elaborate performance of “Jewishness” in Alles auf Zucker! (2004). DVD capture.

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again Levy’s concept of performative identity — Jaecki and his wife have to stage a performance of “Jewishness” for their orthodox relatives from Frankfurt in order to gain a share of the inheritance — is central to his exploration of German, Jewish, and gender identity in the post-unification world.10 Just how daring Levy’s project was is underlined by the fact that it took more than four and a half years to secure the necessary financial support for the film. As he notes, the decision to explore questions of Jewish identity through the medium of comedy could easily have been misinterpreted, and Jewish viewers could see such controversial and humorous representations of Jewish life as a reflection of anti-Semitic tendencies.11 That the film largely succeeded in avoiding such criticism might be explained in part by the Jewish background of its Swiss-born director. Levy himself concedes, “als Jude hat man die größte Handlungsfreiheit, keine Probleme mit der ‘Political correctness’ und kann weiter gehen als alle anderen” (As a Jew one has the greatest room for maneuver, no problems with “political correctness,” and can risk more than others).12 However, as significant as Dani Levy’s background may be for professional critics, it cannot condition the way the ordinary cinema viewer perceives the film. Far more important in this respect is the way the film deliberately sets out to reproduce cultural stereotypes of Jews while simultaneously criticizing anti-Semitic discourses. The implications of Bertolt Brecht’s distinction between “das gesellschaftlich Komische” (the socially comic) and “das ewig Komische” (the eternally comic) are helpful in identifying the function of comedy for dominant and minority cultures respectively.13 Whereas the eternally comic locates the source of comedy within the “nature” of the individual, the socially comic seeks instead to locate it within the structures of society, and, in particular, in what Elizabeth Wright has termed “the historical irrelevance and inauthentic modes of living of a society stuck with an outworn set of beliefs long after history has moved on.”14 Brecht’s definition of social comedy resembles Dani Levy’s description of Jewish comedy as something that “basiert auf Widerspruch, auf dem Zusammenprall nicht passender Elemente” (is based on contradiction and the collision of incongruous elements).15 While the eternally comic works conservatively by exploiting negative stereotypes of the Other in order to reassert the “naturalness” of the dominant order, the socially comic (according to Brecht) is a weapon in the armory of minority cultures, insofar as it draws attention to the contradictions within such stereotypes and exposes the prevailing symbolic order as an artificial construct that merely reflects the needs and desires of the dominant culture. As such, the socially comic has an emancipatory potential that the eternally comic manifestly lacks, and precisely this emancipatory function of comedy allows Levy to reconceptualize victimhood. In the figures of Samuel, Golda, Joshua, and even Rabbi Ginsberg, Levy presents the viewer with a set of stock characters, yet it soon becomes

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clear that these characters are not quite what they seem to be at first sight. By highlighting the contradictions within the characters and inviting us to laugh at the incongruous situations in which they find themselves as a result of their desire to adhere to certain socially conditioned roles, Levy ensures that the humor in the film is never at the expense of the individual characters themselves but rather a reflection of the outmoded and inflexible social structures that compel them to behave in the way they do. From this perspective Levy’s technique of “quoting” stereotypes, only to debunk them, can be seen as part of an attack on all discursive systems that seek to prevent change by “fixing” identity in terms of allegedly “eternal” essences. Alles auf Zucker! is such a remarkable film because its irony — so often regarded as one of the hallmarks of Jewish humor — is deployed to challenge conventional notions of Jewish identity and victimhood. In resorting to irony, and above all self-irony, Levy exploits the freedom that minority cultures enjoy by virtue of their marginal status. Whereas for the dominant culture irony is always a dangerous force insofar as it threatens to expose the provisional character of the status quo, for the minority culture irony has a liberating potential in that it breaks down the traditional subject-object relation and in the process opens up new possibilities of subjectivity. Instead of being merely an object within a discursive system fashioned in accordance with the needs of the dominant culture, self-irony creates an alternative discursive system in which the Other can simultaneously assume the position of both subject and object. Levy’s film offers an alternative to postwar German cinema in which Jews are cast in the role of passive victims to be rescued by altruistic acts of German self-sacrifice and as a result is able to offer a more differentiated picture of Jewish identity. It is important to note, however, that such aesthetic strategies do not conceal the fact of victimhood; rather they transform the way it comes to be experienced (thereby opening up the possibility of change).16 This can be seen most clearly in the position the film constructs for the viewer when Jaecki, an east German communist who vehemently denies his Jewish identity is taken off to hospital, and a passer-by remarks: “Seit der Wende hat der Mann nur Pech gehabt; jetzt soll er auch noch Jude sein” (Poor guy! Nothing but bad luck since the Wall fell . . . And now they say he’s a Jew, too!). Here we are reminded of the latent anti-Semitism that still persists, yet the fact that we do not have sympathy for the “victim” Jaecki but can only laugh at the absurdity of the anachronistic prejudice behind such remarks shows just how far Levy’s film has succeeded in shifting our perceptions. Both Meschugge and Alles auf Zucker! might be described as films in which questions of Jewish rather than German victimhood are foregrounded; however, in each film questions of victimhood and identity are provocatively blurred. By the end of Meschugge Lena Katz is not the Jewish victim she once believed herself to be, but rather the direct descen-

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dant of a German Nazi war criminal; and in Alles auf Zucker! the central character Jaecki insists that he be regarded not as Jew but as an East German communist and a victim of the postwar division of Germany and its reunification. But with his production of Mein Führer in 2007, a comedy about the Third Reich, Levy was to tackle what he regarded as the ultimate onscreen taboo in Germany. Although the German release of Benigni’s La vita è bella in 1998 and the publication of a volume of essays in 2003 entitled Lachen über Hitler: Auschwitz-Gelächter (Making Fun of Hitler. Auschwitz Laughter) might be cited as evidence that cinema audiences in the Federal Republic would accept the use of comedy as a means of tackling Hitler and the Third Reich,17 critics dismissed Mein Führer as an unmitigated flop.18 Writing in the Tagesspiegel on 11 January 2007, Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, criticized the film on the basis that “Hitler war keine Witzfigur” (Hitler was no joke) and that it was superficial, unnecessary, and indeed even dangerous.19 Even more extreme was the reaction of the left-wing historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a key figure in the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) of the 1980s, who protested that “Die Behandlung von Figuren wie Lenin, Stalin und Hitler ist besser bei Wissenschaftlern aufgehoben als in einer Persiflage” (Dealing with figures such as Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler is best left to scholars — not satirists).20 The critical thrust of Mein Führer is essentially twofold. At one level the film goes out of its way to demythologize Hitler by portraying him as a helpless, childish weakling wholly at the mercy of Himmler and Goebbels. Accordingly we are presented with a series of often excruciatingly heavy-handed comic sequences in which Hitler plays with toy battleships in the bathtub, watches corny home movies with Eva Braun, and, when in bed with the latter, suffers from impotence. Seen in this light, Levy’s humor functions as a means of debunking the clichéd characterizations of a demonic Hitler in more conventional treatments of the Third Reich. But there is more to Levy’s depiction of Hitler than just grotesque slapstick. As the film unfolds, Adolf Grünbaum, the Jewish acting teacher hired by Goebbels to prepare Hitler for his New Year’s address of 1945, increasingly comes to assume the role of the Führer’s personal psychoanalyst. In an analysis of Hitler that reflects Levy’s debt to Alice Miller’s study Am Anfang war Erziehung (For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, 1980/1983),21 Grünbaum reaches the conclusion that the Führer’s damaged psyche is the direct result of his father’s mistreatment of him in early childhood. The import of this is underscored in the final sequence where, on the day of the New Year’s address, Hitler loses his voice and Grünbaum is forced to “perform” the role of the Führer by declaiming his speech via a microphone beneath the podium. In a sequence evoking the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Grünbaum departs radically from the script and delivers

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Fig. 12.3. Grünbaum is forced to perform the role of the Führer in Mein Führer (2007). DVD capture.

his diagnosis of Hitler’s condition: “Wir sind ein Volk von gehorsamen, ungeliebten Kindern!” (We are a nation of obedient, unloved children). The concept of “schwarze Pädagogik” (poisonous pedagogy) — the system of authoritarian upbringing to which Miller claims Hitler and other young men of his generation were subjected — lies at the very heart of the film’s analysis of the mass-psychology of the Third Reich. Anxious that his portrayal of Hitler as a victim (surely one of the most radical rewritings of the discourse of victimhood in recent years) could be seen as a right-wing apologia for National Socialist crimes, Levy emphasized in an interview for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that seeking to capture a particular state of mind was not the same as excusing it.22 Nevertheless, his decision to present Hitler as a victim was to entail a radical departure from the techniques of Brechtian alienation deployed in stage comedies about Hitler such as George Tabori’s Mein Kampf (1987).23 For it is precisely by inviting the viewer to empathize with Hitler — a response that cannot be straightforwardly indulged — that Mein Führer sets out to disrupt what have become conventional modes of spectatorship. Moreover, in its efforts to evoke a feeling of empathy for a figure as reviled as Hitler, the film seeks a collective response on the part of the audience that itself would represent the very antithesis of the Nazis’ inability to empathize with the sufferings of others.24 While it is hard to accept the film’s diagnosis of Hitler’s victimhood at face value, its dual focus on Hitler — as a ridiculous buffoon on the one hand, and as the psychological victim of a cruel, uncaring father on the other — also stands in the way of the film’s goal to elicit laughter from its audience. It may be that enough time has elapsed for a new generation of cinemagoers, even German cinemagoers,

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to laugh at Hitler the clown, but, as Levy’s original concept for the film reveals, empathy for Hitler the victim remains inherently problematic. In the commercial release of Mein Führer the action is narrated exclusively from Grünbaum’s perspective, and he has the last laugh over history in his ghostly epilogue, when he reminds the viewer of the impending demise of the Nazi regime (thereby going some way to satisfying comedy’s need for a “happy” resolution). Grünbaum may be dead, but the ghostly voice of his narrative in which he foretells the end of the war acts as an antidote to the film’s otherwise “unhappy” ending. This conceptualization of narrative agency is very similar to that deployed in such films as Train de vie and Jakob der Lügner, where events are recounted from the perspective of the Jewish victim and where, as Sander Gilman argues “what is comic is precisely the qualities ascribed to the little man in extremis who can only act to ameliorate the suffering all around him but cannot act to alter the randomness of the Shoah.”25 In the original version of Mein Führer, however, Levy planned to break with this convention by having both the beginning and end of the film narrated from the perspective of Hitler. In that version (still partially preserved on the commercial DVD) the film is introduced by a now 116-year-old Hitler, and it ends with Hitler in the guise of Baron Alois von Grünbaum, painting watercolors of his German shepherd, Blondi, while offering his services as chancellor to a German nation whose complacency in political matters he sees as the result of an unhealthy enthusiasm for the comforts of bourgeois life. Framed in this way, Levy’s film offers a tacit reminder that, in spite of Hitler’s demise, the potential for new dictators to assume a position of dominance in the present remains a constant threat. However, following adverse audience reactions during preliminary test screenings, Levy abandoned his original approach on the grounds that contemporary viewers required a more secure position from which to approach the film’s subject matter and would find the idea that Hitler was still alive and well too unsettling.26 The decision to restructure the material was openly criticized just days before the film’s release by Helge Schneider — the well-known German comedian cast in the role of Hitler — on the grounds that all that remained was the portrayal of Hitler as a weakling.27 But while the final cut is, as both Schneider implicitly and Levy explicitly conceded, less complex, perhaps even less daring, than the original, the resulting film is a confused blend of often crude caricature coupled with a moral agenda that lacks a clear focus. Although I would not disagree with those critics who saw Mein Führer as an unsatisfactory film, it is nonetheless important to see it in the context of other humorous films about Hitler and the Third Reich. At one level it is inspired by films such as Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, Benigni’s La vita è bella, and Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner. Yet lurking behind such well-known landmarks of

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Fig. 12.4. The original opening sequence — abandoned after test screenings — featured a 116-year-old Hitler. Mein Führer (2007). DVD capture.

comic cinema is the specter of another, rather different, kind of film: Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004). Even before Hirschbiegel’s film was released, Levy conceded that he had begun to conceive of a comedy about Hitler as “eine Art subversive Antwort darauf” (as a kind of subversive response to it).28 Levy was not the first to take issue with Hirschbiegel’s melodramatic presentation of the Third Reich’s final days. The short video Adolf — ich hock in meinem Bonker (Adolf — I Hang Out in My Bunker), a wickedly ironic parody of Der Untergang based on Walter Moers’s cartoon figure “Adolf, die Nazi Sau,” is one of the most heavily accessed videos on the YouTube Web site. But Mein Führer represents perhaps the most sustained attempt in contemporary German filmmaking to take issue with the realist aethetics underpinning Hirschbiegel’s monumentalist project. Although much of the criticism of Mein Führer in the German national press was rooted in a tacit accusation that the film lacked authenticity and was a grotesque distortion of reality, to see the film in this way is to ignore Levy’s comedy as a response to the impossibility of representing the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust by means of realist (or quasi-realist) genres.29 Indeed the depiction of Goebbels’s efforts in Mein Führer to construct an illusion of authenticity through the use of extras and strategically placed facades functions as a meta-critique of the seductive pseudo-authenticity of films like Der Untergang and Schindler’s List (1993). Whereas the polished realism of the latter consigns the spectator to a position of uncritical acceptance of historical myths, the comic structure of Mein Führer is conceived as a means of encouraging the viewer to adopt a position of ethical autonomy. Put another way, the comic approach of Mein Führer, on the one

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hand, rejects the moral didacticism of films that fetishize pseudo-historical authenticity, and on the other, blurs the boundary between good and evil that so many people, in their desire for certainty, wish to maintain. Tempting though it is to interpret this statement as indicative of a position of moral relativity, Levy’s films do not permit such a conclusion. The aesthetics of performance and performativity they embody serve to redefine traditional paradigms of perpetrator and victim by inviting us to see identity not as fixed, essentialist markers — not in terms of being German or Jewish — but rather as a commitment to a particular set of ethical values. As Lena Katz discovers in Meschugge, the question of where the individual stands vis-à-vis the line between good and evil is a far more complex question than whether one is a German or a Jew, or both; and as her Jewish lover acknowledges, ultimately the revelation of her true origins does not compromise her moral legibility as a character. The blend of pseudo-historical authenticity and melodramatic pathos that is the hallmark of so many recent films about the Second World War, together with their appeal to an ahistorical, essentialist notion of humanity shared by all, will convince some that enough time has elapsed for Germans to be redeemed, “normalized,” and even seen as victims in their own right. Levy’s comedies and the political and ethical response he seeks to elicit from our laughter offer a more radical approach to redefining the perpetrator-victim discourse insofar as they remind us that identity is never ahistorical, but always the subject of historical forces, and, as such, capable of transformation.

Notes 1

Dani Levy, “Levy schreibt an die Kino-Besucher: ‘Lachen ist ein Politikum,’” Die Welt, 20 Jan. 2007. 2

Eric Rentschler, “From New German Cinema to the Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus,” in Cinema and Nation, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), 260–77; here 263–64. 3

Aleida Assmann, “On the (In)compatability of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory,” German Life and Letters 59.2 (2006): 187–200; here 193. 4

Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006), 95–98. 5 Paul Cooke, “Performing ‘Ostalgie’: Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee,” German Life and Letters 56.2 (2003): 156–67. 6

This was the basis of the lawsuit brought — though subsequently dropped — by the organization Help e. V. See Jens Biesky, “Beleidigend,” Berliner Zeitung, 29 January 2000. 7

For a discussion of the ways in which Rosenstraße might be seen as sentimentalizing an image of German-Jewish solidarity in order to “tell the story of a German

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desire for redemption and rehabilitation,” see Stuart Taberner, “Philo-Semitism in Recent German Film: Aimée und Jaguar, Rosenstraße and Das Wunder von Bern,” German Life and Letters 58.3 (2005): 357–72; here 361. 8

See Philipp Bühler, ed., Filmheft: Alles auf Zucker! (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2004), 9.

9

Julius Urgiß, “Künstlerprofil: Ernst Lubitsch,” in Der Kinematograph, Düsseldorf, 30 August 1916; repr. in Lubitsch, ed. Hans Helmut Prinzler and Enno Patalas (Munich: Bucher, 1984), 89–90.

10

For a more detailed discussion of performative concepts of identity in Alles auf Zucker!, see Seán Allan, “‘Seit der Wende hat der Mann nur Pech gehabt. Jetzt soll er auch noch Jude sein’: Theatricality, Memory and Identity in Dani Levy’s Alles auf Zucker! (2004),” Debatte 15 (2007): 25–42.

11

See “Interview with Dani Levy,” in Alles auf Zucker! (press materials produced for the film’s release, 6 Jan. 2005). 12

See Bühler, Filmheft, 9.

13

See Berliner Ensemble and Helene Weigel, eds., Theaterarbeit (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1952), 42. 14

Elizabeth Wright, Post-modern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 50. 15

“‘Hitler repräsentiert für mich einen Zeitgeist’: Der Filmemacher Dani Levy im Gespräch über seine Nazi-Komödie,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6 Jan. 2007. 16

In a similar vein, see Valerie Weinstein’s discussion of the way in which camp humor “stages the serious in a humorous way” in her discussion of two of Lubitsch’s early “milieu comedies.” Valerie Weinstein, “Anti-Semitism or Jewish ‘Camp’? Schuhpalast Pinkus (1916) and Meyer aus Berlin (1918),” German Life and Letters 59.1 (2006): 101–21. 17

Margrit Frölich, Hanno Loewy, and Heinz Steinert, eds., Lachen über Hitler — Auschwitz-Gelächter? Filmkomödie, Satire und Holocaust (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2003). 18

Dani Levy wrote in Die Welt, 20 Jan. 2007: “Selten war sich die deutsche Filmkritik so einig . . . wie in der Beurteilung meines Filmes Mein Führer” (German film critics have rarely been as unanimous . . . as they were in their judgment of my film Mein Führer). Daniel Kothenschulte’s review, “Lachen gegen den wohligen Schauer,” in the Frankfurter Rundschau, 9 January 2007, is one of the few explicitly positive reactions to the films. 19

Stephan J. Kramer, “Mein Führer oberflächlich, überflüssig, gefährlich: Warum ich über die Hitler-Satire von Levy nicht lachen kann,” Der Tagesspiegel, 11 Jan. 2007. 20

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, quoted in “Historiker wünscht dem Führer eine Nullquote,” Frankfurter Neue Presse, 11 Jan. 2007. 21 For more detail on this see Dani Levy, “Die Kindheit Hitlers — Alice Miller,” in Dani Levy, “Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler”; Das Buch zum Film, ed. Michael Töteberg (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2007), 215–21. 22 Dani Levy, “Filmkomödie Mein Führer: Dürfen wir über Hitler lachen? Interview mit Johanna Adorján,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 Dec. 2006).

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23

See Klaus Berghahn, “‘Hitler and His Jew’: Notes on George Tabori’s Mein Kampf,” in Unmasking Hitler: Cultural Representations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Bern: Lang, 2005), 193–211. 24

Dani Levy, “Filmkomödie Mein Führer.”

25

Sander L. Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 279–308; here 301. 26

See “Die frühe Schnittfassung” [= Bonusmaterial], Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler, DVD (Warner Home Video, 2007). 27

Helge Schneider, “Ich kann über diesen Hitler nicht lachen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5 Jan. 2007. 28

Dani Levy, “Filmkomödie Mein Führer.”

29

“Dani Levy im Gespräch: Ein Kaleidoscop,” in Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler; Schulheft, www.meinfuehrer-derfilm.de/ downloads/MEINFUEHRER_Schulheft.pdf (accessed 7 Mar. 2009).

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Contributors SEÁN ALLAN is Reader in German Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, and Humboldt University, Berlin. He is coeditor (with John Sandford) of DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992 (Oxford: Berghahn, 1999) and has written articles on representations of East Germany and post-unification German identity in contemporary German cinema. He has also written on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drama, including The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) and The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001). TIM BERGFELDER is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Southampton. He studied at Berlin’s Free University and the University of East Anglia. Together with Hans-Michael Bock and Sabine Hake he edits the book series “Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context” for Berghahn Books, and he is on the editorial advisory board of Screen and Transnational Cinemas. Besides book chapters and journal articles, he has published several other relevant volumes: The Concise CineGraph: Encyclopaedia of German Film, coedited with Hans-Michael Bock (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2009); Destination London: German-speaking Emigrés in British Cinema, 1925–1950, coedited with Christian Cargnelli (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2008); International Adventures: Popular German Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2005); and The German Cinema Book, coedited with Erica Carter and Deniz Göktürk (London: BFI, 2002). DANIELA BERGHAHN is Reader in Film Studies in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published on East and West German cinema, and her monograph Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005), is the first history of East German film culture from 1946 to the present in English. She is coeditor of Unity and Diversity in the New Europe (2000) and Millennial Essays on Film and Other German Studies (2002). Between 2006 and 2008 she led an international research network investigating migrant and diasporic cinema in contemporary Europe (see project Web site: www. migrantcinema.net). Her publications in the field of transnational and diasporic cinema include European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Film in Contemporary Europe, coedited with Claudia Sternberg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and the special issue “Turkish-German Dialogues on Screen,” New Cinemas 7:1 (2009). She is currently writing a book on the representation of the diasporic family in cinema. ERICA CARTER is Professor of German Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her monograph on film aesthetics in the Third Reich, Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film, was published by the British Film Institute in 2004. Other publications include the coedited German Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2002); How German Is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997); and, with Rodney Livingstone, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010). DAVID CLARKE is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Bath. He studied at the universities of Leeds, London, and Swansea and has also taught at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and Nottingham Trent University. His main research interests are East German literature, German film, and contemporary German literature. He is author of the monograph “Diese merkwürdige Kleinigkeit einer Vision”: Christoph Hein’s Social Critique in Transition (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). He edited German Cinema since Unification (London and NY: Continuum, 2006); with Bill Niven, Christoph Hein (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2000); with Arne De Winde, Reinhard Jirgl: Perspektiven, Lesarten, Kontexte (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007); and with Renate Rechtien, The Politics of Place in Post-War Germany (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2009) PAUL COOKE is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Speaking the Taboo: A Study of the Work of Wolfgang Hilbig (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); The Pocket Essential to German Expressionist Film (London: Pocket Essential, 2002); and Representing East Germany: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2005). His edited books include World Cinema’s “Dialogues” with Hollywood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and, with Stuart Taberner, German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006). He is currently writing a monograph for Manchester UP on contemporary German cinema. JOHN E. DAVIDSON is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Director of Film Studies at the Ohio State University. His research interests cover German film and visual culture, post-Enlightenment literature, and contemporary critical theories. He has published articles on the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, New German Cinema, black humor, Uwe Johnson, representations of the radical Right, post-Wall cinema, and

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Wolfgang Liebeneiner, as well as the monograph Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999). He coedited with Sabine Hake Take Two: German Cinema of the Fifties (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2007), and has just completed a book manuscript on “Ottomar Domnick: Father of the Other German Cinema.” His next projects will be a study of discourses of automobility in German film and serving as editor in chief of the Journal of Short Film. SABINE HAKE is the Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of five books, including Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992); The Cinema’s Third Machine: German Writings on Film, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993); Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: U of Texas P, 2001); German National Cinema (London and NY: Routledge, 2008, second revised edition), and Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008). She has published articles and edited volumes on German film and Weimar culture. Her new book project deals with the fascist imaginary in post-fascist cinema. JENNIFER M. KAPCZYNSKI is Assistant Professor of German and Film Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008) and together with Michael Richardson is coeditor of the forthcoming New History of German Cinema. Her articles address a range of film historical subjects, including violence in the German Heimatfilm genre, the function of dance in Weimar operetta film, and nostalgic aesthetics in contemporary German cinema. Her current book project, Leading Men, explores the reconstruction of masculinity in 1950s West German film. MANUEL KÖPPEN is Lecturer in German at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where he completed his habilitation in 2004. Before that he was a lecturer at the Free University in Berlin and a guest professor at Cornell University and the University of Amsterdam. Köppen has authored two monographs: Sozialdemokratische Belletristik vor dem ersten Weltkrieg: Eine Untersuchung zum Zusammenhang von literarischer Struktur, Wirklichkeitssicht und politischer Praxis (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1982); Das Entsetzen des Beobachters: Krieg und Medien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2005), and edited the following volumes: Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1993); with Klaus Scherpe, Bilder des Holocaust: Literatur — Film — Malerei (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1997);

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with Alexander Honold, Die andere Stimme: Das Fremde in der Kultur der Moderne; Festschrift für Klaus R. Scherpe (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Böhlau, 1999); with Rüdiger Steinlein, Passagen: Literatur — Theorie — Medien; Festschrift für Peter U. Hohendahl (Berlin: Weidler, 2001); and with Erhard Schütz, Kunst der Propaganda: Der Film im Dritten Reich (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). JOHANNES VON MOLTKE is Associate Professor of Screen Arts & Cultures and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005). He is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Manhattan Transfer: Siegfried Kracauer and the New York Intellectuals, or: The Trans-Atlantic Construction of Critical Theory. In this context, he is also preparing an anthology of Siegfried Kracauer’s American essays from the 1940s and 1950s, entitled Affinities (U of California P), and coediting with Gerd Gemünden a volume of essays on Siegfried Kracauer entitled Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer for the University of Michigan Press. He coedits The Germanic Review and the book series Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual at Camden House. RACHEL PALFREYMAN is Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the author of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat: Histories, Traditions, Fictions (Oxford and Bern: Lang, 2000), and, with Elizabeth Boa, of Heimat — A German Dream: Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture, 1890–1990 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). She has published on German cinema from Weimar to the present. 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 received his PhD from Cornell University in 1999. He has authored two monographs: Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing Images (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007) and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth (London: Wallflower, 2007). He also recently coedited with David Bathrick and Michael D. Richardson the volume Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008). He is presently completing another edited volume on contemporary German film, entitled The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (forthcoming in 2010). MARC SILBERMAN is Professor of German, chair of the Department of German, and former director of the Center for German and European

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Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1988, where he is an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Theatre and Drama and in the Film Studies program. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century German literature, theater, and cinema. He has published the following monographs: Literature of the Working World in East Germany (Bern and Frankfurt am Main: Herbert Lang, 1976); Heiner Müller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980); German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1995), and edited the Brecht Yearbook from 1990 to 1995. In addition he has edited or coedited another 15 volumes or special journal issues, most recently “The Art of Hearing,” Monatshefte 98.2 (Summer 2006) and “Cold-War German Cinema,” Film History, 18.1 (February 2006).

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Index of Film Titles 08/15: In der Kaserne (At the Barracks), 23–27 A Time to Love and a Time to Die, 68–69, 71 Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday Girl), 233 Adolf — ich hock in meinem Bonker (Adolf — I Hang Out in my Bunker), 263 Aimée & Jaguar, 181, 189, 191, 205n12 Alles auf Zucker! (Go for Zucker), 252, 256–60 Am Ende kommen Touristen (And Along Come Tourists), 126 Am grünen Strand der Spree (On the Green Beach of the Spree River), 70 Amen, 55n19 Anonyma — Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin), 8, 182 Aus einem deutschen Leben (Death Is My Trade), 47 Black Box BRD (Black Box FRG), 159 Bonhoeffer — Die letzte Stufe (Bonhoeffer — The Final Step), 50–52 Brideshead Revisited, 189 Canaris, 28, 40–41, 57, 59, 61–62 Chariots of Fire, 189 Comedian Harmonists, 189, 191–92 Comedian Harmonists — Sechs Lebensläufe (Comedian Harmonists — Six Life Stories), 211, 225 Das schreckliche Mädchen (The Nasty Girl), 48

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Das Versprechen (The Promise), 256–57 Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern), 147, 153–56, 162, 232 David, 226n5 Dein unbekannter Bruder (Your Unknown Brother), 183n6 Der 20. Juli (The Plot to Assassinate Hitler), 28, 38, 61 Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor of Stalingrad), 28, 30, 42 Der Aufenthalt (The Turning Point), 4, 119n2 Der Fangschuss (Coup de Grâce), 125 Der Förster vom Silberwald (The Gamekeeper of the Silver Forest), 150 Der letzte Akt (Hitler: The Last Ten Days), 57, 61, 71 Der Meineidbauer (The Farmer’s Perjury), 151–52, 161 Der neunte Tag (The Ninth Day), 55n26, 189–99, 201–4 Der Prozess — Eine Darstellung des Majdanek-Verfahrens in Düsseldorf (The Trial — A Presentation of the Majdanek Proceedings in Düsseldorf), 209, 217–26 Der Stern von Afrika (The Star of Africa), 19, 28–29, 62 Der Unhold (The Ogre), 126 Der Untergang (Downfall), 8, 71–72, 130, 133, 189, 191, 232, 263 Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General), 40, 57–61 Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (Germany, Pale Mother), 47, 119n2 Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), 159

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INDEX OF FILM TITLES

Die Abenteuer des Werner Holt (The Adventure of Werner Holt), 76n27 Die Architekten (The Architects), 256 Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed), 237–39 Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), 126, 226n5 Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters), 159 Die Brücke (The Bridge), 71, 73, 113 Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation), 159 Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators), 147–48, 157, 159–62 Die Fischerin vom Bodensee (The Fisher Girl of Lake Constance), 150–51 Die Flucht (March of Millions), 8, 71, 123, 127, 130–35, 138–39, 182 Die Frau meiner Träume (The Woman of My Dreams), 86 Die Frauen von der Rosenstraße (The Women of Rosenstrasse), 8, 165, 181, 257 Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City), 86, 95 Die grünen Teufel von Monte Cassino (The Green Devils of Monte Cassino), 19 Die Gustloff (Ship of No Return: The Last Voyage of the Gustloff), 8, 71, 127 Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In), 159, 162 Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula), 171 Die Luftbrücke (The Air Lift), 130 Die Macht der Gefühle (The Power of Emotions), 234, 239, 241, 244–46 Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), 21, 23, 57, 166 Die Nacht als die Synagogen brannten (The Night When the Synagogues Were Burning), 174 Die Patriotin (The Patriot), 233–34, 239

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Die Schauspielerin (The Actress), 119n2, 165, 173–83 Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern (The Inability to Mourn), 3, 18 Die Verlobte (The Fiancée), 119n2, 165, 169–73, 181–83 Die weiße Rose (The White Rose), 48 Dieses Jahr in Czernowitz (This Year in Czernowitz), 134–35 Dresden, 8, 71–72, 130–32, 182, 231–36, 241–43 Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows), 57, 175 Ein Tag: Bericht aus einem deutschen Konzentrationslager (One Day: Report from a German Concentration Camp), 70 Erinnern heißt leben (Remembering Means Living), 174 Ernst Thälmann, Führer seiner Klasse (Leader of his Class), 108 Es geschah am 20. Juli (It Happened on July 20), 38–40, 61 Fabrik der Offiziere (The Officer Factory), 44, 47, 57 Forever My Love, 82 Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten (Women are the Better Diplomats), 86 Fünf letzte Tage (Five Last Days), 51 Fünf Patronenhülsen (Five Cartridges), 103, 108–16 Gloomy Sunday — Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod (Gloomy Sunday — a Song of Love and Death), 189, 205n12 Gone with the Wind, 131 Grüße aus Sarmatien für den Dichter Johannes Bobrowksi (Greetings from Sarmatia for the Poet Johannes Bobrowksi), 134 Haie und kleine Fische (Sharks and Little Fish), 23, 28, 63, 68 Halbe Treppe (Grill Point), 126

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INDEX OF FILM TITLES Herr Zwilling und Frau Zuckermann, 134–36 Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, 226n5 Holocaust, 3–4, 8, 56, 188–89, 211– 12, 215, 226, 242 Holunderblüte (Elderflowers), 134 Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?), 42, 44, 48, 68 Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen), 103, 108–18 Ich zwinge dich zu leben (I Force You to Live), 119n2 Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter), 195 In jenen Tagen (In Those Days), 57, 65 Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar), 4, 119n2, 175–77, 251, 262 Jud Süss, 95, 115 Kalte Heimat (Cold Heimat), 134–37 Kapo, 192 Klassenfahrt (School Trip), 126 Klassenfoto — Erinnerungen deutscher Bürger (Class Photo — Memories of German Citizens), 211, 225 Kolberg, 115 Königskinder (Star-crossed Lovers), 108, 169 Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace), 239 Kurische Nehrung (The Curonian Spit), 134–36 La Paloma, 211, 225 La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful), 251, 260, 262 L’Aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle with Two Heads), 82 Lichter (Distant Lights), 126 Liebe 47 (Love 1947), 58, 65 Lili Marleen, 226, 232 Lissy, 168–69, 172–73 Mama, ich lebe (Mama, I Am Alive), 103, 109–18

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Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler), 251–52, 260–63 Meine Mutter — Spurensuche in Riga (My Mother — Searching for Traces in Riga), 127 Meschugge (The Giraffe), 252–59, 264 Mogadischu, 130 Morituri, 57 Münchhausen, 86 Nacht fiel über Gotenhaufen (Darkness Fell on Gotenhaufen), 57, 65–68, 71, 125 Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (The Devil Strikes at Night), 45–46 Nachtschatten (Night Shade), 157 Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves), 70, 103, 108–13, 166, 184n19, 192 Nanook of the North, 213 NaPolA (Before the Fall), 8, 189–91, 197–204 Nicht alle waren Mörder (Not Everyone Was a Murderer), 50 Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, Nacht und Nebel), 56 October, 237 Petermann ist dagegen (Petermann Is Against It), 65 Pommerland, 134 Professor Mamlock, 175–76 Roots, 188 Rosen blühen auf dem Heidengrab (Rape on the Moor), 157–58 Rotation, 115 Saving Private Ryan, 187–88 Schattenland (Shadowlands), 134 Schindler’s List, 174, 263 Schlesiens Wilder Westen (Silesia’s Wild West), 127 Shoah, 210–11

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INDEX OF FILM TITLES

Sissi, 10, 81–99 Sissi: die junge Kaiserin (Sissi: The Young Empress), 10, 81–99 Sissi: Schicksalsjahre einer Kaiserin (Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress), 10, 81–99 So weit die Füße tragen (As Far As Your Feet Will Carry You), 49, 69, 71–72 Solo Sunny, 171 Sonjas Rapport (Sonja’s Report), 183n7 Sonnenallee (Sun Alley), 256–57 Sophie Scholl — Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl — The Final Days), 50–53, 182, 193 Sophie’s Choice, 192 Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones), 108 Stalingrad, 48 Stärker als die Nacht (Stronger than the Night), 168, 172–73 Steiner — das Eiserne Kreuz (Steiner — Cross of Iron), 76n27 Steiner — das Eiserne Kreuz II (Steiner — Cross of Iron II), 76n27 Strafbatallion 999 (Punishment Battalion 999), 35n14 Tatort (Scene of the Crime), 130 The Da Vinci Code, 130 The Diary of Anne Frank, 2, 56 The Great Dictator, 260, 262

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The Grey Zone, 192 The King Steps Out, 82 The Longest Day, 188 Tiefland (Lowlands), 95–96 Titanic, 130–31 To Be or Not to Be, 262 Train de vie (Train of Life), 251, 262 Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), 24, 200 Triumph of the Spirit, 200 U47–Kapitänleutnant Prien (U47–Lt. Commander Prien), 62 U-Boote Westwärts (U-Boat, Course West!), 62 Umberto D, 213 Und ewig singen die Wälder (Duel with Death), 151 Unruhige Nacht (The Restless Night), 22–23, 43–44 Valkyrie, 231 Viehjud Levi, 205n12 Wenn die Heide blüht (When the Heath Blossoms), 149 Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot (Grave Decisions), 147–48, 156–58, 162 Wir Wunderkinder (Aren’t We Wonderful), 35n13 Zwartboek (Black Book), 231

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Index of Names and Subjects

1950s, 2, 9–10, 17–33, 41–42, 46, 49–50, 56–74, 87, 89–90, 103–8, 145–55, 160–62, 171–72 1960s, 2–4, 10, 18–19, 47, 70–71, 102–4, 108, 124, 145–53, 159–60, 171–72, 233, 238 1961, construction of Berlin Wall and consequences, 4, 70, 106, 108 1968, 3, 47, 106–7, 146, 238 1970s, 3, 8–11, 19, 47, 71, 76n27, 106, 119n2, 124–25, 148–49, 167, 171, 211–14 1980s, 5–6, 9–11, 47–48, 125, 147, 165, 167, 171, 182, 188, 211–14, 260 1989. See unification 1990s, 1, 11, 72, 129–32, 138, 166, 188–89, 209, 227n13, 251–52, 256 20 July 1944, 37, 41, 46, 50; Der 20. Juli (dir. Harnack), 28, 38, 61; Es geschah am 20. Juli (dir. Pabst), 38–40, 61 Adenauer, Konrad, 17, 37, 124, 149, 151 Adlon, Percy, 51–52 Adorno, Theodor W., 6, 56, 71, 189, 230–32, 237–38, 249n31 affect, political, 98–99, 102–19, 189; historical, 11, 187, 232–39, 244; of romance, pity, 11, 189 Agfacolor, in Sissi Trilogy, 86–87 air raids, Allied, on Germany, 1, 28, 68, 72, 123, 127, 138, 239–41, 245; bombing of Dresden, 130, 231, 236 America. See United States

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Anderson, Benedict, 188 antifascism in GDR films, 102–19; and Jews, 173; mourning and melancholia, 10, 104, 117; role of communists in resistance, 109–12, 166, 168; and women, 165–73 antimilitarism, 19 Anzengruber, Ludwig, 151 Apitz, Bruno, 70, 112, 166 Appadurai, Arjun, 85 Applegate, Celia, 154 archival footage, 28–29, 38, 69, 219, 240 Arendt, Hannah, 3 Artisan-Film, 61 Assmann, Aleida, 36–37, 74n2, 128, 177, 182, 252 Assmann, Jan, 146, 216 atonement, 1, 6, 50 Auschwitz, 3, 6, 47, 78n26, 112, 118, 126, 128, 189, 192, 203, 239–40, 260; Frankfurt trials, 3, 238 Austria and Austro-Hungary, 10, 61, 81–99; marketing of Austrian films as German, 81 authoritarianism, 9, 46–47, 153, 198, 261 Badura, Ute, 127 Baier, Jo, 50 Balázs, Béla, 92, 114 Barthel, Manfred, 18 Bartov, Omar, 242 battle scenes, 28–29 Baudissin, Wolf Graf von, 17 Bauer, Josef Martin, 49 Bazin, André, 213–14 Beck, General, 38–40

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INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS

Becker, Jurek, 4, 119n2, 251 Becker, Wolfgang, 256 Benigni, Roberto, 251, 260, 262 Benjamin, Walter, 247n2 Berger, Stefan, 128 Berger-Fiedler, Rosa, 174 Bernard, Jean, 191, 196–97, 206n21 Berteloot, Costar Jean-Yves, 130 Beyer, Frank, 4, 10, 102–19, 166, 169, 175–76, 184n19, 262 Biedermeier, in Sissi Trilogy, 10, 83, 88–89, 91, 93 Biess, Frank, 18 Blech, Hans-Christian, 32 Böhm, Karlheinz, 83 bombing. See air raids Borchert, Ernst, 21 Borchert, Wolfgang, 27, 58, 74n3 Bösiger, Paul, 24 Boym, Svetlana, 88, 129–30, 133, 135, 138 Brandt, Willi, 124 Brauner, Artur, 61 Brecht, Bertolt, 229n41, 243, 245, 258, 261 Brussig, Thomas, 256 Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), 124, 127, 140n7 Bundeswehr, 17, 62, 129 Busch, Ernst, 108 Butler, Judith, 174, 178–79

Chomsky, Marvin J., 3, 8, 56, 211 Christianity, resistance and martyrdom, 9, 36–53; equation of Christian morality with German identity, 42 church, Protestant, 38, 43, 47, 125, 193; Orthodox, 42, 49. See also Christianity; Catholicism Cichocki, Marek, 133 Cocteau, Jean, 82 Cohn, Carol, 20 Cold War, 37, 42, 87, 90; end of, 5–10, 126 color, 68–69, 85–87, 92–94, 152, 154, 179–80, 200, 215, 240, 245 Columbia, 61 comedy, 148, 156–57; in films by Dani Levy, 11, 251, 256–64 communists, 52, 107–12, 168, 259; as victims and victors over Fascism, 107, 166 concentration and extermination camps, 9, 24, 58, 61–63, 68, 73– 74, 95, 108, 112, 118, 181, 192; Bergen-Belsen, 56; Buchenwald, 59, 70, 109, 112; Dachau, 191; Majdanek, 218; Sachsenhausen, 117, 252; Treblinka, 252. See also Auschwitz Cook, Pam, 129 costume dramas, 187–88

Cameron, James, 130–31 Campbell, Jan, 93–95 Canaris, Admiral Wilhelm, 59, 61–62 capitalism, GDR critique of, 102–4; anti-globalization, 159 Carow, Heiner, 171 Carroll, Noël, 244 Catholicism, 3, 41, 47–48, 156–57, 191–93 Cavani, Liliana, 195 CCC-Film, 61 censors, Soviet, 35n12 Chaplin, Charlie, 260, 262 children, 3, 43, 94, 96–97, 131, 157, 161, 221–22; in generational conflict, 146–47; illegitimacy, 150–51

Dahl, Rasmus, 217 De Sica, Vittorio, 213 DEFA, 4, 8, 10, 76n27, 98, 256; antifascist films, 102–19, 165–83; Gegenwartsfilme, 165, 171 Degen, Michael, 50 Degischer, Vilma, 91 Deleuze, Gilles, 105 democracy, 3, 17, 21, 37, 47–48, 51–53, 138 Deppe, Hans, 149 deserters, 43, 110, 117 Devina-Film, 61 diegetic music, 29, 108, 117, 137 disavowal of Nazi past, 9–10, 147, 181, 214

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INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS documentaries and documentary footage, 11, 109, 113, 117, 123–39, 174, 209–26 Doneson, Judith E., 174 Dönhoff, Marion Gräfin, 127 Dönhoff, Tatjana, 127 Dorfmeister, Gregor, 73 DreamWorks, 130 Dresden, bombing of. See air raids Dresen, Andreas, 126 Dudow, Slatan, 168 Dyer, Richard, 180 East Germany, 4–6, 102–19, 126, 165–83, 256; as an Other of Fascism, 103 Eastern territories. See Ostgebiete economic miracle. See Wirtschaftswunder Eichmann, Adolf, 3, 70, 184n19, 223 Eisenstein, Sergei, 233, 237 Elsaesser, Thomas, 98, 137, 233 emotion. See affect empathy, 56, 110, 128, 234–39, 242– 43; distinct from sympathy, 191 Ensslin, Gudrun, 3 escapism, 149 Europa-Verleih, 61 “euthanasia” of the mentally ill and handicapped, 52 exiles, political, 4 expellees. See expulsion of Germans from the East expulsion of Germans from the East, 10, 36, 57–58, 65–66, 72, 90, 123–39; integration of expellees, 89–90, 149–50, 123–25; Sissi as metaphor for territorial loss, 82. See also Heimat film extermination camps. See concentration camps Fama-Film, 61 family narratives, 7, 161–62 Färberböck, Max, 8, 181–82 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 147–48, 159, 232 Fechner, Eberhard, 11, 209–26 Fehrenbach, Heide, 151

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Felmy, Hansjörg, 22–23, 35n17 firebombing. See air raids First World War, 47, 62, 72, 211 Flaherty, Robert J., 213 flashback, 21, 28 Fleisser, Marieluise, 149 Foucault, Michel, 18 Frank, Anne, 2, 56 Franz Joseph, Kaiser, 82–83 Frei, Norbert, 13n4, 76n28 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 93 Friedländer, Saul, 209–10, 213, 226n5 Friedrich, Caspar David, 88 Friedrich, Jörg, 1, 127–28 Fuchsberger, Joachim, 24 Furtwängler, Maria, 130–31 Gansel, Dennis, 8, 187, 189, 197–204 Gavras, Costa, 55n19 GDR. See East Germany Gebel, Else, 51–52 Geisler, Michael, 209, 211–13 generations, 4, 7–8, 47, 58, 71–74, 252–56; generational rupture and conflict, 3, 10, 145–63 genocide. See Holocaust George, Heinrich, 115 Germany, (re-)unification of. See unification Geschonneck, Erwin, 110, 112, 114–15 Gestapo, 7, 38, 51, 59, 61, 63, 169, 176, 195 Gilman, Sander, 262 Gloria-Verleih, 61 Goebbels, Joseph, 191, 231, 260, 263 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 5 Grass, Günter, 1, 125, 140n10 Green, Gerald, 3, 8, 56, 211 Grossmann, Atina, 18 guilt, collective, 2, 5, 7, 49–50, 65, 75n11; cancellation of guilt through individual sacrifice, 63; GDR’s denial of responsibility for Nazi crimes, 174; Karl Jaspers’ Die Schuldfrage, 2, 69, 75n11; metaphysical, 69, 71; transfer or displacement of guilt, 145, 147, 151, 162–63

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Gustloff, sinking of, 8, 65, 71, 125, 127, 140n10 gypsies. See Roma Habermas, Jürgen, 6 Habsburg Empire. See Austria Haeften, Werner von, 41 Halle, Randall, 126, 133, 139 Harfouch, Corinna, 178 Harnack, Falk, 22–23, 28, 38–39, 43, 48, 61 Hasse, O. E., 28, 30 Haußmann, Leander, 256 Hediger, Vinzenz, 236 Heimat, 10, 49, 68, 89, 110, 117, 123, 127. See also Heimat films Heimat films, in 1950s, 86–87, 90–91, 145–46, 149–53; and expellees, 65, 125–26, 149; Heimat in recent films, 134–39, 147–63 Heinemann, Elizabeth, 18 Hell, Julia, 115 Heritage films, 11, 187–203 Herzog, Dagmar, 18, 32 Herzog, Werner, 147 Herzog-Film, 61, 81 Heuss, Theodor, 37 Higgins, Kathleen, 214 Higson, Andrew, 188–89, 204n4 Himmeroder Memorandum, 17–18 Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 8, 71–72, 263 Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute), 5–6, 147, 260 Hitler, Adolf, 3, 7, 36–37, 50, 63, 74, 118, 145, 147, 170, 178, 216, 238; in Der Arzt von Stalingrad, 28, 30; in Der Untergang, 189, 191; in films about Hitler bomb plot, 38, 41, 57, 61–62; in Mein Führer, 251–52, 260–63 Hitler bomb plot. See 20 July 1944 Hochhuth, Rolf, 3, 47, 195 Hoffmann, Hilmar, 66 Hofmann, Nico, 130–31, 232 Hollywood, 68–69, 86, 95, 187, 192, 231, 244; influence on recent German films, 130–31

Cooke.indd Sec1:300

Holocaust, 1, 4, 50, 52, 56–57, 72– 74, 103, 124, 128, 147, 162, 187– 90, 225, 230, 238, 252; in GDR films, 174–81; in non-German films and TV series, 3, 8, 56, 192, 200, 211–12, 215, 226; representation of, 192, 210, 242, 263 Honecker, Erich, 105, 119n2, 174 Horváth, Ödön von, 149 Höss, Rudolf, 47 Huyssen, Andreas, 139, 230 identification, 9–11, 38, 41, 50–53, 99, 103–5, 129, 131, 146, 182, 187–88, 191, 195–97 identity, national, 6, 11, 42–43, 102, 118, 149, 154, 182, 252; European, 137, 139; in Heimat films, 146, 149, 154–55, 162; Jewish, 50, 112, 175–81; as performance, 175–81; socialist, 11, 52, 104, 106, 122n20 interior monologue, 28 Internet, 7, 133 Jaeger, Friedrich, 146, 148 Jameson, Fredric, 231–32 Jaspers, Karl, 2, 69, 75n11, 146 Jenninger, Phillip, 5 Jews, persecution of, 9, 48, 57–59, 62, 65–66, 69–70, 73, 76n26, 124, 173; in DEFA films, 103, 173–81; depicted as feminized, 165, 174– 76; linkage of German suffering with Jewish victims, 66, 68, 71, 197; philosemitism, 191; postwar anti-Semitism, 89, 253, 258–59; seen as complicit in own victimization, 176 Jugert, Rudolf, 151 Kaes, Anton, 211, 245 Kahane, Peter, 256 Kaminski, André, 257 Kannapin, Detlef, 38 Kant, Hermann, 38 Kassovitz, Peter, 251 Käutner, Helmut, 40–41, 57–58

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INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS Kirst, Hans Hellmut, 23, 44, 47, 55n18 Kirsten, Ralf, 119n2 Kishon, Ephraim, 257 Klemperer, Victor, 72, 77n31 Kluge, Alexander, 159, 230–46; writings by: Geschichten vom Kino, 237; Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945, 233; Schlachtbeschreibung: Der organisatorische Aufbau eines Unglücks, 231, 233 Knopp, Guido, 1, 209 Koepnick, Lutz, 130, 189–90, 205n12 Koepp, Volker, 10, 11, 123, 134–39, 211, 227n13 Kohl, Helmut, 5 König, Hans, 157 Koselleck, Reinhard, 7 Kosmopol, 61 Kotulla, Theodor, 47 Kramer, Stephan, 260 Kristallnacht, 13, 174 Krug, Manfred, 114–15 Kuhlbrot, Dieter, 201, 206n22 Kühn, Regine, 171, 175 Kühn, Siegfried, 165, 174–75, 179, 182 Kunert, Joachim, 76 Kutschera, Rolf, 32 Landsberg, Alison, 127–29, 191 landscapes, 10, 68, 84–90, 107, 113, 117; Eastern European, 134–37 Lanzmann, Claude, 205n15, 210–11 Large, David Clay, 37 Leber, Julius, 38 Lenz, Siegfried, 125 Levi, Primo, 192–93, 195–97, 203, 205n20 Levin, David, 52 Levy, Dani, 11, 251–64 Liebeneiner, Wolfgang, 19, 58, 71 Lilienthal, Peter, 226n5 Lippold, Eva, 171 Lubitsch, Ernst, 257, 262 Ludewig, Alexandra, 126, 139 Lukács, Georg, 106 Luxemburg, Rosa, 5

Cooke.indd Sec1:301

301

Maetzig, Kurt, 57, 108, 175–76 Marischka, Ernst, 81–97 Marseille, Hans-Joachim, 28, 62 Martins, Hardy, 49, 71 masculinity: and 1950s West German war films, 9, 18–33; and antifascism in DEFA films, 103, 109, 114, 167–68, 177 May, Paul, 21, 23–33, 57, 151 McLaglen, Andrew, 76n27 Meinecke, Friedrich, 30 Meinrad, Joseph, 83 melodrama, 10–11, 68–69, 71, 82–99, 109, 147–48, 175, 182–83, 190, 211, 231–36, 239, 243, 263–64 memory, collective, 6–7, 37, 41; commemorating, 5, 7, 61; construction of, 12, 70, 127, 146; and historiography, 128–9; individual agency, 133; memory work and culture, 10, 41, 56, 104, 129, 134, 138, 146, 209–10, 215, 217, 225–26; politics of, 47, 57, 61, 70–72; “prosthetic memory,” 127–29, 139, 191, 212; repression of, 57. See also nostalgia Merchant, Ismail, and James Ivory, 189 Messemer, Hannes, 30 migrant communities in Germany, 7 Mihaileanu, Radu, 251 military. See Wehrmacht Miller, Alice, 260–61 mirroring, 84 mise-en-scène, 87, 91, 94, 98, 106, 109–11, 113, 212–15, 221 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, 3, 18 Moeller, Robert G., 1, 36, 41 Moers, Walter, 263 Mohr, Robert, 51–53 Mondi, Bruno, 92, 95 Monk, Egon, 70 montage, 84, 85, 95, 111, 168, 221, 223; in works by Alexander Kluge, 231, 237–40, 243–46 Moses, A. Dirk, 37, 41 mourning, 9–10, 104, 209–13

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302


Müller, Heiner, 4, 167 Müller-Stahl, Arnim, 112, 114–15 naval warfare, 62–65, 125 Negt, Oskar, 234 New German Cinema, 8–9, 47, 106, 119n2, 125, 130, 148, 159, 209– 10, 233, 256 New Wave films, 106, 166 Newsreels. See archival footage NF-Verleih, 61 Niven, Bill, 5, 128 Nolte, Ernst, 147 normalization debate, 166, 182 nostalgia, imperial, 10, 82–99; reflective and restorative, 129–39 Nuremberg Trials, 2–3, 69 Nussbaum, Martha, 244 Nusser, Peter, 98 Oldach, Julius, 88 opposition. See resistance oral history, 135, 211, 214–15 Ostgebiete (Eastern territories), 10, 36, 82, 123–39. See also expulsion of Germans from the East Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 38–41, 57, 61, 71–72 Panzer, Wolfgang, 71, 73 Paulsen, Arno, 21–22 Peckinpah, Sam, 76n27 Pellegrini, Ann, 179 Peters, Werner, 22 Petzold, Christian, 159 Powell, Larson, 117 POWs, German, 1, 18, 42, 125, 155 Praunheim, Rosa von, 127 Prien, Günther, 62–65 Pulver, Liselotte, 68 Radványi, Géza von, 28, 30–31, 42 Reagan, Ronald, 5 Real-Film, 61 rearmament. See remilitarization Red Army. See Soviet Union Red Army Faction. See terrorism

Cooke.indd Sec1:302

refugees: Hungarian refugees view Die junge Kaiserin, 98–99; in U47–Kapitänleutnant Prien, 62–63. See also expulsion of Germans from the East Reinl, Harald, 19, 62, 150 Reisch, Günter, 165, 169–73 religion. See Christianity Remarque, Erich Maria, 68 Remer, Major, 37 remilitarization, 9, 41–42, 46 Rentschler, Eric, 132, 251 resistance, 36–53, 58, 61–63, 65, 102–19, 165–83. See also 20 July 1944 Resnais, Alain, 56 returnees. See POWs revisionism, 5, 9, 103–4, 107, 128, 138, 149, 236, 242 Reyer, Walther, 30, 96 Richter, Roland Suso, 71, 182 Rickard, Katie, 48, 51 Riefenstahl, Leni, 24, 95–96, 206n23 Rittau, Günther, 62 Röhl, John, 19 Rökk, Marika, 86 Roma, 95–96 Rosenmüller, Marcus H., 147, 157 Rosenstone, Robert, 209, 217, 223 Rothemund, Marc, 50–53, 182 rubble films, 34n10, 68 Rücker, Günter, 171 Rüsen, Jörn, 146, 148 Sanders-Brahm, Helma, 47, 119n2 Schilling, Niklaus, 157 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 88 Schlöndorff, Volker, 55n26, 125–26, 187–97, 202, 204 Schmid, Hans-Christian, 126 Schmitz, Helmut, 128 Schneider, Helge, 262 Schneider, Romy, 10, 83, 95 Scholl, Sophie, 48, 50–53, 182, 193 Schreibtischtäter, 3 Schrenk, Emmerich, 24 Schwarz, Jaecki, 115 Sebald, W. G., 1, 127–28, 230–33

6/4/2010 8:35:31 PM

INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS Seeßlen, Georg, 182 Selznick, David O., 131 sexual compensation and dysfunction, 32 Seyferth, Wilfried, 29 Singer, Bryan, 231 Siodmak, Robert, 45–46 Sirk, Douglas, 68–69, 71, 147 Soviet Union, 42, 50, 108–10, 118 Spanish Civil War, in GDR films, 108–10 Spielberg, Steven, 130, 174, 187, 192 Spitzweg, Carl, 88 Stalin, 5, 137, 166–67, 170, 260 Stalingrad, 2, 28–31, 41–44, 48, 68, 231, 233, 240 Stam, Robert, 135 Stasi, 6 Staudte, Wolfgang, 21, 35n12, 57, 115, 166 Stauffenberg, Claus Schenk Graf von, 38–41, 61 Stephan, Bernhard, 183n7 Steven, George, 56 Stigel, Jørgen, 215 Stoltzfus, Nathan, 165 Stummer, Alfons, 150 suffering, German wartime, 1–12, 49, 66, 70–73, 81, 102, 118–19, 123, 138–39, 145, 163; civilian, 129, 138; disconnection from Holocaust, 72; and global interventionism, 128–29; repression of, 127, 129, 230 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 226n5 Tabori, George, 261 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 106 television, 10–11, 69–71, 209, 211–26; historical event-television, 8, 123, 127, 130, 182, 231–36; impact of Holocaust, 3–4, 56, 188 terrorism, West German, 3, 147, 153, 157, 159–62 Thalheim, Robert, 126 Till, Eric, 50–52 Toller, Ernst, 27 Torgovnick, Marianna, 187–88, 190

Cooke.indd Sec1:303

303

trauma, 21, 23, 70, 72, 93–97, 123, 145–63, 252, 254–55 Tresckow, Henning von, 38–39 Trotta, Margarethe von, 8, 125, 159, 165, 256–57 Tykwer, Tom, 234 Udet, General Ernst, 59, 61–62 Umgelter, Fritz, 55n23, 69–71 unification, German, 5–6, 102, 126, 134; post-unification cinema, 146– 63, 165, 182, 251–64 United States, 174, 188, 212 Veiel, Andres, 159 Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Coming to terms with the past), 1, 6, 57, 69–71, 211, 213 Verhoeven, Michael, 48 Verhoeven, Paul, 231 Vertriebene. See expulsion of Germans from the East victimhood, 5–12, 98, 159, 162, 251– 64; and antifascism/GDR, 104, 256; of Christians, 36–53; exclusion of Jewish victims, 162, 189; female, 165, 174; German, 20, 128, 147–48, 158, 182; of German soldiers, 20, 23–24, 30; Jewish, 71, 175–77, 251–64 Vilsmaier, Joseph, 48, 71, 127 Visual symmetry. See mirroring Vollmar, Wolf, 47 Wachowiak, Jutta, 171 Wajda, Andrzej, 106 Waldmüller, Ferdinand Georg, 88–89 Walser, Martin, 6, 13n15, 232 Wednesday Club, 38–39 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 260 Wehrmacht, 17–33 Weidenmann, Alfred, 28–29, 40, 57, 62, 71 Weimar cinema, 26, 147 Weimar Republic, 72, 107, 168, 198 Weingartner, Hans, 147, 157–60 Weininger, Otto, 174

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304


Weiß, Ulrich, 183n6 Wessel, Kai, 71, 130–33, 182 Wessely, Paula, 82 West Germany, 3, 9, 17–33, 38–41, 56–74, 124–27, 145–59, 166, 212 White Rose group, 37, 48 Wicki, Bernhard, 22, 71, 73–74 Wiesenthal, Simon, 221, 223 Wiesinger, Kai, 77n30 Wilder, Billy, 257 Williams, Linda, 236 Winckler, Henner, 126 Winkler, Angela, 130 Wirtschaftswunder (Economic miracle), 47, 57, 149, 151, 154, 156 Wisbar, Frank, 23, 42–45, 47–48, 57, 63, 65–68, 71, 125 Wolf, Christa, 4 Wolf, Konrad, 10 women, 27, 107, 221, 235; female subjectivity, 171, 182; in GDR

Cooke.indd Sec1:304

antifascist films, 10, 165–83; gender roles and perspectives, 18, 97–98, 235; interaction of gender and race stereotypes, 175–80; mass rape of German women, 1, 66, 72, 131, 157, 182; women as avatars of innocent feeling, 245. See also victimhood Wortmann, Sönke, 147 Wright, Elizabeth, 258 X-Filme Creative Pool, 251, 256 York, Eugen, 57 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 125 Zehfuss, Mayer, 129, 138 Zemel, Carol, 190 Zinner, Hedda, 178 Zischler, Hans, 130 Zuckmayer, Carl, 285

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Edited by

CONTRIBUTORS: Seán Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sabine Hake, Jennifer Kapczynski, Manuel Köppen, Rachel Palfreyman, Brad Prager, Johannes von Moltke.

IMAGE CREDIT: British soldiers watch a newsreel of the Nuremberg Trials in a makeshift cinema. DVD-capture from Caroline Link’s Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), reproduced by kind permission of MTM Medien & Television Munich.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.camden-house.com www.boydellandbrewer.com

Screening War Perspectives on German Suffering

Perspectives on German Suffering

PAUL COOKE is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and MARC SILBERMAN is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.

Screening War

The recent “discovery” of German wartime suffering has had a particularly profound impact in German visual culture. Films from Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse (2003) to Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and the two-part television miniseries Dresden (2006) have shown how ordinary Germans suffered during and after the war. Such films have been presented by critics as treating a topic that had been taboo for German filmmakers. However, the representation of wartime suffering has a long tradition on the German screen. For decades, filmmakers have recontextualized images of Germans as victims to engage shifting social and ideological discourses. By focusing on this process, the present volume explores how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both of the postwar German states and the nowunified nation have attempted to face the trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world.

Cooke & Silberman

Edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman

Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering (Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual)

German Travel Cultures

German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives

German Travel Cultures (Leisure, Consumption and Culture)

German After War. Problems

Visual Basic 2005 Programmierhandbuch GERMAN

Film Cultures

German (German and English Edition)

German Armies: War And German Society, 1648-1806

Visual Cultures

Handbook on German Forces

Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy

Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy

Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology

German

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German

The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918-1945 (German Historical Perspectives)

Arthur Schnitzler und der Film German

The German Language and the Real World: Sociolinguistic, Cultural, and Pragmatic Perspectives on Contemporary German (Revised Edition)

The Franco-German War of 1870-71

Der weiße Gürtel in Visual Basic. German

Visual Basic Dot.NET in 21 Tagen GERMAN

Grundkurs Programmieren mit Visual Basic GERMAN

Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television

Jetzt lerne ich Visual Basic GERMAN

Das Visual Basic 2005 Codebook GERMAN

Visual Basic 2008 - Neue Technologien - Crashkurs German

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Visual Basic 6 - Programmiertechniken, Datenbanken, Internet German

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Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering (Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual)

German Travel Cultures

German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives

German Travel Cultures (Leisure, Consumption and Culture)

German After War. Problems

Visual Basic 2005 Programmierhandbuch GERMAN

Film Cultures

German (German and English Edition)

German Armies: War And German Society, 1648-1806

Visual Cultures

Handbook on German Forces

Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy

Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy

Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology

German

Translating Cultures: Perspectives on Translation and Anthropology

German

The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918-1945 (German Historical Perspectives)

Arthur Schnitzler und der Film German

The German Language and the Real World: Sociolinguistic, Cultural, and Pragmatic Perspectives on Contemporary German (Revised Edition)

The Franco-German War of 1870-71

Der weiße Gürtel in Visual Basic. German

Visual Basic Dot.NET in 21 Tagen GERMAN

Grundkurs Programmieren mit Visual Basic GERMAN

Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television

Jetzt lerne ich Visual Basic GERMAN

Das Visual Basic 2005 Codebook GERMAN

Visual Basic 2008 - Neue Technologien - Crashkurs German

Nitty Gritty Visual Basic .NET GERMAN

Visual Basic 6 - Programmiertechniken, Datenbanken, Internet German

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